Brightline, the privately operated passenger train in Florida, had five accidents that killed three people last week.
- On February 13, a man was killed when he drove his car around the lowered crossing gates and was hit by a train in Lake Worth Beach.
- On February 15, a pedestrian was killed when he was struck by a Brightline train in Hallandale Beach.
Brightline posted this video taken from the train that struck a car last week to prove that the accident wasn’t its fault. What it shows is that a freight train had gone through the crossing and an impatient motorist drove around the gates unable to see that a passenger train was coming because his view was blocked by the freight. The accident would have been prevented if Brightline had installed full-width crossing gates instead of gates that covered only half the width of the street.
- Also on February 15, a woman and her baby narrowly avoided injury when a Brightline train struck her car in Delray Beach.
- On February 16, a man suffered “incapacitating injuries” when a Brightline train struck his car, also in Lake Worth Beach.
- On February 19, a man walking on the tracks was killed when he was hit by a Brightline train in Delray Beach.
Of course, the railroad insists that none of these accidents were its fault. Those people shouldn’t have been walking on the tracks or driven their cars around the crossing gates that block access to the tracks on only one side of the streets.
Yet the accidents are so frequent that local media has taken to calling Brightline the Death Train. Before the COVID pandemic began, the Associated Press declared Brightline the most dangerous railroad in America.
The problem is that, like the evil freeways that divided urban neighborhoods, Brightline runs in a rail corridor down the middle of numerous cities and towns in south Florida. Before Brightline, this corridor was used by a few slow-moving freight trains a day, and it was considered dangerous even then. Now, it is also carrying 32 fast passenger trains a day at speeds up to 79 miles per hour.
“There is nothing we would want more than for [the number of deaths] to go to zero,” Brightline’s president told a reporter before the pandemic began. But Brightline shut down for 20 months during the pandemic. They could have used that time to put up better crossing gates and fence their right of way to keep pedestrians off. Instead, they did nothing, and when the trains started up again in November, the first accident took place “within hours.”
Brightline “does not contribute to our quality of life,” a letter writer told the Palm Beach Post on Sunday. Instead, the frequent trains cause congestion, and idling cars increase air pollution. The train should be “prohibited,” she concluded.
Brightline’s target market is cruise ship passengers, not the people who actually live in south Florida. It is currently building a brand-new rail line from Cocoa to Orlando. But, if it doesn’t do something to improve its image and safety record soon, it won’t ever carry a single cruise ship passenger to Orlando.
The person who drove around the crossing gates is dumber, but also keep in mind fatalities on Brightline tracks are also suicides.
Running passenger trains at 79 mph and freight trains at 59 mph on Class 4 rail corridors is an FRA standard inline with the Railroad Safety Act. Even more common are unfenced Class 5 corridors with nearly identical crossing requirements, but with 79 mph freight and passenger traffic.
Meanwhile
US-19 from Denton Ave. to San Marco Dr. is the deadliest stretch of road in Florida with 25 fatal accidents.
And Florida ranks 3rd with 2,900 yearly car related fatalities….
Privately owned Brightline and privately owned freight rail operators in NA are the unsafest railroads in the developed world. In an article prior you cheered American freight trains, but the truth is, they are running with oudated technology (diesel, outdated safety systems). They are often too long and too high to be safe. There are tons of videos on YT which show run down rail infrastructure in the US, mostly freight rail corridors. Here is a video of one of them: https://youtu.be/9X2A2f6E5DI There are many more. It’s a systemic issue of profit maximizing. Brightline is no exception, their railroads are not matching the European standards. It does not surprise me, they have so many accidents. Widespread grade separation would probably help, but that is expensive and a privately owned company won’t be able to do this.
Note that I-95, a limited access highway running parallel to the tracks, is elevated at this point. Cross traffic is prevented from crossing interstate highways with a tiny number of very rural exceptions.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Railroad Administration will hold a meeting this week with South Florida rail operators, as well as government and law-enforcement officials, to discuss safety efforts in the wake of ongoing fatal accidents involving Brightline passenger service.
https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/fra-calls-meeting-on-south-florida-grade-crossing-pedestrian-safety/
The reality is that neither Brightline nor any other US passenger railroad can afford to grade-separate their tracks from the rest of the motorized and pedestrian world. Here, Brightline is playing a dangerous and deadly game in an effort to force government to pay for infrastructure that Brightline needs but cannot afford.
One simple alternative that would likely put Brightline out of business would be to lower the train speeds.
UTISOC wrote, “Privately owned Brightline and privately owned freight rail operators in NA are the unsafest railroads in the developed world.”
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CNBC doesn’t agree … The United States lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to passenger trains, but when it comes to the freight railroad the U.S. dominates.
https://youtu.be/GkfIuEPZzPU
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UTISOC included a link to YouTube videos of class III freight operations which operate safely at very reduced speeds and reduced loads appropriate to the rails they’re using. One linked video was sped up (look at the bare tree branches vibrating in the wind) to make the operation look dangerous.
https://youtu.be/GkfIuEPZzPU
The US has the most dangerous and polluting freight trains in the developed world. A classic example of profit maximization at the expense of safety and the environment. https://youtu.be/t9cc4Et-3Ck
UTISOC wrote, “The US has the most dangerous and polluting freight trains in the developed world.”
UTISOC backed this statement with a link to a YouTube video from Vice News that starts saying, “It’s been almost eight years since a train carrying two million gallons of liquid petroleum crashed in a town in Quebec.” In 2013!
Last time I checked, Quebec is not in the US.
My favorite quote from the video, “Because unlike our roads, bridges, tunnels and public transit, the entire freight system in the US is privately owned meaning, at least in the eyes of management, every dollar spent on maintenance and good safety practices is a dollar coming out of their pockets.”
But … we just learned this about the publicly owned and maintained bridges of Pennsylvania (like the one that recently collapsed) … “Of the 23,166 bridges in the Commonwealth, 3,198, or 13.8 percent, are classified as structurally deficient. … This means one of the key elements is in poor or worse condition.”
And in the case of Pennsylvania bridges, no dollars are coming out of anyone’s pockets from failure to spend on maintenance and repair.
US and Canada have essentially the same freight rail system. Should have said NA freight rail. Sometimes Canada is considered the 51th state of the US anyway. In terms of urban planning, infrastructure and railways both countries are more or less identically backwards. You will have a difficult time finding tracks that are in such a bad shape in Germany, Switzerland and Japan. The lack of electrification and advanced signaling and safety features is apparent. I don’t need a statistics for this to know. Everyone who knows one or two things of railroads knows that freight trains in NA are outdated and unsafe.
Here some other examples that just happened recently:
Train Derails & Cars Topple in Arizona (yesterday)
https://youtu.be/csq2fA3RYdo
Train derails in Bartow County (5 days ago)
https://youtu.be/DbXSUxi_yA8
Freight train derailment causes inferno in Arizona (1 year ago)
https://youtu.be/bDyu163hHKU
TRAIN DERAILMENT AT SANTA FE JUNCTION (September 15, 2020)
https://youtu.be/4oyMx-ta_sY
SANTA FE JUNCTION DERAILMENT (2022)
https://youtu.be/R9VIWVlCIlg
AMAZING SPLIT-SECOND TRAIN STOP AFTER GOING INTO EMERGENCY (April 10, 2021)
https://youtu.be/LQjwOhx-cfI
I am too lazy to do this. Just search it yourself. Youtube is full of freight train crashes in the US. Freight rail crashes are extremely rare here in Germany. It can happen, but is way less likely. It’s just sad that you can not admit, that US freight rail is a safety hazard. It’s obvious.
No, but it does contribute to your quantity of death. How’s that for a tradeoff?
25 fatalities over what period of time? And relative to what level of traffic exposure (e.g. VMT). Those are kind of important details.
And Florida is also 3rd in the US in total population, so…
Eh…short and punchy, but doesn’t have enough pizazz. I prefer the Bastiat-esque Negative Railroad.
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And Florida ranks 3rd with 2,900 yearly car related fatalities….
” ~lazybabbler
Amazing. The 3rd most populous state has the 3rd most fatalities. Amazing.
UTISOC wrote, “I am too lazy to do this. Just search it yourself.”
Thank you for your honesty. Here’s my last link …
Why is Europe so absurdly backward compared to the U.S. in rail freight transport
To a neutral observer, the shrinking of maritime capacity between Asia and Europe could be a marketing opportunity for the trans-European railway intermodal system that now boasts a connection to the industrious Chinese East Coast, made possible through Beijing’s One Belt One Road initiative. But unlike the way the U.S. leverages its extensive railroad network to move freight, Europe does no such thing, with its freight rail system lagging behind the U.S. by several decades.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-backward-compared-to-the-u-s-in-rail-freight-transport
Nice propaganda article, but cargo volume isn’t everything. In terms of freight rail technology the US is far behind Europe, even lacking basic technology that European freight rail operators have implemented for decades. Did you struggle to find videos of derailments of German freight trains on YT? Well, that’s because it is very unlikely due to superior safety technology American freight railways are too greedy to implement. The result are the unsafest freight trains in the developed world. It’s funny how this author thinks that increasing volume at the expense of safety and environmental standards (still using outdated Diesel technology) is a success.
This article is completely laughable. For instance saying that European tunnels are not designed for double stacker trains. Most European railway tunnels were built before double stacker trains were even invented. This shows that the author of this article has no idea what he talking about.
Also extra long trains are not possible in Europe. They would be longer than our biggest cities. This would congest the system. This guy has no clue what he is writing about. Laughable
The video shows the importance of having gates that fully block the road. There is a freight train that passes through shortly before the Brightline train arrives at the xing. The driver, possibly thinking the gates were malfunctioning, goes around the tiny arm and right in front of the oncoming Brightline train.
Noo. The video illustrates the casual idiocy of average drivers.
CARE, CONCERN, ATTENTION to detail are not trainable skills, they’re mindsets. People with those mindsets survive….. those that don’t end up unwilling guineavpigs for Darwinian theory
It’s not uncommon for xings system to malfunction. While what the driver did was not wise, it was _not_ idiotic given that.
Think of gates as crossings as fences at the Grand Canyon. We can pontificate all we want over how dumb someone would be to fall over the edge if there wasn’t a fence. But that is _NOT the issue we’re facing.
The issue is are there sensible, cost effective things we can do to mitigate accidents. Period.
Full gates do that. This corridor has less than 50 xings lacking full gates. NOt a single car has gone around gates where they completely black to road in both directions. For just a few million we can save a couple lives every year.
Which do we value more? Calling out people for doing dumb things or saving human lives?
It’s weird how deaths from the train are given in absolute numbers of deaths rather than deaths per passenger mile. I guess individual people only matter when they are killed by trains, whereas if they’re killed by cars, it’s just a per-mile statistic.