In late February, Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—dutifully doing his boss’s bidding—announced an investigation into the California High-Speed Rail Authority’s use of a $3.1 billion federal grant for its long-awaited high-speed rail system. The project, he said, was “severely—no pun intended—off track.” By comparison, he pointed to another rail project: Brightline West, a $12.4 billion, 218-mile route under construction between the Los Angeles suburbs and Las Vegas. “Those are the projects that I think taxpayers are willing to invest in,” Duffy said during his presser, praising the project for being “on budget, on time.” (It is, in fact, already running behind schedule, but whatever.) Conservatives at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research have similarly portrayed Brightline as proof that private models work better than public ones: “As California’s long-running, over-budget, publicly funded rail project sputters, a Florida private company demonstrates how to get it done.”
Founded by the billionaire Fortress Investment Group co-founder, Milwaukee Bucks owner, and Trump financial enabler Wes Edens, Florida-based Brightline is the first new private passenger rail company in a century. It began operations in 2018, with a 235-mile route between Miami and Orlando that tops out at 125 miles per hour. In 2024, Brightline broke ground on Brightline West, which, if completed according to plan, would reach speeds of 200 miles per hour, making it America’s first high-speed rail. The company has received billions in public grants and bonds for the project, which it says will be ready for passengers by 2028.
The lionization of Brightline as a private-sector corrective to California’s failures was also evident in recent coverage from The New York Times, which reported last week that “Brightline has proved that it can operate reliable, well-designed passenger trains that people want to ride” and asked whether the public sector can “do the same.” The New York Times is not the only mainstream outlet to present private rail—and Brightline specifically—as a remedy to America’s long-standing public rail woes. “The future of U.S. train travel is here—and it’s not on Amtrak,” ran Fast Company’s 2023 headline about the company. Time named Brightline one of the most influential companies of 2024.
Unfortunately, these reports brush over Brightline’s serious shortcomings. And at a time when the Trump administration is calling for the privatization of Amtrak, this kind of coverage risks eroding political support for public rail, threatening the future of a system designed to provide affordable, useful, reliable transportation for the greatest number of people.
The New York Times’ mostly positive article about Brightline does eventually concede that the news about the company “hasn’t all been rosy” and that “some Floridians have taken to calling Brightline the Death Train because more than 100 people have died crossing the tracks.” But reporter Michael Kimmelman immediately notes that three million riders chose to ride the railway “nonetheless” last year.
This understates the extent of the issue. Brightline Florida is not merely deadly, it is the single deadliest railway per mile in the country—three times worse than the next midsize or major railroad, according to a 2022 AP analysis. It’s hard not to see that as related to its for-profit model. Investing in grade separation—that is, overpasses or underpasses—at crossings would allow roads to cross railway tracks without stopping. But grade separation can cost up to $40 million per crossing, and there are 315 crossings along Brightline’s route between Miami and Orlando. For years before it launched the first phase of its service in South Florida, Brightline shunned Federal Railroad Administration recommendations for sealed corridors at 31 of its crossings, as well as far less expensive safety measures such as gates and signs. Brightline initially said the measures were cost-prohibitive before ultimately directing its signals consultants to incorporate all of the recommended design treatments “where applicable” along its service route. It subsequently made additional improvements with tens of millions in federal grant money, and in 2023 it was forced to make even more after settling a lawsuit. That same year, the company faced criticism for encouraging people to sign a digital “safety pledge,” which seemed designed to deflect responsibility for crashes along its route. Today, Brightline attributes 75 percent of the deaths along its route to suicide; a watchdog group estimated the percentage of suicides at closer to 12 percent. A Brightline representative declined to comment on the record.
Paradoxically, while Brightline Florida runs at speeds that are dangerously fast (nearly 80 mph) in densely populated areas, its lack of grade separation actually makes it sluggish compared to trains in most of the developed world. On average, it travels at less than 70 miles per hour, slightly slower than a car traveling on a Florida freeway. Brightline advertises its Florida rail service as high-speed, though it only reaches 125 miles per hour—the minimum for high-speed classification—for a 35-mile stretch of its route, a fact that Kimmelman neglects to mention. “A cynical person might guess that they have this single stretch solely so they could justify calling it a ‘high speed line,’” Jesse Harasta, a co-founder and co-chair of the advocacy group San Antonians for Rail Transit, wrote last year in a Medium essay about the company.
The problems of privatized rail for passengers are not unique to Brightline. In Britain, privatization of passenger rail, which began in the 1990s, was such a disaster—resulting in increased delays, cancellations, overcrowding, and expense to passengers—that the notoriously pro-privatization Conservatives had no option but to renationalize passenger railways in 2020. While Japan’s private rail system is a notable exception, Taras Grescoe, a Canadian transit advocate, notes that “when you look around the world, the countries that are doing this best are the countries that have nationalized, publicly owned rail systems.”
Privatized rail not only fails the riding public, it also largely fails as a business. Despite a 251 percent fare increase last summer, Brightline still has not seen a profit. In fact, it has reported significant losses, including a net loss of nearly $493 million in the first nine months of 2024 alone, even as ridership and revenue have increased. This is hardly unusual; passenger rail is, with few exceptions, a money-losing venture. But for Brightline’s owners—Fortress Investment Group, a subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Co., a sovereign wealth fund of the government of Abu Dhabi—profitability may be, to some extent, beside the point. Harasta, for example, believes “the primary purpose of Brightline is not to turn a profit in itself but to serve as a driver to inflate the property market in impacted markets,” a bit like “Manhattan’s Little Island park, built by billionaire Barry Diller who, not coincidentally, happens to be heavily invested in nearby real estate.”
If this is indeed the strategy, Brightline has been a big success. Residential sales around Miami’s Brightline station increased 31.9 percent between 2018 and 2023. In Fort Lauderdale, total resale value in and around the city’s Brightline station rose 51.4 percent in that same time period. Brightline’s owners are cashing in on the trend: According to the Times, “The company has built, then sold, three towers on top of MiamiCentral and another next door, and also erected then sold an apartment complex near its station in West Palm Beach.” While this is good news for luxury real estate developers, it’s bad news for low-income Floridians vulnerable to the impacts of gentrification. The threat of displacement near Brightline stations is so great, in fact, that it inspired JPMorgan Chase to award $5 million to help a coalition of housing groups build and preserve affordable housing along the company’s Florida route.
Americans overwhelmingly believe in the importance of a strong American passenger rail system, and are eager to see our current rail infrastructure expand. That’s understandable: Driving in America is expensive, dangerous, and cooking the planet. Many of us—like one person Kimmelman spoke to, a Brightline passenger on vacation in Florida who lamented losing “so many hours of my life driving the highway between Little Rock and Memphis”—might be tempted to support a possible mix of private and public ownership of our rail system, as long as it gets trains on tracks and reduces our dependency on cars.
But rail doesn’t work like that. Throwing our lot in with the likes of Brightline may actually preclude the development of something better—since, as Harasta points out, “the number of potentially profitable city pairings are limited.” Each profitable city pairing that gets cornered by a private company instead “weakens the overall fiscal viability of our national rail network.”
Truth be told, California High-Speed Rail is not a great advertisement for the merits of public rail. But the notion that Brightline could do better based on the progress of Brightline West fails to acknowledge the huge differences between the projects: The California High-Speed Rail route is more than three times longer than Brightline West, has eight times as many stations, involves the construction of dozens of grade separation projects, and requires buying land from bitterly resistant private owners—an obstacle Brightline West avoids because it’s being built mostly on a highway median. (Brightline Florida runs largely on existing freight lines, saving the company similar headaches.)
Public rail in America certainly faces substantial challenges, but it’s by no means irredeemable. As Malcolm Harris argues in The Baffler, the challenges of California High-Speed Rail demonstrate the need for more public control of our economy, not less: “Without a strong base level of state capacity, even a state rail project is dependent on the cooperation of many contractors, and these private actors are looking for a nice and easy return.”
Brightline is now looking to expand across the country—Edens has his eyes on Brightline routes that link dense cities in Texas, the Pacific Northwest, the American South, and the Midwest. As the Trump administration targets a wide variety of public goods, it’s never been more important to reject bad-faith demonization of public projects and note the serious shortcomings of the so-called “solutions” offered by the private sector.