Is Florida Our Most Progressive State for Train Travel?

U.S. train travel is bleak, at least compared to a lot of other places in the world. High speed rail systems in places like Europe and Japan can whisk you between cities and countries with ease, and typically for much less money than it would cost you to fly. In fact, if you want to ride in style in business class on a lot of these routes, you can often do it without breaking the bank — a huge departure from the massive gaps between economy and business airline fares. But Brightline, which is the only private passenger railroad in the country, could change the U.S. train travel game for good. And it’s happening in Florida first, of all places.

Florida is a pretty perfect example of a state mirroring the country as a whole. It’s enormous, so politics and worldviews differ greatly from north to south, east to west and pretty much everywhere in between. Cities like Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa have more wealth and diversity than rural areas. And a reliance on cars means that gridlock and pollution are scourges in our daily life. But the Brightline is set on alleviating at least some of that last point.

Currently, the Brightline in South Florida connects West Palm Beach to Miami, with stops in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale and Aventura in between. The company has a partnership with Uber so you can request a ride to and from the station when booking a ticket, and pickups automatically align with the train schedule in Brightline’s app. Friends who live in the area have told me they like having it around — it lets them go to Miami for the day without worrying about fighting the often-insane traffic on I-95 or allows them to drink freely because they don’t have to get behind the wheel at the end of the night. Commuters use it, too. Right now, it sounds a lot like the railroads that connect New York’s populous suburbs to the city, or perhaps even the Bay Area’s BART. But it’s the expansion of Florida’s Brightline that is hopefully going to inspire the United States to change its rail system for the better.

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The Brightline’s latest expansion will connect Miami to Orlando via a three-hour train ride (Amtrak’s current service takes five to seven hours). Though it’s technically not a high-speed train, the Brightline will reach 125 mph in some areas and is set to be the fastest train, second to a Washington, D.C. to Boston route. “The Federal Railroad Administration expects to sign off within days, triggering a three-week testing period before Brightline carries passengers,” according to The Washington Post. And they’re doing it without any federal assistance — the project is coming to life thanks to $6 billion in private investment.

After Brightline makes its maiden voyage from Miami to Orlando (tickets have already gone on sale and start at $79 one way), the company is heading west for a $12 billion project to put a high-speed train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. If all goes according to plan, we could see trains traveling at 186 mph by 2028, right before LA hosts the Summer Olympics that year. Brightline West received a $25 million grant from the recent infrastructure law, the largest federal investment in public transportation in our nation’s history. Most of that $66 billion is going towards existing track, tunnel and bridge upgrades and replacements along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, but “$12 billion is set aside for improving passenger services outside that region, including for high-speed rail,” according to The Post.

This is all very good news. In reality, the United States is far too large to have true, high-speed train connections from coast to coast (I’d love to be wrong, but it seems very unlikely). But even having trains connecting cities like Orlando and Miami and Las Vegas and Los Angeles is good for both tourism and domestic travel. Why fly from London to Paris when you can take a less-than two-and-a-half-hour ride on the Eurostar? Two very different cities can be explored with ease, and that’s true of many locales across Europe and Asia.

I don’t often look to Florida for how I think the country should be run. But at least in one way, the Brightline shows that the Sunshine State is progressing the fastest in the transportation department. Here’s hoping that other metro areas continue to catch on.