High-speed rail in China stretches for 31,000 miles and, in my personal experience, runs at about 190 mph. High-speed rail in Florida is Brightline and boasts 235 miles of rail at an average speed of 70 miles per hour (about 3.5 hours from Miami to Orlando including stops at Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and West Palm Beach. This is about my first Brightline experience, a trip home from Art Basel/Art Miami to Jupiter, Florida by way of West Palm Beach (tragically, some years ago, Jupiter rejected the offer of working with Brightline on a station).
I paid up for Premium, which worked out to $95 one-way for a 1-hour 16-minute trip. At 8:37 pm on a Sunday evening, Google maps says that the same trip would take 1-hour 8-minutes by car (73.3 miles, station to station).
The non-Premium areas of the Miami station are clean and comfortable:
The Premium lounge has unlimited free food (bizarrely, Chinese, which is not something that most people in Miami understand how to cook) and booze:
The Premium seats aren’t especially comfortable and seem overly upright even in the most reclined position:
Maybe because my train left at 8:45 pm or maybe because they don’t serve full meals on the short legs between Miami and West Palm Beach, I was offered drinks and snacks.
Hanukkah and Christmas are the two holidays that are officially celebrated by Brightline in the West Palm Beach station:
It would be insane to pay Brightline prices for a family trip, but it could make sense for one person given the unpredictability of travel by automobile in a country that is absurdly overpopulated. Here’s a Facebook post that I stumbled on just as I was getting off the train at 10 pm (an accident, apparently):
Conclusion: Brightline is one of the things that makes West Palm Beach one of the best places to live in the U.S. The station is walking distance from the part of town that has been spruced up by Stephen Ross. Orlando and Miami are then easily reached with hourly trains.
(Like the Florida East Coast Railway that opened up St. Augustine, Palm Beach, Miami, and Key West to rich New Yorkers, Brightline seems to lose money on its operations and make money on real estate development around its stations. However, unlike with Flagler’s 19th century railroad, Brightline serves places that are already mostly developed. So it is unclear that the real estate good times can make up for epic annual operating bad times.)
> High-speed rail in China stretches for 31,000 miles and, in my personal experience, runs at about 190 mph.
There’s less friction developing officially sanctioned infrastructure in oppressive regimes, built faster and runs faster (let’s not examine the safety record).
Monorail has a bad reputation, although the one in Seattle is fun to ride once and can come in handy for a date with the boss’ wife. (As in, you are not going to see non-tourists take it, which is like standing around gawking up at a tall building in NYC.)
“Slow, steady, and easy — makes them like it.” — sometimes attributed to Humphrey Bogart
> There’s less friction developing officially sanctioned infrastructure in oppressive regimes, built faster and runs faster (let’s not examine the safety record).
Compared this to the U.S., thanks to bureaucracy, even small projects cannot be done on time or on budget, requiring approvals from numerous agencies regardless of the project’s actual impact.
Replacing an old, failing bridge can take years. Just obtaining approval for the project is costly and time-consuming. Once approved, lawsuits always follow, and when construction finally begins, delays and budget overruns will follow. Yet, despite all this, the safety and environmental impact haven’t significantly changed from 100 or even 50 years ago.
The most amazing part is seeing other people besides Greenspun paying $95 to go 70 miles. They must all be government contractors. $95 to go 70 miles is crazy. Even in today’s currency, most of the non Greenspun world is paying $5 to go 30 miles.
Portugal ranks somewhat lower than Puerto Rico in income, but they make the trains run fast. The Porto-Lisbon express hit 222 kph out in the countryside, which is I-don’t-know-how-fast.
We are hoping for a full debrief of the Art Basel/Miami experience. We had reservations for the last year’s show but came down with a last minute case of the plague.