Rail advocates are calling for more safety regulation for one of America’s deadliest passenger rail players after the release of an explosive new investigation — but also putting the carnage in context of how train travel remains subordinate to cars.
Last week, journalists at the Miami Herald published a year-long investigation into Brightline, whose celebrated Florida line was dubbed, “The deadliest major passenger railroad in the United States.”
The Herald team discovered that since beginning service in 2018, Brightline trains had killed an astounding 182 people — an average of one death for every 13 days on the tracks, and nearly 25 dead per million miles traveled.
Both those numbers were far higher than previously known, and far higher than those of Brightline’s competitors; the next-deadliest railroad in America, California’s Coaster line, killed just 16 people per million miles traveled.
Of course, all of those deaths pale in comparison to roadway fatalities in Florida, a state which routinely ranks in the top five for pedestrian fatalities — with 771 walkers killed in 2023 alone. Still, some advocates say that there is more to be done to save lives on America’s rail system — and that it’s not just a Brightline problem.
“It is tragic that people are getting killed; it is tragic that people are getting killed at such high rates relative to the way we do trains in other parts of the country,” said Jim Mathews, president and CEO of the Rail Passengers Association. “But it’s a little disingenuous to create the impression that this is all Brightline’s fault.”
The bigger picture
Mathews applauded the Herald’s meticulous reporting, which explained that much of Brightline’s safety record stems from the company’s decision to run 96 percent of its crossings “at grade” (or at street-level), forgoing overpasses, bridges, and tunnels that would move train tracks out of the path of other road users and make crashes all but impossible.
He also agreed that Brightline’s rhetoric, which dismissed victims as suicidal or drug users — even when lacking strong evidence of either — was “callous” and ethically wrong.
But practically speaking, Mathews points out that Florida had already experienced some of the highest numbers of train “trespassing” deaths for years before Brightline came around. Brightline didn’t even build much of the tracks on which its trains run; the tracks were laid more than a hundred years ago, often through dense neighborhoods where people walk and bike. And federal law did not require the company to significantly retrofit most of its crossings; grade separation is only mandated for trains that exceed 125 miles per hour.
That threshold, Mathews said, should be lowered, since much of the Brightline route runs at a still-blistering 110 miles per hour – including through major population centers like Miami. The train does reach 125 mph, but only in a small section near its Orlando terminus where the company did build new track, and which it fenced off from pedestrians and motorists completely.
Mathews said that building more fencing could save lives elsewhere along the route, too, especially if those fences have sensors that alert authorities when someone is attempting to climb them to cross mid-track. He also says Brightline should install more four-armed “quad gates” along the 31 percent of crossings that don’t currently have them, along with medians to prevent drivers from dodging gates by entering the opposite lane.
Without a federal mandate and federal funding to extend those kinds of protections down the whole length of the route, though, Brightline might not get safer, Mathews argued — at least compared to Brightline West. That train, which will begin service between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. in 2028, will run mostly on new tracks along the median of I-15, without a single at-grade crossing — but it also received a whopping $3 billion from the Biden administration to achieve that ambitious goal. Brightline Florida, meanwhile, had less federal help.
“It is absolutely clear that Brightline did not spend the kind of money that maybe other systems would have spent to grade-separate — and certainly [what] they spend in Europe,” he said. “If you look at what they’re doing on Brightline West though — they are grade separated. … Would it have been financially impossible to grade-separate 96 percent of crossings [in Florida]? I don’t know — it would be a lot of money, for sure.”
A money problem?
Mathews argued that to build passenger rail at the scale that America needs without compromising on safety, taxpayers should be making those kinds of hefty investments — which, to be clear, still pale in comparison the money spent on highways every single year. The National League of Cities says that the U.S. has historically allocated just 11 percent of its infrastructure investment to rail. Japan, for example, spends 31 percent.
The rail industry got an injection under Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, even if highways still received roughly three times more funding. Under that law, Congress set aside $1.1 billion for the dedicated Railroad Crossing Elimination program, along with a slate of other new rail programs that can be used to address track safety.
“The political reality is that if we’re going to impose a regulation, we need to fund whatever change is required,” Mathews added. “And the IIJA did that. It had a lot of money for grade crossing elimination — and that, to me, is where we should be going if we [want] a safer way of doing things.”
Florida DOT itself won a major federal grant under the IIJA that, together with investments from the state and Brightline, was slated to allocate about $45 million to install 33 miles of fencing and other safety improvements along America’s deadliest passenger train route.
In the 33 months it took for the federal funding to be released, though, the Herald reports that 101 people died — and Mathews said that to improve the rest of the route will take even more money. He added that it would also help to have a White House that can be relied on to distribute federal awards without freezing them for political review, or pushing Congress to claw funds back.
“The IIJA recognized [crossing safety] as a serious problem around the country — not just the outlier cases like Brightline, [whose] rate is just so off the charts relative to everybody else,” Mathews added. “That’s why they added money to the Grade Crossing Elimination Program. And now what are we doing? We’re clawing back IIJA money.”
Mathews said he hopes that the next surface transportation reauthorization will give states the same kind of flexible formula funding for rail that they already receive for highways — and that private operators like Brightline will step up to the plate and pony up more money, too.
“If you’re running a train through a neighborhood, I don’t care if you’re running it at 30 miles per hour, at 99 or at 180, you should be required to deal with the reality that there are humans there,” he added. “Should Brightline have done that? Yes: ethically, morally, and even from a business reputation standpoint, they probably should have done that.”
Questions of culture
At the same time, Mathews was hesitant to say that Brightline’s safety failures are only a political problem — because America’s train-deprived culture plays a role, too.
Unlike countries in Europe where tracks are rarely empty for long, he says U.S. residents have come to think of railways as relics of the past where they’re unlikely to encounter an actual train — and especially not a fast train that could crush them in just a few seconds. Many Americans, after all, have far more experience with novelty trains at children’s theme parks or holiday-season “Santa” trains than actual high-speed rail. And over time, people have becomed conditioned to think there’s little risk in dashing across the tracks outside of a designated crossing — or even ducking under a warning gate, as many of the Brightline victims profiled by the Herald did.
“They think it’s OK to walk along the tracks; they think it’s OK to reenact the Stand By Me moment … But that’s American culture,” Mathews added. “It’s like, ‘Well, trains are rare; they’re [just] freight trains, they move so slow, you’ll hear them and see them for miles before you have to do anything about it’ — none of which is true, by the way. … [But] when you see the tracks, you really should assume that there might be a train coming. You wouldn’t walk across I-80 and assume no cars are coming.”
That phrasing might be provocative to proponents of the Safe Systems approach, which calls on decision makers to take action to prevent all transportation deaths, even when victims aren’t behaving perfectly — not least by getting highways out of neighborhoods where people walk.
Still, if higher-speed passenger rail trips are going to replace many of those highway trips — and they should — Mathews said that regulators, the rail industry, and residents will need to do more to prevent people from getting struck, rather than following the autocentric playbook of blaming victims alone.
“The fact is, it’s a lot safer to move people around on trains than to do it on the highways,” he said. “We should be [building trains] at scale, and we should be doing everything we can to get people off the highways, because they’re, they’re polluting [communities] and killing people. … At the same time, … that [death] rate per mile is just unacceptably high. I don’t know why we can’t build fast and still build sensibly. I don’t see why those two things are opposed.”
