Americans love trains, but not for transportation | Opinion

Americans are cuckoo about choo choos.

There are dozens of train museums around the country. There are hundreds of model train clubs. From "Murder on the Orient Express" to "Bullet Train" to "Snowpiercer," pop culture is full of stories about locomotives.

It seems we love everything about trains except actually using them for transportation.

I thought about this a lot during recent trips to and from Miami on Brightline trains.

Brightline is a private company that offers high-speed rail service between Orlando and Miami, with a few stations along the route. (My departure/return station was in West Palm Beach.) The company has also been pursuing plans to offer service between major cities in Texas and California.

Gas prices being what they are, and the cost of everything – cars and car insurance included – going up, you might expect people to be clamoring for alternative ways to get from Point A to Point B.

Brightline train isn't moving fast enough to outrun critics

Yet if you see a lot of the media coverage about Brightline, particularly in my home state of Florida, you might get the impression the trains are transporting the Ebola virus, not passengers who have discovered an antidote for road rage.

Brightline is a boondoggle! The trains kill people! And when they aren't killing people, they're making too much noise trying to warn people of their approach!

It's true that a substantial amount of public money, roughly $500 million from cities along the route, has been invested in Brightline's tracks, stations and crossing improvements. That might seem like a lot for the government to be spending to benefit a private enterprise. Until you compare it with the gobs of money the government uses to subsidize other forms of private transportation:

• The Federal Highway Administration's proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year was $72.6 billion, almost all of it for highway construction or repairs.
• The Federal Aviation Administration's budget request was $27 billion.
• The Federal Railroad Administration's budget was only $16.4 billion.

No one bats an eye when government officials make plans to spend billions on roads or airport improvements, yet for some reason, investments in our rail network are taboo.

If Brightline's critics in Florida were really concerned about the amount of public money that was spent to get the system operational, they should be rooting for the company to succeed so those funds won't be wasted.

Instead, many seem to be hoping for Brightline to fail, so they can say, "I told you so."

Train accidents get more attention than car wrecks do

It's also true that about 200 people have died in pedestrian or vehicle collisions with Brightline trains since the service began operating in South Florida in 2017. No one should try to minimize those deaths, although many of them were thought to be suicides or tragic accidents involving people caught on the wrong sides of safety crossing gates.

Yet people die in car accidents across the country every day. In Florida, crashes involving Brightline trains are always big news. Fatal car accidents on nearby stretches of Interstate 95 or the Florida Turnpike are barely mentioned, if at all.

We've come to view traffic fatalities as just part of modern life, while deaths by train are somehow much more catastrophic.

My recent trips on Brightline felt comfortable and secure. The clean and brightly lit stations are equipped with cameras and metal detectors. As a guard at a checkpoint examined my key chain to make sure it didn't contain a small knife, I thought the fears of hoodlums using the trains to get around as they did in "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Warriors" seemed laughably far-fetched.

My friends and I were seated at tables with plenty of room to work or relax. Food and drink were only an app order away.

If you've never been stuck in South Florida traffic, you might not be able to fully appreciate how empowering it feels to whisk right through it. It's hard to put a price on that.

My round-trip cost, including train tickets and parking, was about $50. Obviously, that would be too much for a commuter to pay every day.

But Brightline wasn't set up for that purpose. Miami has a different train system, Tri-Rail, for moving people from place to place within the metro area.

Brightline's primary market is business and leisure travelers who want to visit cities that are a little too far away to easily reach by car, but too close for airplane trips.

Brightline has made its share of mistakes, but ...

The company has often been its own worst enemy in the public relations department. It hasn't done a good job of telling its story to the public, often coming across as cryptic and defensive at times when candor is needed.

Among the company's most callously boneheaded practices has been referring to people killed or injured on the tracks as trespassers.

But, as the saying goes, just because company officials are paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get them.

In my hometown of Stuart, some residents strongly oppose spending public money on a Brightline station because they believe, counterintuitively, the station would bring more car traffic downtown. It would actually do the opposite, but once a juicy social media narrative gets rolling, it's hard to stop.

There's also a popular conspiracy theory that Brightline's development was an elaborate ruse to get the tracks upgraded so freight trains could use them to haul hazardous materials. Anyone who's lived in Florida more than five minutes should know no such ruse would be necessary.

As long as it was done in the name of economic development, freight haulers could have easily gotten government permission for any requested upgrades.

Despite rising ridership, Brightline is having trouble making debt payments and could face bankruptcy. If that happens, Brightline's creditors will be wise to let the company reorganize rather than going out of business.

After all, a defunct train company has no chance of making good on what it owes. A functioning one might, given enough time.

Meanwhile, there are a couple of questions the rest of us should be asking: If countries like Germany, Japan and China can make high-speed rail work, why can't we? Are we content to just play with toy trains or daydream about nostalgia, or do we want to use trains to make our lives better?

Blake Fontenay is USA TODAY's commentary editor.