When I think about taking a train, I get this warm, fuzzy, nostalgic feeling, sort of like-- ♪ There's something about a train ♪ ♪ That's magic ♪ Of course, the reality of train travel in America is less than magical. There's just huge parts of this country where it's just a hassle to get anywhere by train, and the trains barely run. For the most part, the only passenger trains are Amtrak. That's the case that it's been for almost 50 years now. Even along the busy Northeast Corridor, stretching from Washington, D.C. to Boston, less than 10% of trips each year are taken by train. So it might be surprising
to learn that this guy, a billionaire investor who co-owns the Milwaukee Bucks basketball franchise, is super optimistic about the future of trains in America and has a plan to bring them back. I think people lack imagination
a little bit sometimes, of what actually could happen. And once they can experience it, I think it'll be a question of, you know, why is it not everyplace else? So how did trains get
such a bad rap in America? Well, here's a little background. Just over a hundred years
ago, train travel was really the only option for long-distance trips. But as two major technological
innovations came online, passenger rail's competitiveness
dropped significantly. One of those, of course, is the car. And then to combine those vehicles with a massive amount
of highway construction. The other major technological innovation, of course, was the airplane. Both of those were heavily subsidized by the federal government,
and as a result, the number of riders on passenger
trains started to plummet. And so, the railroad
companies, they were losing all sorts of money on
their passenger lines, so they wanted to dump them,
so they basically convinced the federal government
in 1971 to create Amtrak and basically take over
intercity passenger rail. In the busy Northeast Corridor, Amtrak actually runs a fairly
popular, reliable service. But in most of the rest of the country, where Amtrak doesn't
even own its own tracks, frequent delays are the norm,
and ticket sales are dismal. But of course, it doesn't
have to be this way. In much of Europe and Asia, taking an intercity train
is as natural as it is for Americans to hop into their own cars. There's a dramatic and
large-scale public investment in rail in East Asia and
Western and Central Europe. That's just not an investment
we've made here in the U.S. So we just have significantly
less service on offer. But in some ways, you could
see that as a glass half-full, and there's a tremendous
amount of opportunity there. The question is, how
can we build more of it, how can we afford that service, and where is that service gonna work best? Brightline announcing
it's just a few weeks away from service in Miami-Dade, and they started testing the tracks today. Here in Miami, a city founded by Gilded Age railroad
magnate Henry Flagler, a new grand rail
experiment is taking place, the first brand new, privately-owned intercity passenger
rail service in America in nearly a century. It's the brainchild of
this guy, Wes Edens, head of private equity firm
Fortress Investment Group. How do you help convince a
culture that isn't really interested in the train as transportation to become interested in
trains as transportation? Get 'em to try it once. Not only is it the time
and the efficiency of it, it's a very, very pleasurable experience. It's a proven commodity around the world. It's only the United States
in the industrialized world that doesn't have it, but I
think that's gonna change soon. Wes's project, called Brightline, started operating in 2018, running modern Siemens-built
passenger trains between Miami, Fort
Lauderdale, and West Palm Beach at speeds at up to
around 70 miles per hour, running on existing freight track owned by the Florida East Coast Railway. By 2022, the route will
be extended up to Orlando, on newly-built tracks
that will allow the trains to cruise at up to 125 miles per hour. The entire 250-mile route
will take around three hours, falling into an important
passenger rail sweet spot. It's too short to fly
but too long to drive. If it's too short, then rail service doesn't
really make much sense. People are gonna take their car. And then you're talkin' 1,000 miles. Aviation's always gonna be competitive. But for that two to 500-mile range, rail service really offers potentially the best alternative. These paired corridors
that are too far to drive, too short to fly, there's
about a dozen significant ones. So Atlanta to Charlotte,
Dallas to Houston, Las Vegas to Los Angeles,
which is our next project. I think that it's quite
possible you'll see trains in all those places
over the next 10 years. I actually grew up in South Florida, not far from where Brightline's
route passes today. My parents, like many other transplants, escaped cold, crowded New
York for the tropical, laid-back charm of South Florida. And, like most of the U.S., Florida has a
firmly-entrenched car culture. But in recent decades,
Florida's population has surged, as retiring baby boomers have
been lured in by the state's lack of income and estate taxes. Traffic, especially
along the I-95 corridor, has become a nightmare at all hours. Have you done the drive from
West Palm to Miami before? I have.
What's that like? It's terrible, you're stuck in at least two to three hours of traffic. And just, Florida drivers--
Are terrible. They're the worst.
They're just horrendous. They make New York drivers look like they just got out of driving school. Well, a lot of them are New Yorkers who just made their way down here-- That's true, that's true.
Brought their bad skills, and got worse.
And got worse as they drove down here.
That's so true. It's not hard to see how a train would be an improvement over all of that. But logic aside, there's still the strong cultural bias against
trains, that bad reputation. So Brightline sweetens the deal, and for about $18-40
each way, you get to ride on a bright, clean,
brand spankin' new train, with some luxury-flavored amenities. And finally, there's the
biggest luxury of all, reducing your carbon footprint. We think we'll take four
million cars off the road here, so that's millions of metric tons of CO2. This system will run on biodiesel. Obviously, it's not fossil-free, but you're concentrating
people into transportation, which is a lot more efficient
than individual cars. For all these potential upsides, Brightline has already faced
some serious challenges. One is a bizarrely high
level of fatalities caused by collisions. A Brightline train comes
to a smashing stop, hitting a car on the tracks. Officials say that this person who was in this vehicle is okay. These accidents are pretty clearly not the railway's fault. It's more like risky Floridian drivers are used to ignoring crossing warnings to get past slow-moving freight trains. To their credit, Brightline has undertaken some measures to reduce these accidents, such as improving signage at crossings, and using drones to monitor
potential collisions. The real hurdle, though,
is the business itself. The total bill for Brightline's completed Orlando-to-Miami route is expected to come in at around $4 billion, funded mostly by what are
called private activity bonds, a form of tax-exempt bonds
sold to private investors. Eventually, the bonds
will need to be repaid. So far, ridership has been climbing. Last July, they welcomed
their one-millionth rider. But on a Tuesday afternoon, well, this is what our train looked like. It's disconcerting to see how few people are on the train, though. I walk my dogs every morning, and every time it goes by, I kinda look. There's maybe three people riding it. To help increase ridership, they've partnered with
everyone from local museums to ridesharing services to the Miami Heat. And more recently, they announced a branding partnership with this guy. Hi, everybody! Which will result in
Brightline being renamed Virgin Trains USA sometime in 2020. But Brightline isn't just
betting on ridership. What train service does always really well is it's not just making
money on the service, it's that knowing the
land around train stations is incredibly valuable, and
Brightline's parent company effectively owns land in particular around the station in central Miami. We've built about 1,500,000
square feet of real estate. I mean, this is a part of
Miami, that you would know well, was not really a vibrant economic zone. It now is really the hub of economic development here in downtown Miami, and transportation plays
a huge role in that. So we think that the
real estate part of it is a big component, and actually linking those two things together, economically, it creates a lot of the
foundation for the project. Brightline's Florida route isn't the only recent development for
passenger rail in the U.S. The company's next project is
a high-speed electric train, stretching from Las Vegas
to just outside L.A., a route millions of
tourists drive every year. Other high-speed rail
projects have been proposed in places like Texas and
the Pacific Northwest, though these proposals are
far behind Brightline's operational service. Meanwhile, Amtrak isn't taking all of this private competition lying down. A couple of years ago, it brought on Richard Anderson as CEO, who previously revived Delta
Airlines from bankruptcy. We really need to reposition Amtrak as a modern mode of
transportation similar to what we see in Europe and what we see in Japan. He's been cutting costs in an effort to free up capital for
much-needed infrastructure improvements and revamped trains, like these state-of-the-art
high-speed cars that are coming in 2021 to the business-traveler-focused
Acela line. While Amtrak still needs
subsidies to get by, it's financially healthier than ever, and in 2019, it set a
new record for ridership, serving nearly a million more passengers than the year prior. Ultimately, the future of
American passenger rail, whether public or private, will depend on one really big question, will Americans want to
actually ride trains, or do we prefer to think of them as nostalgia-inducing relics of the past? Rail has always made
sense, but it seems like it's never made more sense than in 2020! We're gonna need more of it. There's the climate issue,
the less people drive, the less people fly, the better
it is for the environment. Countries that invest in infrastructure are the ones that do the best, do the best economically,
do the best for the people, they create the best quality of life. We used to be the leader of
infrastructure in the world. And I mean, frankly, we're
not the leader anymore, and that's something that should change!
