After a 20-month shutdown due to the pandemic, Brightline, which wants to run moderate-speed passenger trains from Miami to Orlando, resumed service between Miami and West Palm Beach on Monday — and hit a car on its very first day. The company is building a line to Orlando, and is asking the state-owned Florida Development Finance Corporation for the right to sell tax-exempt private activity bonds to help pay for it.
I would be thrilled to see privately funded passenger trains. But Brightline’s presentation to the Florida Development company’s board of directors contains a lot of distortions of the truth that reduce my enthusiasm for this project.
Page 14 says Brightline will make “safety and design enhancements to at-grade crossings.” It would have been nice for them to make those enhancements before it resumed service, hit a car, and injured its driver. It’s not like they didn’t have any warning: the company’s trains had killed more than 40 people before the pandemic began. Some of the people were walking on the tracks, which Brightline claims makes it the victims’ fault, but running trains at up to 79 miles per hour through crowded cities is always going to be a problem. Promises to “enhance” grade crossings isn’t enough: the company needs to completely fence its entire right-of-way.
Page 17 says that, thanks to “positive business developments,” the cost of the new construction has risen from under $4.0 billion to more than $4.5 billion since 2019. How is that positive? This increase in costs is why Brightline needs to sell more bonds.
Page 18 compares fares on Amtrak’s Acela with proposed fares on Brightline. It says that the Acela fare for a 68-mile trip from Baltimore to Wilmington is $95 and a $236-mile trip from New York to Washington is $263, while Brightline fares for similar-length trips would be only $40 and $95, respectively.
That makes Brightline look affordable, except the company is quoting Amtrak’s highest fares. The starting fares for those two trips, $29 for Baltimore to Wilmington and $69 for New York to Washington, make Brightline look expensive. The top fares on the Acela are paid mainly by bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other people who can bill their travel costs to someone else, while Brightline will mainly serve tourists who are more price sensitive.
Page 20 says that the Acela and other passenger train startups quickly tripled their ridership after the first year. Based on this, Brightline expects to carry three times as many riders in 2022 or 2023 as it did in 2019. Yet the examples Brightline is citing don’t really apply because they greatly expanded their service after the first year.
Before the Acela, Amtrak had the Metroliners, which went the same speed as the Acelas. The Acelas were phased in as the Metroliners were phased out. This made it appear that ridership on the Acelas grew when all that was happening was that more Metroliner passengers were taking Acelas.
Another example cited by Brightline was the London-Paris Eurostar. For almost half of its first year, the Eurostar operated on a abbreviated schedule. It didn’t truly provide full service until the beginning of the second year when the Ashford station opened, so of course it carried more riders in the second year than the first.
Brightline’s third example was the Italo, a private high-speed train in Italy. This started service on one route, but then quickly expanded to several more routes, leading to a large increase in ridership. But, other than Orlando-Tampa (which will require more borrowings), Brightline doesn’t expect to add any new routes anytime soon. Thus, none of these examples really apply to Brightline.
On top of this, none of the above lines had to contend with a transportation landscape that has been dramatically altered by a pandemic. I’ve always said that Brightline is the one private passenger train that had any chance of success because it could take some of the 15 million cruise ship passengers arriving in Miami and Fort Lauderdale each year on train rides to Disneyland and other Orlando attractions. But will cruise ship traffic ever recover to 15 million a year after the pandemic?
One major cruise ship company says it is operating two-thirds of its ships and that they are two-thirds full, as opposed to 100 percent of its ships 80 percent full before the pandemic. That suggests cruise ship passengers are down by about 50 percent. If the cruise ship industry doesn’t fully recover, Brightline will be toast.
Brightline’s presentation doesn’t mention that its ridership wasn’t doing so hot even before the pandemic, with both passenger and revenue forecasts falling short. In a desperate attempt to increase ridership, the company even offered a “buy one, get three free” ticket deal. That doesn’t bode well for it to earn enough money to pay back its bonds.
Brightline wants to sell $1 billion in new bonds, 10 percent of which would be used to pay interest on its previous bonds, which is a bad sign in itself. Based on some of the questionable claims it made in its presentation, I wouldn’t want to buy any of those bonds.
Some of the people were walking on the tracks
Give them an iq test, I learned since “Stand By Me”
You stay off the tracks.
Brighline’s been averaging a death a month from people hit by trains. They were killing people before the service began.
Now, some of these are not a safety design issue. They’re suicides.
Some of these are accidents like the most recent one the VIPs were on the train to do their we’re open again news conferences and, well, they’re train got delayed. A lil’ ol lady turned onto the tracks. There’s not much one can do about that.
The question isn’t if people are the tracks by why are they on the tracks.
For example, someone got killed here. To detour to the north and cross the tracks legally is a 2 1/2 mile detour. Most any pedestrian faced with an extra 10 minutes of walking, let alone an hour, is going to take the shortest, quickest route. A simple fence at this closed crossing would deter 90% of the trespassing.
https://www.google.com/maps/@26.2108636,-80.1313044,3a,37.5y,279.37h,92.76t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sJKXkngfCOM0wmZYv3tKAeQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
Why was the crossing closed and nothing put in place to allow pedestrians to safely cross? A car going a mile up or down the road to cross isn’t a problem. A pedestrian, it’s more than a burden. The tracks become a barrier, a wall, if they don’t take short cuts.
And that’s the problem here. Some like to pontificate and poo-poo people for taking shortcuts. But the tresspassers aren’t the only ones taking short cuts. So is FEC, Brightline, Florida DOT and the local city and county.
”
That makes Brightline look affordable, except the company is quoting Amtrak’s highest fares. The starting fares for those two trips, $29 for Baltimore to Wilmington and $69 for New York to Washington, make Brightline look expensive. The top fares on the Acela are paid mainly by bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other people who can bill their travel costs to someone else, while Brightline will mainly serve tourists who are more price sensitive.
” ~antiplanner
I suspect Brightline’s not having that low cost coach class is a move so they can sell tickets at that price and talk about it to their customers as a discount.
Like they Disney or Carnival, we’ll move your customers from Port Canaveral or Miami to Miami or Orlando for $X, which is a 40% discount off the cost of a seat if you buy Y seats.
And of course they bundle it as part of some package where you get to do some 3 day cruise and then 3 days in Orlando.
Or something……
Yes exactly. The huge bulk of Acela riders…are people who bill travel expenses to other people or enterprises.
There’s four ways to spend money.
1. Your money on yourself, you care about cost and quality
2. Your money on someone else, you care about cost not so much about quality
3 other people’s money on yourself * hint ? hint* you care about quality but not costs. This is how politicians work
4. Other people’s money on other people, don’t give two shits about cost or quality….this is how politicians spend your money.
Politicians are a sad breed especially lifelong career ones… namely they’re used to being coddled..once out of office don’t really know how to do anything else….If AOC loses she’s gonna have a hard time readjusting to mediocrity. Maybe she’ll con a book deal or become a “consultant”
I’m pretty sure even Brandon himself used to brag about taking the train from Wilmington to DC for work. I’m sure he spared no expense, as he had a publicly-funded travel allowance to cover most, if not all, of his costs.