This article provides details for a significant fraction of the deaths. Reading through at random:
I start with a very strong prior that floridians aren’t actually outliers, and something is wrong with the train.
A large fraction are reported suicides, and of that, a large fraction are verified suicides, i.e. lying on the tracks. This seems hard to prevent engineering-wise, it seems a fix will have to be psychological- for example, tall parking garages aren’t banned for suicide risk, but that one sculpture made of stairs had to be. The complaint that brightline is responsible for these specifically because they didn’t invest in suicide crisis signs, seems farcical, but there is also likely some there there.
A large fraction involve intentionally bypassing lowered crossing gates, including many of the pedestrian deaths. A smaller but large fraction involved reacting to the gates coming down by stopping on the tracks and sitting there for several minutes until the train came and killed them. This fraction was disproportionaltely over 75. One case illustrated how this isn’t prima facie insane- an elderly couple was crossing in a car when the gate closed behind them, they stopped and waited for several minutes for the freight train to pass, but didn’t understand that they were waiting on the second rail line where a second train was coming.
A different large fraction of the pedestrian deaths were scary and illustrate classic safety issues that come from intermittent extreme risk- the trains are flying silently through neighborhoods at 80 mph, people walk over these tracks pretty casually, sometimes they get hit. This part lacks sensationalism, but appears to be the majority of the death, and the core of the case that something is very wrong here.
A small fraction, but not that small, are classic florida man- for example, one victim rode a scooter into the side of the train and died, appears to be an accident not a suicide.
Also lots of drugs, but this may just be the base rate
This surprises me so much I feel like it must be incorrect or not apples-to-apples somehow. Amtrak has fatalities of 0.43 per billion passenger miles (20/100M = 200/B) according to the WaPo. I don't believe that Florida could build a train this much deadlier than a normal one, even if they tried. (These same figures give 7 deaths/billion car passenger miles, which is similar to what this post uses.)
Imagine you're an evil engineer, and the devil tells you to make a train that's 500 times more deadly than average. How would you even do that? What's the mechanistic explanation for how Brightline is this deadly? For now, I roll to disbelieve.
My best guess is you're somehow massively undercounting the passenger numbers by taking a per-week figure as a total or something, but I'm not sure.
The WaPo article appears to refer to passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles, not total fatalities. For comparison, trains in the European Union in 2021 apparently had ca. 0.03 passenger fatalities per billion passenger miles, but almost 0.3 total fatalities per million train miles.
the devil tells you to make a train that's 500 times more deadly than average
Run the train where there are 500x the people?
My guess is the overall Amtrak number is the outlier, including lots of miles of open land. Perhaps relevant for assessing safety/mile when you'd otherwise drive or fly it, but not as relevant for assessing safety/risk in urban areas.
I've ridden amtrack from New Orleans to the middle of mississippi, and there was no point where it looked like a pedestrian could get to the track if they tried- alternating between abandoned looking industrial districts and wilderness the whole way. Also mostly went about 35 miles an hour.
From what I can tell the rate in Europe is around 10x lower than that Amtrak number and falling over time.
Here's some data (Miami Herald). It seems like a bit of a perfect storm of being in a denser and more night-active area, having more crossings, lacking fencing, not sounding horns (thanks locals!), etc. It's easy to blame victims since the tracks don't move, but it's clear that design factors contribute to safety, and Brightline has leaned into just letting the deaths happen (including inaccurately characterizing them).
Another part of the calculus here is that Brightline is faster than driving. Very roughly:
Wikipedia says it takes 3:25 and Google says driving takes 4:03. If we call it half an hour saved per long distance trip, that's ~1.5 million hours saved.
Long distance trips were about 60% of the passenger miles in your model, so if we assume they were also 60% of the fatalities, that's a statistical cost of $1.5 billion, or $1,000 per hour saved. (Minus some adjustment because cars also kill people, so we can call it $950 instead if we take the 20x number.) Compared to the $40/hr that a life seems to be valued at (assuming a fatality represents 40 years lost and we value the cost at $13.7 million).
...I didn't actually generate an advance prediction, but if I had I think it would have been at least an order of magnitude lower.
By contrast: if we assume a fatality represents 40 years of life lost, and we value the cost at $13.7 million, that's about $40/hr.
The government has also been making improvements like adding fencing, and you could probably fence the whole thing for under $100M [3].
While this would solve the problem of deaths it would also harm people by increasing travel times. The article suggests that some people cross the tracks because otherwise they would have to work 10 minutes more to work. It easy to do a lot of harm with safety interventions as well.
How many people do you think this is each day? If it's 1,000 (train runs through busy areas, but most people don't cross tracks illegally) then the annual cost is ~3.7M minutes.
The the average person killed by a train would have had maybe another ~12M waking minutes [1], so fences that prevented even a death every three years would do more good than harm. And the number of tracks-crossers would have to be super high for fencing not to be worth it.
(But adding signaled crossings or overpasses could be worth it!)
[1] 60 min / hr * 16 waking hr / day * 365 day / year * 35 years
Per the Atlantic's A 'Death Train' is Haunting South Florida:
According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. 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.
Trains running people over is obviously bad, but people also die from being hit by cars. Reading the article I was wondering: are we making a big deal about Brightline because it's big and new, but actually we're better off overall now that there's a train because fewer people are driving and so fewer people are dying? And is this actually counterproductive fearmongering? Nope! Brightline is just really deadly, not just for a train, but even relative to driving.
While Brightline is of course much safer for occupants than driving, what I care about is the overall social impact: are there more or fewer deaths than in a non-Brightline world? This means counting everyone, including occupants, drivers, and pedestrians. Ideally we would compare fatality rates directly: how many deaths are there per passenger-mile for Brightline vs cars? These stats don't exist, but we can get decent estimates:
For Brightline, per the article there have been 185 fatalities. [1] They don't publish a passenger-miles number, but there were about 5M passengers before they opened the Orlando section and then 1.6M long-distance and 1.1M short-distance in 2024. If we guess that the first 9.5 months of 2025 looked like 2024, that's an additional 1.3M long-distance and 0.9M short distance. In total that's 2.9M long-distance trips and 7M short-distance. Based on the distances involved, I'm going to guess 200mi for long distance and 50mi. This gives us a total of 930M passenger-miles, and 20 deaths per 100M passenger miles.
For cars, Florida seems to have 1.42 deaths per 100M vehicle miles. If we guess that there's an average of 1.4 people per car, this is ~1 death per 100M passenger miles.
So Brightline is about 20x more deadly per passenger-mile (counting people inside and outside the vehicle) than driving, and the article isn't fearmongering. The Department of Transportation uses $13.7M for the statistical value of a human life, and 185 fatalities is $2.5B. And it's going up at about $0.5B/year. [2] Without safety improvements, in something like seven years the ongoing societal cost in deaths will have grown larger than it's initial $6B construction cost.
I do expect this to get better over time: some of these fatalities are people not being used to the trains, and as that changes I expect fewer people to do things like cross the tracks where they don't have good visibility or under an assumption that the only trains that might come by are slow freight trains. The government has also been making improvements like adding fencing, and you could probably fence the whole thing for under $100M [3]. Getting Brightline to be less deadly than cars will be a lot of work (a 20x reduction is hard) but since trains elsewhere manage to be much safer this seems plausible.
The key takeaway for me, however, is that people who advocated for Brightline on the idea that it would reduce deaths made a pretty serious mistake. That Brightline would get cars off the road was a standard talking point, and people seemed to assume that this would be be positive from a traffic fatality perspective. Here's the Rail Passengers Association saying this explicitly:
Regular train service along the corridor would remove as many as three million cars from regional highways each year, reducing both commuter stress and road fatalities. With 300 drivers killed in road accidents between 2004 and 2008, Interstate 95 has been ranked as the deadliest highway in the United States. A passenger rail alternative will thus save lives.
Advocates weren't wrong in the general case, since trains are normally much safer than cars even counting non-occupants. The problem was Brightline's specific route, with hundreds of grade crossings in densely populated areas and unfenced tracks that divide many places people want to move between. This is something people who know trains well should have been able to anticipate.
Since Brightline is following the laws, and there are strong legal protections for railroads, even if we decided Florida would be better off with Brightline shut down, it would be very difficult and would likely require federal legislation or a massively expensive buyout. So the best we can realistically do is safety infrastructure improvements, and there's already a lot of political motivation here. A 20x decrease in fatalities sounds very difficult, but combination of additional fencing, improved crossings, and increasing public familiarity with the trains may be able to bring fatalities down to where the train is at least competitive with driving.
[1] Arguably you should not count some fraction of the 37 suicides, as
some of the people may have otherwise have chosen other ways to kill
themselves. But even if we don't count all of them, dropping
fatalities from 185 to 148, the bottom line doesn't change very much:
16x more deadly instead of 20x.
[2] The Atlantic says 42 deaths in 2024. At $13.7M/death this is $575M.
[3] The corridor is 235mi, which is 2.5M ft when you count both sides. Installing fencing might be $25/ft, so $63M.