Amid great expectations that South and Central Floridians will garage their cars and even eschew some flying in favor of regional rail travel, Brightline launches its $5 billion expansion between West Palm Beach and Orlando on Friday with inaugural rides of up to 125 mph.
Brightline is viewed by many industry analysts and economic development officials as a template for other regional lines now being contemplated in Texas, California and the Pacific Northwest. Under the “Brightline West” moniker, Brightline is planning a high-speed line between Las Vegas, Nev., and the Los Angeles area. The 170-mile Florida extension expands the higher-speed rail line’s existing 67-mile-long segment to 235 miles.
Fortress Investment Group, Brightline’s owners, “studied this market carefully,” said Miami attorney Mitchell Bierman, an immediate past president of the transportation committee of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce.
“The main investors were looking at how can we find two areas easily served by rail that are not served by rail,” he said. “This was the first one they looked at. Los Angeles was the second. I know they looked elsewhere. There are other places to invest where they can do this.”
The creation of Brightline’s passenger railroad is essentially a circular trip back to the era of rail baron Henry Flagler, whose Florida East Coast Railway, over which Brightline’s trains now travel, blazed a developmental trail along the state’s Atlantic Coast, triggering tourism and agriculture as centerpiece industries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In some respects, history is repeating itself through a spate of transit-oriented development in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, as well as cities the rail line serves in between.
Watershed event
“This is a pretty important moment, whether you’re thinking about it in the context of the state of Florida or what it might mean for these kinds of products as they develop elsewhere in the United States,” Brightline CEO Mike Reininger told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “The idea that my car is the only way for me to get where I need to go is being challenged by a new product. A new product that’s safer, that’s greener, that is a great value proposition (and) it’s fun.”
Andy Kunz, president of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association, an industry trade group based in Washington, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel he expects the extension to be a strong draw, largely because of the multiple inconveniences travelers now face on the nation’s crowded roads and in its airports.
“I’d say it’s going to exceed everyone’s expectations because you either sit in traffic hell for hours and you spend more time in the airport than you do flying,” said Kunz, who is a native of Clearwater. “In terms of opening up a new option, I think it is going to be tremendously successful.”
He expects Brightline will stimulate traffic in both directions as northbound travelers head for Central Florida’s vast warren of amusement attractions and southbound travelers head for the beaches and other attractions of South Florida.
“This isn’t just speculation,” Kunz added. “We deal closely with all of the high speed rail systems around the world, and it’s always the same thing. It induces new travel big time. It opens up the ability to go places that normally would be too far away.”
Some trains selling out
A four-car early bird launch train is scheduled to leave the MiamiCentral station on Friday morning for Orlando populated with politicians, other dignitaries and media members, picking up passengers at intermediate stations at Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach.
Later in the day, according to the company’s online timetable, five trains were scheduled to head for Central Florida with paying passengers who were charged prices starting at $79 one-way for “SMART” seating and PREMIUM class prices starting at $149.
Late Wednesday, the Brightline website showed tickets for the 11:21 a.m. Friday train from Fort Lauderdale were sold out. Depending on the departure times of subsequent trains, prices rose to $169 for SMART tickets and $269 for PREMIUM.
Ultimately, the company intends to operate 32 trains daily, 16 each way. From Fort Lauderdale and Miami, the rides to a new station embedded at Orlando International Airport are slightly more than three hours long, an hour less than it takes by car on Florida’s Turnpike or Interstate 95 but 90 minutes more than a flight from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
For the money-conscious, Brightline prices are competitive if passengers use the lower level SMART fare.
By car, lofty gasoline prices can range as high as $80 roundtrip, and that doesn’t include tolls if the traveler takes the turnpike.
By air, prices can be sky-high if travelers fail to book far enough in advance to score a discount. A roundtrip Southwest Airlines trip booked late Wednesday for Friday between Fort Lauderdale and Orlando cost $531.95 including taxes and fees.
Business and pleasure
Brightline, which started as a three-stop operation serving the downtowns of Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach in 2018, is the first privately funded rail operation to launch in a century. It completed the Orlando station over the summer, and had opened stations in Boca Raton and Aventura in late 2022. The company has spoken with local officials about building one along the Treasure Coast, but no plans have been announced.
South Florida economic and tourism development officials have sought to leverage the service ever since, promoting it as a key component of a regional transportation system of the future and a trigger for real estate development and companies looking to relocate from other parts of the country. .
“Discover the Palm Beaches was one of the first organizations attending the Legislature in Tallahassee to support the development of this type of service,” said Milton Segarra, newly appointed president and CEO of Palm Beach County’s tourism development agency. “I can tell you how committed and pleased we are as an organization to have this type of service.”
Although he said there are no figures immediately available to show how many tourists Brightline has delivered to the county since the rail line’s inception, he believes it will be an important conduit for tourism.
“Right now Orlando, Fort Lauderdale and Miami are three of our top (contributing) Florida markets in terms of visitation to the Palm Beaches,” said Segarra, who intended to be among those on the first Brightline ride to Orlando.
Orlando Sentinel
The new Brightline train station at Terminal C of Orlando International Airport will see its first paying passengers on Friday as the Miami-based rail line starts service over its extension from West Palm Beach. (Composite image by Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel)
Gail Bulfin, a senior vice president at the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, the economic development arm of Broward County, said Wednesday that but for a meeting, she’d be on the inaugural train ride, too.
“For us it’s an opportunity for new visitors,” she said. “They have 58 million visitors to Disney a year.”
And thousands daily ride on the tourist mecca’s monorail.
“If we get even a small percentage, that would be a great benefit for us,” she said, alluding to the alliance’s business recruiting efforts. “It all starts with a visit.”
The idea is that once a business executive visits Broward County either alone or with family members, a leisure visit can turn into a decision to locate a branch office or even a company headquarters there.
“Talent wants to go where there is ease of travel, and that’s how we’ve competed in the past” with the help of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, she said.
Bulfin added that business people are also frequent rail users, a trend she did not expect.
“I’m surprised how frequently it comes up anecdotally in conversations,” she said. “I run into folks I never thought would be any kind of rail rider.”
Local connections
Once those riders reach their destinations, then what?
The company has been working on helping move its customers between its stations and local urban destinations.
In South Florida, it has introduced an array of street-level transportation options that range from chauffeur-driven electric cars to partnerships with rideshare services like Uber.
On Thursday, Brightline announced a partnership with an Orlando-area ride service called Mears Transportation, which says it can transport passengers from the station at Orlando International to Walt Disney World and other destinations around the area.
The Mears fleet of limousines and shuttle vehicles will be incorporated into Brightline+, the rail line’s door-to-door booking service, which is accessible on its mobile app and website.
Bierman, the Miami attorney, said Brightline did a “very good job” of teaming with local transportation providers in South Florida.
“Hopefully they will have it as strong in Orlando as they have in Miami,” he said.
Safety watch
As observers contemplate the commercial benefits of the new extension, some will be closely watching for vehicle-train and pedestrian-involved accidents, which have plagued Brightline since its inception.
No accidents have been reported since June.
But ironically, the launch of Orlando service comes during Rail Safety Week, an annual collaborative effort among Washington-based Operation Lifesaver, Inc., which was founded in 2003, state Operation Lifesaver programs, and rail safety partners across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Brightline has spent millions upgrading crossings, erecting fencing along its property lines, and participating in education programs with Operation Lifesaver and local law enforcement to keep trespassers away from its tracks and to stop motorists from trying to beat trains across the tracks.
The spending came as deaths mounted along its South Florida line, with Brightline trains fatally striking 98 people since the service begin, according to a continuing Associated Press analysis of federal data.. None of the accidents was found to be the railroad’s fault. But the deaths translated into an industry high rate of one for every 32,000 miles the trains travel, according to The AP’s analysis.
Information from The Associated Press was included in this article.