Getting to the University of Miami without a car

The University of Miami has its own Metrorail station. That one fact decides a lot about where it makes sense to live, and almost no housing listing anywhere mentions it.

The station is called University, and it sits at the edge of the Coral Gables campus. Both Metrorail lines — Green and Orange — run through it, so from anywhere on the shared stretch of track you get to campus without changing trains. If you do not have a car, and most first-year students do not, this is the difference between a commute and a problem.

Every stop, and how far it is from campus

These are the stations on the section of track both lines share, north to south. The count is stops, not minutes — trains do not run to a schedule you can set a watch by, but the number of stops between two stations never changes.

North of Earlington Heights the two lines split — Green continues north to Palmetto, Orange turns west to the airport — so anything past that point means a transfer. Those stations are left out here because a transfer changes the answer enough that a stop count stops being useful.

What that means for each neighborhood

• Coral Gables — the campus station is inside this neighborhood.
• Coconut Grove — 2 stops from Coconut Grove, no transfer.
• Brickell — 4 stops from Brickell, no transfer.
• South Miami — 1 stop from South Miami, no transfer.
• Downtown Miami — 5 stops from Government Center, no transfer.
• Sunset — no walkable station. No walkable Metrorail. The nearest station, Dadeland South, is about 4.5 km away in a straight line — well beyond a walk — so plan on a bike, a bus or a car.

The part nobody tells you

Stops are not minutes

Four stops is not four times one stop. Trains sit at platforms, and how long you wait for one is usually a bigger share of the trip than the ride itself. Check the live times before you decide a neighborhood is too far — Miami-Dade publishes them, and the gap between lines and times of day is real.

Getting from the station to your door still counts

A place that is four stops from campus and a twenty-minute walk from its own station is not a four-stop commute. When you look at a listing on Crash, the walk to the nearest station is shown next to the walk to campus, so you can see both halves of the trip instead of one.

Straight-line distance lies

Everything on this site that says "about N minutes" is rounded, on purpose. Distances are measured as the crow flies from a deliberately approximate point — the exact address of a listing stays private until both people agree to talk — and streets, the canal and US-1 all make the real walk longer. Rounding to the nearest five minutes says the same thing without pretending to a precision that is not there.

Where the stop counts come from

The station list and their positions on the line are stored in this site's own code and checked against OpenStreetMap's Miami-Dade station data, not typed in from memory. An earlier hand-written version of that list was wrong on 21 of 23 stations, which is exactly why it is derived now. The stop counts on this page are counted from that list every time the page is built.

Crash lists sublets and student-friendly leases around the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and shows the nearest Metrorail station on every one. Browse what is listed now.