Yes, I know I’m inviting controversy with that title – but the fact remains that Brightline has problems that make it very far from ideal. Criticism is warranted if the US is to have solid HSR at the level that Europe or Asia do.
The idea behind Brightline is seeing how efficient and cost-effective a sorta high speed rail line can be built. It’s open, yay, while CAHSR is far from it, but on the other hand there’s so many level crossings because Florida is flat and it costs too much to grade separate. When mixed with Florida stupidity that causes frequent collision incidents. It’s kind of the extreme of what happens when you pay less to start which makes you pay more later, if you get what I mean.
Second the ineffectiveness is also the fault of not having good transit connections from the Brightline station. If there isn’t even a dinky, infrequent bus to the airport from the station then you can’t really get customers. Many Americans hate walking too and also think buses are for poor people, so any sort of “AirTrain people mover” sort of thing between the airport and stations would work well. Even if you had some sort of transit connection, if you have to change modes 3 times to get to downtown from the airport then that’s also a problem.
Fixing those issues will increase ridership and make lowering fares more feasible (assuming brightline isn’t just going to pocket the difference like a greedy little American company ought).
That’s exactly it! Brightline is an amazing concept in theory, but the implementation feels half-baked, like they established a minimum level of functionality and just left it at that without considering the other, related issues that would make for an actually useful, comprehensive transit solution.
As it is, it’s all too easy for people to point to the flaws in the system and go “see, that’s why HSR will never work in North America. Let’s just go back to commuting by car, traffic be damned.”