Brightline Trains Florida update

[Intercity]

Do you know whether Brightline has contingency plans for such situations (such as a bus shuttle maybe) or is it just everybody to themselves?

A bus bridge was in place between Fort Lauderdale and Miami.

 

[jis]

Wasn't the FEC Bascule bridge a replacement. It has been many years but it certainly seemed very new late 1999.

The problem with the New River Bridge is not its age, though some repairs needed to be made to it in preparation for Brightline Service as described in (PDF) New River Bridge FAQ. The problem is that with projected increased traffic what with both Bridghtline and TriRail service being added, boats will have a relatively small window of availability of the Waterway. Hence there is a plan to either build a higher bridge or a tunnel, yet to be determined exactly what, to mitigate the situation.

The bridge that was recently rebuilt was the one across the Loxahatchee River in Jupiter.

News photos: Brightline introduces temporary Loxahatchee River bridge - Trains

JUPITER, Fla. — Replacing a 96-year-old, bascule drawbridge while keeping both rail and river traffic moving requires round-the-clock activity and lots of compromise. This was obvious Sunday, April 10, with the latest step in the project to replace a Florida East Coast Railway bridge over the...

www.trains.com

 

[Qapla]

Brightline Construction: Final Girder Installation at Turkey Creek - January 20, 2023​

 

[Qapla]

Brightline Construction: CP Oslo to CP Fort Pierce Cutover - December 2022​

 

[Caesar La Rock]

Another video from Roaming Railfan.

 

[AmtrakMaineiac]

Wow that #32 turnout. In HO that would probably take up most of my layout

 

[Caesar La Rock]

And here is another one from Roaming Railfan, part 2.

 

[Anderson]

Year    Month       Ridership    Tix Rev-A    Tix Rev-B    PPR-A    PPR-B    Tot Rev    Total PPR
2022    January     64,243      1.3         $1,254,666    $20.24    $19.53    1.5     $23.35
2022    February    77,806      1.6         $1,624,589    $20.56    $20.88    1.9     $24.42
2022    March       107,069     2.3         $2,289,135    $21.48    $21.38    2.7     $25.22
2022    April       93,922      1.9         $1,926,340    $20.23    $20.51    2.3     $24.49
2022    May         102,796     2.2         $2,178,247    $21.40    $21.19    2.6     $25.29
2022    June        92,304      1.7         $1,713,162    $18.42    $18.56    2.1     $22.75
2022    July        111,582     1.9         $1,896,894    $17.03    $17.00    2.3     $20.61
2022    August      100,116     1.9         $1,917,221    $18.98    $19.15    2.4     $23.97
2022    September   91,577      1.8         $1,769,268    $19.66    $19.32    2.5     $27.30
2022    October     102,615     2.1         $2,126,183    $20.46    $20.72    3.0     $29.24
2022    November    102,544     2.2         $2,213,925    $21.45    $21.59    3.4     $33.16
2022    December    183,920     3.7         $3,733,576    $20.12    $20.30    5.1     $27.73
                       
2022                1,230,494    24.6      $24,643,207    $19.99             31.8     $25.84

[I hope the above chart comes out right.]

This is based on Brightline's disclosures. Tix Rev-A/PPR-A are based on the "Ticket Revenue" column in the disclosure reports (and dividing that revenue number by the number of tickets sold). Tix Rev-B/PPR-B use the average ticket price indicated in the report and multiply that by the number of tickets sold. [Neither figure is guaranteed to be right, but the revenue figure from Tix Rev-A and the per-passenger ticket price from PPR-B are direct from the disclosures.]

Analysis: PPR is off slightly in December, and will probably land down a little bit in 2023, due to introducing two intermediate stations (which by their nature cannot add end-to-end ridership). I forget what they did in terms of promotional fares.

December ridership included about 41k riders on "Special Event Trains", giving a "normal" ridership level of 142,479 in December. I presume (but do not assume) that this was mostly Polar Express service. No such trains were indicated in November (and often that spills into November). Note that the Boca/Aventura stations were only open for about 1/3 of December.

I haven't discussed shifts from 2021 because the late 2021 figures were heavily affected by Brightline doing promotional fares to publicize the (re)start of service.

Just as an aside, here's the Big Bad Bond Prospectus/Disclosure from 2019 (I said 2021 earlier; that was my bad):

https://emma.msrb.org/P31404627-P31092118-P31501001.pdf

Page 120 in the document (page 134 of the PDF) has a lot of interesting ridership projection figures. Of note, PortMiami has not materialized, and obviously the Disney Springs/west-of-MCO situation is a muddle for now.

Page 126 includes more detailed revenue/expense data, but it isn't easy to disentangle the estimated costs of the Orlando segment vs just WPB-MIA (not to mention the whole Disney Springs bit). That being said, it looks like estimated operating expenses for the full operation would be around $200-250m/yr (probably on the low end if you exclude Disney Springs)...but I'm not clear on whether the (apparently) shorter trainsets reduce that in any material way in terms of maintenance costs (the report indicated that sets could, in theory, end up being expanded up to 10 cars long over time, but we're still working with four-car sets).

As a general note, we're at 1.2m riders for 2022. If the adjusted December ridership figures hold for 2023 at around 180k/month [1], that would put ridership at about 2.16m for 2023. A slight bump in PPR (say, to $24) seems plausible. That would put South Segment revenue at around $51.84m. This feels plausible, but if you add in six figures of ridership to/from Orlando it feels pretty close to the practical capacity of the service (which, at 16 r/t per day over 365 days is around 2.9m seats/yr - yes, there's seat turnover to be had, but at the same time you're going to have at least some empty seats at 0500 or late into the evening). Admittedly, with probable Brightliner orders stretching out to the horizon, ordering another 10-20 cars to meet capacity needs isn't hard to imagine, but I'm wondering just how close to this they can get. That being said, I won't dare project Orlando-related ridership until we get a start date there.
[Note: Here's the most recent Big Bad Bond Disclosure, dated last August: https://emma.msrb.org/P21607364-P21239225-P21662981.pdf I intend to analyze it later tonight.]


[1] Note that ridership seems to be fairly stable on a seasonal basis; 180k/month feels like a stable "best guess" for the South Segment since while Brightline was at 140k "normal" riders for the month, that included Aventura/Boca for only a third of the month but also included promotional fares and the holiday period.

 

[Anderson]

I'm doing this in a second post because...well, I just need to break things out a bit more to figure out Brightline's probable ridership. For clarity, I am primarily working off of this document:

https://emma.msrb.org/P21607364-P21239225-P21662981.pdf

The 2019 ridership/revenue projections (page 120 in my prior post) seem to be self-evident nonsense at this point versus the ridership that has panned out. The 2017 study wasn't necessarily flawed (though as the folks at BL have noted, it missed weekend business - initially, service was quite light on weekends vs weekdays), but the revenue projections just aren't lining up on the South Florida segment and equipment purchases at the time seem to have been (probably) dialed down for the foreseeable future. The ridership projections simply can't pan out if there's not more equipment in the mix.

The revised 2022 numbers are a bit less wild, but I'm still going to call them "optimistic": Looking at page 70 (80th page of the PDF), there's a projection of 3.65m riders in South Florida in 2025. This simply will not happen with the current equipment mix. Currently, Brightline is running roughly about 18 weekday round-trips in South Florida. Let's be quite generous and say that they are able to achieve those frequencies on a daily basis 365 days/yr. With the present equipment having 248 seats (and IIRC no clear plan to buy more cars right now), that offers 8,928 seats per day or 3,258,720 seats per year. Why do I digress upon this? Because going with the data from that page in last August's disclosures, here are the ridership projections (re-ordered for ease of review, since the chart on that page is a bit jumbled):

​	​	MIA-AVE​	AVE-FLL​	FLL-BOC​	BOC-WPB​	WPB-ORL​
MIA-AVE​	​	485,061​	​	​	​	​
MIA-FLL​	​	356,802​	356,802​	​	​	​
MIA-BOC​	​	570,077​	570,077​	570,077​	​	​
MIA-WPB​	​	546,898​	546,898​	546,898​	546,898​	​
AVE-FLL​	​	​	284,914​	​	​	​
AVE-BOC​	​	​	102,629​	102,629​	​	​
AVE-WPB​	​	​	364,954​	364,954​	364,954​	​
FLL-BOC​	​	​	​	374,222​	​	​
FLL-WPB​	​	​	​	229,081​	229,081​	​
BOC-WPB​	​	​	​	​	336,597​	​
MIA-ORL​	​	1,489,329​	1,489,329​	1,489,329​	1,489,329​	1,489,329​
AVE-ORL​	​	​	493,981​	493,981​	493,981​	493,981​
FLL-ORL​	​	​	​	1,138,012​	1,138,012​	1,138,012​
BOC-ORL​	​	​	​	​	447,550​	447,550​
WPB-ORL​	​	​	​	​	​	720,273​
​	​	3,448,167​	4,209,584​	5,309,183​	5,046,402​	4,289,145​
​	​	​	​	​	​	​
Curr. Equip.​	​	3,258,720​	3,258,720​	3,258,720​	3,258,720​	3,258,720​
​	​	105.81%​	129.18%​	162.92%​	154.86%​	131.62%​

MIA: Miami; AVE: Aventura; FLL: Fort Lauderdale; BOC: Boca Raton; WPB: West Palm Beach; ORL: Orlando
Please note that I would consider getting a load factor of 80% on any segment to be a bit on the high side - there are always going to be off-peak times where you can't fill as many seats, and with fixed equipment sets you can't adjust capacity to optimize load factors but so much, and dynamic pricing will only move but so many riders around but so far, and some limited amount of "seat misalignment" is also inevitable with assigned seating. 70% is probably more realistic than 80%. However, with the current equipment and schedules, there are insufficient seats on the entire route (even on the Miami-Aventura segment).

Were Brightline to try to accommodate the above ridership, going with my generally assumed limit of an 80% load factor on any one segment, they would need to roughly double capacity (presumably involving going to roughly 8-car trainsets rather than adding sets). Even the plans to go to five-car sets in anticipation of service to Orlando does not seem to be materializing, let alone evidence of a 40-car coach order or more trainsets. It is possible that Brightline could press a ninth set into service within South Florida (the "charter/redundancy" set), but the impact of this would be necessarily marginal and it would likely only be able to be used for one or two pairs of additional rush hour round trips (adding just under 1000 seats/day, or 365,000 seats/yr if done daily), but this wouldn't even come close to addressing the current seat shortfall vs the projections.

===== ===== ===== ===== =====

I will say that I doubt the South Florida to Orlando projections, but that has more to do with the massive miss on the ridership within South Florida in the initial study (projections in the 2019 disclosures, linked in my prior post, put ridership within South Florida at about 5.1m; removing PortMiami from that data put the estimate at 4.6m) than anything. I will note the lack of an obvious increase in ridership across 2022 (prior to the opening of the Aventura/Boca stations). The easiest explanation, in my mind, is that the "ramp up" occurred pre-pandemic and that you cannot treat the post-pandemic return to service in the same way that you could treat a newly started service. That being said, the new stations are "new service".

That noted, I would also note that while Brightline is projecting those 3.65m riders in South Florida, less than 1/3 (1.13m) are between the initial three stations, and this ridership count is not only in line with existing ridership, it is potentially a hair below 2022's actuals. The remainder touch one of the two new stations (or both). Based on history, I will say that I still expect ridership to miss those projections - of course, not least because there aren't enough seats to be had.

FWIW, by station intra-South Florida ridership breaks down as follows:
Miami: 1.96m
Aventura: 1.24m
Fort Lauderdale: 1.25m
Boca Raton: 1.38m
West Palm Beach: 1.48m
Boca as #2 isn't something I was expecting, but it doesn't really surprise me. The idea that it would have made sense as one of the original stations does "track" given the distance to Miami (that trip is about an hour by train, after all).

[More in a second post - I hit a character cap.]

 

[Anderson]

So, I've spent a lot of (digital) ink on discussing these issues. What do I think ridership and will look like in 2025? My best guess is this, assuming supplemental equipment ordering happens to accommodate more riders:

(1) The estimates for the existing three stations are about right. Honestly, they might even be low to the tune of 10% or so - from what I can tell from my data-grabbing a few years ago, there are probably a number of peak-ish trains that are either selling out or getting reasonably close to it that they're losing riders to a lack of space on the "right" trains. By the same token, there's empty space on the far-off-peak trains (say, the 2345 out of Miami on weeknights - that's probably never going to be a sold-out train).
My estimate: 1.25m riders for the original three stations. Average revenue of $25-26/passenger.

(2) The estimates for the two new stations are a bit high, for two reasons. First of all, the ridership estimates in these disclosures have been chronically on the high side, so in general I am going to continue to assume a bias towards the high side until I see a reason to believe that this is not the case. Second, as of right now only 11 of the 18 daily trains are stopping at those two stations. While I can understand not bothering with stops for (say) the first train or two of the day, if the rest of the trains don't add stops at those stations it will limit ridership accordingly. Without access to Brightline's data, I suspect that the ridership estimate on the Aventura-Miami pair is on the high side in particular (though I note with amusement that this pair wasn't even deigned important enough to include back in the 2019 slap-on figures). I'm inclined to knock these estimates down by about a quarter.
My estimate: 1.85m riders for the "rest of South Florida". Average revenue of $24-25/passenger.

South Florida totals: 3.10m riders. Average revenue of $25/passenger.

(3) The ridership numbers for Orlando are probably junk, based on how far off the initial estimates were (South Florida per the above is about 1/3 lower than the 2017 projections. Despite these misses, whereas the combined MIA/FLL/WPB-ORL ridership there (3.56m) plus the added Aventura/Boca ridership (about 100k) was about 3.65m, in the current study it goes up to about 4.3m. Note that the underlying 2017 data did not include Disney Springs (that bit was slapped on later, and boy did it show it) or Boca/Aventura (also slapped on, with either their numbers being incredibly low or the other numbers being incredibly high - WPB sending almost 1.7m to ORL but BOC only sending 75k there is just absurd). Miami-Orlando ridership in the 2017/19 projection was 948k; in 2022, it shows up at 1,489k. West Palm Beach was 1,689k in the 2017/19 projection; now, it's 720k (and even if you were to accrue Boca's ridership to West Palm, Boca only has 447k riders so you're still down about half a million net). This comes across to me as a blatant case of somebody just making up numbers. I'm just going to knock this estimate by 40%, from 4,289k to 2,573k based on existing errors (and I think there's a case it could be a bit lower - a drop of 50% honestly seems viable to me). I'm also going to drop revenue to $100/ticket (I think that number is more likely to hold water given the lack of a Tri-Rail-style competitor.
My estimate: 2.57m riders to/from Orlando. Average revenue of $100/passenger.

Tallied up, this gives 3.10m pax/yr in South Florida at $25/passenger ($77.5m); 2.57m "long distance" passengers to/from Orlando at $100/passenger ($257m) for $334.5m in ticket revenue. I will assume another 18% in Ancillary Revenue ($60.2m); this is about 1/3 lower than Brightline's projections (it is proportionally higher than the share Brightline projects, but substantially lower than the 30-odd percent that shows up on the current report) for about $394.7m. This amount is probably not enough to cover interest on the bonds. I could be off by a buck or two (particularly in South Florida), but if I am it's because of inflation (they were assuming 2% inflation) not because of cost pressures.

And as I said above, all of this assumes that Brightline is going to invest in additional cars - even in my reduced scenario, you're probably looking at needing sets in the 7-8 car range to achieve plausible load factors (Brightline's projections probably need to get up into the 9-10 car range). If they don't add equipment, then they can only fit about half of the pax indicated at the Fort Lauderdale-Boca Raton chokepoint and everything becomes a mess. Notably, Brightline's projections don't indicate points where they'd be adding equipment - and even for "just" the existing operations, by their own projections ridership would eventually outstrip the capacity of the existing 10-set operation even with trains extended to a full ten cars. I also cannot find an estimated equipment replacement timeframe despite the charts going out into the late 2050s.

There's one saving grace - Cocoa might be worth another half-million riders or so, partly as a "feeder" to the Orlando airport (Brightline's parking is cheaper than non-"economy" airport parking is at MCO) and partly with folks heading to South Florida. And a proposed Martin County station might add a similar number of folks. I think those two might provide just enough riders to get Brightline "over the hump"...but again, they're going to need more equipment to make that work.

The rest of the Orlando-area operations are simply something that cannot be evaluated at this time since we don't know what the station locations (or even how many we ultimately get) will shake out as.

 

[jiml]

So, I've spent a lot of (digital) ink on discussing these issues.

Thank you for doing so. It was much easier to digest in layman's terms than trying to decipher an entire report.

 

[JWM]

So, I've spent a lot of (digital) ink on discussing these issues. What do I think ridership and will look like in 2025? My best guess is this, assuming supplemental equipment ordering happens to accommodate more riders:

(1) The estimates for the existing three stations are about right. Honestly, they might even be low to the tune of 10% or so - from what I can tell from my data-grabbing a few years ago, there are probably a number of peak-ish trains that are either selling out or getting reasonably close to it that they're losing riders to a lack of space on the "right" trains. By the same token, there's empty space on the far-off-peak trains (say, the 2345 out of Miami on weeknights - that's probably never going to be a sold-out train).
My estimate: 1.25m riders for the original three stations. Average revenue of $25-26/passenger.

(2) The estimates for the two new stations are a bit high, for two reasons. First of all, the ridership estimates in these disclosures have been chronically on the high side, so in general I am going to continue to assume a bias towards the high side until I see a reason to believe that this is not the case. Second, as of right now only 11 of the 18 daily trains are stopping at those two stations. While I can understand not bothering with stops for (say) the first train or two of the day, if the rest of the trains don't add stops at those stations it will limit ridership accordingly. Without access to Brightline's data, I suspect that the ridership estimate on the Aventura-Miami pair is on the high side in particular (though I note with amusement that this pair wasn't even deigned important enough to include back in the 2019 slap-on figures). I'm inclined to knock these estimates down by about a quarter.
My estimate: 1.85m riders for the "rest of South Florida". Average revenue of $24-25/passenger.

South Florida totals: 3.10m riders. Average revenue of $25/passenger.

(3) The ridership numbers for Orlando are probably junk, based on how far off the initial estimates were (South Florida per the above is about 1/3 lower than the 2017 projections. Despite these misses, whereas the combined MIA/FLL/WPB-ORL ridership there (3.56m) plus the added Aventura/Boca ridership (about 100k) was about 3.65m, in the current study it goes up to about 4.3m. Note that the underlying 2017 data did not include Disney Springs (that bit was slapped on later, and boy did it show it) or Boca/Aventura (also slapped on, with either their numbers being incredibly low or the other numbers being incredibly high - WPB sending almost 1.7m to ORL but BOC only sending 75k there is just absurd). Miami-Orlando ridership in the 2017/19 projection was 948k; in 2022, it shows up at 1,489k. West Palm Beach was 1,689k in the 2017/19 projection; now, it's 720k (and even if you were to accrue Boca's ridership to West Palm, Boca only has 447k riders so you're still down about half a million net). This comes across to me as a blatant case of somebody just making up numbers. I'm just going to knock this estimate by 40%, from 4,289k to 2,573k based on existing errors (and I think there's a case it could be a bit lower - a drop of 50% honestly seems viable to me). I'm also going to drop revenue to $100/ticket (I think that number is more likely to hold water given the lack of a Tri-Rail-style competitor.
My estimate: 2.57m riders to/from Orlando. Average revenue of $100/passenger.

Tallied up, this gives 3.10m pax/yr in South Florida at $25/passenger ($77.5m); 2.57m "long distance" passengers to/from Orlando at $100/passenger ($257m) for $334.5m in ticket revenue. I will assume another 18% in Ancillary Revenue ($60.2m); this is about 1/3 lower than Brightline's projections (it is proportionally higher than the share Brightline projects, but substantially lower than the 30-odd percent that shows up on the current report) for about $394.7m. This amount is probably not enough to cover interest on the bonds. I could be off by a buck or two (particularly in South Florida), but if I am it's because of inflation (they were assuming 2% inflation) not because of cost pressures.

And as I said above, all of this assumes that Brightline is going to invest in additional cars - even in my reduced scenario, you're probably looking at needing sets in the 7-8 car range to achieve plausible load factors (Brightline's projections probably need to get up into the 9-10 car range). If they don't add equipment, then they can only fit about half of the pax indicated at the Fort Lauderdale-Boca Raton chokepoint and everything becomes a mess. Notably, Brightline's projections don't indicate points where they'd be adding equipment - and even for "just" the existing operations, by their own projections ridership would eventually outstrip the capacity of the existing 10-set operation even with trains extended to a full ten cars. I also cannot find an estimated equipment replacement timeframe despite the charts going out into the late 2050s.

There's one saving grace - Cocoa might be worth another half-million riders or so, partly as a "feeder" to the Orlando airport (Brightline's parking is cheaper than non-"economy" airport parking is at MCO) and partly with folks heading to South Florida. And a proposed Martin County station might add a similar number of folks. I think those two might provide just enough riders to get Brightline "over the hump"...but again, they're going to need more equipment to make that work.

The rest of the Orlando-area operations are simply something that cannot be evaluated at this time since we don't know what the station locations (or even how many we ultimately get) will shake out as.

I concur with the stop idea but have to point out that each stop extends the route time. American trains, unlike others, seem to take an inordinate amount of time at intermediate stops versus European ones where people line up to board and board quickly.

 

[Anderson]

I concur with the stop idea but have to point out that each stop extends the route time. American trains, unlike others, seem to take an inordinate amount of time at intermediate stops versus European ones where people line up to board and board quickly.

I agree wholeheartedly. My analysis is strictly a question of the interaction of Brightline's decisions about stopping patterns for various trains with the report's ridership projections. If BL doesn't stop most/all trains at those stops, it will suppress ridership at the skipped stops as a result, and ridership at those stops will come in even lower.

 

[JWM]

I agree wholeheartedly. My analysis is strictly a question of the interaction of Brightline's decisions about stopping patterns for various trains with the report's ridership projections. If BL doesn't stop most/all trains at those stops, it will suppress ridership at the skipped stops as a result, and ridership at those stops will come in even lower.

Point well taken and the population is there as is the demand. I lived in Palm Beach and Palm Beach Gardens for many years and a fast train direct to the Orlando airport for international flights would be much more attractive to me than going down to Miami.

 

[Caesar La Rock]

Part 3.

 

[Ziv]

I concur with the stop idea but have to point out that each stop extends the route time. American trains, unlike others, seem to take an inordinate amount of time at intermediate stops versus European ones where people line up to board and board quickly.

I agree that Americans do not seem to want to board a train quickly which is odd. If you use the NY or DC metro, the crowd generally stands to the side of the doors to allow people off then board relatively fast. Amtrak does not seem to have that same mindset. Is it a generational thing? A lack of train experience thing? My money is on the latter. Luggage adds fuel to the "slow movement" fire. And families with tons of luggage is what central Florida is about, when it comes to tourism.

 

[cirdan]

Amtrak does not seem to have that same mindset. Is it a generational thing? A lack of train experience thing? My money is on the latter. Luggage adds fuel to the "slow movement" fire. And families with tons of luggage is what central Florida is about, when it comes to tourism.

I think it comes down to how valuable time is, and how sensitive a train's business case / profitability is to extensions of the journey time.

There are ways to expedite people getting on and off, even with tons of luggage. Commuter trains typically have wider doors (and often also more of them) than LD trains. The reason is that wider doors permit speedier boarding. The design paradigm then continues in the train interior, with doors being easier to get to, and there being sufficient space where people can stand inside the doors so they can be ready to get off. The same then continues on the station side with platforms and exit ways being wide and spacious enough to absorb large numbers of people getting off the train at the same time. You van say the same thing about what happens outside. Are there sufficient taxis waiting, for example, and how many can be loaded in parallel? The capacity of any system is always limited by the weakest link.

Many railroads tend to look to airlines and think airlines do everything better. Typically airlines will disembark an entire 747 through a single doorway with several hundred people stepping out in single file. That is an inefficient use of an airplane, that could if it were cleared more quickly be available for another use more quickly. As a railfan I have struggled to understand why they don't find a way to disembark by multiple doors like on a train. But I then realized this isn't the point. It would actually be an inefficient use of airport infrastructure to disembark more efficiently, because, if say 600 people swarmed into the terminal building all at once there would be instant congestion and the building would need to be designed differently (more space), not to mention the effects on people movers, etc etc. Plus knock on effects on car rentals, taxis, or even the coffee stall. All of these would have to provide more costly capacity without getting additional revenue in return. Sometimes going slow is simply more infrastructure-friendly and I believe it is possible that some of the convoluted designs of airports (and also modern train stations) are intentionally inefficient to slow people down and spread them out to ease handling.

Have you ever noticed that escalators in shops go pretty slow, those in airports are similar, whereas escalators in commuter and metro stations move much faster? It's because they don't want people to hand around but actually want them to move on.

So to get back to Brightline, or Amtrak, the question is, how much monetary value is there in people being able to get off more quickly, versus how many problems would this be creating. I think if there was a genuine need to expedite disembarkation, finding a way would be the smaller problem.

 

[Anderson]

I agree that Americans do not seem to want to board a train quickly which is odd. If you use the NY or DC metro, the crowd generally stands to the side of the doors to allow people off then board relatively fast. Amtrak does not seem to have that same mindset. Is it a generational thing? A lack of train experience thing? My money is on the latter. Luggage adds fuel to the "slow movement" fire. And families with tons of luggage is what central Florida is about, when it comes to tourism.

In a lot of cases it doesn't seem to be a case of "want to". Sometimes it takes time for the doors to get opened. Way, way too many stations don't have level boarding. And so on.

I'd note that adding the two stops seems to add about 8 minutes to the runtime (72 min vs 80 min). If you account for wheelchair/disabled boarding, this feels like you lose a minute-and-change to deceleration from roughly 79 to 0, ditto to acceleration, and allow 90-120 seconds for folks getting on and off. That's not too bad, especially since I think Brightline isn't exactly timetabling for only turning over a few seats per stop. If you're swapping 30 people at a stop, that might take a moment even if everyone is properly positioned when the train comes in.

 

[VentureForth]

Start leaving before everyone gets off the train, and they'll learn.

 

[daybeers]

Up here in the northeast, things move quickly. If 30 people disembarked at a high-level platform, the dwell time would be under a minute. I'm sure Brightline will get there; they'll have to in order to keep the travel times Orlando-Miami.

 

[VentureForth]

Seriously, when I rode BL like a year ago or so, they did a kindergarten walk from the waiting area to the platform. Only thing is, at FLL, there was a train approaching for WPB and MIA at the same time. The "guides" did little after getting the passengers to the platform. No digital displays to confirm which train was going which way.

On the way TO FLL, there were DOZENS of passengers, with many kids, who just would not stand up at all until the train was completely stopped. This was despite calls from the PA to do so. Seeing no one disembarking, the people boarding went ahead and did so.

They probably could use a few more ambassadors on the train and on the platform - like some low rent high school kids that enjoy riding trains....errr...interns.

 

[Qapla]

 

[Anderson]

Seriously, when I rode BL like a year ago or so, they did a kindergarten walk from the waiting area to the platform. Only thing is, at FLL, there was a train approaching for WPB and MIA at the same time. The "guides" did little after getting the passengers to the platform. No digital displays to confirm which train was going which way.

On the way TO FLL, there were DOZENS of passengers, with many kids, who just would not stand up at all until the train was completely stopped. This was despite calls from the PA to do so. Seeing no one disembarking, the people boarding went ahead and did so.

They probably could use a few more ambassadors on the train and on the platform - like some low rent high school kids that enjoy riding trains....errr...interns.

Honestly, you could probably find some early-retirement folks interested in making some supplemental cash for those positions, too.

 

[cirdan]

There's one saving grace - Cocoa might be worth another half-million riders or so, partly as a "feeder" to the Orlando airport (Brightline's parking is cheaper than non-"economy" airport parking is at MCO) and partly with folks heading to South Florida.

I don't really see it having much impact as an airport feeder because an hourly service is simply not attractive on such a comparatively short distance.

But i do see it as an alternative starting point for people travelling south by Brightline, especially because, as you say, Brightline parking will be cheaper than airport parking, and you don't really want to drive to an airport to catch a train. Especially seeing you need to factor in time and hassle actually getting from the parking lot to the station inside the airport. If and when the station at International Drive (or wherever) comes to fruition, this could similarly syphon ridership away from the airport. I expect more so than Cocoa as there are more people resident in the area.

 

[VentureForth]

Cocoa is going to be important for cruise transfers. Port Canaveral is a MAJOR cruise terminal and has also recently become a port of call. Having fast, reliable transportation to Orlando from the Ports will be HIGHLY utilized. The question is, will there be seats available? Will they take away from MCO - Miami demand?

The Ports will still need a transfer from Cocoa that will take about 15 minutes or so.

As for a feeder route, I live in Melbourne. I doubt I would drive 30 minutes to wait for a train to wait for a 20 minute train ride vs just driving to MCO directly. Except, I like riding trains. I don't find that a practical solution, particularly because Brightline charges for parking. Of course, my DW could drive me to the station. But I have a good thing going flying out of MLB (for business, anyway).