Listen to the podcast series Killer Train here, or find it on your favorite podcast platform. Other stories in the WLRN / Miami Herald reporting series can be found here.
From the beginning, Brightline sold Floridians a dream.
Passenger trains would make a triumphant return to Henry Flagler’s 130‑year‑old rail corridor along the east coast of Florida.
Finally, there would be a fast, comfortable alternative to driving between Miami and Orlando — and it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a penny.
“It’s not publicly funded at all,” Brightline executive Michael Reininger said at a 2017 congressional hearing. “It’s completely an investment of private‑sector capital.”
But despite the company’s claim to be the country’s “first new privately funded passenger rail service in a century,” the luxury train has been boosted by nearly a half-billion taxpayer dollars, an investigation by the Miami Herald and South Florida NPR member station WLRN found.
Reporters identified $486 million in public money directed to Brightline-related projects, a figure that includes funds for Brightline itself as well as money granted to state and local agencies.
About one-fifth of the total has been for safety initiatives, largely in response to an epidemic of fatalities that make Brightline the deadliest major passenger train in the country. More than one-quarter of the funding has been set aside for Brightline stations that were not in the company’s original plans but have been requested by communities.
Today, the private company that promised to be “financially viable on its own” is losing money — and using government subsidies to grow its business. At Brightline’s request, a $33 million federal grant was awarded this year to help it add new railroad cars, lengthening the train from five railcars to seven. The grant, Brightline said in a financial report, will help the company “offset operating costs associated with its expansion of service.”
Brightline now acknowledges it is relying on government safety grants that will amount to tens of millions of dollars in the coming years. At a congressional hearing in June, Brightline senior adviser Husein Cumber went as far as to warn lawmakers: “My fear is if you pull back on funding, you would also see an increase in safety incidents.”
Patrick Goddard, Brightline Florida’s CEO, disputed the Herald/WLRN’s findings, calling the $486 million figure a “gross mischaracterization.” In many cases, the company said, it wasn’t Brightline that applied for public money and the funding didn’t “directly benefit” Brightline.
Brightline said two big-ticket items totaling $200 million shouldn’t count: a $130 million grant to replace a railroad bridge in the city of Stuart — where boaters complained that Brightline trains were crossing so often it was backing up traffic on the water — and $70 million to build a platform at Brightline’s downtown Miami station to connect with a public train system. In both cases, Brightline said the improvements benefited the broader community.
Brightline’s original proposal was a route from Miami to Orlando, with stops in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Stations in Aventura and Boca Raton were added later at the request of local governments. Future stops are planned in Martin County and Cocoa, and an extension from Orlando to Tampa is in the works.
The company emphasized that it invested more than $6 billion to build out the “original scope” of its rail line, including the trains, track improvements and the four initial stations.
“The Herald is trying to make Brightline look nefarious or that we have not come through on our promises,” Goddard said in an email. “We made this investment.”
When Reininger told federal lawmakers in 2017 that the project was “not publicly funded at all,” the company said, he was referring specifically to “the original scope of the corridor” and the fact that Brightline “would be responsible for the long-term operations” of the train.
Reporters were unable to identify past instances in which Brightline made clear that additional costs could be shouldered by taxpayers.
The Herald and WLRN scoured local, state and federal spending records to calculate the total amount of public funding directed to Brightline-related projects.
But the death toll keeps climbing.
Running fast trains at street level through some of the densest areas of South Florida has led to 193 people being killed since 2017.
Mario Lopez, whose brother David was killed by a Brightline train in 2019, said he has long been mystified that the train can operate in such a crowded corridor and at such high speeds.
His brother was walking over the tracks with his dog Roku in Hollywood one afternoon as a train was approaching. The conductor blew the horn, but David seemed to notice the train only moments before it hit him. He let go of his dog’s leash, saving Roku’s life, and had started to run forward when the Brightline struck him at 73 mph.
Six years after his brother was killed, Mario Lopez said he understands that David’s death was an accident — but an “accident that shouldn’t happen … if there was more money invested into safety measures.”
Much of the public money that has been allocated for safety has been held up by red tape, reporters found. Even as the deaths have persisted, Brightline has waited years for the federal government to pay out tens of millions of dollars in safety grants for critical measures like fencing and warning signs.
The Harrison Street rail crossing where David Lopez was killed remains among the most dangerous in Florida, according to collision data.
Two busy roads run next to the tracks on either side. The surrounding blocks are dotted with apartments, restaurants, bars and several schools.
Since David’s death, three more people, all on foot, have died in Brightline strikes at the same location.
In December 2021, 25-year-old Luke Naumiuk, an employee at Chewy, ran into the path of the train. His death was ruled an accident.
The following month, Jerry Santomaso, a 66-year-old, was struck and killed as he darted across the tracks. His death was also ruled an accident.
At the end of 2022, Kristo David Leon, 36, who’d been released from jail and sent on a bus back to Broward County, tried to beat the train but was struck and killed. His death, too, was ruled an accident.
Mario Lopez said it pains him to see the “normalization” of repeated Brightline deaths.
“What makes me more angry is that it keeps happening,” he said. “It’s ludicrous.”
’A huge difference in cost’
When Mario Lopez first moved to South Florida in 2014, the New York transplant was surprised to see that trains ran at street level, right through city centers. A few years later, when Brightline started running its fast trains on the same tracks, he was floored.
“I personally was like, this is BS,” he recalled. “Like, why is this coming through the city?”
But that setup was part of Brightline’s plan — to save money by running its trains through the existing Florida East Coast rail corridor that Flagler had built in the late 1800s.
Brightline would pay to upgrade the tracks to accommodate its faster trains, but it would be spared the massive expense of building out the entire route from scratch. The company was also counting on making money by developing real estate around the stations in downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Today, Brightline runs on wide open, mostly unfenced tracks through urban communities and across busy roads — something that federal regulations allow because the trains don’t exceed 125 mph. Brightline goes 79 mph from Miami to West Palm Beach and only reaches 125 mph along its final stretch from Cocoa to Orlando.
Wes Edens, a billionaire investor who is Brightline’s founder, said in 2018 that running a true high-speed train in Florida was not feasible.
“If you want to really go high speed … you basically have to build a bridge for 250 miles that you then put a train on,” he said. “That sounds hard, and it sounds expensive, and it’s both of those things.”
Brightline’s decision to use the existing rail corridor rather than building out new tracks above street level made for “a huge difference in cost,” Edens said.
But to some observers, the regular deaths that followed came as no surprise.
“It was virtually impossible to mitigate the problems that were inherent,” said Susan Mehiel, founder of the Alliance for Safe Trains advocacy group, which opposed the Brightline project. “Everybody knew that from the start.”
In the lead-up to Brightline’s launch, local governments sparred with the company over who should pay to address those baked-in safety problems.
County governments on Florida’s Treasure Coast filed lawsuits challenging the rail project, arguing, among other things, that the company needed to do more to improve safety.
At a 2018 congressional hearing, Goddard — Brightline’s then-president — said the company had gone “above and beyond” what was legally required. He said the opposition came from “narrow-minded residents” pushing an “anti-progress narrative.”
Two counties, Martin and Indian River, ultimately reached settlements in which Brightline agreed to invest millions of dollars into safety infrastructure.
Still, in the absence of clear regulations about who is financially responsible for making the tracks safer, too much of the burden to pay for life-saving measures has fallen to the public, said Todd Baker, an attorney who represents the families of several people who’ve been killed by Brightline trains.
“The taxpayers don’t want to pay for Brightline to run a safer train,” Baker said. “That should be what Brightline does.”
Paying to keep trains quiet
The first public money related to Brightline came several years before the trains began running.
In South Florida, where entire cities had been built around Flagler’s train tracks, local leaders worried that repeated horn noise from the fast new train running 32 times a day would disturb neighborhoods.
Communities along the route requested “quiet zones,” where the train would not need to sound its horn as it approached crossings, though it could still be blown in emergency situations. Local governments would have to add gate arms and medians at crossings to meet federal requirements to keep train horns silent.
But there was uncertainty over who would pay.
Local governments feared the burden would fall on them. Decades-old agreements said cities should cover the maintenance costs at crossings. South Florida transit agencies that receive federal funds began setting aside money for crossing improvements.
In 2014, Brightline agreed to put up $60 million for the crossing upgrades.
The state also agreed to chip in, with the Florida Legislature allocating $10 million to help communities become quiet zones.
But then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott vetoed the funding, saying it hadn’t gone through the proper vetting process. Scott, who had rejected $2.4 billion in federal funds for high-speed rail in 2011, was adamant that there would be “no state subsidies” for the Brightline project.
Nonetheless, state funding for quiet zones began flowing in 2015. The Florida Department of Transportation has allocated a total of $32 million for safety measures related to Brightline over the past decade, according to a Herald/WLRN review of state contract records.
Deaths in South Florida’s quiet zones spiked after Brightline was introduced. In many of the incidents, including David Lopez’s death, conductors have blown the horns once they saw people on the tracks. But by that time, it’s often too late for the trains to stop or for people to jump out of the way.
READ MORE: Killer Train: The high price of quiet trains
After the federal government started to review the rise in deaths in Broward County’s quiet zone in 2022, some in the rail industry said it was clear that trains needed to start sounding their horns.
Keeping the quiet zone intact would be “a reckless act that fails to prioritize the safety of our members or the public at large,” said a union representing freight-railway workers on the tracks shared with Brightline. Public-awareness campaigns and added safety equipment at crossings were not enough to keep people safe, the union argued in a memo at the time, particularly given Florida’s large international and tourist populations.
“It doesn’t matter where you come from, you know what the horn of a train means,” Andres Trujillo, the union’s legislative director in Florida, told the Herald/WLRN. “You don’t need education, you don’t need translations.”
At the Harrison Street crossing where David Lopez died, there was no routine train horn because the Hollywood intersection is in Broward County’s quiet zone.
Some additional safety measures have been installed there since 2019, thanks, in part, to a federal grant. Bollards were erected along the edge of each lane to direct drivers away from the tracks. A sign reading “No Train Horn” was added near the crossing.
But other safety measures are still on hold.
In 2021, the Florida Department of Transportation recommended adding fencing, hedges and other barriers to make it harder for people to cross the tracks at certain spots along the Brightline corridor. Among them was a five-mile stretch between Hollywood and Aventura — including the area around Harrison Street.
The state was awarded a federal grant for fencing throughout the corridor in 2022. But the money wasn’t released until this year due to government delays.
The fencing still hasn’t been installed.
‘We don’t want any more fatalities’
Six people had died by the time the Brightline station in downtown Miami opened in May of 2018. The company had only been welcoming riders since that January, but lawmakers were already calling the situation an “emergency.”
“We don’t want any more fatalities,” U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami Gardens, told WLRN at the grand opening.
Wilson urged the federal government to quickly release funding that Brightline was seeking for safety improvements at dozens of railroad crossings.
A $2.3 million federal grant for those improvements was awarded in 2019. Brightline agreed to contribute $1.4 million toward the effort, and local governments chipped in $1.5 million.
Brightline didn’t complete the safety measures until 2023. The company told reporters that “the process was disrupted by a government shutdown but otherwise proceeded through the normal, rigorous federal grant agreement process.”
Seventy-eight people were killed by Brightline trains in the interim.
That grant was the first in a parade of federal safety subsidies to try to stop the deaths: $25 million to put fences around the tracks and upgrade crossings, $15 million to add raised medians and extra gate arms in Broward County, $5 million to improve crossing safety in Brevard County.
Mike Arias, a retired transportation officer for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and an advocate for roadway safety, said that Brightline, as a private company, should have invested in more comprehensive safety upgrades before starting service instead of waiting for government grants.
“The public on a daily basis is subjected to this high, unnecessary risk,” Arias said. “There’s been no accountability on their safety record at all.”
Amy Brunelle, whose daughter Madison died by suicide in 2017 in the very first Brightline fatality, said Brightline should have done more early on to make the corridor safer.
“They should have done it from the get-go,” Brunelle said. “Would it have alleviated all of these tragic deaths? No, but it probably would have prevented quite a few.”
Some rail advocates say that, while the safety record of Brightline is a concern, even more government funding should be provided to address it. For railroads across the United States, public dollars are a key source of safety infrastructure.
“It is, without question in my mind, a government issue that needs to be taken care of by all levels of government,” said Rick Harnish, the executive director of the High Speed Rail Alliance, a Chicago-based advocacy group. Florida spends billions every year on highways and roads, Harnish said, and should similarly subsidize Brightline and invest in rail safety.
But other transit advocates aren’t so sure. Brightline isn’t providing enough of a public benefit to warrant public dollars, they say, pointing to pricey tickets that make the train inaccessible for most local residents. The average one-way fare on Brightline from South Florida to Orlando is more than $70, while rides within South Florida typically cost around $27.
This year, the Federal Railroad Administration gave Brightline the $33 million to add new train cars so it could sell more tickets. In a January press release, Brightline said the money would allow it to sell cheaper tickets in bulk, easing the cost burden for frequent commuters within South Florida.
But when the commuter pass was rolled out, the bulk ticket deal cost $899 for 40 rides, more than twice as much as a previous package. Facing backlash, the company lowered the price, but ride costs still increased by 50%.
The case is emblematic of what should not happen when public money is given to private companies, said Cathy Dos Santos, executive director of the advocacy group Transit Alliance Miami.
“Public funding should come with a public benefit,” Dos Santos said.
‘Public-private partnership’
Brightline says it has delivered on its private-funding promise by building out its “original corridor” with track upgrades and stations in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Orlando.
But costs beyond that have increasingly fallen to taxpayers, the Herald/WLRN’s analysis found.
To build the Brightline station in Aventura, Miami-Dade County covered the $72 million cost.
For its station in Boca Raton, Brightline paid $30 million but was helped by a $16 million federal grant and $10 million from the city to build a parking garage.
Farther north in Stuart, city officials backed out of a station deal last year. Commissioners complained that the city would be on the hook for half of the $60 million price tag without a significant funding commitment from Brightline. One commissioner called the deal “an agreement where Brightline has no skin in the game.”
Brightline officials say it makes sense for taxpayers to help subsidize stops that benefit their communities. Cities like Aventura and Boca Raton have “recognized the value of integrating Brightline service and proactively pursued station development,” said Goddard, the Brightline Florida CEO.
The company made a similar case about the use of $70 million of city and county money to build a platform for public Tri-Rail trains to connect with Brightline’s MiamiCentral station. That spending helps the public, not Brightline, Goddard told the Herald/WLRN.
“Regional leaders recognized that building a train station in downtown Miami is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and contributed funds to add Tri-Rail platform/tracks and the necessary structure and common areas to support them, none of which are of benefit to Brightline,” he said.
But Brightline could stand to benefit, too. When Tri-Rail began service to MiamiCentral last year, Brightline acknowledged that the two systems would share riders, saying they were “complementary.”
The connection might also assist in a planned expansion of public train service from MiamiCentral, a service that Tri-Rail could seek to operate. Because Brightline has the exclusive rights to run passenger rail on the tracks, the deal could mean a $330 million influx of public dollars for the private company, according to a 2024 bond-offering document.
If the commuter rail plan goes through, it would be a major win for Brightline as it faces an uncertain financial future.
Brightline Florida has so far reported huge operating losses, to the tune of $153 million in 2024. Even as its ridership increased from 2.1 million in 2023 to 2.8 million last year, the company lost about $55 per passenger.
Brightline also has more than $5 billion in outstanding debt, some of which is backed by the anticipated county payments for the commuter rail deal.
The company saw its bond ratings reduced to “junk” status this year and spooked investors in July by announcing it would defer an interest payment. Since it began passenger service, Brightline has lost a cumulative $1.8 billion, including over a half-billion dollars in 2024 alone, according to a Herald/WLRN analysis of its public financial reports.
At a June Senate hearing about the future of rail in the United States, lawmakers lauded Brightline as a potential model for the industry. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was among those eager to learn more about “innovative companies like Brightline” and what the government could do to help them thrive.
Cumber, the Brightline adviser, issued the warning about “safety incidents” increasing if federal grants get cut. And he argued it should be easier for a private company like Brightline to access federal loans and grants.
The company is seeking a $6 billion federal loan as construction costs rise for Brightline West, a new rail line that would run along the highway median between Las Vegas and Southern California. The project previously received a $3 billion federal grant.
Today, Brightline describes itself differently than when it first pitched the project to Floridians.
It is, the company recently told the Herald/WLRN, “a model public-private partnership.”
Anyone who is experiencing suicidal thoughts should contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (988) or Crisis Text Line (text “HELLO” to 741741) for immediate support. Regular check-ins with primary care physicians and clergy members, who often have insights into community resources, can also be beneficial.
How the Miami Herald and WLRN calculated the amount of public funding for Brightline-related projects
To determine how much government money has been allocated to projects related to Brightline, journalists at the Miami Herald and WLRN combed through federal, state and local records, plus public statements and media reports.
At the federal level, reporters reviewed publicly available spending records and obtained grant documents through public records requests. At the state level, reporters utilized Florida’s database of contracts, grant awards and purchase orders, as well as the Florida Department of Transportation’s five-year work program.
Items were counted in the overall tally if reporters found them to be directly related to the Brightline project. That included, among other things, safety measures along the route, enforcement efforts around the tracks, the construction of new stations, planning efforts related to future expansion and money for train cars.
The Herald/WLRN sought to identify funding that government agencies have set aside for those purposes, some of which has not yet been paid out. Not all of the money was requested by Brightline or directed to Brightline itself; some of it was granted to state and local agencies.
Brightline disputed the Herald/WLRN’s inclusion of a $130 million grant to the city of Stuart to replace a railroad bridge, saying the funds would benefit boat traffic and other rail partners, “not exclusively Brightline.”
Reporters included it in the tally because the city pursued the grant amid concerns about Brightline’s frequent trips over the bridge and its effects on boat traffic.
The company also challenged the inclusion of $70 million in city and county funds to build a platform for public Tri-Rail trains at Brightline’s downtown Miami station, saying it was intended to “benefit the greater good of establishing a multimodal train station downtown.”
The funds were counted in the tally because Brightline officials publicly acknowledged that the two rail services were “complementary” and because Brightline is seeking payments from Miami-Dade County for a commuter rail expansion that Tri-Rail could operate from the station.
Killer Train Series Credits
WLRN
Danny Rivero | Reporter
Joshua Ceballos | Reporter
Jessica Bakeman | Editor
Sergio R. Bustos | Editor
Denise Royal | Editor
Merritt Jacob | Audio Engineer
Mihail Halatchev | Digital Production
Matheus Sanchez | Digital Editor
Alyssa Ramos | Digital Engagement
Valentina Sandoval | Digital Engagement
Miami Herald
Brittany Wallman | Investigative Reporter
Susan Merriam | Data & Visual Journalist
Shradha Dinesh | Data Journalist
David Newcomb | Director of Editorial Project Experiences
Matias J. Ocner | Photo Journalist
Aaron Leibowitz | Reporter
Allison Beck | Reporter
Carolina Zamora | Audience & Engagement
Kevin Scott | Audience & Engagement
Adrian Ruhi | Audience & Engagement
David Santiago | Photo Editor
John Parkhurst | Copy Editor
Jessica Lipscomb | City Editor
Trish Wilson Belli | Investigations Editor
The Fund for Investigative Journalism provided support for this series.
