Brightline Trains Florida discussion 2025

[Anderson]

I've split my commentary off into a separate post. The above is Short Distance, Long Distance, and Consolidated.

Versus my placeholder, there were an additional 17k and change riders and an additional $1.3m in overall revenue for 2024. As I said before, I figured ridership and revenue would be a bit higher - the increase was about 7.2%. Now, in a vacuum about 3.3% would be down to December having an extra day, so you've got about 4% more in terms of a "ridership trend".

Some thoughts:
(1) Based on this data, the station at MCO has more ridership than any Amtrak station south of Washington, DC. In fact, I think the only state south of DC that has more ridership is Virginia. It is probable that one or more of the South Florida stations has more ridership, but this is still pretty stunning.

(2) I'm reasonably certain that this puts intercity passenger rail ridership in Florida at its highest levels since the 1960s. Adding Amtrak ridership to Brightline puts intercity ridership in Florida at over 3 million. Mind you, I'd be stunned if you couldn't find higher ridership numbers from the early 1960s or 1950s, but this is still a huge number.

(3) Brightline has indicated, in the December report, that the next cars will be 10 Smart cars and then 10 Premium cars (so, 5 Smart/2 Premium per train). This makes a certain amount of sense given that Premium seems to sell pretty well for long(er)-distance ridership.

(4) Noting all of the above, I think it is quite likely that Brightline will see revenue exceed operating costs in 2025. It would probably need a 10-20% increase in revenue (depending on which number you use and how close to projections expenditures come), but that'll still be a major milestone. And with both the additional car that's on each train now and the two more on the way, the odds are good that they'll be "in the black" on this metric in March and in the latter part of the year (at a minimum).

 

[cirdan]

In fairly plain terms, the AA FAs get paid a ton for hawking the cards. The commission is something like $100/card. FAs who are good with the pitch can rake in a comfortable five figure supplementary income, and it's a big incentive to try to work lower-frequency-traveler flights (e.g. Thanksgiving/Christmas).

I would have expected the market to be pretty saturated by now, with everybody already having way more credit cards than they need and being tired of the marketing.

 

[cirdan]

(4) Noting all of the above, I think it is quite likely that Brightline will see revenue exceed operating costs in 2025. It would probably need a 10-20% increase in revenue (depending on which number you use and how close to projections expenditures come), but that'll still be a major milestone. And with both the additional car that's on each train now and the two more on the way, the odds are good that they'll be "in the black" on this metric in March and in the latter part of the year (at a minimum).

Going from 5 to 6 cars is approximately 20% more capacity and hitting 7 cars would be 40% plus. If however the additional cars are delivered in Q3 or Q4, this would not be sufficient to boost all-year ridership by anything approaching that. So I would guess the real payback won't become visible on the balance sheet until 2026.

 

[Anderson]

Going from 5 to 6 cars is approximately 20% more capacity and hitting 7 cars would be 40% plus. If however the additional cars are delivered in Q3 or Q4, this would not be sufficient to boost all-year ridership by anything approaching that. So I would guess the real payback won't become visible on the balance sheet until 2026.

The metric I was using was operating expenses. However, I would also point out that IIRC Car 5 wasn't delivered for all sets until November (Brightline says they were placed into service as of early January, but I honestly cannot recall if they were being ticketed on any trains in December or not), so for most of 2024 Brightline was running four-car sets. The four-car train baseline was around 220-240k riders/month.

My thinking is that Brightline was trending about 11-12% above 2023 and that this will increase a bit as some commuter traffic slips back in (December was the first month where short distance traffic was back above 100k since April). So I suspect that may tick up a bit further - let's say 15% with five cars; if you add another 10% vs the baseline with six and an additional 10% vs the baseline with seven, with those 20 cars being delivered "on average" around midyear, that would be 25% YoY. Having said that, I would also expect some slight downward pressure on average revenue until the additional Premium car is delivered due to a shifting ridership mix favoring Smart over Premium just due to seats being available.

One thing I'll point out: Sold-out peak trains are likely costing at least some non-peak ridership (because a blocked-out trip in one direction is likely to lose you the return journey as well).

 

[Anderson]

I would have expected the market to be pretty saturated by now, with everybody already having way more credit cards than they need and being tired of the marketing.

I'd agree, except that I think you have a few million people becoming freshly eligible every year. As long as the circle of life continues unabated, permanent market saturation won't happen.