Brightline, the private railroad that was going to prove fast trains could turn a profit in America, filed for bankruptcy in September after failing to make enough money to cover its debts.
The company, founded in 2012, still runs its Florida trains between Miami and Orlando and says it is pressing ahead with a planned 200-mile line between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., outside Los Angeles, where trains would reach 200 miles per hour. For now, its Florida service tops out at 125 mph, and only over a 38-mile stretch near Orlando.
That leaves the United States as a glaring exception. From Japan, France and China to Morocco, trains that sustain at least 150 mph — the global definition of high speed — are common. America has none, and it never has.
Lou Thompson, a leading rail advocate who was involved in the formation of Amtrak in the early 1970s and later advised the World Bank on railways, says the cause is money, not culture. Foreign governments “wanted high speed rail, and they were willing to pay for it,” Mr. Thompson told CNN. “Our government has never met those two conditions.”
Federal support went instead to the interstate highways and the air traffic system, pushed along by the industries that stood to gain: auto makers, oil companies and construction firms in the case of roads, airlines and aerospace companies in the case of aviation. The lobbying pushed high-speed rail “into the background in order to keep funding roads and aviation,” said Andy Kunz, the chief executive of the advocacy group US High Speed Rail.
Geography compounds the problem. “Once you get much beyond 400 miles (between destinations), then high speed rail begins to lose out to air because then air becomes faster (in the United States),” Mr. Thompson said. “It’s amazing how far you can go in Europe in 400 miles. Most of the major cities are within that kind of distance. That’s true in Japan as well.”
Scale matters, too. Japanese high-speed trains carry hundreds of millions of passengers a year. The maximum demand projected for California’s long-planned line is about 30 million or 35 million, Mr. Thompson said, and Amtrak’s Acela between Washington and Boston carries 12 million. “When you get hundreds of millions of people a year or billions of people a year, then the economic shift pretty significantly,” he said.
There are faster trains coming, with limits. Amtrak’s NextGen Acela, which began running about a month ago, can reach 160 mph, though only in short bursts. Brightline’s ridership was growing before the filing: 1.8 million passengers in the second quarter, up 16 percent from a year earlier, according to its quarterly reports. The company says it made money on an operating basis in some months, that shedding debt in bankruptcy will help it move forward and that no tax dollars will be lost.
The one big public attempt, the line meant to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The project has “reached a dead end,” said Mr. Thompson, who sat on a peer review group overseeing it.
Mr. Kunz said he remains hopeful: if Brightline’s Las Vegas line opens, he thinks it will build demand elsewhere. Mr. Thompson said private investment alone cannot carry such projects. “The value of high-speed rail is partly for people riding it … but it’s also partly social things like reduced pollution, reduced noise, better safety, or better land use,” he said. “There are a lot of other public benefits that the rider won’t and shouldn’t pay for.”