By Andres Viglucci, Miami Herald
Photo credit, Al Diaz, Miami Herald

Hidden in plain sight of thousands of people, the paved path runs all the way from Brickell to Dadeland through the grass beneath the elevated Metrorail line. It might be an unparalleled urban amenity — if only anyone used it.

Instead, 30 years after the transit system opened, the M-Path, which traverses past the University of Miami through some of Miami’s liveliest neighborhoods and suburbs, remains an obscure afterthought.

It doesn’t take a Dutch cycling expert to figure out why. But there’s one here — three, in fact, flown in by the consulate of the Netherlands this past week to help an unusual coalition of volunteers and local government officials begin to transform the path into a dazzling, 10-mile-long park and bikeway — so let’s ask him.

“There really is a lot of potential in it,” Erik Tetteroo, a consultant with Dutch Cycling Embassy — an outfit that exports Dutch bike-planning expertise — said after riding and evaluating the path for four days last week. “But right now the line is not very comfortable. It’s very bumpy in places. It’s not direct — it winds around. It has little cohesion. Most street crossings are not safe. Those are all elements that must be improved. There’s a lot to do.”

But do it they will, and more, say a group of advocates, Miami and Miami-Dade elected officials and municipal and county planners who have coalesced around a singular idea: turning the dowdy M-Path into The Underline, an alluring, lush linear landscape for cyclists and pedestrians that would be dotted with gardens and playgrounds and linked to neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and parks.

Its backers say that, like the High Line, the wildly successful linear park on an elevated train track in Manhattan upon whose name the Underline plays, Miami’s version could be both a recreational and an economic boon, drawing thousands of people to a corridor that’s now little more than leftover space while fostering harmonious development along its edge.

By making the path “functional, beautiful and alive,” in the words of Coral Gables Mayor Jim Cason, backers say, the Underline could finally fulfill its original conception, becoming the spine of a new bike and pedestrian network that would make it simple and safe for adults and kids to walk or cycle short distances to school, work and Metrorail stations, providing relief to the car-choked U.S. 1 corridor.

Since formally incorporating just a year ago, the group, now calling itself Friends of the Underline, has managed to corral eager backing from the University of Miami, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez, the county parks, public works and transit departments, and the cities of Miami, Coral Gables and South Miami — rapidly taking what seemed a blue-sky idea to the brink of realization.

“The Underline has captured everyone’s imagination, and it doesn’t even exist yet,” South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard said at the opening of last week’s Dutch-run ThinkBike workshop at HistoryMiami.