United States
City overview
Miami-Dade's beach corridor holds one of the largest and most concentrated Orthodox communities in the United States, strung along a few miles of barrier island. Harding Avenue in Surfside is a genuine kosher restaurant street, with more than twenty kosher establishments in a five-block stretch, and the 41st Street corridor in Mid Beach is a second cluster with its own markets, bakeries and restaurants. Aventura, Sunny Isles Beach and Bay Harbor Islands each add their own shuls and kosher shops. Three working eruvin cover much of the corridor, the beaches are public and walkable, and a visitor can keep a full Shabbos on foot from most of the oceanfront hotels.
Miami Beach, FL
Rabbi
Rabbi Zev Katz
Phone
305-242-2231Website
https://www.mbjewish.comThe Chabad campus serving South Beach, on North Lincoln Lane, running Shabbat services, dinners and lunches and a visitor information service for tourists.
Getting Around
Public transit
You can cover this corridor without a car, and a good deal of it for nothing.
The Miami Beach Trolley is free and runs four routes - the South Beach Loop, the Middle Beach Loop, the Collins Express and the North Beach Loop - from 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM seven days a week, at roughly twenty-minute intervals, with live vehicle tracking through the city's trolley tracker. Miami-Dade Transit's Metrobus fills in the rest. Route 100 runs from Downtown Miami up through Miami Beach, Haulover, Surfside and Sunny Isles to Aventura Mall, and is the single most useful line for this corridor. Route 125 links North Miami with Bay Harbor Islands, Bal Harbour, Surfside and North Beach. Route 79 crosses from Hialeah over the 79th Street Causeway into North, Mid and South Beach. Routes 14 and 15 work South Beach and Mid Beach, Route 15 arriving over the Venetian Causeway from the Omni Terminal. Route 3 and Route 203 Biscayne MAX run the Biscayne Boulevard spine between Aventura and Downtown. From Miami International Airport, Route 150 Miami Beach Airport Express runs direct to the beach with stops on 41st Street, Alton Road, Collins Avenue, Lincoln Road and Washington Avenue, and Route 110 also connects the airport to Miami Beach. Airport buses pick up on the west side of the MIA Metrorail station. Metrobus and Metrorail are both $2.25 a ride, discounted to $1.10. A 1-Day Pass is $5.65 and a 7-Day Pass is $29.25. Pay with a contactless card, the GO Miami-Dade Transit app, an EASY Card (a $2 card holding up to $150) or an EASY Ticket. Cash is accepted on buses, but cash riders pay full fare on every leg rather than getting transfer credit. The Metromover is free. Its three loops - Omni, Inner and Brickell - cover twenty-one stations from the Financial District in Brickell up to the School Board station, running 5:30 AM to 10:00 PM daily and every ninety seconds at peak. For anyone staying Downtown or in Brickell it is the fastest way around and costs nothing. Freebee runs free on-demand electric shuttles, hailed through the Ride Freebee app, by phone on 855-918-3733, or street-side. In Miami Beach it covers Mid Beach and parts of North Beach, Monday to Friday 6:30 AM to 10:00 PM, Saturday 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM and Sunday 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. In Aventura it covers the whole city daily 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM, closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. It is free in both, and in Aventura tipping is explicitly not expected. Sunny Isles Beach runs its own free City Bus on three lines: Orange Line 1 daily 8:00 AM to 7:35 PM, Orange Line 2 Monday to Saturday 8:00 AM to 7:50 PM, and the Blue Line weekdays 7:45 AM to 3:50 PM. Anyone may ride, children under twelve need an adult, and there is a City Bus tracking app. Aventura also operates its own Aventura Express shuttle bus. For travel beyond the county, Brightline's Aventura station at 19796 West Dixie Highway sits at the north end of the corridor, with trains to Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, West Palm Beach and Orlando, and a second Miami station at MiamiCentral Downtown. Station parking can be added to your ticket at checkout and the same ticket opens the garage.
Rideshare
Uber and Lyft both operate across Miami-Dade around the clock, and between them they cover every municipality in this corridor.
Uber's Miami service includes UberX, UberXL and UberXXL, and rides can be reserved up to ninety days ahead; Lyft likewise runs on-demand and scheduled rides in Miami with scheduling up to ninety days in advance. Both are the normal way visitors move between the beach and Downtown outside trolley and bus hours. Airport pickups are zoned and you cannot simply meet your driver at the kerb of your choice. At Miami International Airport, ride-app pickups happen on both the first level at Arrivals and the second level at Departures, and the app assigns you the level and door number, so open it before you leave baggage claim. At Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, pickups for Terminals 1 and 2 are kerbside on the lower Arrivals level, with the Terminal 1 zone just beyond the taxi podium, while pickups for Terminals 3 and 4 are on the first floor of the southern portion of the Palm Garage, a short walk from the terminal. Licensed metered taxis are the regulated alternative at Miami International: $2.95 for the first sixth of a mile, $0.85 for each additional sixth up to one mile and $0.55 per sixth thereafter, plus a $0.40 per minute wait charge, a $2.00 airport origination fee and a $15 minimum fare, with a 30 per cent surcharge on SUVs and vans.
Car rental
Both airports consolidate their rental desks in one building, which makes collection simple and the walk long.
At Miami International, the Rental Car Center is off-site at 3900 NW 25th Street and you reach it on the MIA Mover, the free automated people mover boarded on the third level between the Dolphin and Flamingo garages. Thirteen companies operate inside, among them Alamo, Avis, Budget, Enterprise, Hertz, National and Thrifty, with around seventeen smaller operators nearby that collect from the Rental Car Center lobby on request. The building is open around the clock, but individual counters may close between 11:00 PM and 5:00 AM, so check your company's hours if you land late. At Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood, the Rental Car Center sits next to Terminal 1 and holds twelve companies: Ace, Alamo, Avis, Budget, Dollar, Enterprise, Fox, Hertz, National, Payless, Sixt and Thrifty. From Terminal 1 you walk across the Concourse B pedestrian bridge on level 2; from Terminals 2, 3 and 4 a free shuttle runs from the lower baggage-claim level. Two things catch visitors out here, and neither is the car. Parking. Miami Beach is metered almost everywhere and priced to discourage you. On-street metered parking is $4.00 an hour in South Beach and the Entertainment District, $3.00 in East Middle Beach, and $1.00 an hour in West Middle Beach and North Beach; off-street lots are $2.00 an hour in the southern zones and $1.00 further north. Enforcement hours differ by zone: the Entertainment District is enforced twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; South Beach and East Middle Beach from 9:00 AM to 3:00 AM daily; North Beach 8:00 AM to 11:00 PM; and West Middle Beach 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM. The city runs twelve garages and sixty-six surface lots of its own. Most city garages work on a rising scale to a $20.00 daily maximum, with the 42nd Street garage the bargain of the set at $1.00 an hour to an $8.00 daily maximum, and many garages charging a $15.00 flat rate Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 PM to 5:00 AM. Miami Beach accepts two parking apps, ParkMobile and PayByPhone, and both will remind you before your session expires. Parking Administration is on 305-673-7275. Tolls. South Florida's expressways are all-electronic and there are no cash lanes, so either you carry a transponder or the toll is captured from your licence plate. Toll-By-Plate invoices go to the registered owner of the vehicle, which for a hire car is the rental company rather than you, and Florida's turnpike authority states plainly that Toll-By-Plate is not available to rental-car customers. In practice that means using the rental company's own toll programme, either a supplied SunPass transponder or plate-based billing, and each company charges its own service fees on top of the tolls, so ask what those are before you drive off. If you already own a portable SunPass transponder you can use it in a hire car by adding the rental plate to your account for the rental dates at SunPass.com or on 1-888-865-5352, and taking the transponder with you when you return the car.
Miami International Airport (MIA) is roughly thirty to forty minutes from the beach corridor, and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) is a similar thirty to forty minutes to the north. Fares can differ between the two, so it is worth pricing both.
Good to know
November through April is the pleasant season, with warm dry days and low humidity, while the summer months are hot, humid and prone to afternoon storms.
Understand the geography before you book. Miami Beach is a barrier island, separate from the mainland city of Miami, joined to it only by causeways: the MacArthur into South Beach, the Venetian a slower and prettier alternative alongside it, the Julia Tuttle into Mid Beach, and the 79th Street Causeway into North Beach. North of Miami Beach the island continues through Surfside, Bal Harbour and Sunny Isles, while Bay Harbor Islands sits just across the water on its own two islands and Aventura is on the mainland behind them. Downtown Miami and Brickell are on the mainland too. A hotel described as being in Miami may be nowhere near the beach. Allow far more time than the distance suggests. Downtown to South Beach is a short hop on paper and can take well over half an hour in traffic, because everything funnels onto the same few causeways. Getting north up Collins Avenue from South Beach to Surfside or Aventura in the afternoon is slow for the same reason. The corridor rewards staying put. Most of what a visitor needs in Surfside, Bal Harbour, Bay Harbor Islands and Mid Beach is within a walk, and the free Miami Beach Trolley plus the free Freebee and Sunny Isles City Bus will cover the rest. A car is a liability on the island and an asset only if you are leaving it. Time your visit with the seasons in mind. November through April is the dry, comfortable stretch and also the busiest and most expensive. Summer is hot and humid with near-daily afternoon thunderstorms that usually pass within the hour. Hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, September most of all, and travel insurance is worth more here than in most destinations. March is its own category. Miami Beach actively discourages spring break crowds and imposes hard restrictions on the peak weekends: parking garages and lots south of 42nd Street close to visitors, stretches of Collins and Washington Avenues become no-parking zones, nonresident towing rates double, golf carts and scooters are banned, licence-plate readers slow traffic on the MacArthur and Julia Tuttle causeways, and beach entrances south of the Entertainment District close at 6:00 PM with only 5th, 10th and 12th Streets open. The first week of December, Art Week, is the other pinch point, when hotel rates and traffic both spike. If you have a choice, avoid both. Every beach along this coast is public. The sand is continuous from South Beach to the county line, and the restriction is not on the beach but on getting to it: access is through numbered public entrances rather than through hotels. Surfside's wheelchair-accessible entries are at 88th and 96th Streets. Bring a hat and water, because shade is scarce and there are long stretches with no facilities. Sargassum seaweed washes up seasonally and is heaviest in the warmer months. Miami Beach cleans its seven and a half miles of beach daily, but a bad week is a bad week, and it is worth checking conditions before committing to a beach day.
The beach corridor is heavily policed and, by the standards of a major American city, straightforward to move around. Each municipality here runs its own police force, so the number you want depends on which town you are standing in. For any emergency anywhere in Florida, dial 911. For non-emergency police matters: Miami Beach, covering South, Mid and North Beach, 305-673-7900; Surfside 305-861-4862; Bal Harbour 305-866-5000; Bay Harbor Islands 305-866-6242; Sunny Isles Beach 305-947-4440; Aventura 305-466-8989; and the City of Miami, covering Downtown and Brickell, 305-579-6111. Haulover Park and the county-run beaches between the municipalities are patrolled by the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office, whose non-emergency line is 305-743-7433. The ocean is the hazard visitors underestimate. Every beach in the corridor flies the same colour-coded warning flags from the lifeguard towers: green for calm conditions, yellow for moderate surf or currents, red for high surf or strong currents, double red for water closed to the public, and purple for dangerous marine life. Flags change through the day. Rip currents account for more than eighty per cent of beach rescues in Miami-Dade. If you are caught in one, do not fight it - swim parallel to the shore until the pull releases you, then angle back in, and float and signal if you cannot break free. Swim in front of a staffed tower. Lifeguard cover is daytime only. Miami Beach Ocean Rescue staffs towers from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM and its conditions hotline is 305-673-7714. Sunny Isles Beach Ocean Rescue covers 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM during daylight saving time and 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM the rest of the year, with a conditions line on 305-792-1940. Surfside's beach conditions line is 305-866-3635. Outside those hours nobody is watching the water. Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November, with September historically the most active month. A named storm gives several days of warning; the practical advice for a visitor is to watch the forecast, know that your hotel sits in a coastal evacuation zone, and follow whatever instruction the city issues rather than deciding for yourself. Miami Beach also runs a Safe Place Initiative, under which participating businesses display a decal marking them as places where anyone who has been the target of a hate crime can step inside and have police called immediately.
Local time
4:07 AM
+4 hrs from NYC
Plug
Type A/B
120V
Currency
United States Dollar
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