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!