Dude, who even knows.

25th August 2018

Link reblogged from jakke with 20 notes

Brightline’s combination of rail and development in Miami makes believers of Tampa leaders →

jakke:

Brightline is a privately-run passenger train in South Florida. I’ve ridden it, and it’s incredibly fast and comfortable and futuristic, but the trains are strikingly and persistently empty. In a way this doesn’t really matter though because Brightline is a real estate development company that happens to nominally operate some trains?

Like, what has really gotten local governments excited (and what keeps the whole enterprise afloat) is the massive office and retail developments that are planned to accompany these new stations, especially in Miami. Plunking down a train station generates the impression that the neighbourhood will be important and accessible in the future and therefore companies will pay a premium to locate there even if the train isn’t particularly useful yet - and so the neighbourhood becomes important as those companies move in as kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Local politicians love this sort of outcome so it’s unsurprising that they want Brightline to expand to Tampa even as its current expansion to Orlando is still at least three years off.

As Sunbelt cities grow faster than state and local governments are willing to fund commuter transit, this kind of real estate development driven infrastructure could make sense between other city pairs. To me it seems like a private project could outcompete the very long-term plans for publicly-funded trains between Phoenix and Tuscon or between San Antonio and Austin, for example. But there’s really nowhere with the ridiculous real estate markets and excess rail capacity and steady high population density of Florida. 

friendly remonger that private transportation routes pay off not in tolls but in raising the value of newly connected land

(you can see this with the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and commuter railroads in [aristo-held] 19th cen. London, and most initial American rapid transit, the LA streetcars are a great example cause transportation eras were compressed there)

I mean this seems obvious - oil pipelines exist for the benefit of one field, coal/ore spurs clearly exist for one mine

Issue is how you pay for upkeep and hold off the inevitable default into public hands

  1. youzicha said: I’ve seen people on reddit claim that Japanese private train lines work because the companies still own the land next to the stations (e.g. the Keio line is paired with the Keio department store at one end), whereas the American companies sold off the land at the end stations, made a one-time profit, and then didn’t have any cash to run the line itself. No idea how true this is, though…
  2. voxette-vk said: The private lines didn’t really run out of money, AFAIK. The government just started nationalizing them and building unprofitable new ones around the 60s.
  3. rustingbridges reblogged this from kontextmaschine and added:
    My vague and undereducated impression is that much of the passenger rail in the us was at some point privately...
  4. kontextmaschine reblogged this from jakke and added:
    friendly remonger that private transportation routes pay off not in tolls but in raising the value of newly connected...
  5. jakke posted this