Well, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one doing this sort of analysis. I've been meaning to add February to my data set, but I've also been traveling.
IMO there's no way they're going to get to even the revised ridership estimates. I've been saying this for a
long time, but there's a
massive disconnect between what is being officially projected in Brightline's documents and what is possible based on capacity. Brightline is pacing to land somewhere around 2.7-3.0m riders in 2024. Adding a car for the full year would put Brightline around 3.6m riders in 2024 (roughly in line with what they said with respect to the February ridership data). Now, it is quite possible that they will shake a few more riders loose on the existing capacity, but Brightline's supplements suggest that they're getting boxed in on growing ridership.
Edit:
Revising and extending the above, Brightline's apparently still-for-2026 projections are so detached from reality that I have to wonder how their lawyers are signing off on publishing the numbers that are being cited. As far as I know, by 2026 Brightline does have another 30 cars coming. That would bring the capacity per set up to about 440 pax (presuming 64 seats/car for the new cars), and give them about 5,139,200 seats/year (presuming 16 round-trips per day every day for 365 days per year). Apparently they are still projecting something like 8m riders in 2026.
I'll just say it: That dog won't hunt. Right now, Brightline is on track to book about 2.9m pax in 2024 (notwithstading the new car arrivals) on the basis of about 2.9m seats this year. [1] Extrapolation suggests that they
might get to 5.2m riders/yr with the already-ordered capacity [2], maybe a shade more if they can get more folks onto off-hour trains and/or their decision to stop allowing seat selection within South Florida in Smart lets them effectively squeeze a bit more capacity out there, but the gap between 5.2m and 8.0m is pretty big. But they do not have the equipment on order to enable that kind of capacity, and given delivery lead times I cannot figure out how they can claim those projections with a straight face.
Depending on your capacity/load assumptions, even going to the full planned length of trains at 10 cars would only get you to 7,381,760 seats [3]. 11 cars gets you there [4], but IINM the platforms aren't set up for that. Also, depending on the ridership, it's possible that the Boca Raton-Fort Lauderdale "pinch point" pushes this number higher (as I've discussed before), so you could practically need 12-13 cars per train.
[1] (248 seats/train)*(32 trains/day)*(365 days/yr)=2,896,640
[2] (440 seats/train)*(32 trains/day)*(365 days/yr)=5,139,200
[3] (632 seats/train)*(32 trains/day)*(365 days/yr)=7,381,760
[4] (696 seats/train)*(32 trains/day)*(365 days/yr)=8,129,280