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Miami Herald
a day ago
- Miami Herald
How the Miami Herald and WLRN found Brightline's death toll
A team of reporters from the Miami Herald and WLRN spent over a year documenting every death involving Brightline trains since the rail line's launch seven years ago. Drawing on autopsy reports and local law enforcement records, reporters discovered that 182 people — so far — have been killed by the fast-speed train. The team of reporters analyzed federal railroad data, reviewed federal safety studies, consulted experts and reviewed hundreds of pages of medical examiner and police incident reports to better understand the factors that contributed to each death and to compare Brightline's safety record against other railroads nationwide. Counting the dead There is no one-stop shop for requesting and obtaining records about the 182 people, as of July 14, who have died in incidents involving Brightline trains. The task was made more difficult by errors and delays in federal rail data, a federal policy to withhold detailed suicide information from public release, and a relatively new Florida law that prevents release of autopsy reports of people who died by suicide. The Federal Railroad Administration's website is also challenging to navigate. As a result, prior media reports on Brightline deaths have undercounted the true toll. We found that 182 people were killed by Brightline trains, with 41% ruled suicides by medical examiners. The Federal Railroad Administration recorded only 23% as suicides in its data, which can lag by up to three months. Both figures are well below Brightline's determination that 'more than half of deaths' were confirmed or suspected suicides. The team started by obtaining train fatality data from the Federal Railroad Administration, which maintains the most comprehensive record of train deaths. Railroads are responsible for filing a Form 55a incident report whenever an incident on railroad property results in injury or death. This data is available as both a public database with individual records for each injury or fatality and an interactive dashboard with summary statistics. The public database typically excludes all incident data for deaths determined to be suicides and the dashboard only includes summary totals of suicide deaths. It does not contain enough information to identify the number of people who had died by suicide by county for each month and year, crucial information for verification purposes. We accessed the dashboard's underlying data, which contains far more detail about each incident. This allowed us to build a more robust dataset by writing code to combine these detailed records with the more limited data typically available on the dashboard. We then turned to local public records to identify victims and create an accurate count. Getting these records presented a new set of challenges. Each county has its own medical examiner office. Each city has its own police department or in some cases uses the county sheriff's office. Each agency has its own computer system, and some weren't able to find records that reporters requested. Sometimes, agencies denied our requests, requiring us to assert legal rights to public records. The team's goal was to confirm each fatality with at least two records. The work of confirming details was made more difficult thanks to a Florida law that went into effect last year and made it a third-degree felony for medical examiners to release autopsy reports in suicide cases. So reporters turned to local police reports for the missing details. Where Brightline stands nationally In 2019, an analysis by the Associated Press named Brightline the deadliest railroad in the country. At the time, 41 people had died. Since then, Brightline has expanded to Orlando, adding 170 miles to its network. We used death totals from the same FRA dashboard to compare all passenger railroads with Brightline's numbers. The team's analysis found that the federal dataset contained duplicates, missing records and inconsistent death rulings, but it still offered the most accurate and standardized baseline for comparing all railroads. The totals used to compare each passenger railroad included trespasser and suicide deaths between 2018 and 2024. Using operational data that railroads submit each month, we calculated the distances traveled each year, which allowed for a determination of each railroad's death rate per million miles, a standard metric used by transportation-safety experts. Our analysis found that Brightline remains the deadliest passenger railroad in the country per million miles traveled. Its fatality rate is one-and-a-half times worse than San Diego's Coaster Commuter, which has the second-highest rate. South Florida's Tri-Rail and Central Florida's SunRail, which use different tracks than Brightline, are also among the top 10 deadliest passenger trains. Comparing crossings While many Brightline deaths didn't occur at official train crossings, the only practical way to compare the safety characteristics of the Brightline route with the routes of other passenger trains was to compare the relative safety of these official crossings using data that railroads and state departments of transportation submit to the FRA. The team took inspiration from the methodology used by the FRA to assess risk at highway-railroad crossings, calculating safety levels using maximum timetable speed and exposure, a metric representing the product of the average daily total traffic count and number of daily trains. We also considered whether a crossing was at-grade — when the crossing is at the same level as the road — and if it had a whistle ban. We compared Brightline with the Coaster commuter train in the San Diego area, Caltrain in Northern California, Altamont Corridor Express between Stockton and San Jose and Amtrak's Lincoln and Wolverine routes from Chicago to St. Louis and Detroit. The team chose to compare these lines because Coaster, Altamont and Caltrain were among the top five deadliest railroads from the analysis, and the two Amtrak routes were referenced by Brightline's president as comparable during a 2018 congressional hearing. To ensure that the comparison included all the crossings for each rail line, the team used geospatial data from the North American Rail Network Lines and Amtrak Routes datasets to compare with the FRA crossings data. The team determined the total daily trains that ran on each line by adding counts of daylight, nighttime and switching trains. Exposure was calculated by multiplying the total daily trains by average daily traffic. Reporters also wrote code to calculate the percentages of at-grade crossings and whistle bans for each railroad. The analysis shows that 96% of Brightline's crossings are at-grade and more than half are within quiet zones. Its trains are also permitted to travel at higher speeds at a larger share of crossings and are more exposed to vehicle traffic compared to every railroad in the comparison. Visualizing Brightline deaths Reporters created maps and a 3D model to show fatality locations, compare crossings by railroad and walk readers through a high-risk intersection. One map highlights Brightline crossings with an exposure value over 5,000. Federal Highway Administration guidance suggests active warning devices, like flashing lights and automatic gates, at crossings at or above this threshold. It isn't clear from the data how many of those crossings actually had active warning devices. The team's reporting found several instances where recent crossing modifications were missing. Another map primarily uses geographic information from FRA records. About a third of the locations had to be manually geocoded using Google Maps and by referencing descriptions of the locations in death and safety records and local news reports. Most of these geocoded locations were missing from the FRA data because they were considered suicides or were too recent to be included in the federal records. An additional handful of locations had to be manually geocoded because there were minor inaccuracies in the FRA coordinates. To show the population distribution on the Brightline fatalities map, the team used 2020 American Community Survey data to map Florida's population using evenly spaced dots that were sized based on the estimated population in the area they represent. To understand the nature of where and how these fatalities occurred, reporters also analyzed the relationship of the locations of these fatalities to nearby street-level crossings along the Brightline route. The Brightline route used in the map was extracted from a Florida Department of Transportation map and the current station locations were geocoded using Google Maps. The underlying map is composed of Florida's county lines from the U.S. Census Bureau 2020 TIGER/Line shapefiles. To recreate a photorealistic 3D model of the intersection at 141st Street and U.S. 1 in North Miami — where a Brightline train collided with a vehicle — the team used on-the-ground and drone photography, along with visual-effects software. Miami Herald photographers captured hundreds of high-resolution images from multiple angles of the intersection. The team stitched together overlapping photos of the area to produce a 3D model of the intersection using a technique called photogrammetry. In the process, reporters replaced distorted objects in the model — such as palm trees, intersection signs, crossing arms and poorly rendered vehicles — with detailed 3D models purchased from Turbosquid, an online library of 3D models. The team matched the virtual camera to the perspective of actual cellphone crash footage that had been posted on X (formerly Twitter). The team also added effects highlighting the intersection's problem areas, such as the absence of fencing and the proximity of U.S. 1 to the tracks. McClatchy Media Creative Director Sohail Al-Jamea contributed to this report.
Newsweek
16-06-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
California High-Speed Rail Hits Back at Funding Cuts: 'Outright Misleading'
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The California High-Speed Rail Authority has hit back at the Department of Transportation after a new report threatened to withdraw federal funding for the state's rail project. The authority stated that the Federal Railroad Administration's description of the largest high-speed rail project in the country was "inaccurate" and even "outright misleading" at times. Newsweek reached out to the Federal Railroad Administration via email for comment. Why It Matters While the California high-speed rail project continues to make progress throughout the Central Valley, the project is increasingly drawing the ire of the federal government. President Donald Trump has been a longtime critic of the project, branding it a "waste" and a "green disaster." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has echoed similar skepticism over the cost and timeline of the project, both of which have ballooned beyond original estimates. What To Know This skepticism culminated in a compliance review into the project's use of two federal grants worth around $4 billion. The report, published on June 5, said that the project was still $7 billion short, and that there was "no credible strategy in place to secure additional funds." "CHSRA is on notice — If they can't deliver on their end of the deal, it could soon be time for these funds to flow to other projects that can achieve President Trump's vision of building great, big, beautiful things again," Duffy said in a statement. However, the project's management fired back in their initial response, stating that the project was making significant progress in construction. "I must also take this opportunity to dispute, in the strongest possible terms, the misleading claim that the Authority has made 'minimal progress to advance construction', Authority CEO Ian Choudri said in a letter on Wednesday. "The Authority's work has already reshaped the Central Valley. We have built many of the viaducts, overpasses, and underpasses on which the first 119 miles of high-speed rail track will run." "In short, FRA's conclusions are based on an inaccurate, often outright-misleading, presentation of the evidence." An Amtrak Pacific Surfliner train stops at the Moorpark Train Station in Moorpark, California, on June 15, 2024. An Amtrak Pacific Surfliner train stops at the Moorpark Train Station in Moorpark, California, on June 15, 2024. Getty Images Trump previously threatened to withdraw federal funding for the project, telling reporters in May: "It's hundreds of billions of dollars for this stupid project that should have never been built. This government is not going to pay." Last week, the California High-Speed Rail Authority announced the completion of 53 structures and almost 70 miles of guideway between Merced and Bakersfield. The finished structures include the 4,741-foot San Joaquin River Viaduct in Fresno and the Hanford Viaduct in Kings County, which the authority described as the largest structure in the Central Valley for high-speed rail. What People Are Saying U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, in a statement: "I promised the American people we would be good stewards of their hard-earned tax dollars. This report exposes a cold, hard truth: CHSRA has no viable path to complete this project on time or on country deserves high-speed rail that makes us proud – not boondoggle trains to nowhere." What Happens Next The rail project is entering the tracklaying phase this year, with much of its Central Infrastructure already completed.
Axios
06-06-2025
- Business
- Axios
California high-speed rail project faces reckoning
California's high-speed rail project was billed as the future of transportation, but with President Trump moving to pull $4 billion in federal funds, its future remains precarious. Why it matters: The system was initially slated for completion in 2020. But because of funding challenges and other delays, construction has not started beyond the 171-mile segment in the Central Valley, which would connect San Francisco to Los Angeles and Anaheim. Driving the news: In a 310-page compliance review released this week, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) called the project a "story of broken promises." Citing mismanagement of budget shortfalls, missed deadlines, costly change orders, and the "lack of a credible plan" to close the $7 billion funding gap needed for the Central Valley segment, the FRA said it sees "no viable path" to a completed system. The California High Speed Rail Authority (CHRSA) has 37 days to respond to the review before the FRA moves to withdraw federal grants. The other side: The CHSRA said in a statement after the report's release that it "strongly disagrees with the FRA's conclusions, which are misguided and do not reflect the substantial progress made." It added, "The Authority will fully address and correct the record in our formal response." Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla also issued a statement calling the announcement "devastating" for Californians. Between the lines: One reason for the missed deadlines is a California policy that requires utility companies to review and approve relocation plans before public utility infrastructure can be moved to accommodate construction for a government project. The CHSRA inspector general said in a February assessment that there is "little incentive" for owners to do so in a timely manner and that CHSRA should instead work with legislators to revise state laws to minimize third-party delays. By the numbers: Spending for the project totals $14 billion, with 82% from the state and 18% from federal funds. The entire budget for the system is almost $100 billion higher than the original $33 billion estimate provided in 2008, when voters approved the ballot to initiate the project. Yes, but: Californians still largely support the endeavor. A recent Politico-UC Berkeley poll found that 67% of registered voters in the state back the project, compared to 33% who oppose. It's especially well-regarded in the Central Valley, where it's helped create more than 15,000 jobs, per the governor's office.
Daily Mail
05-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Taxpayer cost for California's High-Speed Rail project revealed
The Trump administration is considering pulling federal funding from California 's High-Speed Rail project after the US Department of Transportation revealed no track has been laid despite nearly $7 billion in taxpayer funds spent over 15 years. The ambitious project, initially approved by voters in 2008 with a $10 billion budget, aimed to connect major cities in California, however, costs have escalated dramatically, with the total projected cost now ranging from $89 billion to $128 billion. The Federal Railroad Administration has since issued a scathing 315-page report which cites key issues with the troubled project including missed deadlines, budget overruns and unreliable ridership projections. The White House has now initiated a review to determine whether to rescind an additional $4 billion in federal grants allocated for the project's completion. The embattled rail line faces further roadblocks with a $7 billion funding gap for the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment, even before the Trump administration considers pulling the $4 billion in federal funds. The entire San Francisco-to-Los Angeles project was initially supposed to be completed by 2020 for $33 billion, Reuters reported - but the project is far from completion of any phase. The Transportation Secretary emphasized that if the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) cannot demonstrate progress, the federal government may redirect funds to other infrastructure projects. 'CHSRA is on notice - If they can't deliver on their end of the deal, it could soon be time for these funds to flow to other projects that can achieve President Trump's vision of building great, big, beautiful things again,' he said. 'Our country deserves high-speed rail that makes us proud - not boondoggle trains to nowhere.' In response, CHSRA defended the project, asserting that over 15,000 jobs have been created and 119 miles are under active construction. 'There is active civil construction along 119 miles in the Central Valley, resulting in over 15,000 construction jobs, and design and pre-construction activities are underway on the extensions to Merced and Bakersfield totaling 171 miles,' as per a CHSRA statement. The CHSRA added that most of its funding comes not from federal origins but rather from the state of California. 'We remain firmly committed to completing the nation's first true high-speed rail system connecting the major population centers in the state. While continued federal partnership is important to the project, the majority of our funding has been provided by the state. To that end, the Governor's budget proposal, which is currently before the Legislature, extends at least $1 billion per year in funding for the next 20 years, providing the necessary resources to complete the project's initial operating segment,' a CHSRA spokesperson told the 'The Authority will fully address and correct the record in our formal response to the FRA's notice,' the authority added. The federal government has given California until mid-July to respond to the review - if the CHSRA fails to provide satisfactory evidence of progress, the $4 billion in federal grants may be rescinded. In 2021, then-President Joe Biden restored a $929 million grant for the high-speed rail, funds which Trump had revoked in 2019 after he called the project a 'disaster,' Reuters reported. Now, all eyes are on the Golden State's response and whether the innovative rail project can overcome its financial and logistical challenges. The California High-Speed Rail System is a planned two-phase 800-mile system with speeds of up to 220 miles per hour that aims to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles/Anaheim and in the second phase extend north to Sacramento and south to San Diego .
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump drives California into the arms of high-speed rail
President Donald Trump is about to snatch $4 billion away from California's high-speed rail project — and all that's doing is reinforcing Democrats' iron-willed support for the beleaguered venture. The Trump administration said Wednesday — in the form of a 300-page report — that it's on the verge of nixing Biden-era grants for the planned rail line from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, a conclusion state officials have feared since the president put the project in his crosshairs in February. Rather than being a death knell for a project that's years behind schedule and has a price tag that's ballooned from $33 billion to as much as $128 billion, Trump's attacks are fortifying state Democrats who hold the purse strings to its largest funding source — the state's emissions trading program for greenhouse gases. 'We've seen this coming and we're going to do everything we can to prevent it,' said Senate Budget Committee Chair Scott Wiener. 'Regardless of what happens here, we're committed to making this project a reality.' It's been a question just how much Democratic support the project would garner during negotiations to reauthorize the state's emissions trading system, as several lawmakers made it clear at the start of the year that high-speed rail isn't their priority amid finite climate funding. That uncertainty made its way into the Federal Railroad Administration's report, which, among other arguments, points to the lack of 'long-term stability of cap-and-trade proceeds' as a reason to cancel grants. But Trump's dual assaults on high-speed rail and cap-and-trade itself lit a fire under Gov. Gavin Newsom, who committed to reauthorizing the program this year after initially waffling on timing and championed a proposal to guarantee the rail line at least $1 billion in funding annually in his budget proposal last month. Republican lawmakers who've long blasted the project as a waste of taxpayer dollars are taking a victory lap. 'Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the end for high-speed rail,' Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said during a press conference. 'This project needs to be over. It has been the biggest public infrastructure failure in American history.' Newsom spokesperson Daniel Villaseñor, when asked about Wednesday's news, pointed to the governor's budget press conference, where he doubled down on his support. 'I want to get it done, and that's our commitment. That's why it's still reflected in the cap-and-trade extension,' Newsom said. Carol Dahmen, the High-Speed Rail Authority's chief of strategic communications, said in a statement that the agency will 'correct the record' on the Trump administration's 'misguided' decision. But she also highlighted Newsom's proposal, saying $1 billion annually will be enough to 'complete the project's initial operating segment' from Bakersfield to Merced. Democrats' continued backing of high-speed rail also reflects an important reality of California politics: Labor unions can still make or break you. That's a lesson former Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter learned last month, after she bashed the project in a TV appearance before recalibrating at a labor event and saying she wants to 'put people to work, and I want to get it done for Californians.' A coalition of powerful labor and public government interests announced its cap-and-trade priorities last month, a list of infrastructure projects including high-speed rail. The project has employed nearly 15,000 union workers since construction started in 2015, more than any other infrastructure undertaking in the country. 'The time to double down is now,' said Michael Quigley, executive director of the California Alliance for Jobs, which represents carpenters, laborers, contractors and other construction unions. Like this content? Consider signing up for POLITICO's California Climate newsletter.
