The Company Changing Rail in America: Brightline

the body count of failed High-Speed Rail projects in the United States is large and rather disconcerting but one project is looking like it might actually break this pattern and we'll create an electric High-Speed Rail line that will actually travel at the highest World standard speeds and will be done before I'm 40 years old let's talk about it hey there my name is Reese and I run a channel called RM Transit where I talk about fast trains with parking lots brightline West is a high-speed rail project in the United States that appears to have moved far enough along that it actually deserves an RM Transit video I've been burned before with a project that appears like it's going to happen but doesn't happen but in this case it actually seems like brightline is going to build this thing so let's take a look at this project meant to connect Las Vegas with Los Angeles today America doesn't have 300 kilometer per hour class High-Speed Rail which is the world standard now China has it Saudi has it turkey has it Japan has it and Spain has it the Northeast Corridor maxes out around 250 kilometers per hour which is similar to upgraded High-Speed Rail lines in Europe but there aren't any plans as far as I know to upgrade that further to get close to 300 kilometers per hour enter brightline brightline is a private railroad company which is pretty well known for its service in Florida which runs in between Miami Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach and which brightline is currently extending to Orlando where most of Florida's theme parks are an extension that is actually set to open really quite soon I think in the next couple of months or so now from my understanding brightline is in large part of real estate play which to be fair is historically how a lot of Railways worked and is even how some Railways like the MTR in Hong Kong work today that makes sense rail goes in makes a place better connected and then that land is more valuable and can be used to capture value back for shareholders or more optimally for the public ultimately if it's the government and the public benefiting from that land value uplift well they can reinvest those profits into more service and more rail to increase the value of more land expanding your transit system brightline as good as it might be being a private company means that that's not a guarantee you get and there's also no guarantee that other priorities with the housing are actually going to be met like it being affordable for example but at the same time the service is good sure this first line is not electric it runs Sleek diesel-powered trains from Siemens which are actually very similar to the ones that VIA Rail and Amtrak are going to be getting over the next 10 years or so and it's not 300 kilometer per hour class High-Speed Rail these trains max out at around 200 kilometers per hour like the iconic British Intercity 125 from the 1970s which is over 50 years ago now but they're nice trains and interestingly brightline manages to share a lot of their rails with freight trains despite the fact that brightline runs a fairly frequent fairly fast and Fairly reliable service and I think what that goes to show is that if the freight company is actually invested in the passenger service being fast and reliable it's actually possible and so maybe we don't need to go build an entire new passenger rail network for North America we could just get Freight and passenger to work better together now getting off that tangent the trains themselves have excellent finishings and service there's free Wi-Fi a design that actually thinks about accessibility with large washrooms similar to those you'll see in say British trains and really really high quality level boarding that is frankly as good as anything anywhere in the world that actually uses an automated electronic Gap filler system to allow freight trains to pass the high platforms without clipping it because the passenger train has a gap filler and it's just kind of crazy that the first place that used this technology in North America is Florida but hey 2023 crazy things happen even better the service is frequent during peak hours it's every half hour and during off peak it's every hour and for what is technically an Intercity train service that's excellent and even though it's not public run it does set a standard which public agencies can and appear to be aspiring to and that will raise the tide that lifts all North American passenger train boats and that's just a good thing for everyone who hops on a nicer passenger trains in North America in like 10 years well you probably have brightline defense tank even if just for a little little bit of that and the experience of the stations and just the passenger experience in general is also just better than in the rest of North America there are big open lounges with seating no lining up in open halls with very little seating and they're actually ticket barriers so you don't have to be scanned like you're getting on an airplane in a lot of ways the passenger experience for brightline exceeds the passenger experience you'll get on International Railways and that's the standard that we should be aiming for in North America and frankly in anywhere where you're building a new passenger Railway or transit system there's no good reason not to aim for literally just being the best but there are real problems well it's sort of miraculous that brightline is already making money without even opening their pretty valuable extension to Orlando and to be fair if you want more trains built in North America that is good news the current trains are just kind of small they only have four cars which kind of look hilarious bookended by two diesel locomotives and while they will get longer it doesn't really appear that brightline is being designed for mass transportation now I've heard from others that ticket prices are very high but looking at the ticket prices at least proposed for the extension to Orlando they don't really feel all that out there compared to say the tickets on VIA Rail Canada for example including exchange rates Etc and that's especially true given that the experience on brightline is probably going to be nicer than on VIA Rail sorry VIA Rail stop making people line up at the station please brightline has a lot of grade Crossings and it ends up hitting a lot of vehicles and people and while there's definitely something to be said for people being safe and responsible around rail corridors because they're extremely dangerous the reality is there are few rail corridors in Europe or Asia that have the level of frequency and speed that brightline does and have that many grade crossings that are so poorly protected in North America we don't really use the gates that fully enclose the crossing we don't use the special radar devices that check if the crossing is clear and set the signaling to Red so that the train stops it's just not a good situation it would clearly be in the public interest for a lot of those grade Crossings to be either closed or just removed at the same time brightline is a private company which is okay but I can't exactly go complain to my local politician if I don't like that bright line is starting to charge way higher prices for tickets the same way I could with someone like Amtrak or VIA Rail and at the same time during covid when it probably wouldn't have been very profitable brightline mostly wasn't running while VIA Rail and Amtrak were even if at reduced scheduled frequencies and that makes sense because for the most part via and Amtrak don't exist to make money they exist to serve the public ultimately though if more rail Services keep coming online and competing with one another and regulations get updated this feels like it's a pretty positive step for North American passenger rail now brightline has something else cooking and that's a project from LA to Las Vegas which is even more exciting in a lot of ways it's being designed for roughly 300 kilometer per hour electric trains and it might even introduce a new High-Speed Rail model from Siemens to the North American market now to be clear brightline West won't exactly drop you off on the Strip but it will get you fairly close roughly about as close as the airport gets you the truth is that there's not really a place in Las Vegas that you could put a train station where everyone would just be within walking distance of their final destination or even the vast majority for that matter what this does highlight though is the lack of better blast mile transit in Las Vegas this is a tourist City and I even made an entire dedicated video just sort of highlighting what a rapid transit system could look like in Las Vegas so if you're interested go check it out up here sadly the reality of most brightline stations outside of Miami itself is that they just aren't all that well connected to public transit and in this case both the LA and Las Vegas station are going to have tons of parking like thousands of parking spots and that just doesn't feel very good it's not a great real estate play if brightline is meant to mostly be a real estate play and it also just kind of sucks to say hmm okay let me drive my car to the train station there's also the positive pressure that this project could apply not unlike the first project but to California High-Speed Rail if brightline West actually manages to get high-speed electric trains running through the desert in just a couple of years when California High-Speed Rail has already been working on this for probably 10 it would be a really good wake-up call that California high speed rail needs to focus more on getting actual trains running on the tracks its buildings so that passengers today can benefit from that infrastructure now the biggest problem with this project in my personal opinion is that it's going to La the reality is there are few cities less centralized than Los Angeles but it's pretty clear to me at least that when most people think of Los Angeles they aren't thinking of Rancho Cucamonga which is over 50 kilometers from downtown Los Angeles and all of the transit that is already kind of centralized there but there is hope Rancho is actually on metrolinks not that metrolinks San Bernardino commuter line which actually already features roughly hourly service between La Union Station and San Bernardino with the trip from Rancho Cucamonga taking about an hour which means that you could hypothetically in the future travel from La Union Station to Las Vegas albeit you're gonna need to get a cab in Las Vegas in about three and a half hours when you're factoring in not perfect but still pretty good connection at Rancho Cucamonga which If we're honest is pretty good because that's already faster than driving of course it is worth mentioning that a lot of people aren't living in downtown L.A and for many people it wouldn't take quite as long as driving from there and this is the reality of decentralized cities even if you have high speed rail to the city center well it can take people a long time to act actually get to the high speed rail to then take it out of the city so the question here is how do we go from eh to Great the first thing that sort of comes to mind to me is the LA Metro connection or I should say the lack of an LA Metro connection currently the Gold Line is a fair distance west of Rancho Cucamonga but it's actually going to be extended down to the San Bernardino line and to me it seems sort of tempting to say hey like extend the Gold Line 10-ish more kilometers to get to Rancho Cucamonga it could be a mostly single track extension where only let's say one third of the trains actually continue onwards to Rancho but it would at least provide an electric rail connection from Rancho Cucamonga to La Union Station which would be good and at the same time that's a useful Transit connection so people from say Azusa or Pasadena could just get on the Gold Line at Rancho Cucamonga instead of going all the way into downtown LA and then coming back out clearly the best and most important part of a solution is upgrading and electrifying the San Bernardino Metrolink line which on one hand there is a lot of space generally to upgrade the lion but there are also a lot of places where the line is currently single track that will require re-jigging things to double track it and expand it for more service which wouldn't be necessary for 30 minute brightline Florida style surface but probably just makes more sense in the long run places like for example where the San Bernardino line runs down the middle of an interstate highway and some of the grade separations that are designed for one track not two now fortunately the San Bernardino line doesn't have a lot of grade Crossings close to the city center but as you get further and further out into the suburbs there are many and that's not optimal for high frequency or high-speed trains so that's something you're also going to need to work on in the long term but all of that's worth it because it would mean that you can run frequent electric Metrolink and High-Speed Rail trains to San Bernardino as well as to Las Vegas and because people wouldn't need to connect and because ideally we would be increasing the speeds a bit on the San Bernardino line you could probably get the travel time from the strip to downtown Los Angeles close to three hours which would be awesome now if it sounds like I'm negative about this I'm Not brightline For Better or For Worse is already doing a lot for passenger rail in North America showing people want to take it showing it can be a good accessible experience showing how it can be integrated with really nice Tod and just generally showing how it can be modern brightline is also clearly building the ability to construct these projects and they seem generally fairly successful at it you can sort of see the improvement from one project to the next and you could sort of only imagine how much more successful they might be if they built rail in places where there was already good local public transit to take you to the station it also just generally feels like a big rail industry win that people in North America who are working for brightline right now are learning how to plan design and build High-Speed Rail corridors running adjacent to highways at reasonable prices because even if a project like brightline West doesn't end in the optimal places California High-Speed Rail shows that half the battle is just laying the track between the cities and so in a lot of ways this project just feels like the Embers at the start of something good it seems pretty obvious that a lot of High-Speed Rail corridors we might want to build could have their tracks directly next to existing inter-city highways we also get a link from Las Vegas to the Greater Los Angeles area and a couple nice high quality stations which can support Modern Electric high-speed trains and generally just look nice it would also mean that we would only be a Caltrain style or Regional Rail upgrading project away from Fast electric trains from LA to Las Vegas proper La Union Station and that's really exciting better yet well initially we would already have a fairly good brake line service operating on these tracks in the long-term California High-Speed Rail trains could also use them meaning that if you want to travel from other places in California to Las Vegas to go eat delicious food then that's something you could conveniently do and as with the first phase of brightline by building this project in a tourist hotspot you can kind of turn the train into a machine for converting people into High-Speed Rail supporters Who start asking for more and more High-Speed Rail when they go back home to other places around the world and particularly in North America and we could use a lot more of that thanks for watching a special thanks to the roaming rail fan for all of his footage of the construction of brightline go check out his channel in the video description [Music] [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 180,725

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning, brightline, brightline west, florida, las vegas, los angeles, cahsr

Id: m4UGNYNGxXs

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2023