Okay but genuinely, the dick riding for Brightline is unreal, American News Outlets genuinely think that all of the public and Public private partnerships are either fake or bad and will never get done, but the private entity that has little experience in railway management, they will manage to build a High Speed Rail Service that can't actually fund the project without massive tax payer subsidies will be able to solve all our problems because a private entity can be trusted with public infrastructure and one of the most Climate threatened cities in the nation that exists entirely as an entertainment venue is the perfect place to build a high-speed rail line.
Seriously, they think that this fucking private enterprise has been sent by God to solve America's transit Woes, which does nothing but hasten the decline of American Passenger Railroads as only short profitable routes will remain under a privatized rail system which is promised by Brightline. Also High Speed Rail in the US already has a fucking Model, it's called the Acela and it works!! And California High-speed Rail is only in this situation because of Anti Transit Republicans pulling Federal Funding from it keeping the project off schedule and they had to aquire land, something Brightline doesn't have to do because another company did all of the environmental review and land acquisition over a decade just like CAHSR but because Brightline bought the company and made the announcement after that was done they could pretend it didn't take just as long to get to their starting point as it took CAHSR to begin construction
And Brightline won't build Vegas to LA in 4 years they can't even build a simple traditional rail segment from Cocoa to Orlando on time, given they had to delay opening to December yesterday. So we have a private company build something for the Olympics that won't connect to downtown LA that isn't going to be done by the Olympics and is being praised on the work done by previous entities which is going to use billions of dollars in subsides ro build a railroad to fucking Las Vegas and yet nobody sees the flaws in this system
Oh and Brightline is only Profitable because it buys real estate and resells it assuming that home prices will go up from the train, which has been tried before, by the Florida East Coast Railway and by Penn Central when they started losing money and ridership in the 70s and surprise surprise that isn't a fucking sustainable business model and both ended passenger service or collapsed. And reminder the moment that Brightline starts to lose profit it is shutting down because it is owned by an investment group and they only care about profit not sustainability or the public good. We are funneling billions into an overhyped private venture run by people who aren't even from the rail way industry, they are from fucking Hotels.
The Republican party has been trying to kill Amtrak since its inception, purposely designing it to fail and forcing on it the profitability clause in that attempt to kill it. Every attempt to improve Amtrak by forcing the Freight Railroads to respect Right of Way Laws has been ignore or flat out ended by the courts. Amtrak is one of the last vestiges of the Great Soceity and New Left in American Governance, it is a public intercity rail company that operates over 20,000 miles of track, a miracle in a nation which failed to achieve public Healthcare. Brightline is going to be used to attempt to end Amtrak, the private market can better run trains anyways they’ll say, ignoring every example. It has already begun the Republican House of Representatives this year proposed at 70% cut in Amtrak Funding, they want to privatize amtrak and that will end the last spark of American Passenger Rail. There are 2 possibilities either Amtrak is privatized as the Republicans hope, or Brightline Collapses and is Nationalized into Amtrak like the Auto Train before it. Because the current trajectory of both is unsustainable without intervention as the government refuses to fund Amtrak what is needed because of austerity politics and Brightline runs on real estate sales and government money being directed towards it in an attempt to kill amtrak. Don’t let the shiny news peices fool you, Brightline will not save American Passenger Railroads, it is just another part of a 50 year saga of government disinvestment.