Two Ways to Build Rail Projects

Major delays and ballooning costs prompted Vivek Ramaswamy to last week describe California’s High Speed Rail as a “wasteful vanity project.” Florida’s Brightline rail project, which is privately owned, stands in stark contrast.

California: Sixteen years after Californians voted to fund a high-speed rail system, not one passenger has boarded, with only a 119-mile stretch of the 494-mile project under construction and trains unlikely to run before 2030.

Florida: While the Sunshine State’s Brightline is less ambitious in scale than California’s rail project, it’s also undeniably been more successful.

• Brightline spans 235 miles, from Miami to Orlando, and carried more than two million passengers last year.

• According to the company, ridership grew by 38% from May 2023 to May 2024.

• Brightline West, a West Coast expansion which would provide a bullet train trip from Southern California to Las Vegas, is expected to cost just $12 billion and be operational by 2028.

Bubba’s Two Cents

Sure you can say this is cherry picking an example, but it’s a pretty glaring data point when the country’s only privately owned and operated rail project is so much more efficient than its dysfunctional government counterpart.