Brightline collides with Florida’s wild-eyed drivers

The epiphany materialized as a black Ford pickup truck, paused behind me at the

Fifth Street railroad crossing, just south of the New River.

To someone puzzled by the mayhem afflicting Brightline trains, the truck was a revelation on wheels.

Crossing gates were lowered. Red lights were flashing. Warning bells were clanging. The train was coming, and coming fast.

Me? I stayed put, figuring a three-minute wait was preferable to a sudden encounter with a 120-ton locomotive.

The driver of the pickup, however, was truer to the ethos that makes South Florida roadways so special. He floored it.

The trucker passed me and slalomed around the gates and over the tracks barely in time to avoid becoming the 56th fatality attributed to Brightline since the passenger service opened a 67-mile West Palm Beach-toMiami route four years ago.

Another imprudent driver, age 48, earned that sad designation last Sunday at a Lake Worth Beach crossing, when he ignored the same suite of warning signals and tried to circumvent the gates in fatal disregard of basic physics. Just two days later, the 57th Brightline death occurred when a pedestrian blundered onto the tracks in Hallandale Beach.

That was the same day a 28-year-old woman, who had inexplicably steered her car off the crossing and onto the tracks, and her 3-month-old baby escaped from the car just before it was crushed. Police suggested the woman had suffered a psychological crisis.

Brightline’s dreadful week continued the next day.

A harrowing locomotive dashcam video showed a Honda civic swerving around a waiting car at a Lake Worth Beach crossing, past the gate, then disappearing from the camera’s periphery, sparing viewers the gruesome spectacle of an automobile ripped apart, a metal remnant left draped over a nearby fence like tattered laundry. The 55-year-old driver was extracted from the wreckage still alive but with injuries too brutal to call this a “miraculous” survival.

Even before this recent spate of carnage, Brightline was already tainted by an ignominious distinction. Last month, a Miami Herald analysis of Federal Railroad Administration data found the luxury passenger line “has caused more fatalities per mile traveled than any other major rail operator in the country.” That report echoed the findings of a 2019 investigation by the Associated Press.

The passenger service has also suffered from a dismal timing. I was aboard one of Brightline’s inaugural PR junkets in 2018, when a pedestrian ignored the warning signals and became a “trespasser incident” — the railroad euphemism for a grisly death. So much for the upbeat PR.

On Nov. 8, the very day the passenger line resumed service after a 19-month pandemic stoppage, a celebratory train laden with dignitaries crashed into a gate-jumping car, driven by a 71-year-old woman with her 1-year-old grandchild aboard. Both survived, but once again the railroad’s PR attempt turned bleak.

Brightline runs along the lower portion of the historic right-of-way built by the Florida East Coast Railroad in the 1890s, which carried the passengers who transformed an agricultural backwater into a tourist mecca. (The rails also served as a stark social delineator — whites on the east and Blacks consigned to the west, the proverbial “other side of the tracks.”)

Critics of Brightline’s audacious plan to reintroduce a privately owned passenger service hereabouts have made much of car collisions and trespasser fatalities. Yet the company has installed the same safety equipment at its 178 crossings used by other railroads in other states with less lethal records. And Brightline intends to spend another $10 million on crossing safety.

But I doubt rail safety experts can cure the reckless impetuousness that afflicts South Florida, a place where road-rage shootouts are a regular feature of our daily commute.

Brightline has mailed 600 warning letters (with no legal consequences) to drivers videoed as they raced around crossing gates. Earlier this month, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava retweeted a video showing five drivers bypassing the gates, oblivious to the danger.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s our penchant for double espressos and café cubanos thick as molasses.

Police have classified most of the 27 pedestrian deaths on Brightline tracks to suicide or cognitive impairment due to drugs, drunkenness or mental illness. Or all of above.

The woman killed while I was aboard that inaugural Brightline train in 2018 fit the profile — a 28-year-old opioid addict who had abandoned three children for her mother to raise.

Her mother told me that she had long been unable to reason with her drug-addled daughter. I doubt a safety campaign by Brightline could have done better.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred.

Fred Grimm