“A well-planned and integrated system becomes as much a part of the urban form as a river or other natural feature and plays a similar role in future development.” 

Final environmental impact statements are seldom so poetic, but this was the advice of the U.S. Department of Transportation authors of Project No. FL-03-0036’s environmental impact statement when those engineers published their 507-page tome on May 17, 1978, for an ambitious transportation project. This would be the second (and last) of its kind to be constructed in the southeastern United States of America. Project No. FL-03-0036 is now better known as the “Miami Metrorail”—the only rapid transit metro rail system in Florida. It runs for 24.4 miles through some of the heaviest commuter-trafficked portions of the seventh-most populated county in the country.