Miami Tunnel

Official Page of the Port Miami Tunnel
The Miami Tunnel (also State Road 887; formerly Port of Miami Tunnel) is a 4,200 feet (1,300 m)[3] bored, undersea tunnel in Miami, Florida. It consists of two parallel tunnels (one in each direction) that travel beneath Biscayne Bay, connecting the MacArthur Causeway on Watson Island with PortMiami on Dodge Island. It was built in a public–private partnership between three government entities—the Florida Department of Transportation, Miami-Dade County, and the City of Miami—and the private entity MAT Concessionaire LLC, which was in charge of designing, building, and financing the project and holds a 31-year concession to operate the tunnel.[4][5][6]

The tunnel was first conceived in the 1980s as a way to remove traffic to PortMiami that was congesting downtown Miami streets. Prior to the tunnel's opening, the only route for PortMiami traffic was through the streets of downtown Miami; that traffic, especially trucks, was considered detrimental to the economic growth of downtown and a planned project to expand the port's capacity would increase the volume of trucks through downtown. Those issues would be remedied by the construction of the tunnel, allowing traffic to move between PortMiami and the MacArthur Causeway (which connects to Interstate 95 via I-395) without traveling through downtown. In the first month after opening, the tunnel averaged 7,000 vehicles per day; nearly 16,000 vehicles travel to the port each weekday.[1]

The project was approved in December 2007, but was temporarily cancelled a year later. Construction began in May 2010. The tunnel boring machine began work in November 2011 and completed the second tunnel in May 2013.[7] The tunnel was opened to traffic on August 3, 2014.