Historical note: Miami owes its founding to Julia Tuttle's successful sales pitch to a railroad company.
> Julia Tuttle, a local landowner, convinced Henry Flagler, a railroad tycoon, to expand his Florida East Coast Railway to Miami. On July 28, 1896, Miami was officially incorporated as a city with a population of just over 300.
> Julia DeForest Tuttle was an American businesswoman who was largely responsible for, and the original owner of, the land upon which Miami, Florida, was built. For this reason, she is called the "Mother of Miami".
Part of Flagler's motivation for building the railroad was beach property rights. The government at the time incentived railroad construction by granting land along the sides of the rails extending several miles.
By building the railroad Flagler gained rights to most of Florida's east coast beach property. So in a sense, Miami was a giant public works project.
Are we going to be willing to do the same for space exploration?
I doubt it. NASA and the US government has lost its sense of adventure and conquering spirit. Too many people in the administration (not Trump's, but rather the deep-state) are 1) afraid of deaths, 2) afraid of being seen as colonizers. That's why we don't have moon bases yet. People couldn't figure out a need, so they became timid hamsters with their Shuttle. So our magnificent men in their flying machines just "go up tiddly up up,they go down tiddly down down." [1]
What I saw over decades after Apollo was an unrelenting pounding by Congress, specifically Republicans in regards to cost and commercial payback, and Democrats in regards to why are we spending money out there when it is needed here, instead. Not a "deep state", of which even if it did exist would have then been filled with the unimaginative and risk adverse since because of my previous point.
Deep-state doesn't just mean conspiratorial "them/they". It means all of the bureaucratic individuals that haunt the halls of government between administrations and Congressional turnover. They drive policy. They are around for years. It's these unimaginative individuals that hold us back.
Republicans wanted a payback. That's fine. Every colonial backer wants that. The argument could have been fusion. We'd extract helium on the moon. We'd also have the ability for meta-materials fabrication there given the weaker gravity. All of this could have been wrapped up in the Republican's favorite spending bucket: war readiness. Few argued for that at the time.
The Democrats did what you said, tried to keep their plantations populated through bread and circuses. They lacked the ability to see how colonization would provide jobs and reduce crime by allowing people that don't fit well in society an outlet like the US had with its Western frontier.
At this point the US is too indebted to support such a program, at least at a governmental level. I think our only hope is private parities establishing their own colonies in order to create meta-materials from mined asteroids.
Agreed with all your points; the old term was bureaucrats. The term "deep state", to me, is very loaded, reeking of conspiracy theories, especially in today's politics. Thanks for the response.
> They lacked the ability to see how colonization would provide jobs and reduce crime by allowing people that don't fit well in society an outlet like the US had with its Western frontier.
I’m not sure that criminals and other social misfits would be welcome in space exploration / colonization. Space is a harsh environment that requires cooperative behavior just to stay alive. Colonization occurred in places where there was oxygen, food and water. The main skills needed were very basic survival skills, and a willingness to murder the non-European (and sometimes European) locals that got in the way.
We are a long way away from the point where we could tolerate a showdown at high noon in space, though that might make for a profitable summer blockbuster.
The prior poster was explicitly talking about reducing crime by exporting criminals. That’s not a cheap way to execute “undesirable” people, and if they aren’t killed on the way up, we end up with people who are not a great fit for the demands of living in space, however willing prisoners may be to go.
I hope we can find a more humane way to deal with our troubled fellow humans than to send them on suicide missions.
Deep-state doesn't just mean conspiratorial "them/they". It means all of the bureaucratic individuals that haunt the halls of government between administrations and Congressional turnover.
I have never seen this interpretation expressed by anyone else, ever.
Even if I gave you free land on the moon, and the one-way trip, you could not live there. Colonizes work because people who manage to get there can live self-sufficiently
Do note that many colonies stated not by people living there, but by people going to "get rich" while being supported from home, and they left infrastructure behind that the latter colonists used.
Space exploration and colonization is, or course, more difficult given the harsh environment. Given land and manufacturing capacity, people could attempt to create a larger colony.
We can heavy lift the manufacturing systems to the moon if we use 3D printing and accept risk of death and colonial collapse. It would be spartan and difficult, but I think we could do it. The meager printing would give rise to more advanced machines capable of manufacturing for materials and forms.
My present thesis is that the government lacks the vision and fortitude to colonize any celestial body. So they won’t land grant.
I took the inaugural train this weekend from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale. The distance is 24miles as the crow flies and the journey exactly 30 minutes. So the average speed for this leg of the journey was 48mph.
This same journey would take 45 minutes by car in the express lane. I don't even want to imagine what this would be in the non-express during rush hour.
Just looked up an example to compare: Östertälje-Uppsala C, a large part of a Stockholm commuter train line, is 102 km long, and takes 1:32h for an average speed of 66km/h, or 41mph, below the 45mph quoted in the article.
The acceleration and waiting at stations really hits the average.
A better comparison is the Stockholm C – Uppsala C SJ-operated non-stop services, which like the Miami to Ft Lauredale services take exactly 30 minutes.
This is 63 km (39 mi) as the crow flies (66 km by track), so an average speed of 126 km/h (78 mph), substantially quicker than the Miami to Ft Lauredale service.
Taking a look at Google maps that is not really comparable either. Much of the area between them appears to be rural with a low population density where as Miami to Ft Lauderdale is high population density the entire route. Train speeds are limited in high density areas for safety.
> Train speeds are limited in high density areas for safety.
There are plenty of places in Europe where 100mph+ running through urban areas is common. Urban v. rural isn't really a consideration for line speeds here. Heck, most of the mainlines north and west out of London reach their 125mph top speeds while still within Greater London. The question here is more about the presence and type of at-grade crossings, and there's a fair number on lines with 125mph running.
> The acceleration and waiting at stations really hits the average.
Actually, having to wait about 1 or 2 minutes at each stop is what really drags down the commercial speed. A train only takes a fraction of that time to go from 100km/h to zero.
I always wondered why does that have to be this way?
why not have parts at the end of the train decoupled and decallerating and a new carriage with new passengers following the speeding through train. Any engine needed for that could drop and return to station autonomously.
> That is a really slow train, almost makes it sound like a tram.
I don't believe that's remotely slow. A commercial speed of 48mph (about 77km/h) is a respectable speed for a conventional intercity and suburban train. Please note that commercial speed is the average speed, and also takes into account the time that a train stays at each stop.
As a comparison, the commercial speed of a tram (light rail, no right-of-way) is around 20km/h (about 12mph) and the average commercial speed of a subway system (medium rail, right-of-way) is about 30km/h (about 17mph). The latter is, obviously, also not slow because it matches the average speed of an automobile circulating in an urban area.
Going nearly 80km/h is respectably fast, and will beat the commercial speed of your typical commute by car.
> I don't believe that's remotely slow. A commercial speed of 48mph (about 77km/h) is a respectable speed for a conventional intercity and suburban train.
There's nothing respectable about under 80 for an intercity train which has 0 stops over 40km. In Europe this is an average speed more closely associated with commuter train, or the regional trains with relatively frequent stops (every 5~10km).
It's not a commuter train it's intercity. Tri-rail is the existing commuter service, it has 17 stations between Miami and West Palm Beach included (and Mangonia Park beyond WPB). This has 3 stations total: Miami, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauredale.
Silver Service has more stops along the way than Brightline.
It's fairly common in Europe to have trains go fast, even on short distances. Some London tube line (Victoria line, metropolitan line) got faster than that train.
Don't get me wrong, definitely a great step in the right direction.
The question is if whether or not saving ten minutes is worth the amount it would cost the company to do the required upgrades. The answer is, at least right now, not yet.
It's a brand new regional train yet barely reaches the speed of your average euro commuter train from the 60s (not joking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_Class_Z_5300 has a top speed of 81mph).
We are also talking about rail service where none previously existed, in a sprawled out, auto-dependent metropolitan area. High speed rail was not built in a day.
It's also worth noting that all rail has to be at this point is faster than its competition, which it is. Cars are slower and this is far too short of a distance for airplanes.
The area has had commuter rail for over 20 years. This express service is using previously freight-only lines. What's really going to be impressive is when it connects Orlando.
Especially considering you can fly Orlando to Miami, possibly in less total time.
Granted, flying is not a cost effective means to commute, but I don’t think rail service from Orlando to Miami will have too many true commuters on board compared to less frequent travelers.
You're basically talking the equivalent of Boston to New York City although you don't have the same potential for downtown to downtown travel. That's definitely not a daily commute sort of thing. I don't know enough about Florida travel patterns to know how much sense that city pair makes.
If you have the market for an HSR (a real one) it's feasible, thought not great and you'd really need better downtown public transport. Assuming direct it'd be a ~1:45 trip, possibly 1:30 on the really modern 350km/h (~220mph) lines, and if you don't have trouble falling asleep you can usually sleep/nap, you can work, and you could have a meal service.
Not cheap though, HSR tickets are not $10 (though it's not that far if you're using a high-frequency subscription thing, especially if you're using it daily).
That's about 75 miles per hour. Acela (our high-speed intercity train) makes the 39 mile Washington to Baltimore trip (with a single stop in-between) at 68 miles per hour. The non-express intercity train makes a two-stop trip at 49 miles per hour. The commuter train is under 40 miles per hour.
Acela does the trip between Boston and Providence (43.6 miles by rail) in 33 minutes: that's just about 80mph, which includes one stop along the way. The Northeast Regional does it in 38 minutes- about 69mph on average.
The Acela hits 150mph along some stretches in New England.
> Acela (our high-speed intercity train) makes the 39 mile Washington to Baltimore trip (with a single stop in-between) at 68 miles per hour.
That's not necessarily a fair comparison, as IIRC Amtrack shares rail tracks with cargo trains. Cargo trains are far slower and occupy tracks for longer stretches of time, while passenger trains require longer stretches of track to be reserved for their passage to ensure higher circulation speeds. Thus, having to share tracks with slower trains limits how the track can be allocated to passenger traffic.
To put it differently, that would be like stating that a bus is slow because in some stretches of road it is forced to wait cargo trucks to pass.
As a comparison, the TGV connection between Paris and Brussels may be a high-speed track, but train speeds grind to a halt way down to 20km/h when passing through track sections used by commuter and freight trains.
There've been a number of accidents involving the train now, too. People who think they can outrun the train, as far as I'm aware they've all been pedestrians. I wonder if this is the reason they're not going faster yet.
> The question then is why it takes so long to accelerate.
For a number of reasons, including safety, passenger comfort, and managing the trade-off between energy waste and traveling speed. You can picture a passenger bus and how gradually the driver needs to start the ride. You can't just supercharge the engine and expect passengers to grab hold to their seats.
The relatively new stopping trains here accelerate at up to 1.0m/s^2; using that as a figure (because it's nice and round), and where 79mph ~= 35m/s (to 2 s.f., as are all derived figures below):
It takes 35 seconds to accelerate up to top speed, in which case it has travelled 610m. The distance of the track is 25 miles (or 40km), and assuming it maintains the top speed throughout and deceleration matches acceleration for comfort, then the journey would take 19 minutes.
If we take the lower value of 0.79m/s^2, which is what the newest intercity diesel trains do:
It takes 44 seconds to accelerate up to top speed, in which case it has travelled 780m. The journey would take 20 minutes.
Okay, these are somewhat optimistic assumptions, but the European in me would be surprised if there were that many places where it had to slow significantly, and obviously they don't actually have linear acceleration (we're talking closer to 60s to 60mph in the diesel case in reality, though the additional acceleration to 79mph is likely near the maximum acceleration give the reason for the prolongation is reducing jank).
It's about to. Texas is going to build a bunch of high speed rail over the next 15-20 years, likely linking every major city in the state and then connecting into a few neighbor states. The first line, between Dallas and Houston, will begin construction within the next year. Unlike California, Texas will actually get this done quickly at a sane cost, and it will act as a model for the rest of the US.
15-20 years is exactly the same timeframe that most of Europe uses for railway planning. That includes things like HS2 in the UK, the Berlin-Munich high speed rail project, LGV Rhin-Rhone, the new Gotthard tunnel, etc.
The main difference is that this planning is done much further in advance (although at least the UK is well behind in terms of rail capacity construction - the UK and the US have many similarities in terms of government incompetence).
Only place that is faster is China, but they work on a different scale.
Hopefully you'll be alive in 20 years too. It's the old adage about the best time to plant a tree. The US has been avoiding high speed rail for decades leaning on excuses about time & cost; it's a form of being crippled by short-term thinking.
Connecting Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, will take at least a decade, more likely closer to 15 years. There is no real scenario where it happens faster.
From El Paso you push to Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque.
From Houston you go to New Orleans.
From Dallas you go to Oklahoma City.
Then if other cities are smart at all and pick up some confidence about what can be done, and at a reasonable cost, you then see eg St Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago all link up. And so on.
The model for the US will be regional high speed rail, rather than massive scale coast to coast approaches. Maybe eventually you get high speed interlinking between them.
Charlotte to Atlanta to Jacksonville to Orlando to Tampa to Miami.
Atlanta or Jacksonville to Mobile and on to New Orleans, which gets you to Texas via Houston.
El Paso to Tucson/Phoenix gets you to Vegas. Properly that's an easy hop to Los Angeles (skepticism warranted because it's infrastructure in California), which gets you LA to Texas to Miami.
If they did it right, Texas ends up acting as the obvious central web that you can tie the country together with high speed rail over time.
We could build all of this for $400 billion perhaps, if it's done as it will be in Texas in terms of time & cost (enter the land & zoning nightmares in some parts of the country); $20b per year for 20 years (non inflation adjusted), which we can easily afford.
Why these big switchbacks, like atl-jax-orl and orl-tpa-mia? Kind of out of the way for little benefit. Perhaps Orlando could be a hub, with lines going NE, NW, SW, and SE.
Yes, but this is passing through developed land at this point. I've yet to see a european high speed train hit it's top speed in a populated area. Even TGV doesn't do it's namesake while in Ile-de-France.
They're slower in populated areas because the tracks aren't made for high-speed there (eg. too strong curvature, lots of junctions).
The same train takes 12 minutes for the ICE Frankfurt/Cologne to get from Frankfurt central station to Frankfurt Airport (9km linear distance, average 45km/h, 28mph) and then 49 minutes from there to Cologne (150km linear distance, average 183km/h, 113mph).
The latter leg is still pretty close to "populated areas" (just outside various towns along the route), but the track was specifically made for that train (taking required minimum curvature etc into account) and point-to-point connection (fewer junctions).
> The latter leg is still pretty close to "populated areas" (just outside various towns along the route), but the track was specifically made for that train (taking required minimum curvature etc into account) and point-to-point connection (fewer junctions).
How many grade crossings are there on that route? This train, at least through Hallandale/Hollywood, needs to deal with a grade crossing every half mile (800m) or so. Considering the crap that went on during the effort 20 years ago to get FEC to stop using horns at certain times of day convincing people that a train should be allowed to do 100+ mph down that line is a non-starter.
Basically nowhere in Europe allows grade crossings (of any sort, pedestrian or vehicular) at over 200km/h, and it's a 300km/h line. There aren't any.
That said, I can think of a fair number of places in different places in Europe where there's at-grade crossings in built up areas where trains regularly cross at around 100mph. (OTOH, there's no general requirement for horns/whistles at them.)
Of course not all of it is, but at the same time there are limits to how much benefit you can get out of it for the downside. In the West eminent domain's necessity is contestable, and thus it is used very sparingly and only when the benefits are undoubtedly much better than the downside; no modern Western country could get away with evicting 1.5 million people for a sporting event, or appropriating massive amounts of land to build speculative real estate when vacancy rates are in the double digits.
Is the benefit of running at full tilt in cities really worth it? You don't spend a lot of mileage traveling within a city, and cities are generally places where trains slow down and stop anyways. Combined with the very high cost of land appropriation in a city assuming fair market compensation, there's a reason why most places just don't bother with full high speed rail in urban areas.
> In the West eminent domain's necessity is contestable, and thus it is used very sparingly and only when the benefits are undoubtedly much better than the downside
The USA actually has a long history of extensive eminent domain use, although it has cooled more recently. As with most anglosphere countries lately its use has become more highly protested, challenged and politicized, making it a little more haphazard (and much more if those with economic ability to mount a serious legal challenge are involved).
In China its been used more regularly however compensation has been often ridiculously pitiful (although sometimes also quite reasonable and this has as I understand improved more recently). Sometimes we pay poor compensation in the west too though maybe not as bad.
Its also tied to China's communist past where land is for the public good (and typically only leased by individuals) as opposed to the west's 'right to land ownership' (i use inverted commas because its never really been an absolute right, even if people use the phrase).
Best practice in my view (as someone in the industry) is probably somewhere in between. I don't believe in a world of limited resources (as we are in) in indefinite rights of land ownership. I do believe however in fair compensation, which probably should be a considerable premium above an independently assessed market value (if the site was otherwise sold today, accounting for any other anticipated changes to the neighbourhood).
> Opposition to the ruling was widespread, coming from groups such as AARP, the NAACP, the Libertarian Party and the Institute for Justice. Many owners of family farms also disapproved of the ruling, as they saw it as an avenue by which cities could seize their land for private developments. The American Conservative Union condemned the decision.[29]
As a result, many states changed their eminent domain laws. Prior to the Kelo decision, only seven states specifically prohibited the use of eminent domain for economic development except to eliminate blight. Since the decision, forty-four states have amended their eminent domain laws, although some of these changes are cosmetic.[30]
The mechanisms were adjusted accordingly as the public and the politicians they voted in saw fit.
Compared to Sonoma County Smart Train, in my area, which takes an hour to get from Santa Rosa to San Rafael (Google say 38 miles by freeway so I assume less as the crow flies) in an hour, this seems quite good.
Any issue is that the car brings you close to your final destination. With a train you need connecting service, a working public transport system, like in Japan and many parts of Europe.
High-speed trains often move close to straight-line (which is a reason why they're so expensive) and if you compare to planes (for longer distances), they also fly approx straight lines.
Theoretical average speed is a valid measurement, in my opinion, also for door-to-door times for flying vs. driving.
"The train runs at a top speed of 79 miles per hour on the leg between Miami and Fort Lauderdale compared to an average speed of about 34 miles per hour for cars"
Top speed of 79 is also the case for Caltrain in the SF Bay area.
Which only happens on certain stretches of track, and can be affected by how many stops a particular train needs to make or how many others are ahead of it.
The problem is the rule of diminishing returns. Unless you want your passengers vomiting everywhere, there are limits to how quickly you can accelerate and decelerate, and you spend less and less time going at the top speed. It's why subways don't generally bother going much above a 50-70MPH top speed.
Unless you're building a straight line, you need larger and larger curves to accommodate high speed traffic, which makes the cost of higher speed rise significantly since you can't just buy a curve and split a property in two. A train going at 220 km/h has a minimum curve radius of 2.5km; a train at 300 km/h has a minimum curve radius of 4km; and a train at 350 km/h has a minimum curve radius of 7km.
> The problem is the rule of diminishing returns. Unless you want your passengers vomiting everywhere, there are limits to how quickly you can accelerate and decelerate
This thing has 30mn legs (Miami to Ft Lauredale and Ft Lauredale and West Palm Beach have no intermediate stops), it's not a commuter rail. Subways have a few minutes (and km) between stations.
Your numbers seem off. Traveling in a circle at constant speed implies acceleration of v^2 / r, so, holding acceleration constant and doubling velocity, I'd expect the necessary radius to double. A Wiki article seems to roughly agree with me.
However, from your numbers, 4km * (350 / 300)^2 = 5.4 km, not 7 km. The Wiki article agrees with the 300 km/h => 4km radius data point, but agrees with me for 350 km/h, and actually says 400 km/h => 7 km. Was it a typo on your part, or am I missing something?
I see, thanks for the citation. It looks like those are numbers for a few actual railways—i.e. "On railway X, the maximum speed somewhere along the track is n, and the minimum radius of curvature is r." Explanations could be: (a) the path of the train didn't really need any sharper turns (i.e. "minimum allowable radius" ≠ "minimum radius we chose"); (b) different architects, working at different times, possibly using different materials, chose different safety margins; (c) perhaps one of the lines is designed to carry taller or heavier trains.
I do believe that, holding everything else constant, the minimum allowable radius would be proportional to the square of the velocity of the train. If you look at table 6.15 on page 183, it compares 250 km/h with 350 km/h, and 350/250 = 7/5, and (7/5)^2 = 49/25 = 1.96, so I would predict the radius would be roughly 2x for 350 as for 250, and, if you compare corresponding entries in the table, you see this holds very well for the columns labeled "(1)" and for the rightmost three columns, although those labeled "(2)" (apparently done with a different calculation—I can't see the page the calculation is from) diverge somewhat.
The train already has a top speed of 79mph. Anything further requires new investments in signalling and whatnot according to American regulations, because that tends to be the speed at which wayside signalling becomes hard to see.
So the best the system manages (the 4-stop "Baby Bullet" pattern) is 62 minutes for 47 miles, averaging just over 45mph. The worst (the local making all stops) is 95 minutes for 47 miles, averaging just under 30mph.
Factoring out the time spent stopped at the stations is unfortunately not possible from Caltrain's timetables, which only give the scheduled time of departure from each station.
The maglev in Changsha between the airport and HSR station runs at 100km/hour. It is on a viaduct for much of its path, however, and isn’t very urban (goes nowhere near downtown Changsha). It only averages 57km with stops.
Having ridden on the Changsha Maglev I wouldn't suggest its a very well refined design. Lots of shuddering and certainly didn't seem designed for anything much more than commuter speed.
Its possible to achieve substantially higher speeds, but that would require grade separation and electrification, which are much too expensive for a private company to take on.
At $10 a ticket sounds like they would need to move ~32k passengers every day for 10 years to break even on the $1.2B purely from tickets. I wonder what other subsidies are coming in to make this make sense.
They’re using the Hong Kong/Japan model. They own land along the route and are already doing a lot of high density development around the Miami station.
There is a lot of solid economics behind this approach. The problem with infrastructure is that it generates a lot of positive externality. The passenger benefits, but so too does the business that employs the commuters who ride in rail, or the retail owners. Inability to capture revenues from these sources makes infrastructure investment less attractive than it otherwise should be.
Inability to capture revenues from these sources makes infrastructure investment less attractive than it otherwise should be
You could also argue that this sort of infrastructure is best done by the government because it is best positioned to reap the benefits. Medieval historians would use the word Landesausbau. I understand that rural parts of Japan Railways are essentially enabling tourism.
Unfortunately every odd administration is hostile to the concept of anything outside of a car being useful for transportation and reflects that accordingly in funding.
If you're an advocate for transportation options, this is a good thing.
Unfortunately lots of public projects seem to skyrocket in prices as they progress. Look at the high speed rail in California. Originally I think it was priced $10B and now it might be approaching $77B.
Right, there is a real and serious problem with public infrastructure costs massively ballooning, worse than any other developed country.
But on the other hand, if you don't build and replace infrastructure now, you're going to have tons of problems that have real, tangible costs. Imagine you're a patient with a disease, but you don't have health insurance and you know the cost is for treatment is high. You wait several years to get treated but the cost for treatment hasn't changed or is higher and you've suffered all that time.
That's our conundrum. We can choose to not treat the disease and that's been the choice of a fair number of public officials but it's only cost us.
Ballooning? Yes. More than other developed countries? Maybe. The new hospital in Stockholm cost like 2 Burj Khalifas and when opened was unusable due to design flaws and shoddy construction.
Depends how it's run. Look at crossrail, on time, on budget[0]
Sadly those that pay for crossrail are the workers who pay marginal tax rates of 45%, 55%, even higher than 70% in some cases, on the money their employer spends on them.
Those that benefit are the non-workers, who pay very little in tax (unearned income is taxed far less than earned income), and benfit from £5.5b increase in land value [1] from their monopolization of a common asset.
Not sure where you are coming from the highest marginal rate is I believe 60% there is an odd band around £110k for a few k
An I would love for my next job to be paid in London a similar to salaries FANG pay in SV (housing costs are about the same) and pay additional rate tax as that would give me a lot more options for pension contributions could max out my ISA that's 20k pa removed from any future tax.
Also when I buy RDSB (Shell) shares the dividend and capital gain I get is in return for risking my post tax money its defiantly not unearned income from my perspective.
Every £1138 that comes out of my department budget on my overtime, I keep £400 of (£138 employer NI, £20 employee NI, £400 income tax, £180 child tax). That's 65% tax. At £100k to £120k you keep 33%. With 4 kids between £50k and £60k you keep about 25% of the money.
At the "higher tax" threshold, you can earn an extra £118, but end up paying an extra £268 in tax as you lose married couple tax allowance -- i.e. do some overtime and end up with less money.
Meanwhile those who are wealthy and powerful enough to structure their earnings as capital gains pay a mere 28%
Ah "child tax" which is not a tax but a means tested benefit.
Sounds like your one of those people who earn enough several times the UK median wage to have some child benefit removed.
Ranting about people who put equity at risk and receive capital gains seems strange for such a high earner such as you why haven't you done salary a sacrifice into a pension.
1.85 times UK median wage (1.6 times the median for my age bracket). About the same as a train driver [0] [1]
If you look at households with two adults and two children, this kicks in just below the median [2]
The upshot is that I do £1k overtime, which costs my employer £1138, and I keep £400
My collegue who earns 50% as much as me keeps £600
My contractor collegue who is paid twice as much gets paid that £1138 and he keeps £682
My part time collegue who does 5 days a fortnight and gets paid more per day than I do keeps £670 (as does her husband who does the same shift pattern - so they have the same pre-tax household income but far more post-tax)
BTW the median household income in the uk was £27,300 compared to a lot of people in the media/add industries in London you would have to get to director level to earn 60k+
I few years ago I was the lead technical resource for an in house consultancy at RELEX and solved major problems for house hold names and I got paid < 1/2 what a train driver does for a 4 day week.
You both need to realize you are lucky and also learn some maths you colleague who earn 50% less than you is not coming out ahead.
Household of £27k? That's Post Tax, and includes retirees, small householeds, and isn't adjusted for cost of living. 2 years ago household disposable income was £29,200 [0]. GDHI per head in 2015 was £19,106 each, or for a 2 adult family £38,212. And that of course is before you factor in housing costs.
A household with one earner on £50k has a post-tax income of £37k, 26% above average as a household, and lightly under average for the size of household.
My collegue who earns 50% less for 50% of the work does come out ahead. My household works 40 hours a week and gets £50k, her household works 40 hours a week and gets £50k. Our marginal tax rate is over 60%, theirs is 33%.
Right, but we also spend billions on automobile infrastructure and nobody complains at nearly the levels they do about one high-speed rail project. It's clearly not just the money. People are particularly critical of rail projects and particularly unconcerned about the cost of new highways.
Consider for example that every single American (at least) on this forum has heard about California high-speed rail and how much it costs, but I had never heard of this $8-billion highway project until I just googled "LA highway projects":
Essentially all EDF Nuclear power plants? Apple's replacement for the classic Mac operating system scheduled for the mid-nineties as an internal project but eventually achieved by buying an entire OS company?
A large number of movies, split roughly equally between masterpieces like Alien and forgettable failures like Water World?
The idea that the private sector is somehow more efficient at large-scale projects can only be believed by people who deliberately ignore the track record of large-scale private-sector projects.
> In 1993, FoxMeyer Drugs was the fourth largest distributor of pharmaceuticals in the U.S., worth $5 billion. In an attempt to increase efficiency, FoxMeyer purchased an SAP system and a warehouse automation system and hired Andersen Consulting to integrate and implement the two in what was supposed to be a $35 million project. By 1996, the company was bankrupt; it was eventually sold to a competitor for a mere $80 million.
> In 1998, two years after filing for bankruptcy, FoxMeyer sued Andersen and SAP for $500 million each, claiming it had paid twice the estimate to get the system in a quarter of the intended sites. The suits were settled and/or dismissed in 2004.
> Installed in 2003, the system promptly ran into what were then described as "horrendous" barcode-reading errors. Regardless, in 2005 the company claimed the system was operating as intended. Two years later, the entire project was scrapped, and Sainsbury's wrote off £150 million in IT costs. (That's $265,335,000 calculated by today's exchange rate, enough to buy a lot of groceries.)
That assumes you trust your government enough to operate a transit system. In Florida (or almost anywhere else in the U.S.) is not a foregone conclusion.
I think privatized systems (with appropriate incentive structures) are particularly appropriate for the U.S., because most of the country does not use transit, so there is little effective political oversight over transit systems.
Why is this a bad thing? Public projects should be works that benefit the public at large, why doe everything have to lead to profit?
We have a national government, why can't they provide grants to increase and build more railways? I mean the US government provides billions in grants/money to maintain and build roads because States are unable, whether politically or mathematically, to raise taxes to cover the true costs of road maintenance.
I think Brightline is a really good thing, if NIMBYIM doesn’t kill it.
As to the government building things: it can’t. For whatever reason our governments in the US are completely unable to build and maintain infrastructure, especially transit. The two best American systems, NYC and DC, are in shambles now after decades of mismanagement. This is not unique to transit: local governments all over the country are poisoning kids through ancient lead water pipes. We are unwilling to spend the money, and when we do, our outrageous public unions and NIMBYism cause things to cost multiples what it costs Europe or Asia.
That’s not true of all governments. (Though, I think you’d be surprised to see that most European countries have a heavier dose of privatization than the US, though less than Japan.) But for whatever reason, maybe some moral deficiency in our body politic, its true of ours. Given that, developing a market solution is a good option. And allowing the transit provider to “tax” both sides of the equation by charging fares as well as rents on surrounding land, is an economically sound way of optimizing the incentive to invest.
> Public projects should be works that benefit the public at large, why doe everything have to lead to profit?
The current model is equivalent to socializing the losses and privatizing the profits. Let's go all public or all private but not some horrible mishmash system like we did with healthcare.
The states have actually been raising gas taxes due to the inability of the federal government to do so (and provide more funding.) In fact the main issue these days is that the federal government hands out lots of money for new projects but not a lot for maintenance, which just encourages localities and states to spend a lot of money on infrastructure they don't really need because they don't need to think about the long term liabilities and the lifecycle replacement.
There's quite a few people who would rather privatize as much of that as they could and setup toll roads everywhere, as opposed to funding more projects.
The classic funding mechanism that matches best with that model is municipal bond issues, where private funders get to tap into the future revenue stream of the region as a whole and the local government get cash up front to spend on capital investment. Since the government does capture revenue from those positive externalities (via a more robust tax base) it aligns incentives nicely. Not sure why they seem to have gone out of favor to be replaced with public-private-partnership type arrangements, where the private entity gets just profits from tolls or tickets in exchange for fronting some cash.
Perhaps it helps that there’s a lot of undeveloped land in Florida: this is also roughly the model that The Villages (massive retirement community in north-central Florida) uses.
The developer builds and sells the homes but retains the town centers and thus makes money on leasing retail and restaurants.
> Perhaps it helps that there’s a lot of undeveloped land in Florida
There is barely any undeveloped land in the metro area that the Brightline is starting life in. There is underdeveloped land on the rail corridor that can be used to further increase population density, but that is true of many metro areas.
Except that a transit system is now subject to the property market. And creates perverse incentives. Instead of servicing people today (dense areas with higher prices) the best returns are to service low-density areas and profit on the rise you create. That wouldn't address current a traffic problem. It's biulding the 'bridge to nowhere' over expanding current capacity. Id rather a model based on profits, not another leveraged property scheme.
Large swaths of the East Coast were initially developed on this model, going from farmland to dense MDUs surrounding trolley and train stations. Why is smart growth so off-putting to you?
And now we fund large, tax-break dependent business and entertainment districts on train yards rather than solve existing capacity and commuting issues within the current system. There are great economic effects in improving the commute of 100,000 people by ten to fifteen minutes, but that's not easy for a property developer to capture, so it's not a good project.
In fact, the 7 Line extension serving the Hudson Yards development in New York also involved a bait-and-switch in which a intermediate subway station was promised, the neighborhood was developed, and then the subway station was cancelled due to cost concerns.
I'd rather not go into much depth, because I could probably write for a few days on the economics of train transportation, but there are two aspects that are key here:
The first is that they own the land surrounding the station and are pursuing development potential. They are deliberately trying the Hong Kong MTR model here. This should help, but if they do it right (like the MTR does it), they'll be able to make money on rail revenues alone, with development being the cherry on top.
But the big one is the growth of the line. The dirty secret in HSR is that fast trains are valuable not because of their top speed, but rather because of how their acceleration enables more stops with minimal negative impact to their schedule. The revenue of a line tends to grow polynomially (where the polynomial is > 1) with the length and the number of stops, whereas the speed decreases logarithmically. The value of a Miami to Ft Lauderdale line is tiny, with the market defined by the people who are going from Miami to Ft Lauderdale. But as the line grows, the market definition will include anybody with travel demand found in the cartesian product of {Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Pompano Beach, Palm Beach, Orlando}. That market is huge, and this segment is just the beginning.
Where did you read that it (the Brightline) stops in Boca Raton and Pompano Beach? I heard that it only has four stops----Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and (eventually) Orlando.
I could have sworn that I read about a station being planned right in between the two cities, but I can't find anything about it now. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that in the future though, along with some of the cities that are heavily lobbying for stops (St Lucie/Fort Pierce, Palm Bay, Cocoa, and possibly even Jacksonville and Tampa)
It defeats the purpose of "high speed" if you can't actually get to "high speed" due to stops.
Also, this I think is more geared for tourist traffic than daily commute traffic. Orlando for the parks, West Palm Beach for the shopping (my guess), Ft. Lauderdale and Miami for the cruise ships.
> It defeats the purpose of "high speed" if you can't actually get to "high speed" due to stops.
Not in the slightest. Every successful HSR system in the world has plenty of stops in what most people would consider trivial towns. And they all regularly run on average well below their top speed because of it. Those aren't pointless stops; when put in the context of the rest of the cartesian network, they provide significant enough revenue to justify their own existence.
This is true for both HSR lines that are publicly owned as well as pure private systems like in Japan...in other words, they aren't there for political reasons. In fact, the most financially successful lines in the world happen to have the most stops in <50k population towns. If there is any political influence in the matter, it is doing the opposite and passing up stops with little political power, to their financial detriment. Like I said, the real reason for the power in HSR is acceleration, not top speed.
The only thing that defeats the purpose of HSR is when they don't make enough money to justify their existence, making them eventually go away.
In France there where major demonstrations and direct actions to try and get one of the northern TSV's to stop in their city - they wanted the tourism benefits.
Usually when they won't stop in a specific city it is either because there is another stop very close by (<30min drive), or because a stop would require a complete change of the right of way. There are plenty of LGV stops in tiny towns and suburbs...I've seen some with populations as low as 15k people.
>Fortress Investment Group, the parent company of the Brightline, is hedging that its investment in new transit hubs will increase property values surrounding stations as well as revenue generated by real estate development. Forrest Investment Group is already building more than 800 high-priced rentals at its Miami station and close to 300 in West Palm, in tandem with new skyscrapers dedicated to commercial and retail functions.
There's talk of a remotely similar venture in Australia connecting Melbourne and Sydney ("via" Canberra), and establishing up to eight greenfield cities along the route.
That'd be an absolute dream. Never going to happen with the current political climate though. The Victorian government could barely get some level crossings removed without Murdoch and the Liberals shitting all over it.
It's basically sacrilege to invest in infrastructure other than coal power plants in this country.
Funny. I just listened to a lecture about streetcars in my city. The owner of the first streetcar company just happened to be an at-large councilman whose family happened to own the farms adjacent to the route the car line took.
Generally, if you're serious about getting people were they need to be quickly, you use light rail technology and principles.
Streetcars, in the sense that they're being implemented in North America are no faster than buses in mixed traffic. What they mostly lend is the idea of permanently high frequency transit, which is a positive sign for developers although not as useful for residents as light rail.
Oh sure. I’m talking about lines built in 1890-1925 to take folks from the center business district to 1-4 family detached housing.
These lines stuck around until the late 1950s, and had dedicated lane ownership. The city I live in is small and was demolished by urban renewal, so as suburbs that were a 15 minute drive away developed, the system declined with the central business district.
Judging from Singapore's experience it aligns the needs of the passenger with the developer; as a commuter in Singapore you pretty much are guaranteed a drugstore, grocery store, or hawker section on the last mile of your trip.
What happens after 10 years? Or is 10% per year some investment standard?
This ferengi formula goes way over my head. Here we just have government sponsored trains that take people places and costs what it costs. It all runs on wind. After doing the very bussy part of the trip you get to see giant trains with 1 or 2 passengers at 30 min interval. I think cheap parking for cleaning and maintanace alone makes it worth rolling them to barely habited areas.
Why is this downvoted? Even on Brightline's website they say the $10 fare is only for an an "Introductory period"
> Real-time fares are displayed online and vary based on demand, day, time, service (Select or Smart), cities and Special Requests. During our introductory period, rides as low as $10 one way will continue to be available, but only for limited trains while seats last. Book now!
So, $400 a month, assuming one uses this to commute? That sounds like quite a bit more than gas + parking for most people. Especially if it's a 4 cylinder with good mileage.
That's very normal in a lot of places. If I commuted daily into Boston from the western suburbs where I live (I don't actually work in the city), I'd be $380 for a monthly rail pass, another $60 or so for daily parking, and another $75/month if I needed to use the subway to get from the train station to an office.
I checked your math and it seems correct. I don’t get it. I could see them possibly moving a few thousand passengers a day but 32k seems out of the question?
As a resident of South Florida, I'm guessing they're banking on the eventual Orlando connection. Many of the theme parks in Orlando offer very attractive discounts for Florida residents, especially in the off season, but speaking personally, our family has refrained from taking more advantage due to the drive. From Miami to Broward traffic can be a nightmare, and then from Broward to Orlando the Florida Turnpike is surrounded by...nothing. For two hours of drive time the only signs of civilization are the rest areas on the Turnpike (which, admittedly, are undergoing major updates, but still have limited offerings).
If we had the option, instead, to pay $100 per person to ride up on a relaxing train, we'd probably be taking the kids every other weekend over the summer.
Alternatively, taking a slightly more cynical outlook, they might be gambling on a hurricane evac windfall or two. As Irma approached we evac'd our family to Orlando, but the drive that usually took 3 hours turned into 12 hours of bumper-to-bumper nightmare. Flights out of MIA and FLL that usually cost $300 or $400 jumped in price to over $3500 literally overnight. For even $400 we probably would've opted for the train.
As a former South Floridian who used the heck out of my Disney passes for the ~15 months I had them... US-27 is the way to go. Much less stressful and you're never far from civilization from South Bay on up. Can get a bit trafic-y around Sebring but generally it's an easy smooth drive.
Or go around the east side of Lake Okeechobee at South Bay, 98/441. Less civilization, more tourist traffic and having to deal with passing zones... but still a nicer ride than the Turnpike.
Either way takes a bit longer but the scenery is nicer. For middle Florida values of nice scenery, anyway -- I greatly prefer the mountains.
And you could probably have a buffet car on that length of route and as you say it increases the potential catchment area for the parks.
Last year in the UK I helped optimise a ppc campaign for Centre Parcs (up market forest holidays) and they found that almost all customers would only drive < 2hours.
So I knocked up a simple Perl system that used the lat and long of every post town/place in the country and worked out the as the crow flies distance to each site.
Sounds just like the SF<->LA drive along I-5, traffic, then nothing for a long time (western edge of the San Joaquin valley), then more traffic. Yet people still do it. Currently the coastal train route is very slow and expensive, the inland train stops at Bakersfield, hours from LA. The best option is to fly until the eventual high speed rail.
I've done both drives. The FTL to Orlando drive is so easy in comparison that, I'm not sure they are comparable at all. Its only 3 hours from FTL to downtown Orlando.
That is like half way from SF to Tahoe on Friday after work.
Florida East coast railways, owner and operator of Brightline also the owns the tracks this runs on. As part of Brightline they have done a lot of track work and will eventually be doubling the tracks from Miami up the coast and adding the new track to Orlando. I suspect they are capitalize these cost under Brightline but will take advantage for the freight business too. That could account for some if the math not seeming to make business sense.
Well they can also generate revenue by advertisement.
plus property rate around station will going to be high (it will be great impact on money rotation)
more people traveling in train instead of personal car will also reduce co2 in air which is eco friendly too.
less traffic means there is a wide and safe road for bicycle rider and people who like to walk.
one big benefit of travel throw train is time.
you can be on place on estimated time. due to less traffic.
All my comments are based on my experience, I am traveling throw train for work, here in tokyo.
A 4 lane highway can move 10,000 people per hour. I don't see 32k people/day as a problem.
It might take some time for development to build around the idea of this form of transit as people reconfigure their live-work arrangements around it but it should be do-able. Hopefully the local ordinances are adjusted to allow for this reconfiguration.
A new, financed car is approaching $500/mo in payments, insurance, and petrol. The price of a well equipped Camry is over $30k. And dealers are turning to more exotic financing terms to keep people buying; 6 and 7 year financing is becoming more common just to keep the payments down.
Owning a car is becoming a major, but necessary, liability for those that don’t have mass transit.
This makes sense if your only use of the car was for your commute but many people use a car for other activities as well and if you have one the incremental cost of driving to work could be less than mass transit, hence the complaints about the high cost. Personally, I hate driving and would much rather use the train.
They're using existing tracks and stations, as I understand it. So they basically managed to hit a third to a quarter of the cost of actually building a new rail line without building anything.
It's quite a bit cheaper than that per-mile for the existing segment. Not sure where the above poster got "30 miles" from, since there are already 70 miles of track in service (Miami-W. Palm Beach). The $1.5 billion figure is for upgrades to the entire existing Miami-Cocoa corridor, which is 200 miles, so about $7.5m per mile in upgrades. Another $1.5b is budgeted to construct the new 40-mile line from Cocoa to Orlando, so that'll be $37.5m/mile for the new-construction portion if that comes in on-budget (remains to be seen).
I'm a Miami commuter for the moment and I know the ins and outs of this system as I guess I'm in the minority of Miami commuters who actually try and use mass transit.
Tri-rail is strictly a commuter train and is not an intercity train. Except for West Palm Beach all the train stations are just outside the main corridors of major cities, along I-95. You'll need to take a bus, shuttle, rideshare or taxi into the city center. Miami has it far worse as Tri-rail doesn't follow the I-95 corridor and heads west to Hialeah. Basically dropping you off into a train yard where you then have to take the metrorail into the city of Miami.
Brightline is another attempt at creating real intercity rail. A few stops at major cities. There is parking but it is not commuter park and ride.
Btw, I don't own a car. I use mass transit, rideshare, and care hire. In South Florida I'm a bit of an anomaly.
Double average speed, fewer stops, station is in Downtown FTL instead of West of I95, doesn’t have the stigma that it’s what poor people take when they can’t afford a car
South Florida (area between Jupiter and Homestead) is roughly 100 miles north to south and about 15 miles east (Atlantic Ocean) to west (Everglades swamp) so it's a narrow stip of land. Tri-Rail runs mostly (but not entirely) along I-95 (about 2 to 4 miles from the Atlantic Ocean). Nice if you live near a Tri-Rail station, or work near a Tri-Tail station, but that's not the majority of people, who have to travel a significant portion east/west. Again, nice if you have a car. Less so if you don't [1].
[1] Years ago, some friends and I took public transportation from Boca Raton to the Miami Zoo. One way took over three hours and involved several transfers between rail and bus systems.
How does a train that has 3 stops in south Florida going to solve the problem? People will still need to move east/west. At least tri rail has more stops, so you don't need to move north/south as much. Additionally Brightline schedule is showing a train every 2 hours. I don't believe their target audience is commuters, but people flying into MIA and stopping in Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach or Orlando - or vice versa, from Orlando to down south.
It’s slow and has too many stops. It’s a problem with public transit in general: it can’t figure out what it wants to be. Is it core infrastructure to get people to work? Is it a life line for people too old or poor to drive? Etc.
I don't understand it either. I'm originally from Fort Lauderdale. The Fort Lauderdale stop is in downtown Fort Lauderdale. If you work there you probably live in Broward. I suppose it gives people waaay in the future to live near a station in Miami and Palm Beach and commute down on the train.
My guess is they are banking on ridership to Orlando. It talks of connecting to Atlanta, and other cities, which would be nice. I've transplanted to Atlanta and would take a train over driving or flying (at a reasonable cost) in a heart beat.
I really hope they succeeded. Imagine if one day we had rail from Orlando up to Atlanta, and then on to Chattanooga, Nashville? ... I think once we saw really good high speed systems, Americans would demand more.
Florida and California are the two hot spots right now that really need to succeed. I don't think I'll see real high speed rail expansion in the US before (if) I reach retirement age, but I think it will greatly benefit the next generation. But for that to happen, it needs a lot of support to expand now.
Fantastic! This sort of thing would be more common if we had user fees on the US' most-used form of transport (roads) as opposed to making them a taxpayer-subsidized all-you-can-drive buffet that you get to pay for whether you use it or not. (Fuel taxes only cover about half of road building/maintenance costs, and that share has fallen over the years)
It'll run at 200km/h to Orlando once that part's open. 200km/h also qualifies as high-speed in Europe. But technically, the parts open currently are not high-speed.
Assuming no discounts for frequent use, $400 is less than a car payment, insurance, maintenance, and gas would be. If there are discounts it would be even more reasonable, especially for middle class families trying to decide whether or not to get a second vehicle.
I definitely agree with you re the cost of owning a car but I don't think people will sell their car to just ride this train. They still have to alight and navigate either city using their possibly poor transit system.
Could see it making an effect on marginal[0] decisions (like buying a second car as you state) but it still sounds more to me like being used more for one off trips than for commuting. It's far to expensive for that.
One-off trips require learning a new mode of transport, so one-off are a natural weak spot of a "new" mode of transport. (how much time buffer do I need at the station, how do I conveniently pay for my ticket and so on). Getting people to switch rarely happens.
Your best bet, as a new rail line are people whose regular transportation demands change while the line is still new and shiny (e.g. new job at the far end of the line, do I drive/move/rail?). This also meshes very well with the real estate development model of financing the line.
A 24-mile trip by car would cost at least a gallon of gas each way. Call it a gallon and half since it's slow, grueling traffic. That's ~$10 a day in just fuel costs.
Plus ~12,000 fewer miles driven per year. Even if they can't get rid of their car payment/car insurance entirely the mileage saved is significant.
"Cars and light trucks sold in the United States hit a new record for fuel efficiency last year — 23.6 miles per gallon, on average"
This was cars sold in 2012, so only 6 years old. The average light vehicle is almost 12 years old. But according to some reports, the measurements in the US are different, leading to lower MPGs for the same car.
People on low wages often don't drive the most efficient cars since those are more expensive. 24mpg is not unrealistic with an old car and AC in traffic.
As a South Floridian sorry to say but this is probably a massive waste of money and investment in an old technology that frankly I don't see how it's going to benefit people when it only has a few stops and because it can't seem to stop killing people it seems to be running slower and slower every week, wasn't this supposed to be a "Fast" train?
Also sure Florida has plenty of freight trains, something I'm used to but it seems like Brightline passes more frequently (not sure if they're still doing test runs here and there) which mess up local traffic patterns especially in rush hour times.
I like trains, I prefer them over any highway project any time. But I have a few concerns about this train service.
Like it has only 8 north and 8 south bound trains per day. Will this be really interesting for enough commuters to switch?
Also most people won't be at their destination when the train stops at a station, will the ticket be compatible with other transit providers?
Nevertheless I hope it is a success, even though the patriotism on the site is annoying me: "We’re American-made and 100% Buy America-compliant." At least the trains were made by Siemens. ;-)
you get them to switch provided your end points are convenient and have adequate last mile options to get people to their destination.
the problem with trains is they are not flexible to change in population needs where buses are. however since this is between two cities it avoids a lot of waste that is inherent in light rail that cities use for metro transit.
the real numbers that matter is maintenance, how is this budgeted for. one of the major issues facing public light rail is the tens of billions in deferred maintenance combined with removing buses because of the cost of paying for the rail.
will this succeed? who knows, they have to convince people that it is worth their time and money to park their car at point A, ride the train to point B, and secure transportation at cost to their destination if it is not close. that is a lot to overcome and the city needs to assist by not preventing ride hailing services and taxis from providing options at both ends as well as making sure if there are local bus services that they do come to the stations
I like light rails, prefer them over busses. People kinda trust light rail more than busses, because for light rail you need a track and a station, for busses you just need a bus stop sign.
My bigger point is, when you $10 for a ticket with the train you need to pay additionally for you next leg of the commute. If you commute it is really a good idea when the ticket is valid for your entire commute, not matter to which transport you transfer: train, light rail, or bus.
At 50k ft this sounds great. On the other hand, is the $10 fare sustainable? At what point will, fare reflect cost? Will, in time, taxpayers - local and national - be called upon to subsidize and/or bail this effort out?
I hope it work. But I can't help being a bit cynical.
p.s. I hope this train floats because it won't be long before Miami is treading (climate change) water.
You ackknowledge the topic of climate change and yet you fail to make the connection to the much more enrgy efficient transportation system trains are?
Are the costs to counter the effects of sea level rise (in Miami) accounted for in car transportation? We are already bailing out fossil fuelled individual motorized transport, but who is attributing these costs to the culprit?
I didn't fail to make the connection. One train isn't going to save Miami.
I might even go so far to argue that projects such as this (e.g., the ship is going down but the band keeps playing) led the general public to believe that there's nothing to worry about. "Who would build a billion+ train that's going to end up under water?"
Why do you not worry about the sustainability oh the high way system this is many to alleviate. Trains are vastly more efficient than roads which are almost 100% tax payer funded.
He's talking about sustainability via usage. The highway system has no shortage of that. Unfortunately climate change is not yet an economic model; trains are.
I know there are monorails (outside of Disney) that Florida municipalities spent a lot of money on but are rarely used (for a multitude of reasons). I don't think the revenue even covers the cost of maintenance in many cases. I think he's referring to that.
I remember talk about a train that goes down the 95 corridor from Jax to Miami. I'm not sure whatever happened to that.
Yes. That's it. $10 isn't going to cover the costs. So then where is that money coming from, and who's going to pay for it? Add in rising oceans and it looks more like a skam or some sort.
To be clear, I like the idea - less cars, more trains But in this case something isn't adding up.
Are there a lot of private trains in Sydney? Melbourne has the regional V-lines, but other than that, I think it's the iter-city touristy rail lines (i.e. The Overland to Adelaide).
Sydney to Melbourne was the most traveled air route in the world at one point. There really needs to be a high speed line between the through via the ACT. They could have probably built one with the money the wasted on Myki.
With most Electricity in the region from coal, externalities of a high speed train might not be much better, esp considering the environmental impact of tracks. I'm a fan of trains but high-speed rail consumes a lot of energy.
How much energy is used by the two technologies to move 100 people 100 miles? I'd bet flying them consumes a lot more, but I don't know much about the train technologies.
Nobody I know wants this thing speeding through our town 30 times per day, filled to the brim :/
Companies like this team up with the government to steamroll, figuratively and literally (IIRC, this thing has killed 3 people already), small towns for the benefit of nasty cities like Miami.
How exactly is this passenger train worse than any current freight trains? I grew up less than 1km from a freight train track in rural America and I knew well enough to avoid freight trains even as a kid.
I really feel like this attitude really hurts the US in catching up with the rest of the world in good, affordable public transportation (which we are decades behind in). Australia has fewer people and is less densely populated than the US and most of their capital cities have really good train+bus systems.
I think to that Ben Sollee song, "In America, in America, they bury us, with our cars."
Trains only run over pedestrians when the rails appear almost abandoned. A well-frequented line would be eager. (Unless they are actively trying to commit suicide)
Firstly, 1000 cars on the road doesn't sound like a minor planet crashing through the atmosphere very 30 minutes.
Secondly, 1000 passengers on a train isn't replacing 1000 cars, firstly, because the average car has an occupancy greater than 1.0, and secondly, because what trains do is increase the maximum capacity of cities.
Find me one city in the US that has trains in and out where that city does not also have extreme traffic problems and huge rush-hour commute times. If trains relieve traffic, that traffic is replaced by new traffic. Trains are just a necessary force for cramming more and more people into an increasingly disgusting place where homelessness will expand, etc. Every US city that caters to continual growth results in the same thing; a stench pit of garbage, crime, human waste and drugs.
San Francisco has a hepatitis epidemic so bad that they're literally having to wash the sidewalks of feces. New York smells like a giant garbage dump. London has to coat its buildings with hydrophobic fluid to prevent people from urinating on them. Seattle has homeless encampments in the medians. LA... nothing even needs to be said about LA. Same goes for ATL.
Traffic regulates a city's population to something that could be described as reasonably manageable. Due to its lack of fast and good public transport, South Florida has been manageable all these years. Now, it will be ruined by collectivism.
don't know why you are getting downvoted, this is exactly what people are saying. all someone has to do is google "brightline train criticism" or "brightline train deaths". there are tons of stories backing up your claims.
From my experience, a majority of the members here believe in collectivism / socialism and not in individual rights, and are big city dwellers that thing small towns and their constituents are a disease.
I grew up in a small town in Florida next to the railroad tracks. I could hear trains passing by at night from my bedroom. There are trains coming through many times a day carrying freight. I don't understand why people would be any worse.
I also grew up in a small Florida East Coast town, which Brightline will eventually pass through on its way to Orlando.
My parents, who still live in Florida, regularly give me an earful about the train. To an extent, I can see where they're coming from: there has been some controversy over who will pay for crossing upgrades to handle these faster trains, and increased train traffic will mean increased crossing delays in these smaller towns. There have also been some well-publicized pedestrian deaths (https://bit.ly/2GA0QN2) along Brightline's existing route.
But I'm in favor of these trains, and I think most of the opposition amounts to classic NIMBYism. Transportation in Florida is a nightmare, and passenger rail is the obvious solution. And I find it inconceivable that any accidental deaths due to the additional train traffic won't be offset by even fewer deaths on the highways.
Florida has a proud history of rail transportation (there's a reason Florida has an entire county named after Henry Flagler), and Brightline could be a return to some of those past glories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Railroad
Historical note: Miami owes its founding to Julia Tuttle's successful sales pitch to a railroad company.
> Julia Tuttle, a local landowner, convinced Henry Flagler, a railroad tycoon, to expand his Florida East Coast Railway to Miami. On July 28, 1896, Miami was officially incorporated as a city with a population of just over 300.
> Julia DeForest Tuttle was an American businesswoman who was largely responsible for, and the original owner of, the land upon which Miami, Florida, was built. For this reason, she is called the "Mother of Miami".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Miami
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle
Part of Flagler's motivation for building the railroad was beach property rights. The government at the time incentived railroad construction by granting land along the sides of the rails extending several miles.
By building the railroad Flagler gained rights to most of Florida's east coast beach property. So in a sense, Miami was a giant public works project.
Are we going to be willing to do the same for space exploration?
There are no "land" grants in space. Perhaps you mean on the moon or on mars?
I doubt it. NASA and the US government has lost its sense of adventure and conquering spirit. Too many people in the administration (not Trump's, but rather the deep-state) are 1) afraid of deaths, 2) afraid of being seen as colonizers. That's why we don't have moon bases yet. People couldn't figure out a need, so they became timid hamsters with their Shuttle. So our magnificent men in their flying machines just "go up tiddly up up,they go down tiddly down down." [1]
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUTBYI6rcxs
What I saw over decades after Apollo was an unrelenting pounding by Congress, specifically Republicans in regards to cost and commercial payback, and Democrats in regards to why are we spending money out there when it is needed here, instead. Not a "deep state", of which even if it did exist would have then been filled with the unimaginative and risk adverse since because of my previous point.
Deep-state doesn't just mean conspiratorial "them/they". It means all of the bureaucratic individuals that haunt the halls of government between administrations and Congressional turnover. They drive policy. They are around for years. It's these unimaginative individuals that hold us back.
Republicans wanted a payback. That's fine. Every colonial backer wants that. The argument could have been fusion. We'd extract helium on the moon. We'd also have the ability for meta-materials fabrication there given the weaker gravity. All of this could have been wrapped up in the Republican's favorite spending bucket: war readiness. Few argued for that at the time.
The Democrats did what you said, tried to keep their plantations populated through bread and circuses. They lacked the ability to see how colonization would provide jobs and reduce crime by allowing people that don't fit well in society an outlet like the US had with its Western frontier.
At this point the US is too indebted to support such a program, at least at a governmental level. I think our only hope is private parities establishing their own colonies in order to create meta-materials from mined asteroids.
Agreed with all your points; the old term was bureaucrats. The term "deep state", to me, is very loaded, reeking of conspiracy theories, especially in today's politics. Thanks for the response.
> They lacked the ability to see how colonization would provide jobs and reduce crime by allowing people that don't fit well in society an outlet like the US had with its Western frontier.
I’m not sure that criminals and other social misfits would be welcome in space exploration / colonization. Space is a harsh environment that requires cooperative behavior just to stay alive. Colonization occurred in places where there was oxygen, food and water. The main skills needed were very basic survival skills, and a willingness to murder the non-European (and sometimes European) locals that got in the way.
We are a long way away from the point where we could tolerate a showdown at high noon in space, though that might make for a profitable summer blockbuster.
His point to my mind was that life is viewed too sacrosanct given that there are individuals willing to go.
The prior poster was explicitly talking about reducing crime by exporting criminals. That’s not a cheap way to execute “undesirable” people, and if they aren’t killed on the way up, we end up with people who are not a great fit for the demands of living in space, however willing prisoners may be to go.
I hope we can find a more humane way to deal with our troubled fellow humans than to send them on suicide missions.
Deep-state doesn't just mean conspiratorial "them/they". It means all of the bureaucratic individuals that haunt the halls of government between administrations and Congressional turnover.
I have never seen this interpretation expressed by anyone else, ever.
Even if I gave you free land on the moon, and the one-way trip, you could not live there. Colonizes work because people who manage to get there can live self-sufficiently
Do note that many colonies stated not by people living there, but by people going to "get rich" while being supported from home, and they left infrastructure behind that the latter colonists used.
Space exploration and colonization is, or course, more difficult given the harsh environment. Given land and manufacturing capacity, people could attempt to create a larger colony.
We can heavy lift the manufacturing systems to the moon if we use 3D printing and accept risk of death and colonial collapse. It would be spartan and difficult, but I think we could do it. The meager printing would give rise to more advanced machines capable of manufacturing for materials and forms.
My present thesis is that the government lacks the vision and fortitude to colonize any celestial body. So they won’t land grant.
You lost me when you said "not Trump's, but rather the deep-state".
I took the inaugural train this weekend from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale. The distance is 24miles as the crow flies and the journey exactly 30 minutes. So the average speed for this leg of the journey was 48mph.
This same journey would take 45 minutes by car in the express lane. I don't even want to imagine what this would be in the non-express during rush hour.
That is a really slow train, almost makes it sound like a tram. How many stops were there?
Trains here in Sweden, albeit for longer distances usually go either 120, 160 or 200 km/h. Thats 74/100/124 miles/h.
Just looked up an example to compare: Östertälje-Uppsala C, a large part of a Stockholm commuter train line, is 102 km long, and takes 1:32h for an average speed of 66km/h, or 41mph, below the 45mph quoted in the article.
The acceleration and waiting at stations really hits the average.
This is a regional train not commuter. According to the official website there is no stop between Miami and Ft Lauredale: https://gobrightline.com/fort-lauderdale/
A better comparison is the Stockholm C – Uppsala C SJ-operated non-stop services, which like the Miami to Ft Lauredale services take exactly 30 minutes.
This is 63 km (39 mi) as the crow flies (66 km by track), so an average speed of 126 km/h (78 mph), substantially quicker than the Miami to Ft Lauredale service.
Taking a look at Google maps that is not really comparable either. Much of the area between them appears to be rural with a low population density where as Miami to Ft Lauderdale is high population density the entire route. Train speeds are limited in high density areas for safety.
> Train speeds are limited in high density areas for safety.
There are plenty of places in Europe where 100mph+ running through urban areas is common. Urban v. rural isn't really a consideration for line speeds here. Heck, most of the mainlines north and west out of London reach their 125mph top speeds while still within Greater London. The question here is more about the presence and type of at-grade crossings, and there's a fair number on lines with 125mph running.
> The acceleration and waiting at stations really hits the average.
Actually, having to wait about 1 or 2 minutes at each stop is what really drags down the commercial speed. A train only takes a fraction of that time to go from 100km/h to zero.
I always wondered why does that have to be this way? why not have parts at the end of the train decoupled and decallerating and a new carriage with new passengers following the speeding through train. Any engine needed for that could drop and return to station autonomously.
> That is a really slow train, almost makes it sound like a tram.
I don't believe that's remotely slow. A commercial speed of 48mph (about 77km/h) is a respectable speed for a conventional intercity and suburban train. Please note that commercial speed is the average speed, and also takes into account the time that a train stays at each stop.
As a comparison, the commercial speed of a tram (light rail, no right-of-way) is around 20km/h (about 12mph) and the average commercial speed of a subway system (medium rail, right-of-way) is about 30km/h (about 17mph). The latter is, obviously, also not slow because it matches the average speed of an automobile circulating in an urban area.
Going nearly 80km/h is respectably fast, and will beat the commercial speed of your typical commute by car.
> I don't believe that's remotely slow. A commercial speed of 48mph (about 77km/h) is a respectable speed for a conventional intercity and suburban train.
There's nothing respectable about under 80 for an intercity train which has 0 stops over 40km. In Europe this is an average speed more closely associated with commuter train, or the regional trains with relatively frequent stops (every 5~10km).
From the article: “The train runs at a top speed of 79 miles per hour on the leg between Miami and Fort Lauderdale ”
Top speed vs average speed.. ~80km/h average is pretty normal/good for commuter trains
It's not a commuter train it's intercity. Tri-rail is the existing commuter service, it has 17 stations between Miami and West Palm Beach included (and Mangonia Park beyond WPB). This has 3 stations total: Miami, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauredale.
Silver Service has more stops along the way than Brightline.
It's not even a 40km trip. How fast do you expect the train to get up to?
https://www.google.fr/maps/dir/Dijon+Gare,+Dijon,+France/Bea...
~40km, 18 minutes. That's an average speed of ~130km/h.
There's also a run with 4 station stops inbetween and makes the trip in 28, so that's still an average speed of ~85km/h.
77km/h average on a ~40km non-stop (I'm assuming) run is quite slow.
There is a lot of open fields in that route and there are lot of above grade and under grade crossings. No need to slow for traffic.
Brightline covers a few cities with one long strip of a suburb the entire route. Except in length the comparison isn't remotely fair.
It's a completely fair comparison, Brightline decided not to use grade separation.
Brightline reused existing tracks for the most part. They just upgraded what was needed over the course of several months.
> non-stop (I'm assuming)
Confirmed looking at the official site, there is no stop between Miami and Ft Lauredale.
It's fairly common in Europe to have trains go fast, even on short distances. Some London tube line (Victoria line, metropolitan line) got faster than that train.
Don't get me wrong, definitely a great step in the right direction.
London St Pancras to St Albans (a medium size town north of london) is 25 miles. The train takes 19 minutes.
The question is if whether or not saving ten minutes is worth the amount it would cost the company to do the required upgrades. The answer is, at least right now, not yet.
It's a brand new regional train yet barely reaches the speed of your average euro commuter train from the 60s (not joking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_Class_Z_5300 has a top speed of 81mph).
We are also talking about rail service where none previously existed, in a sprawled out, auto-dependent metropolitan area. High speed rail was not built in a day.
It's also worth noting that all rail has to be at this point is faster than its competition, which it is. Cars are slower and this is far too short of a distance for airplanes.
http://www.tri-rail.com
The area has had commuter rail for over 20 years. This express service is using previously freight-only lines. What's really going to be impressive is when it connects Orlando.
The 3h they're predicting for Miami - Orlando seems less than impressive. Especially as the Orlando station is at the airport.
Especially considering you can fly Orlando to Miami, possibly in less total time.
Granted, flying is not a cost effective means to commute, but I don’t think rail service from Orlando to Miami will have too many true commuters on board compared to less frequent travelers.
You're basically talking the equivalent of Boston to New York City although you don't have the same potential for downtown to downtown travel. That's definitely not a daily commute sort of thing. I don't know enough about Florida travel patterns to know how much sense that city pair makes.
If you have the market for an HSR (a real one) it's feasible, thought not great and you'd really need better downtown public transport. Assuming direct it'd be a ~1:45 trip, possibly 1:30 on the really modern 350km/h (~220mph) lines, and if you don't have trouble falling asleep you can usually sleep/nap, you can work, and you could have a meal service.
Not cheap though, HSR tickets are not $10 (though it's not that far if you're using a high-frequency subscription thing, especially if you're using it daily).
Personally I’d rather see Orlando to Tampa, but it definitely felt like 80% of the people I went to college with in Orlando were from south Florida.
West Palm Beach to Miami is equivalent to Trenton to New York, which is not great but also not wildly unrealistic.
Both airports are traffic prone and you have to account the time of getting there and passing through American security theater.
> you have to account the time of getting there
Only at Miami since the Orlando train station is, again, at the Orlando airport. So the traffic trouble will be the exact same.
Arbitraging TSA rules with rail is only going to work until the first train bomb. At most.
The top speed here is regulatory. There is a 79mph speed limit on tracks shared with freight trains. Also we have weight minimums.
Basically most of the reason our trains suck is because our regulatory body sucks.
That's about 75 miles per hour. Acela (our high-speed intercity train) makes the 39 mile Washington to Baltimore trip (with a single stop in-between) at 68 miles per hour. The non-express intercity train makes a two-stop trip at 49 miles per hour. The commuter train is under 40 miles per hour.
Acela does the trip between Boston and Providence (43.6 miles by rail) in 33 minutes: that's just about 80mph, which includes one stop along the way. The Northeast Regional does it in 38 minutes- about 69mph on average.
The Acela hits 150mph along some stretches in New England.
> Acela (our high-speed intercity train) makes the 39 mile Washington to Baltimore trip (with a single stop in-between) at 68 miles per hour.
That's not necessarily a fair comparison, as IIRC Amtrack shares rail tracks with cargo trains. Cargo trains are far slower and occupy tracks for longer stretches of time, while passenger trains require longer stretches of track to be reserved for their passage to ensure higher circulation speeds. Thus, having to share tracks with slower trains limits how the track can be allocated to passenger traffic.
To put it differently, that would be like stating that a bus is slow because in some stretches of road it is forced to wait cargo trucks to pass.
Amtrak owns the Boston-DC segment and does not share with freight rail.
> Amtrak owns the Boston-DC segment and does not share with freight rail.
Wikipedia says that several companies run freight trains over sections of the NEC, as well as the line is also used by commuter trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor
As a comparison, the TGV connection between Paris and Brussels may be a high-speed track, but train speeds grind to a halt way down to 20km/h when passing through track sections used by commuter and freight trains.
There've been a number of accidents involving the train now, too. People who think they can outrun the train, as far as I'm aware they've all been pedestrians. I wonder if this is the reason they're not going faster yet.
The FEC (Florida East Coast railway) tracks that the Brightline runs on have a lot of grade crossings in between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale.
The top speed is nearly irrelevant to the time of the trip. The bulk of the difference is in the length and frequency of the stops.
It has no stops between Miami and Ft Lauredale. 0. None. Nada. Zip.
Possibly limited by the max speed allowed by the track limits as some one said that it was using freight tracks.
Or this, since 79 mph is oddly specific.
"Trains without "an automatic cab signal, automatic train stop or automatic train control system "may not exceed 79 mph."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_speed_limits_in_the_Unite...
They spent $1.5 billion reusing existing track and still couldn’t get ATC? :-(
Don't think they have this on a national scale in the states
Don't you have commuter trains?
This is a regional train not a commuter train. Commuter trains have stations every few miles, this doesn't.
It's a bit subtle, but that folks commute with it doesn't make it a commuter train, I've known folks who commuted via HSR (proper, euro-style).
Yes, but they speed up to between stations and don't run at just 48 mph.
Presumably the average speed of 48mph includes slowing down/accelerating.
The question then is why it takes so long to accelerate.
> The question then is why it takes so long to accelerate.
For a number of reasons, including safety, passenger comfort, and managing the trade-off between energy waste and traveling speed. You can picture a passenger bus and how gradually the driver needs to start the ride. You can't just supercharge the engine and expect passengers to grab hold to their seats.
The relatively new stopping trains here accelerate at up to 1.0m/s^2; using that as a figure (because it's nice and round), and where 79mph ~= 35m/s (to 2 s.f., as are all derived figures below):
It takes 35 seconds to accelerate up to top speed, in which case it has travelled 610m. The distance of the track is 25 miles (or 40km), and assuming it maintains the top speed throughout and deceleration matches acceleration for comfort, then the journey would take 19 minutes.
If we take the lower value of 0.79m/s^2, which is what the newest intercity diesel trains do:
It takes 44 seconds to accelerate up to top speed, in which case it has travelled 780m. The journey would take 20 minutes.
Okay, these are somewhat optimistic assumptions, but the European in me would be surprised if there were that many places where it had to slow significantly, and obviously they don't actually have linear acceleration (we're talking closer to 60s to 60mph in the diesel case in reality, though the additional acceleration to 79mph is likely near the maximum acceleration give the reason for the prolongation is reducing jank).
Yeah, we don't get to have those kinds of trains here. Maybe 74, and maybe hyperloop one day.
The train travels 79mph, it's just not in a straight line.
Take the straight line distance and using that to computer average speed is disingenuous to say the least.
It's definitely a good option and it's just a conventional speed intercity service: A true high speed rail line would take about 14 minutes.
As if high speed rail exists in the united states. This is high tech for us here.
It's about to. Texas is going to build a bunch of high speed rail over the next 15-20 years, likely linking every major city in the state and then connecting into a few neighbor states. The first line, between Dallas and Houston, will begin construction within the next year. Unlike California, Texas will actually get this done quickly at a sane cost, and it will act as a model for the rest of the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Central_Railway
https://communityimpact.com/houston/tomball-magnolia/develop...
This is still too slow. Available in 20 years? I live now, not 20 years from now. True investment would see it being built far quicker.
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
I agree with you that it's too little too late, but at least they're trying.
15-20 years is exactly the same timeframe that most of Europe uses for railway planning. That includes things like HS2 in the UK, the Berlin-Munich high speed rail project, LGV Rhin-Rhone, the new Gotthard tunnel, etc.
The main difference is that this planning is done much further in advance (although at least the UK is well behind in terms of rail capacity construction - the UK and the US have many similarities in terms of government incompetence).
Only place that is faster is China, but they work on a different scale.
Hopefully you'll be alive in 20 years too. It's the old adage about the best time to plant a tree. The US has been avoiding high speed rail for decades leaning on excuses about time & cost; it's a form of being crippled by short-term thinking.
Connecting Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, will take at least a decade, more likely closer to 15 years. There is no real scenario where it happens faster.
From El Paso you push to Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque.
From Houston you go to New Orleans.
From Dallas you go to Oklahoma City.
Then if other cities are smart at all and pick up some confidence about what can be done, and at a reasonable cost, you then see eg St Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago all link up. And so on.
The model for the US will be regional high speed rail, rather than massive scale coast to coast approaches. Maybe eventually you get high speed interlinking between them.
From OKCity to Wichita to KSCity to Chicago. Connect Texas to Chicago by high speed rail.
Charlotte to Atlanta to Jacksonville to Orlando to Tampa to Miami.
Atlanta or Jacksonville to Mobile and on to New Orleans, which gets you to Texas via Houston.
El Paso to Tucson/Phoenix gets you to Vegas. Properly that's an easy hop to Los Angeles (skepticism warranted because it's infrastructure in California), which gets you LA to Texas to Miami.
If they did it right, Texas ends up acting as the obvious central web that you can tie the country together with high speed rail over time.
We could build all of this for $400 billion perhaps, if it's done as it will be in Texas in terms of time & cost (enter the land & zoning nightmares in some parts of the country); $20b per year for 20 years (non inflation adjusted), which we can easily afford.
Why these big switchbacks, like atl-jax-orl and orl-tpa-mia? Kind of out of the way for little benefit. Perhaps Orlando could be a hub, with lines going NE, NW, SW, and SE.
For comparison, Germany is just now finishing rail projects that were triggered by the reunification.
And then there's the new Berlin airport...
The company has indicated that service on the line could start as early as 2020
Yes, but this is passing through developed land at this point. I've yet to see a european high speed train hit it's top speed in a populated area. Even TGV doesn't do it's namesake while in Ile-de-France.
They're slower in populated areas because the tracks aren't made for high-speed there (eg. too strong curvature, lots of junctions).
The same train takes 12 minutes for the ICE Frankfurt/Cologne to get from Frankfurt central station to Frankfurt Airport (9km linear distance, average 45km/h, 28mph) and then 49 minutes from there to Cologne (150km linear distance, average 183km/h, 113mph).
The latter leg is still pretty close to "populated areas" (just outside various towns along the route), but the track was specifically made for that train (taking required minimum curvature etc into account) and point-to-point connection (fewer junctions).
> The latter leg is still pretty close to "populated areas" (just outside various towns along the route), but the track was specifically made for that train (taking required minimum curvature etc into account) and point-to-point connection (fewer junctions).
How many grade crossings are there on that route? This train, at least through Hallandale/Hollywood, needs to deal with a grade crossing every half mile (800m) or so. Considering the crap that went on during the effort 20 years ago to get FEC to stop using horns at certain times of day convincing people that a train should be allowed to do 100+ mph down that line is a non-starter.
Basically nowhere in Europe allows grade crossings (of any sort, pedestrian or vehicular) at over 200km/h, and it's a 300km/h line. There aren't any.
That said, I can think of a fair number of places in different places in Europe where there's at-grade crossings in built up areas where trains regularly cross at around 100mph. (OTOH, there's no general requirement for horns/whistles at them.)
In China, HSR can hit full speed in urban areas, but they are also on viaducts.
China also lacks actual mechanisms ensuring that land seizure serves the public and results in fair compensation.
Some models are better off not being applied.
I’m not sure if you are asserting eminent domain is a mistake.
Of course not all of it is, but at the same time there are limits to how much benefit you can get out of it for the downside. In the West eminent domain's necessity is contestable, and thus it is used very sparingly and only when the benefits are undoubtedly much better than the downside; no modern Western country could get away with evicting 1.5 million people for a sporting event, or appropriating massive amounts of land to build speculative real estate when vacancy rates are in the double digits.
Is the benefit of running at full tilt in cities really worth it? You don't spend a lot of mileage traveling within a city, and cities are generally places where trains slow down and stop anyways. Combined with the very high cost of land appropriation in a city assuming fair market compensation, there's a reason why most places just don't bother with full high speed rail in urban areas.
> In the West eminent domain's necessity is contestable, and thus it is used very sparingly and only when the benefits are undoubtedly much better than the downside
Or for an alternative view, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London .
The USA actually has a long history of extensive eminent domain use, although it has cooled more recently. As with most anglosphere countries lately its use has become more highly protested, challenged and politicized, making it a little more haphazard (and much more if those with economic ability to mount a serious legal challenge are involved).
In China its been used more regularly however compensation has been often ridiculously pitiful (although sometimes also quite reasonable and this has as I understand improved more recently). Sometimes we pay poor compensation in the west too though maybe not as bad.
Its also tied to China's communist past where land is for the public good (and typically only leased by individuals) as opposed to the west's 'right to land ownership' (i use inverted commas because its never really been an absolute right, even if people use the phrase).
Best practice in my view (as someone in the industry) is probably somewhere in between. I don't believe in a world of limited resources (as we are in) in indefinite rights of land ownership. I do believe however in fair compensation, which probably should be a considerable premium above an independently assessed market value (if the site was otherwise sold today, accounting for any other anticipated changes to the neighbourhood).
> Opposition to the ruling was widespread, coming from groups such as AARP, the NAACP, the Libertarian Party and the Institute for Justice. Many owners of family farms also disapproved of the ruling, as they saw it as an avenue by which cities could seize their land for private developments. The American Conservative Union condemned the decision.[29]
As a result, many states changed their eminent domain laws. Prior to the Kelo decision, only seven states specifically prohibited the use of eminent domain for economic development except to eliminate blight. Since the decision, forty-four states have amended their eminent domain laws, although some of these changes are cosmetic.[30]
The mechanisms were adjusted accordingly as the public and the politicians they voted in saw fit.
There is no land ownership in China. So why should there be strong eminent domain laws?
Compared to Sonoma County Smart Train, in my area, which takes an hour to get from Santa Rosa to San Rafael (Google say 38 miles by freeway so I assume less as the crow flies) in an hour, this seems quite good.
Any issue is that the car brings you close to your final destination. With a train you need connecting service, a working public transport system, like in Japan and many parts of Europe.
I hope it's obviously why you can't use straight line distance to computer average speed for something that doesn't move in a perfectly straight line.
High-speed trains often move close to straight-line (which is a reason why they're so expensive) and if you compare to planes (for longer distances), they also fly approx straight lines. Theoretical average speed is a valid measurement, in my opinion, also for door-to-door times for flying vs. driving.
This is a sadly dishonest sounding comparison...
"The train runs at a top speed of 79 miles per hour on the leg between Miami and Fort Lauderdale compared to an average speed of about 34 miles per hour for cars"
Indeed, the average speed is likely lower. Traffic from Miami to Ft Lauderdale is horrendous in rush hour.
Top speed of 79 is also the case for Caltrain in the SF Bay area.
Which only happens on certain stretches of track, and can be affected by how many stops a particular train needs to make or how many others are ahead of it.
What’s the average speed?
For a distance of 30 miles, shouldnt we be able to build a train that averages 60 mph for 30 minutes?
China is working on low-speed maglevs.
The problem is the rule of diminishing returns. Unless you want your passengers vomiting everywhere, there are limits to how quickly you can accelerate and decelerate, and you spend less and less time going at the top speed. It's why subways don't generally bother going much above a 50-70MPH top speed.
Unless you're building a straight line, you need larger and larger curves to accommodate high speed traffic, which makes the cost of higher speed rise significantly since you can't just buy a curve and split a property in two. A train going at 220 km/h has a minimum curve radius of 2.5km; a train at 300 km/h has a minimum curve radius of 4km; and a train at 350 km/h has a minimum curve radius of 7km.
> The problem is the rule of diminishing returns. Unless you want your passengers vomiting everywhere, there are limits to how quickly you can accelerate and decelerate
This thing has 30mn legs (Miami to Ft Lauredale and Ft Lauredale and West Palm Beach have no intermediate stops), it's not a commuter rail. Subways have a few minutes (and km) between stations.
French regional trains run this kind of route in under 20mn: https://www.google.fr/maps/dir/Dijon+Gare,+Dijon,+France/Bea...
And from experience I can tell you that they can be used comfortably standing, they accelerate no faster than a subway.
Your numbers seem off. Traveling in a circle at constant speed implies acceleration of v^2 / r, so, holding acceleration constant and doubling velocity, I'd expect the necessary radius to double. A Wiki article seems to roughly agree with me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_railway_curve_radius#S...
However, from your numbers, 4km * (350 / 300)^2 = 5.4 km, not 7 km. The Wiki article agrees with the 300 km/h => 4km radius data point, but agrees with me for 350 km/h, and actually says 400 km/h => 7 km. Was it a typo on your part, or am I missing something?
I got those figures from here: https://books.google.com/books?id=apKZDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA187&lpg=.... But maybe the French are overengineering? Entirely possible.
I see, thanks for the citation. It looks like those are numbers for a few actual railways—i.e. "On railway X, the maximum speed somewhere along the track is n, and the minimum radius of curvature is r." Explanations could be: (a) the path of the train didn't really need any sharper turns (i.e. "minimum allowable radius" ≠ "minimum radius we chose"); (b) different architects, working at different times, possibly using different materials, chose different safety margins; (c) perhaps one of the lines is designed to carry taller or heavier trains.
I do believe that, holding everything else constant, the minimum allowable radius would be proportional to the square of the velocity of the train. If you look at table 6.15 on page 183, it compares 250 km/h with 350 km/h, and 350/250 = 7/5, and (7/5)^2 = 49/25 = 1.96, so I would predict the radius would be roughly 2x for 350 as for 250, and, if you compare corresponding entries in the table, you see this holds very well for the columns labeled "(1)" and for the rightmost three columns, although those labeled "(2)" (apparently done with a different calculation—I can't see the page the calculation is from) diverge somewhat.
What about a train going 120 kph (75mph)?
No one said you need to go 300 kph.
What’s an acceptable time to accelerate to that speed?
The train already has a top speed of 79mph. Anything further requires new investments in signalling and whatnot according to American regulations, because that tends to be the speed at which wayside signalling becomes hard to see.
A lot of trains have a high top speed yet average under 50 mph. What’s it take to get the average speed to 120 kph, for example?
The full Caltrain line is around 77 miles long.
Just the San Jose <-> San Francisco portion is ~47 miles.
Caltrain's timetables give the following for San Jose Diridon Station to San Francisco 4th and King Station, weekday service:
* Train 101, local, 20 stops, 04:28 -- 06:03 (1 hour 35 minutes)
* Train 207, local south half / limited north half, 12 stops, 05:59 -- 07:24 (1 hour 25 minutes)
* Train 211, limited south half / local north half, 17 stops, 06:23 -- 07:57 (1 hour 34 minutes)
* Train 215, limited, 9 stops, 06:54 -- 08:07 (1 hour 13 minutes)
* Train 305, "Baby Bullet" pattern A, 4 stops, 05:45 -- 06:47 (1 hour 2 minutes)
* Train 309, "Baby Bullet" pattern B, 5 stops, 06:04 -- 07:08 (1 hour 4 minutes)
So the best the system manages (the 4-stop "Baby Bullet" pattern) is 62 minutes for 47 miles, averaging just over 45mph. The worst (the local making all stops) is 95 minutes for 47 miles, averaging just under 30mph.
Factoring out the time spent stopped at the stations is unfortunately not possible from Caltrain's timetables, which only give the scheduled time of departure from each station.
The maglev in Changsha between the airport and HSR station runs at 100km/hour. It is on a viaduct for much of its path, however, and isn’t very urban (goes nowhere near downtown Changsha). It only averages 57km with stops.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changsha_Maglev_Express
Having ridden on the Changsha Maglev I wouldn't suggest its a very well refined design. Lots of shuddering and certainly didn't seem designed for anything much more than commuter speed.
An other commenter above quoted ~50mph average for the inaugural run.
> For a distance of 30 miles, shouldnt we be able to build a train that averages 60 mph for 30 minutes?
Euro regional rail does 80+mph for this sort of non-stop distances.
Its possible to achieve substantially higher speeds, but that would require grade separation and electrification, which are much too expensive for a private company to take on.
Top speed on i95 also hits 80mph-95mph, not during rush hour
At $10 a ticket sounds like they would need to move ~32k passengers every day for 10 years to break even on the $1.2B purely from tickets. I wonder what other subsidies are coming in to make this make sense.
They’re using the Hong Kong/Japan model. They own land along the route and are already doing a lot of high density development around the Miami station.
There is a lot of solid economics behind this approach. The problem with infrastructure is that it generates a lot of positive externality. The passenger benefits, but so too does the business that employs the commuters who ride in rail, or the retail owners. Inability to capture revenues from these sources makes infrastructure investment less attractive than it otherwise should be.
Inability to capture revenues from these sources makes infrastructure investment less attractive than it otherwise should be
You could also argue that this sort of infrastructure is best done by the government because it is best positioned to reap the benefits. Medieval historians would use the word Landesausbau. I understand that rural parts of Japan Railways are essentially enabling tourism.
Unfortunately every odd administration is hostile to the concept of anything outside of a car being useful for transportation and reflects that accordingly in funding.
If you're an advocate for transportation options, this is a good thing.
Unfortunately lots of public projects seem to skyrocket in prices as they progress. Look at the high speed rail in California. Originally I think it was priced $10B and now it might be approaching $77B.
Right, there is a real and serious problem with public infrastructure costs massively ballooning, worse than any other developed country.
But on the other hand, if you don't build and replace infrastructure now, you're going to have tons of problems that have real, tangible costs. Imagine you're a patient with a disease, but you don't have health insurance and you know the cost is for treatment is high. You wait several years to get treated but the cost for treatment hasn't changed or is higher and you've suffered all that time.
That's our conundrum. We can choose to not treat the disease and that's been the choice of a fair number of public officials but it's only cost us.
Ballooning? Yes. More than other developed countries? Maybe. The new hospital in Stockholm cost like 2 Burj Khalifas and when opened was unusable due to design flaws and shoddy construction.
Depends how it's run. Look at crossrail, on time, on budget[0]
Sadly those that pay for crossrail are the workers who pay marginal tax rates of 45%, 55%, even higher than 70% in some cases, on the money their employer spends on them.
Those that benefit are the non-workers, who pay very little in tax (unearned income is taxed far less than earned income), and benfit from £5.5b increase in land value [1] from their monopolization of a common asset.
[0] https://www.civilserviceworld.com/articles/feature/crossrail... [1] http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/crossrail-predicted...
Not sure where you are coming from the highest marginal rate is I believe 60% there is an odd band around £110k for a few k
An I would love for my next job to be paid in London a similar to salaries FANG pay in SV (housing costs are about the same) and pay additional rate tax as that would give me a lot more options for pension contributions could max out my ISA that's 20k pa removed from any future tax.
Also when I buy RDSB (Shell) shares the dividend and capital gain I get is in return for risking my post tax money its defiantly not unearned income from my perspective.
Every £1138 that comes out of my department budget on my overtime, I keep £400 of (£138 employer NI, £20 employee NI, £400 income tax, £180 child tax). That's 65% tax. At £100k to £120k you keep 33%. With 4 kids between £50k and £60k you keep about 25% of the money.
At the "higher tax" threshold, you can earn an extra £118, but end up paying an extra £268 in tax as you lose married couple tax allowance -- i.e. do some overtime and end up with less money.
Meanwhile those who are wealthy and powerful enough to structure their earnings as capital gains pay a mere 28%
Ah "child tax" which is not a tax but a means tested benefit.
Sounds like your one of those people who earn enough several times the UK median wage to have some child benefit removed.
Ranting about people who put equity at risk and receive capital gains seems strange for such a high earner such as you why haven't you done salary a sacrifice into a pension.
1.85 times UK median wage (1.6 times the median for my age bracket). About the same as a train driver [0] [1]
If you look at households with two adults and two children, this kicks in just below the median [2]
The upshot is that I do £1k overtime, which costs my employer £1138, and I keep £400 My collegue who earns 50% as much as me keeps £600 My contractor collegue who is paid twice as much gets paid that £1138 and he keeps £682 My part time collegue who does 5 days a fortnight and gets paid more per day than I do keeps £670 (as does her husband who does the same shift pattern - so they have the same pre-tax household income but far more post-tax)
Not exactly progressive.
[0] https://www.virgintrainscareers.co.uk/VacancyInformation.asp... [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/15/how-well-off-are... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how...
BTW the median household income in the uk was £27,300 compared to a lot of people in the media/add industries in London you would have to get to director level to earn 60k+
I few years ago I was the lead technical resource for an in house consultancy at RELEX and solved major problems for house hold names and I got paid < 1/2 what a train driver does for a 4 day week.
You both need to realize you are lucky and also learn some maths you colleague who earn 50% less than you is not coming out ahead.
Household of £27k? That's Post Tax, and includes retirees, small householeds, and isn't adjusted for cost of living. 2 years ago household disposable income was £29,200 [0]. GDHI per head in 2015 was £19,106 each, or for a 2 adult family £38,212. And that of course is before you factor in housing costs.
A household with one earner on £50k has a post-tax income of £37k, 26% above average as a household, and lightly under average for the size of household.
My collegue who earns 50% less for 50% of the work does come out ahead. My household works 40 hours a week and gets £50k, her household works 40 hours a week and gets £50k. Our marginal tax rate is over 60%, theirs is 33%.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/08/17/britons-bett...
Right, but we also spend billions on automobile infrastructure and nobody complains at nearly the levels they do about one high-speed rail project. It's clearly not just the money. People are particularly critical of rail projects and particularly unconcerned about the cost of new highways.
Consider for example that every single American (at least) on this forum has heard about California high-speed rail and how much it costs, but I had never heard of this $8-billion highway project until I just googled "LA highway projects":
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-high-desert-fr...
Projects like that one are running all the time and nobody cares or complains.
> lots of public projects seem to skyrocket in prices as they progress
So do lots of private projects. Large-scale projects in general have this problem. I'd like to see a comparison of private and public.
Also, at the end of a public project, the public owns valuable assets.
Can you give an example of a large scale private project with skyrocketing prices?
Essentially all EDF Nuclear power plants? Apple's replacement for the classic Mac operating system scheduled for the mid-nineties as an internal project but eventually achieved by buying an entire OS company?
A large number of movies, split roughly equally between masterpieces like Alien and forgettable failures like Water World?
> forgettable failures like Water World?
I don't think anyone who was around in the 90s will forget Waterworld, just not for the reasons the studio wanted!
Almost any major corporate IT project?
The idea that the private sector is somehow more efficient at large-scale projects can only be believed by people who deliberately ignore the track record of large-scale private-sector projects.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533563/it-project-man...
> In 1993, FoxMeyer Drugs was the fourth largest distributor of pharmaceuticals in the U.S., worth $5 billion. In an attempt to increase efficiency, FoxMeyer purchased an SAP system and a warehouse automation system and hired Andersen Consulting to integrate and implement the two in what was supposed to be a $35 million project. By 1996, the company was bankrupt; it was eventually sold to a competitor for a mere $80 million.
> In 1998, two years after filing for bankruptcy, FoxMeyer sued Andersen and SAP for $500 million each, claiming it had paid twice the estimate to get the system in a quarter of the intended sites. The suits were settled and/or dismissed in 2004.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533563/it-project-man...
> Installed in 2003, the system promptly ran into what were then described as "horrendous" barcode-reading errors. Regardless, in 2005 the company claimed the system was operating as intended. Two years later, the entire project was scrapped, and Sainsbury's wrote off £150 million in IT costs. (That's $265,335,000 calculated by today's exchange rate, enough to buy a lot of groceries.)
Target's failed expansion to Canada makes for a fun read, too: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...
Speaking of dramatically inflated costs, you could have made the same point in just three bytes: S A P
OS/360?
That assumes you trust your government enough to operate a transit system. In Florida (or almost anywhere else in the U.S.) is not a foregone conclusion.
I think privatized systems (with appropriate incentive structures) are particularly appropriate for the U.S., because most of the country does not use transit, so there is little effective political oversight over transit systems.
Why is this a bad thing? Public projects should be works that benefit the public at large, why doe everything have to lead to profit?
We have a national government, why can't they provide grants to increase and build more railways? I mean the US government provides billions in grants/money to maintain and build roads because States are unable, whether politically or mathematically, to raise taxes to cover the true costs of road maintenance.
I think Brightline is a really good thing, if NIMBYIM doesn’t kill it.
As to the government building things: it can’t. For whatever reason our governments in the US are completely unable to build and maintain infrastructure, especially transit. The two best American systems, NYC and DC, are in shambles now after decades of mismanagement. This is not unique to transit: local governments all over the country are poisoning kids through ancient lead water pipes. We are unwilling to spend the money, and when we do, our outrageous public unions and NIMBYism cause things to cost multiples what it costs Europe or Asia.
That’s not true of all governments. (Though, I think you’d be surprised to see that most European countries have a heavier dose of privatization than the US, though less than Japan.) But for whatever reason, maybe some moral deficiency in our body politic, its true of ours. Given that, developing a market solution is a good option. And allowing the transit provider to “tax” both sides of the equation by charging fares as well as rents on surrounding land, is an economically sound way of optimizing the incentive to invest.
> Public projects should be works that benefit the public at large, why doe everything have to lead to profit?
The current model is equivalent to socializing the losses and privatizing the profits. Let's go all public or all private but not some horrible mishmash system like we did with healthcare.
The states have actually been raising gas taxes due to the inability of the federal government to do so (and provide more funding.) In fact the main issue these days is that the federal government hands out lots of money for new projects but not a lot for maintenance, which just encourages localities and states to spend a lot of money on infrastructure they don't really need because they don't need to think about the long term liabilities and the lifecycle replacement.
There's quite a few people who would rather privatize as much of that as they could and setup toll roads everywhere, as opposed to funding more projects.
The classic funding mechanism that matches best with that model is municipal bond issues, where private funders get to tap into the future revenue stream of the region as a whole and the local government get cash up front to spend on capital investment. Since the government does capture revenue from those positive externalities (via a more robust tax base) it aligns incentives nicely. Not sure why they seem to have gone out of favor to be replaced with public-private-partnership type arrangements, where the private entity gets just profits from tolls or tickets in exchange for fronting some cash.
Perhaps it helps that there’s a lot of undeveloped land in Florida: this is also roughly the model that The Villages (massive retirement community in north-central Florida) uses.
The developer builds and sells the homes but retains the town centers and thus makes money on leasing retail and restaurants.
> Perhaps it helps that there’s a lot of undeveloped land in Florida
There is barely any undeveloped land in the metro area that the Brightline is starting life in. There is underdeveloped land on the rail corridor that can be used to further increase population density, but that is true of many metro areas.
Except that a transit system is now subject to the property market. And creates perverse incentives. Instead of servicing people today (dense areas with higher prices) the best returns are to service low-density areas and profit on the rise you create. That wouldn't address current a traffic problem. It's biulding the 'bridge to nowhere' over expanding current capacity. Id rather a model based on profits, not another leveraged property scheme.
Large swaths of the East Coast were initially developed on this model, going from farmland to dense MDUs surrounding trolley and train stations. Why is smart growth so off-putting to you?
And now we fund large, tax-break dependent business and entertainment districts on train yards rather than solve existing capacity and commuting issues within the current system. There are great economic effects in improving the commute of 100,000 people by ten to fifteen minutes, but that's not easy for a property developer to capture, so it's not a good project.
In fact, the 7 Line extension serving the Hudson Yards development in New York also involved a bait-and-switch in which a intermediate subway station was promised, the neighborhood was developed, and then the subway station was cancelled due to cost concerns.
Transit isn't really intended to solve traffic problems, transit is basically a work around to allow cities to scale in spite of traffic.
I'd rather not go into much depth, because I could probably write for a few days on the economics of train transportation, but there are two aspects that are key here:
The first is that they own the land surrounding the station and are pursuing development potential. They are deliberately trying the Hong Kong MTR model here. This should help, but if they do it right (like the MTR does it), they'll be able to make money on rail revenues alone, with development being the cherry on top.
But the big one is the growth of the line. The dirty secret in HSR is that fast trains are valuable not because of their top speed, but rather because of how their acceleration enables more stops with minimal negative impact to their schedule. The revenue of a line tends to grow polynomially (where the polynomial is > 1) with the length and the number of stops, whereas the speed decreases logarithmically. The value of a Miami to Ft Lauderdale line is tiny, with the market defined by the people who are going from Miami to Ft Lauderdale. But as the line grows, the market definition will include anybody with travel demand found in the cartesian product of {Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Pompano Beach, Palm Beach, Orlando}. That market is huge, and this segment is just the beginning.
I would say the Singapore mrt is an even better example, since it features privately operated lines.
Where did you read that it (the Brightline) stops in Boca Raton and Pompano Beach? I heard that it only has four stops----Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and (eventually) Orlando.
I could have sworn that I read about a station being planned right in between the two cities, but I can't find anything about it now. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that in the future though, along with some of the cities that are heavily lobbying for stops (St Lucie/Fort Pierce, Palm Bay, Cocoa, and possibly even Jacksonville and Tampa)
It defeats the purpose of "high speed" if you can't actually get to "high speed" due to stops.
Also, this I think is more geared for tourist traffic than daily commute traffic. Orlando for the parks, West Palm Beach for the shopping (my guess), Ft. Lauderdale and Miami for the cruise ships.
> It defeats the purpose of "high speed" if you can't actually get to "high speed" due to stops.
Not in the slightest. Every successful HSR system in the world has plenty of stops in what most people would consider trivial towns. And they all regularly run on average well below their top speed because of it. Those aren't pointless stops; when put in the context of the rest of the cartesian network, they provide significant enough revenue to justify their own existence.
This is true for both HSR lines that are publicly owned as well as pure private systems like in Japan...in other words, they aren't there for political reasons. In fact, the most financially successful lines in the world happen to have the most stops in <50k population towns. If there is any political influence in the matter, it is doing the opposite and passing up stops with little political power, to their financial detriment. Like I said, the real reason for the power in HSR is acceleration, not top speed.
The only thing that defeats the purpose of HSR is when they don't make enough money to justify their existence, making them eventually go away.
In France there where major demonstrations and direct actions to try and get one of the northern TSV's to stop in their city - they wanted the tourism benefits.
Usually when they won't stop in a specific city it is either because there is another stop very close by (<30min drive), or because a stop would require a complete change of the right of way. There are plenty of LGV stops in tiny towns and suburbs...I've seen some with populations as low as 15k people.
Well, it does have to turn in Cocoa anyways, so it wouldn't slow it down too much. Cocoa's still the most inconsequential city on this list, though.
(nb - from Cocoa)
>Fortress Investment Group, the parent company of the Brightline, is hedging that its investment in new transit hubs will increase property values surrounding stations as well as revenue generated by real estate development. Forrest Investment Group is already building more than 800 high-priced rentals at its Miami station and close to 300 in West Palm, in tandem with new skyscrapers dedicated to commercial and retail functions.
https://archpaper.com/2018/01/floridas-brightline-private-ra...
There's talk of a remotely similar venture in Australia connecting Melbourne and Sydney ("via" Canberra), and establishing up to eight greenfield cities along the route.
http://www.clara.com.au/the-clara-plan.html
Bold plan but I hope they can see it through.
That'd be an absolute dream. Never going to happen with the current political climate though. The Victorian government could barely get some level crossings removed without Murdoch and the Liberals shitting all over it.
It's basically sacrilege to invest in infrastructure other than coal power plants in this country.
If only there was more sunshine, then you could use solar panels. :-/
Funny. I just listened to a lecture about streetcars in my city. The owner of the first streetcar company just happened to be an at-large councilman whose family happened to own the farms adjacent to the route the car line took.
Generally, if you're serious about getting people were they need to be quickly, you use light rail technology and principles.
Streetcars, in the sense that they're being implemented in North America are no faster than buses in mixed traffic. What they mostly lend is the idea of permanently high frequency transit, which is a positive sign for developers although not as useful for residents as light rail.
Oh sure. I’m talking about lines built in 1890-1925 to take folks from the center business district to 1-4 family detached housing.
These lines stuck around until the late 1950s, and had dedicated lane ownership. The city I live in is small and was demolished by urban renewal, so as suburbs that were a 15 minute drive away developed, the system declined with the central business district.
Do they own the stations the train operates from? If this is successful those stations could be some valuable real estate and generate revenue, too.
Hong Kong leverages this: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-inf...
Judging from Singapore's experience it aligns the needs of the passenger with the developer; as a commuter in Singapore you pretty much are guaranteed a drugstore, grocery store, or hawker section on the last mile of your trip.
I suspect that's a major part of this. The article mentions them having a new MiamiCentral station, which involves six blocks of real estate holdings.
What happens after 10 years? Or is 10% per year some investment standard?
This ferengi formula goes way over my head. Here we just have government sponsored trains that take people places and costs what it costs. It all runs on wind. After doing the very bussy part of the trip you get to see giant trains with 1 or 2 passengers at 30 min interval. I think cheap parking for cleaning and maintanace alone makes it worth rolling them to barely habited areas.
They clearly state right in the article:
> A one-way ticket initially will cost $10 compared with a trip on Uber that can cost $40 or more.
The price will go up after people are addicted to the convenience and luxury if it's superior to the alternatives.
Why is this downvoted? Even on Brightline's website they say the $10 fare is only for an an "Introductory period"
> Real-time fares are displayed online and vary based on demand, day, time, service (Select or Smart), cities and Special Requests. During our introductory period, rides as low as $10 one way will continue to be available, but only for limited trains while seats last. Book now!
https://gobrightline.com/F-A-Q
Yes, they've effectively said the prices will go up, especially during peak times.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/transportation/fl-reg-brigh...
It's because this ticket price is a loss leader, of course. They're hoping to build ridership/mindshare now and then jack up the prices later.
So, $400 a month, assuming one uses this to commute? That sounds like quite a bit more than gas + parking for most people. Especially if it's a 4 cylinder with good mileage.
That's very normal in a lot of places. If I commuted daily into Boston from the western suburbs where I live (I don't actually work in the city), I'd be $380 for a monthly rail pass, another $60 or so for daily parking, and another $75/month if I needed to use the subway to get from the train station to an office.
well in the UK the commute from my town to London (about 65 miles) is over $600
I checked your math and it seems correct. I don’t get it. I could see them possibly moving a few thousand passengers a day but 32k seems out of the question?
What are we missing?
As a resident of South Florida, I'm guessing they're banking on the eventual Orlando connection. Many of the theme parks in Orlando offer very attractive discounts for Florida residents, especially in the off season, but speaking personally, our family has refrained from taking more advantage due to the drive. From Miami to Broward traffic can be a nightmare, and then from Broward to Orlando the Florida Turnpike is surrounded by...nothing. For two hours of drive time the only signs of civilization are the rest areas on the Turnpike (which, admittedly, are undergoing major updates, but still have limited offerings).
If we had the option, instead, to pay $100 per person to ride up on a relaxing train, we'd probably be taking the kids every other weekend over the summer.
Alternatively, taking a slightly more cynical outlook, they might be gambling on a hurricane evac windfall or two. As Irma approached we evac'd our family to Orlando, but the drive that usually took 3 hours turned into 12 hours of bumper-to-bumper nightmare. Flights out of MIA and FLL that usually cost $300 or $400 jumped in price to over $3500 literally overnight. For even $400 we probably would've opted for the train.
As a former South Floridian who used the heck out of my Disney passes for the ~15 months I had them... US-27 is the way to go. Much less stressful and you're never far from civilization from South Bay on up. Can get a bit trafic-y around Sebring but generally it's an easy smooth drive.
Or go around the east side of Lake Okeechobee at South Bay, 98/441. Less civilization, more tourist traffic and having to deal with passing zones... but still a nicer ride than the Turnpike.
Either way takes a bit longer but the scenery is nicer. For middle Florida values of nice scenery, anyway -- I greatly prefer the mountains.
And you could probably have a buffet car on that length of route and as you say it increases the potential catchment area for the parks.
Last year in the UK I helped optimise a ppc campaign for Centre Parcs (up market forest holidays) and they found that almost all customers would only drive < 2hours.
So I knocked up a simple Perl system that used the lat and long of every post town/place in the country and worked out the as the crow flies distance to each site.
Sounds just like the SF<->LA drive along I-5, traffic, then nothing for a long time (western edge of the San Joaquin valley), then more traffic. Yet people still do it. Currently the coastal train route is very slow and expensive, the inland train stops at Bakersfield, hours from LA. The best option is to fly until the eventual high speed rail.
I've done both drives. The FTL to Orlando drive is so easy in comparison that, I'm not sure they are comparable at all. Its only 3 hours from FTL to downtown Orlando.
That is like half way from SF to Tahoe on Friday after work.
Florida East coast railways, owner and operator of Brightline also the owns the tracks this runs on. As part of Brightline they have done a lot of track work and will eventually be doubling the tracks from Miami up the coast and adding the new track to Orlando. I suspect they are capitalize these cost under Brightline but will take advantage for the freight business too. That could account for some if the math not seeming to make business sense.
Well they can also generate revenue by advertisement. plus property rate around station will going to be high (it will be great impact on money rotation)
more people traveling in train instead of personal car will also reduce co2 in air which is eco friendly too.
less traffic means there is a wide and safe road for bicycle rider and people who like to walk.
one big benefit of travel throw train is time. you can be on place on estimated time. due to less traffic.
All my comments are based on my experience, I am traveling throw train for work, here in tokyo.
Advertising revenue is insignificant compared to fare revenue.
I edited my response, sorry I did not see your response before, but my point it is not always about money.
Ask that to Bangkok BTS system. Fare revenue is roughly equals to advertising revenue.
> What are we missing?
Nothing. This is a bad business model.
So all those investors are idiots?
Yes!
I know it is astounding, but sometimes people with lots of money can make stupid decisions with that money.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-s...
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/betsy-devoss-family-lost-1...
See sibling comments about property investments
A 4 lane highway can move 10,000 people per hour. I don't see 32k people/day as a problem.
It might take some time for development to build around the idea of this form of transit as people reconfigure their live-work arrangements around it but it should be do-able. Hopefully the local ordinances are adjusted to allow for this reconfiguration.
Americans love cars and the roads are heavily subsidized, a 40mi drive will cost a few dollars and you can take 3-6 people.
A new, financed car is approaching $500/mo in payments, insurance, and petrol. The price of a well equipped Camry is over $30k. And dealers are turning to more exotic financing terms to keep people buying; 6 and 7 year financing is becoming more common just to keep the payments down.
Owning a car is becoming a major, but necessary, liability for those that don’t have mass transit.
This makes sense if your only use of the car was for your commute but many people use a car for other activities as well and if you have one the incremental cost of driving to work could be less than mass transit, hence the complaints about the high cost. Personally, I hate driving and would much rather use the train.
Americans hate cars now, which is why they prefer mass transit and ride share.
Dear SF Bubble, meet the rest of America.
Yes. SF needs to stop trying to make self-driving cars a thing and catch up to the rest of the country that wants mass transit.
Why do SF tech companies keep reinventing the bus??
Wait, they've spend 1.5 billion dollars for 30 miles of train? That's only 50 million per mile!
Most city light-rail projects in the US are 150 to 200 million per above-ground mile. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...
The track was already there. $50mm/mi is just new stations, trains, and signaling.
And they still don’t have signaling that qualifies for going >= 80mph. I don’t get it?
They're using existing tracks and stations, as I understand it. So they basically managed to hit a third to a quarter of the cost of actually building a new rail line without building anything.
It's quite a bit cheaper than that per-mile for the existing segment. Not sure where the above poster got "30 miles" from, since there are already 70 miles of track in service (Miami-W. Palm Beach). The $1.5 billion figure is for upgrades to the entire existing Miami-Cocoa corridor, which is 200 miles, so about $7.5m per mile in upgrades. Another $1.5b is budgeted to construct the new 40-mile line from Cocoa to Orlando, so that'll be $37.5m/mile for the new-construction portion if that comes in on-budget (remains to be seen).
That’s what privatization can get you. They’re probably not paying some union “inspectors” $70/hr to sit around playing poker.
No, that's what existing infrastructure gets you.
Commuters between Miami and Ft Lauderdale can already take Tri-Rail; service started in 1990. What's missing?
I'm a Miami commuter for the moment and I know the ins and outs of this system as I guess I'm in the minority of Miami commuters who actually try and use mass transit.
Tri-rail is strictly a commuter train and is not an intercity train. Except for West Palm Beach all the train stations are just outside the main corridors of major cities, along I-95. You'll need to take a bus, shuttle, rideshare or taxi into the city center. Miami has it far worse as Tri-rail doesn't follow the I-95 corridor and heads west to Hialeah. Basically dropping you off into a train yard where you then have to take the metrorail into the city of Miami.
Brightline is another attempt at creating real intercity rail. A few stops at major cities. There is parking but it is not commuter park and ride.
Btw, I don't own a car. I use mass transit, rideshare, and care hire. In South Florida I'm a bit of an anomaly.
Double average speed, fewer stops, station is in Downtown FTL instead of West of I95, doesn’t have the stigma that it’s what poor people take when they can’t afford a car
They are actually careful not to say the average speed, only the top speed. But they then compare the top speed to the average speed of cars.
South Florida (area between Jupiter and Homestead) is roughly 100 miles north to south and about 15 miles east (Atlantic Ocean) to west (Everglades swamp) so it's a narrow stip of land. Tri-Rail runs mostly (but not entirely) along I-95 (about 2 to 4 miles from the Atlantic Ocean). Nice if you live near a Tri-Rail station, or work near a Tri-Tail station, but that's not the majority of people, who have to travel a significant portion east/west. Again, nice if you have a car. Less so if you don't [1].
[1] Years ago, some friends and I took public transportation from Boca Raton to the Miami Zoo. One way took over three hours and involved several transfers between rail and bus systems.
How does a train that has 3 stops in south Florida going to solve the problem? People will still need to move east/west. At least tri rail has more stops, so you don't need to move north/south as much. Additionally Brightline schedule is showing a train every 2 hours. I don't believe their target audience is commuters, but people flying into MIA and stopping in Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach or Orlando - or vice versa, from Orlando to down south.
It’s slow and has too many stops. It’s a problem with public transit in general: it can’t figure out what it wants to be. Is it core infrastructure to get people to work? Is it a life line for people too old or poor to drive? Etc.
I don't understand it either. I'm originally from Fort Lauderdale. The Fort Lauderdale stop is in downtown Fort Lauderdale. If you work there you probably live in Broward. I suppose it gives people waaay in the future to live near a station in Miami and Palm Beach and commute down on the train.
My guess is they are banking on ridership to Orlando. It talks of connecting to Atlanta, and other cities, which would be nice. I've transplanted to Atlanta and would take a train over driving or flying (at a reasonable cost) in a heart beat.
I really hope they succeeded. Imagine if one day we had rail from Orlando up to Atlanta, and then on to Chattanooga, Nashville? ... I think once we saw really good high speed systems, Americans would demand more.
Florida and California are the two hot spots right now that really need to succeed. I don't think I'll see real high speed rail expansion in the US before (if) I reach retirement age, but I think it will greatly benefit the next generation. But for that to happen, it needs a lot of support to expand now.
This one goes to west palm beach and eventually to Orlando. I think it is faster too but not sure.
Tri-rail is basically ratchet AF and slow, but it is convenient if you have nothing else.
Fantastic! This sort of thing would be more common if we had user fees on the US' most-used form of transport (roads) as opposed to making them a taxpayer-subsidized all-you-can-drive buffet that you get to pay for whether you use it or not. (Fuel taxes only cover about half of road building/maintenance costs, and that share has fallen over the years)
"High-speed train" ... "runs at a top speed of 79 miles per hour". That doesn't sound right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail
It'll run at 200km/h to Orlando once that part's open. 200km/h also qualifies as high-speed in Europe. But technically, the parts open currently are not high-speed.
> 200km/h also qualifies as high-speed in Europe.
Only for refits of existing lines. For new lines it's 240.
20$ a day for a commute is going to block the people that would benefit the most. Only middle and upper middle class people will be able to afford it.
If someone is making minimum wage, I doubt they are commuting from Palm Beach to Fort Lauderdale in the first place.
If you commute using this, it would cost 100usd a week. Doesn't seem feasible except for the upper middle class.
Assuming no discounts for frequent use, $400 is less than a car payment, insurance, maintenance, and gas would be. If there are discounts it would be even more reasonable, especially for middle class families trying to decide whether or not to get a second vehicle.
I definitely agree with you re the cost of owning a car but I don't think people will sell their car to just ride this train. They still have to alight and navigate either city using their possibly poor transit system.
Could see it making an effect on marginal[0] decisions (like buying a second car as you state) but it still sounds more to me like being used more for one off trips than for commuting. It's far to expensive for that.
[0] marginal in the economic sense
One-off trips require learning a new mode of transport, so one-off are a natural weak spot of a "new" mode of transport. (how much time buffer do I need at the station, how do I conveniently pay for my ticket and so on). Getting people to switch rarely happens.
Your best bet, as a new rail line are people whose regular transportation demands change while the line is still new and shiny (e.g. new job at the far end of the line, do I drive/move/rail?). This also meshes very well with the real estate development model of financing the line.
It is steep. Not saying it will make a huge impact but I’d be surprised if they didn’t sell 10-ride, weekend, monthly, etc. passes at a discount.
A 24-mile trip by car would cost at least a gallon of gas each way. Call it a gallon and half since it's slow, grueling traffic. That's ~$10 a day in just fuel costs.
Plus ~12,000 fewer miles driven per year. Even if they can't get rid of their car payment/car insurance entirely the mileage saved is significant.
24mpg in your best case?! Surely that's well below average, even in the US?
"Cars and light trucks sold in the United States hit a new record for fuel efficiency last year — 23.6 miles per gallon, on average"
This was cars sold in 2012, so only 6 years old. The average light vehicle is almost 12 years old. But according to some reports, the measurements in the US are different, leading to lower MPGs for the same car.
People on low wages often don't drive the most efficient cars since those are more expensive. 24mpg is not unrealistic with an old car and AC in traffic.
Cheap, small cars in Europe get way better milage than that - I'm just surprised how poor MPG figures are in the US.
And that is only the introductory rate.
https://gobrightline.com/F-A-Q
Pet peeve of mine: when writing amounts in USD, the dollar sign goes before the number: "$20", not "20$".
I hope I don't drive people nuts when I do the same.
I guess my messed up reasoning when I am reading a sentence...
$ = dollar
20$ = Twenty Dollar
$20 = Dollar Twenty
I know it's not the correct way but it's the way my mind thinks...
Why do you think that lower class would have benefit from this commute more?
It's not about benefiting more but about benefiting at all.
If the line is full its going to free up road traffic which benefits everybody
As a South Floridian sorry to say but this is probably a massive waste of money and investment in an old technology that frankly I don't see how it's going to benefit people when it only has a few stops and because it can't seem to stop killing people it seems to be running slower and slower every week, wasn't this supposed to be a "Fast" train?
Also sure Florida has plenty of freight trains, something I'm used to but it seems like Brightline passes more frequently (not sure if they're still doing test runs here and there) which mess up local traffic patterns especially in rush hour times.
" it can't seem to stop killing people it seems to be running slower and slower every week, "
I presume you aren't familiar with how well freeways perform in this respect?
What newer technology would you rather people invest billions of dollars into for mass transit that is proven to work?
this is the exact reason Fort Lauderdale decided to kill the WAVE Streetcar project, old technology that nobody seemed to want:
http://wavestreetcar.com/
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fort-lauderdale/fl...
I like trains, I prefer them over any highway project any time. But I have a few concerns about this train service.
Like it has only 8 north and 8 south bound trains per day. Will this be really interesting for enough commuters to switch?
Also most people won't be at their destination when the train stops at a station, will the ticket be compatible with other transit providers?
Nevertheless I hope it is a success, even though the patriotism on the site is annoying me: "We’re American-made and 100% Buy America-compliant." At least the trains were made by Siemens. ;-)
you get them to switch provided your end points are convenient and have adequate last mile options to get people to their destination.
the problem with trains is they are not flexible to change in population needs where buses are. however since this is between two cities it avoids a lot of waste that is inherent in light rail that cities use for metro transit.
the real numbers that matter is maintenance, how is this budgeted for. one of the major issues facing public light rail is the tens of billions in deferred maintenance combined with removing buses because of the cost of paying for the rail.
will this succeed? who knows, they have to convince people that it is worth their time and money to park their car at point A, ride the train to point B, and secure transportation at cost to their destination if it is not close. that is a lot to overcome and the city needs to assist by not preventing ride hailing services and taxis from providing options at both ends as well as making sure if there are local bus services that they do come to the stations
I like light rails, prefer them over busses. People kinda trust light rail more than busses, because for light rail you need a track and a station, for busses you just need a bus stop sign.
My bigger point is, when you $10 for a ticket with the train you need to pay additionally for you next leg of the commute. If you commute it is really a good idea when the ticket is valid for your entire commute, not matter to which transport you transfer: train, light rail, or bus.
At 50k ft this sounds great. On the other hand, is the $10 fare sustainable? At what point will, fare reflect cost? Will, in time, taxpayers - local and national - be called upon to subsidize and/or bail this effort out?
I hope it work. But I can't help being a bit cynical.
p.s. I hope this train floats because it won't be long before Miami is treading (climate change) water.
You ackknowledge the topic of climate change and yet you fail to make the connection to the much more enrgy efficient transportation system trains are?
Are the costs to counter the effects of sea level rise (in Miami) accounted for in car transportation? We are already bailing out fossil fuelled individual motorized transport, but who is attributing these costs to the culprit?
I didn't fail to make the connection. One train isn't going to save Miami.
I might even go so far to argue that projects such as this (e.g., the ship is going down but the band keeps playing) led the general public to believe that there's nothing to worry about. "Who would build a billion+ train that's going to end up under water?"
It's a good idea. Or is it?
Why do you not worry about the sustainability oh the high way system this is many to alleviate. Trains are vastly more efficient than roads which are almost 100% tax payer funded.
He's talking about sustainability via usage. The highway system has no shortage of that. Unfortunately climate change is not yet an economic model; trains are.
I know there are monorails (outside of Disney) that Florida municipalities spent a lot of money on but are rarely used (for a multitude of reasons). I don't think the revenue even covers the cost of maintenance in many cases. I think he's referring to that.
I remember talk about a train that goes down the 95 corridor from Jax to Miami. I'm not sure whatever happened to that.
Yes. That's it. $10 isn't going to cover the costs. So then where is that money coming from, and who's going to pay for it? Add in rising oceans and it looks more like a skam or some sort.
To be clear, I like the idea - less cars, more trains But in this case something isn't adding up.
Former South Floridian here asking any current South Floridian. Thoughts on Tri-Rail Coastal Link? Yay, or Nay?
Miami also has a cool small futuristic monorail. It's free too, recommended for the views!
It is pretty cute, though it's slow, unreliable, and services only three neighborhoods. I live 50 ft from a stop and rarely find myself using it.
Yeah, I guess most such things would need a big network effect to be successful.
I don't know which places people go to in Miami anyway, besides the beach ;)
This reminds me of the subway system in Sydney Australia. Lots of private lines branching off.
Are there a lot of private trains in Sydney? Melbourne has the regional V-lines, but other than that, I think it's the iter-city touristy rail lines (i.e. The Overland to Adelaide).
Sydney to Melbourne was the most traveled air route in the world at one point. There really needs to be a high speed line between the through via the ACT. They could have probably built one with the money the wasted on Myki.
Flights between Melbourne and Sydney are cheap though, and already fairly fast.
The train would need to be under 4 hours to really be competitive with flying.
It could be done, with something like a TGV style train. I can't imagine how much it would cost though.
> Flights between Melbourne and Sydney are cheap
It may be expensive if you include the externalities of climate change.
With most Electricity in the region from coal, externalities of a high speed train might not be much better, esp considering the environmental impact of tracks. I'm a fan of trains but high-speed rail consumes a lot of energy.
How much energy is used by the two technologies to move 100 people 100 miles? I'd bet flying them consumes a lot more, but I don't know much about the train technologies.
Nobody I know wants this thing speeding through our town 30 times per day, filled to the brim :/
Companies like this team up with the government to steamroll, figuratively and literally (IIRC, this thing has killed 3 people already), small towns for the benefit of nasty cities like Miami.
How exactly is this passenger train worse than any current freight trains? I grew up less than 1km from a freight train track in rural America and I knew well enough to avoid freight trains even as a kid.
I really feel like this attitude really hurts the US in catching up with the rest of the world in good, affordable public transportation (which we are decades behind in). Australia has fewer people and is less densely populated than the US and most of their capital cities have really good train+bus systems.
I think to that Ben Sollee song, "In America, in America, they bury us, with our cars."
There aren’t 30+ freight trains each day, and they don’t run over an average of 1 pedestrian per month as far as I know.
But hey, as long as we can provide an affordable way for transients to get to and from the needle exchange safely.
Trains only run over pedestrians when the rails appear almost abandoned. A well-frequented line would be eager. (Unless they are actively trying to commit suicide)
Trains run over pedestrians when pedestrians trespass onto the track.
And pedestrians trespass when they believe that the track is almost unused. Regular trains are a fix for that.
Instead of a train brim full of 1000 passengers, people would rather have 1000 cars speeding through town?
Firstly, 1000 cars on the road doesn't sound like a minor planet crashing through the atmosphere very 30 minutes.
Secondly, 1000 passengers on a train isn't replacing 1000 cars, firstly, because the average car has an occupancy greater than 1.0, and secondly, because what trains do is increase the maximum capacity of cities.
Find me one city in the US that has trains in and out where that city does not also have extreme traffic problems and huge rush-hour commute times. If trains relieve traffic, that traffic is replaced by new traffic. Trains are just a necessary force for cramming more and more people into an increasingly disgusting place where homelessness will expand, etc. Every US city that caters to continual growth results in the same thing; a stench pit of garbage, crime, human waste and drugs.
San Francisco has a hepatitis epidemic so bad that they're literally having to wash the sidewalks of feces. New York smells like a giant garbage dump. London has to coat its buildings with hydrophobic fluid to prevent people from urinating on them. Seattle has homeless encampments in the medians. LA... nothing even needs to be said about LA. Same goes for ATL.
Traffic regulates a city's population to something that could be described as reasonably manageable. Due to its lack of fast and good public transport, South Florida has been manageable all these years. Now, it will be ruined by collectivism.
don't know why you are getting downvoted, this is exactly what people are saying. all someone has to do is google "brightline train criticism" or "brightline train deaths". there are tons of stories backing up your claims.
Thanks.
From my experience, a majority of the members here believe in collectivism / socialism and not in individual rights, and are big city dwellers that thing small towns and their constituents are a disease.
The state bill to fund and build a HSR has passed in senate and referendum multiple times. And each time the governor has vetoed it.
yeah, not in my back yard!
I grew up in a small town in Florida next to the railroad tracks. I could hear trains passing by at night from my bedroom. There are trains coming through many times a day carrying freight. I don't understand why people would be any worse.
I also grew up in a small Florida East Coast town, which Brightline will eventually pass through on its way to Orlando.
My parents, who still live in Florida, regularly give me an earful about the train. To an extent, I can see where they're coming from: there has been some controversy over who will pay for crossing upgrades to handle these faster trains, and increased train traffic will mean increased crossing delays in these smaller towns. There have also been some well-publicized pedestrian deaths (https://bit.ly/2GA0QN2) along Brightline's existing route.
But I'm in favor of these trains, and I think most of the opposition amounts to classic NIMBYism. Transportation in Florida is a nightmare, and passenger rail is the obvious solution. And I find it inconceivable that any accidental deaths due to the additional train traffic won't be offset by even fewer deaths on the highways.
Florida has a proud history of rail transportation (there's a reason Florida has an entire county named after Henry Flagler), and Brightline could be a return to some of those past glories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Railroad