The Lower Keys Shuttle: From Workhorse to Racehorse
One road. Fifty miles. The case for transforming the Keys’ most important bus into a transit spine worthy of the place.
April 18, 2026. By Chris Hamilton
Two weeks ago, on an evening walk along Truman Avenue, I stopped to take a couple of photos. Circle K: $4.59 a gallon for unleaded. Chevron across the street: $4.49. These weren’t anomalies — when I walked by again this week, the prices had gone up. Monroe County consistently has the highest gas prices in Florida, and right now, with global oil markets in turmoil, those prices are punishing anyone who has no choice but to drive to work.
And in the Florida Keys, almost everyone who works here has no choice but to drive.
Think about what that means for a worker commuting from Marathon to Key West — about 50 miles each way, roughly 100 miles round trip every day. At $4.59 a gallon in a car getting 25 miles per gallon, that’s $300 to $400 a month just in fuel. Even someone coming from Big Pine Key, just 30 miles away, is spending well over $200 a month just in fuel. And that assumes a reasonably fuel-efficient vehicle. For someone driving an older truck or van, the number climbs higher still. Add Florida’s now-notorious auto insurance rates — the highest in the nation — a car payment, maintenance, and downtown parking, and you’re looking at a transportation burden that can easily exceed $800 to $1,000 a month. On top of Keys housing costs. On top of everything else.
Now consider this: a monthly Keys pass on the Lower Keys Shuttle costs $75.
That gap — between what it costs to drive and what it could cost to ride — is the story of the Lower Keys Shuttle in a single number. The bus is there. The route is there. The need is there. What’s missing is the frequency, the span of service, and the political will to make it something people can actually depend on.
But right now, for the first time in years, that political will may actually be within reach. This summer, Monroe County and the City of Key West have a chance to transform the Lower Keys Shuttle from the everyday workhorse bus it is into the racehorse transit spine the Keys has always needed — frequent enough to be useful, late enough to serve the people who keep this island running, good enough to make a tourist put down the car keys. This is that story.
The Workhorse
The Lower Keys Shuttle is the quiet backbone of Key West Transit. While the Duval Loop grabbed headlines when it was suspended in January — and rightly so — the LKS has been doing its job steadily and without fanfare for years. Ten trips a day from Marathon to Key West. Ten trips back. Every day since the mid-2000’s without change.
Ridership has been remarkably consistent: more than 96,000 rides in FY2022-23, over 100,000 in FY2023-24, and on pace again this year — averaging roughly 7,500 to 7,800 riders a month in the fall and winter months. The service held up through COVID better than almost any other route in the system. It is, in every practical sense, the one transit lifeline connecting the workforce corridor of the Lower Keys to the jobs, services, and economic engine of downtown Key West.
And over the past several years, the City of Key West has made real investments in that lifeline — just not in frequency. New bus shelters, benches, bike racks at the stops and new additional and wider bike racks on the buses, lighting, and map and schedule signage have been installed at stops from Marathon to Key West, making it genuinely easier to bike to the shuttle and complete that first and last mile of the journey. It’s good work and it deserves credit. But you can have the nicest bus stops in South Florida and if the next bus isn’t coming for 90 or even 120 minutes, most workers simply can’t risk it.
That’s where we’ve been stuck for a decades. The infrastructure got better. The schedule didn’t.
One Road. One Opportunity.
Here’s something that transit planners in most American cities would find almost impossible to believe: the Lower Keys Shuttle serves a corridor where every single destination — every hotel, every restaurant, every shop, every job, every home — sits on or within a short walk or bike ride of a single road.
US Route 1. The Overseas Highway. There is no other road.
In most cities, the fundamental challenge of public transit is coverage. How do you put a bus stop reasonably close to where people live, work, eat, and shop when those origins and destinations are spread across a grid of hundreds of streets? You can’t. You make tradeoffs, you serve the densest corridors, and you accept that a lot of people will never be close enough to a stop to make transit practical. The Lower Keys don’t have that problem. You need one really good route, running frequently, for a long span of the day.
Think of it like a subway trunk line. The A train in New York, the Orange Line in DC — these are the arteries that everything else connects to. They work because they’re frequent enough that you don’t need to check a schedule. You just show up and a train comes. The Lower Keys Shuttle could be that for this community. The geography is practically begging for it. One road. No transfers needed. No coverage problem to solve.
What would that look like in practice? A bus every 30 minutes from early morning until midnight — or later, for the hospitality workers whose shifts end well after the current last departure from downtown at 7:49pm. Round trip for a month: $75 with a Keys pass, $45 if you qualify for reduced fare. For workers, for residents, for tourists stuck in the grinding traffic that US-1 serves up every winter season — a frequent, reliable shuttle along that single corridor would be genuinely transformative.
Three Audiences. One Bus.
Here’s what’s easy to miss when we talk about the Lower Keys Shuttle: we tend to frame it as a service for workers, as if tourists and residents are separate conversations. But on US-1, those three groups are riding the same road, stuck in the same traffic, heading to the same downtown. The case for a better shuttle isn’t three separate arguments. It’s one argument with three faces.
Start with the workers, because the numbers are the most damning. According to the US Census, less than half of one percent of Monroe County residents use public transit to get to work. Half. Of. One. Percent. That’s not an indication of demand — workers aren’t choosing their cars because they love sitting on US-1 at 8am. They’re choosing their cars because 90 to 120 minutes between buses makes the shuttle functionally unusable for anyone with a shift that starts at a specific time. As I’ve written before, you can’t tell your boss you might be an hour and a half late because you missed the bus.
And the cost of that forced car ownership lands hardest on exactly the people who can least afford it. We’ve documented that here. What if each adult in a family didn’t have to own a car to get to work? They could save $1,000 a month according to AAA. A monthly Keys pass on the Lower Keys Shuttle costs $75. The math is not subtle.
The business community should be paying attention to this too, and the smart ones — like Paul Menta of Shop Mom and Pop Key West — already are. A restaurant or hotel in Key West that can tell a prospective employee in Big Pine Key or Summerland Key that there’s a reliable, frequent bus — one that comes every 30 minutes and runs past midnight — has something to offer that no competitor up the Keys does. Right now, the pitch to any worker who doesn’t own a car or can’t afford to drive is essentially: sorry, you can’t work here. That’s not a transit problem. That’s a recruiting problem.
Then there are the residents — the people who live up the Keys, not necessarily for work, but who have built their lives in Big Pine Key or Cudjoe or Sugarloaf and need to get to Key West for medical appointments, grocery runs, government offices, family. For these residents, the LKS is a lifeline or it’s nothing, depending entirely on whether the schedule works for them. At current frequency, for many it’s nothing. A retired couple in Big Coppitt who doesn’t want to maintain two cars — or can’t — has essentially no transit option that works for anything resembling a normal errand.
And then there are the visitors — who may be the most underappreciated audience of all. We tend to imagine tourists as people happily tooling around in rental cars, at least up the Keys. But talk to anyone staying at a resort on Summerland Key or a vacation rental in Big Pine and the reality is different. They arrived by car — the overwhelming majority of Monroe County visitors do — and now they’re dependent on that car for absolutely everything. Dinner requires driving. A sunset drink on the water requires driving. A morning fishing charter, a trip to the grocery store, a lazy afternoon on Duval Street — all of it means getting back in the car, finding parking, and navigating US-1. Which at 6pm, when every Keys worker is heading home and every tourist is heading out for dinner, is nobody’s idea of a relaxing vacation.
A frequent, reliable shuttle along US-1 — running from Marathon through every key into downtown, every 30 minutes, until well after midnight — would change that calculation entirely. You wouldn’t even have to call it a commuter bus. Brand it for visitors. Put a conch shell on the side. Call it the Keys Explorer. Workers and residents will figure it out, and the Tourist Development Tax dollars that currently fund zero transit would finally be doing what they were always supposed to do: serving tourists. Every city that has built a thriving tourist economy on a walkable, transit-connected downtown knows that people spend more money when they’re not worried about driving back. They stay longer, stop at more places, come back sooner. The Lower Keys Shuttle, done right, isn’t a cost to tourism. It’s an investment in it.
Follow the Money
Here’s a number worth sitting with: the Lower Keys Shuttle costs roughly $1.56 million a year to operate. Monroe County — the government that represents every single person living in the Keys from Key Largo to Key West — contributes about $332,000 of that. The City of Marathon chips in about $190,000. The City of Key West covers the rest. That’s over a million dollars annually from Key West’s budget for a route that runs 50 miles up someone else’s highway, serving workers, residents, and tourists spread across the entire Lower Keys corridor.
To be clear: Key West isn’t complaining, at least not publicly. The City has been a faithful steward of this route for years. But the funding math raises a legitimate question. If the Lower Keys Shuttle serves the whole region — and it does, visibly and measurably — why is one municipality carrying the majority of the cost while the County and its other cities benefit?
The County’s contribution for operations works out to roughly 21 cents of every dollar spent on the LKS. And the County spends zero for capital. For a service that is, in every practical sense, a regional lifeline, that’s a thin slice. And it becomes thinner still when you consider what the County does spend on tourism promotion. Monroe County’s TDC took in $61.5 million in Tourist Development Tax revenue in FY2024, and their recently-released FY2025 Annual Report celebrates a record 4.7 million domestic visitors — up 4% year over year. The TDC employs 29 people across marketing, advertising, PR, sales and technology. They spent nearly $10 million on capital projects and nonprofits and $3 million on events. Somewhere between $30 and $40 million goes to marketing campaigns — ads, streaming audio, influencer trips, and media missions. The amount directed to transit, specifically to the Lower Keys Shuttle those 4.7 million visitors might ride once they get here? Zero. The 37-page FY2025 Annual Report does not mention transit once. Not a word. Couldn’t some of this be spent on tourist serving buses and their operation?
This isn’t a new argument. I’ve been making it for years, most recently here and here, and so have others. Florida Statute §125.0104 allows Tourist Development Tax funds to be used for transportation serving tourists. The LKS serves tourists — we just established that in the previous section at some length. The legal pathway exists. What has been missing is the political will to walk through it.
The Window Is Open
There’s a version of this story where nothing changes. The County’s FY27 budget gets consumed by the property tax fight, the LKS funding conversation gets deferred again, and we’re writing the same article in 2028. That version is entirely possible and frankly not hard to imagine.
But there’s another version, and the signals in recent weeks suggest it’s genuinely within reach.
Christine Hurley, the Monroe County Administrator, confirmed recently that her office has been meeting with Key West staff about the Lower Keys Shuttle and that a recommendation could make it into the FY27 budget process. That’s not a press release. That’s an administrator who has done her homework telling you the machinery is moving. On the City side, Assistant City Manager Rod Delostrinos and the transit team have been working through funding alternatives and exploring new revenue streams — cruise ship disembarkation fees, parking revenues, potential TDC partnership — to restore and expand transit services. Commissioner Sam Kaufman, one of the most vocal transit advocates on the City Commission, has been pushing this conversation from inside City Hall, and Commissioner Monica Haskell has been working with TDC Executive Director Kara Franker on the tourism funding angle.
The pieces are in place in a way they haven’t been before. The question is whether the political will matches the moment.
What would meaningful improvement actually look like? The Key West Transit Ten-Year Plan — updated just last month — gives us a framework. The plan calls for increased frequency on the LKS, extended evening service, and better connections between the shuttle and local Key West routes. These aren’t moonshots. They’re the kinds of service improvements that transit agencies around the country implement when they decide a corridor is worth investing in. The Lower Keys corridor, with its single road and captive ridership potential, is one of the most investable transit corridors in Florida. You don’t need to build anything. The road is there. The buses are there. The stops — freshly upgraded with shelters, benches, bike racks, and real-time info on the app — are there. What’s needed is frequency and span, and frequency and span cost money.
Here’s a useful comparison. Arlington, Virginia — where I spent more than two decades working in transportation before moving to Key West — built a nationally recognized transit and commuter services program on the back of exactly this kind of corridor thinking. The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor is one road, essentially, lined with offices, apartments, restaurants, and hotels. When they decided to invest in frequent, reliable transit along that corridor, ridership followed. Businesses followed. Workers who didn’t own cars could suddenly live and work there. The corridor became one of the most economically productive in the Washington region. The investment paid for itself many times over.
The Lower Keys aren’t Arlington. The scale is different, the density is different, the politics are different. But the underlying logic is identical: a single well-served corridor, where everyone’s origin and destination is already on the line, is the easiest case for transit investment you will ever find. You don’t get many of those. When you have one, you invest in it.
And here’s the bigger dream, while we’re at it. The Lower Keys Shuttle doesn’t have to stop at Marathon. Richard Clark, the transit director the County let go last summer when it dismantled its fledgling transit department, used to talk about a 30-minute frequency service running the entire length of the Keys, all the way to Key Largo and beyond. A true regional rapid bus corridor along the Overseas Highway. That vision didn’t die with his departure. It just needs someone to pick it back up. Start with the Lower Keys. Prove the model. Then build north.
The FY27 budget process begins this summer. The decisions made in the next few months will determine whether the Lower Keys Shuttle stays exactly what it is — a reliable, underloved workhorse running on a decades-old schedule — or becomes something closer to what this corridor has always deserved. A real transit spine for the Lower Keys. Frequent enough to be useful. Late enough to serve the workers who keep this island running. Good enough to make a tourist put down the car keys.
Imagine It.
Picture it. Not as a policy outcome. As a Tuesday morning, January 2027.
A teacher in Big Pine Key finishes breakfast, grabs her bag, and walks to the stop. She doesn’t check the schedule because she doesn’t need to — the bus comes every 30 minutes. She knows that. Everyone knows that. She rides in, reads her phone, watches the water slide past on both sides of the Seven Mile Bridge, and gets to work without having touched a steering wheel.
A couple staying at a resort on Summerland Key decides on a whim to spend the afternoon in Key West. No discussion about parking. No designated driver negotiation over dinner. They just go. They stay later than they planned because they can. They spend more money because they’re relaxed. They tell their friends about it when they get home.
A line cook finishing a late shift on Duval Street catches the 11:30 bus north. He’s home by midnight. He’s not calculating whether he can afford the gas this week or texting someone for a ride. He’s just going home.
This is what frequent, reliable transit does. It doesn’t just solve a transportation problem. It quietly stitches a community together — the same way the Metro stitched Washington together, gave it a connective tissue that turned a collection of neighborhoods into something that felt like a shared city. The Lower Keys are already connected by one road and one extraordinary landscape. All they’re missing is a bus worthy of both.
I walked past those gas stations on Truman Avenue again the other night. The prices had barely moved.
Somewhere up US-1, a cook finishing a dinner shift in Key West was trying to figure out whether to wait for the last bus or call someone for a ride. A housekeeper in Big Pine Key was calculating whether this month’s gas bill was going to make rent tight. A family on vacation in Summerland Key was arguing about who had to be the designated driver so they could finally go have a nice dinner in Old Town.
None of these people are asking for anything unreasonable. They want to get where they’re going reliably, affordably, without the whole exercise feeling like a punishment. That’s not a radical vision of transportation. That’s just a bus that comes often enough to be useful.
The Lower Keys Shuttle has been that bus for a lot of people for a long time — quietly, steadily, without much fanfare. It has hauled workers and retirees and tourists and students up and down 50 miles of the most beautiful highway in America, ten times a day, every day, for years. It deserves better than the schedule it’s been running since the early days of the Obama administration.
The County is at the table. The City is at the table. The funding mechanisms exist. The political moment, fragile as it always is, is here.
The workhorse has earned its chance to run like a racehorse. All it needs now is for the people making the budget decisions this summer to decide that this is the investment worth making.
It is.
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Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.
It would take a while to catch on Chris, but if it was a solid and reliable service. I can’t see too many working people choosing to pay $1,000 per month versus $75.