Brightline is the deadliest major passenger train in America — and it's running through our communities with only piecemeal safety measures in place. Since 2018, nearly 200 people have died along Brightline’s route in Florida. Experts and officials already know how to stop these deaths. The state of Florida has even written the blueprint. But instead of urgent action, we’re getting delay, denial, and a refusal to apply life-saving standards to the very tracks where people are dying.

The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) just released new rail safety rules that would make dozens of proven protections — from fencing to quad gates to LED-lit warnings — mandatory for future projects. But why aren’t they being installed now, along the current 195-mile Brightline corridor from Miami to Cocoa, where the crisis is already deadly and ongoing?

We call on Governor Ron DeSantis, FDOT Secretary Jared Perdue, and the Florida Rail Safety Coalition to immediately expand these rules to existing crossings, not just new ones. Communities like Pompano Beach and Hollywood are already trying to install fencing using their own local funds — but it shouldn’t be up to individual cities to bear the burden for a statewide public safety failure.

Experts have identified low-cost, effective tools: fencing to keep pedestrians off the tracks, wayside horns in “quiet zones” where train whistles have been silenced, crisis signs for suicide prevention, and smarter traffic signals that prevent cars from getting trapped between gates. These aren’t future hypotheticals — they’re common-sense safeguards already being used in other U.S. cities and around the world.

If Florida leaders truly care about public safety, the time to act is now. No more secrecy. No more excuses. No more preventable deaths.

Sign this petition to demand full implementation of Florida’s new rail safety standards along existing Brightline tracks — before more lives are lost.

Photo: Matias J / Miami Herald