A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida
My take: BL has a bad rail safety design, because of the enormous number of grade crossings (300+) in a densely populated area. This is unprecedented anywhere in the world and makes it uniquely dangerous compared to other railroads. It’s popular to blame “Florida Man” but that’s not the underlying reason.
Excerpts
the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides … By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.
In January 2023, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Brightline’s accident rate per million miles operated from 2018 to 2021 was more than double that of the next-highest—43.8 for the Brightline and 18.4 for the Metra commuter train in Chicago.
if the people of Florida were uniquely stupid in a way that made them more susceptible to being hit by trains, you would expect them to be hit uncommonly often by all trains. This is not the case. Amtrak serves fewer passengers than Brightline, but operates through many of the same urban areas as well as some additional ones, and it reported six total fatalities in the state in 2024, compared with Brightline’s 41. The NTSB’s 2023 report found that Brightline’s accident rate per million miles was more than eight times that of SunRail, another commuter train that operates around Orlando.
There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida. James Hopkins, a former Brightline conductor, cited this when explaining to me why he no longer works for the company. He mostly enjoyed his time at Brightline, he said—the company was a good employer—but he didn’t want to work on that route anymore in large part because of how often the train would hit people. At his previous job operating a freight train in the 200-mile stretch between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, he said there were 40 to 50 grade crossings. In the 65 miles between West Palm Beach and Miami, there are 174. “It’s just real busy,” he told me. “The fatalities—this was just something I didn’t want to continue doing.”
During my trip, I met with Eric Dumbaugh, a professor of urban and regional planning at Florida Atlantic University who has lived in the area for most of his life. “Brightline is unique nationally,” he said. “It’s operating right through the urban fabric.”
“Fast trains and grade crossings are always a deadly combination,” the historian Richard White, whose 2011 book about American railroads was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, told me. He put it the most succinctly, but I did not talk with anybody who disagreed with that conclusion.
