Wes Edens has broken ground on Brightline West, his $12 billion Las Vegas-to-SoCal railway, aided by billions from the Biden Administration. But building more high-speed lines like this one won’t be easy.
Under a blazing morning Las Vegas sun, billionaire Wes Edens and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg threw a party this week to mark the start of construction of Brightline West, the first private high-speed railway in the U.S., driving yellow spikes into a section of track.
Now comes the hard part. The $12 billion project is three years behind his original schedule — delayed by the pandemic and final environmental approvals — but if construction goes as fast as the billionaire cofounder of Fortress Investment Group promises, it'll open in time to speed travelers across the desert at 200 miles per hour from Sin City to Southern California in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“The timeline is both realistic and achievable,” Edens told Forbes. “The impact of this is going to be long-lasting and prodigious. And I want it to be successful because I want the next one and the next one and the next one to happen.”
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2024/04/23/in-las-vegas-a-billionaires-blueprint-for-building-bullet-trains/?sh=1884f4bb64ac
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Under a blazing morning Las Vegas sun, billionaire Wes Edens and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg threw a party this week to mark the start of construction of Brightline West, the first private high-speed railway in the U.S., driving yellow spikes into a section of track.
Now comes the hard part. The $12 billion project is three years behind his original schedule — delayed by the pandemic and final environmental approvals — but if construction goes as fast as the billionaire cofounder of Fortress Investment Group promises, it'll open in time to speed travelers across the desert at 200 miles per hour from Sin City to Southern California in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“The timeline is both realistic and achievable,” Edens told Forbes. “The impact of this is going to be long-lasting and prodigious. And I want it to be successful because I want the next one and the next one and the next one to happen.”
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2024/04/23/in-las-vegas-a-billionaires-blueprint-for-building-bullet-trains/?sh=1884f4bb64ac
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 I'm in Las Vegas this morning on a sunny, hot day.
00:06 We're here to mark the start of construction
00:09 of Brightline West.
00:10 This is expected to be the first high-speed rail project
00:13 that's operational in the United States.
00:15 The goal by its developer, Wes Edens,
00:19 a billionaire who owns the Milwaukee Bucks
00:21 and the Aston Villa Football Club in the UK,
00:24 is to have this thing built in four years
00:26 for a total cost of $12 billion.
00:29 And the expectation is that it's gonna be operational
00:32 in time for the Summer Olympics in LA in 2028.
00:36 This project, if it moves as fast as expected
00:41 and stays on budget and on time,
00:44 would be the first true bullet train in the United States
00:47 running at speeds of up to 200 miles an hour or more
00:51 and do that within about four years.
00:54 Wes Edens, the guy behind this,
00:56 is a private equity billionaire.
00:58 He's a part owner of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA franchise.
01:02 He also owns the Aston Villa Football Club in the UK
01:05 and other European soccer teams.
01:08 Wes has been fixated on doing this project for years.
01:11 Previously, Brightline opened its first private railway
01:14 in Florida a few years ago,
01:16 and last year added a new extension
01:19 connecting that project from Orlando
01:21 all the way down to Miami.
01:24 To learn a little bit more,
01:25 Forbes had an exclusive opportunity
01:27 to sit down with Wes Edens,
01:29 who is the chairman of Brightline,
01:30 as well as US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg
01:33 to understand what this project means
01:36 both for Wes and his company,
01:38 but also more broadly, high-speed rail in this country.
01:40 (upbeat music)
01:44 Finally, groundbreaking for Brightline West,
01:47 and you expect this to be the first high-speed rail system
01:51 in the United States when it opens.
01:53 Do you really think you can get this 218-mile system
01:56 between Las Vegas and Southern California
01:59 built within a four-year timetable?
02:01 - 100%.
02:02 It's not just a wild speculation on our part.
02:05 That's the product of a tremendous amount of work
02:07 and time and money that's been put into it already.
02:09 We kind of broke the system up into segments,
02:12 so we're not really starting at one place
02:13 to get to the other.
02:14 So you'll see simultaneous activity
02:16 along the corridor for this.
02:18 You know, the rolling stock, you know,
02:19 is something we are actually out, you know,
02:20 putting out for the bids right now,
02:21 so that's something that we wanna get, you know,
02:23 off the drawing boards and into production soon.
02:26 So all those things together,
02:27 we really do believe that the timeline
02:29 is both an aggressive one, but a very achievable one,
02:31 and we think four years from now,
02:32 we'll have a train where we're standing right now.
02:34 - And you're confident it'll be operational in time
02:36 for the LA Summer Olympics in 2028?
02:38 - We are.
02:39 There's the things we control and things we don't control,
02:41 so we think that we can control the construction part of it.
02:44 At the end of it, there's then a very lengthy process
02:46 of then making sure that it qualifies for all the FRA
02:49 and, you know, government guidelines for this,
02:51 and there hasn't been a high-speed train to test against,
02:54 so that's a little bit of ambiguity,
02:55 but we do feel like that was the target all along.
02:58 We feel like, you know, having President Biden ride it
03:01 during, before the end of his second term
03:03 is a big part of a, it's always good to have a goal,
03:05 and that's a goal that we have, and we're excited about it.
03:07 - Mr. Secretary, this project is happening
03:09 with a lot of federal support,
03:10 a $3 billion grant, $3.5 billion in private activity bonds.
03:15 Is this the model, or in this case,
03:17 are you trying to just, like, get things going
03:19 and fund, help fund this particular project
03:22 and hoping that that stokes up interest?
03:24 - Well, we do believe that when this project is complete,
03:27 it's gonna open the floodgates for American expectations
03:30 around high-speed rail.
03:31 It won't anymore be, "I just got back from Japan.
03:34 "Why can't we have that?"
03:35 It'll be, "I just got back from Vegas.
03:37 "Why can't we have that in the Midwest
03:39 "or in the Northwest or wherever I live
03:42 "as a domestic tourist in the United States?"
03:44 This is important because it really establishes
03:47 that it can be done here, which, by the way,
03:49 of course it can be done here.
03:50 This is the United States of America,
03:51 but in the past, we haven't invested enough
03:54 to make this happen.
03:55 I'll tell you, the federal funding coming into this project
03:58 came from a very competitive process.
04:00 So it was not done lightly.
04:02 They had to hit all sorts of marks in order to qualify,
04:05 both for the $3 billion in grants
04:07 and the $3.5 billion in financing
04:10 that's coming to support this project.
04:11 But we wouldn't be here if we didn't believe in it.
04:13 And human experience and American experience
04:17 has demonstrated that projects of this level of ambition
04:20 are difficult, they're doable,
04:23 and they're hugely impactful
04:24 when they actually get achieved.
04:25 - This is not the first groundbreaking
04:27 for a high-speed rail project.
04:29 Next door in California, one's been underway for a while,
04:32 but the timeline is a lot longer,
04:34 the costs are a lot greater.
04:36 There's a big chunk of the budget
04:37 that no one knows exactly where that's gonna come from.
04:40 Should California consider working with a Brightline West
04:43 or another private entity to maybe help that project
04:46 get built all the way from LA to San Francisco?
04:48 - Well, the structure, the scale,
04:51 and the distance of the California project
04:54 make it quite different from this one.
04:56 But what I will say is,
04:58 the more you do it, the more you do it.
04:59 In other words, the more we have functioning high-speed rail
05:02 up and running in the United States,
05:04 the more we have a nationwide readiness for it,
05:07 both in terms of customers, passengers,
05:09 and in terms of the professionals who work on it,
05:12 who, when they encounter a problem,
05:14 they're not encountering it for the first time.
05:16 I think that's already served Brightline well
05:18 because of their experience,
05:19 not what we consider high-speed in these terms,
05:21 but real experience delivering
05:23 an important train service in Florida.
05:25 And I think in turn, that the California project,
05:27 and this, and every other high-speed rail vision in America
05:30 can all benefit from each other
05:32 because we build that muscle memory,
05:33 as a country, on how to do this.
05:35 And that industry, as a country,
05:37 that domestic high-speed rail industry,
05:39 that I think could take its place
05:41 alongside the auto industry and the aviation industry
05:43 as a huge employer and driver of value in the United States.
05:47 - Wes, you've been thinking about this a long time,
05:49 and as mentioned,
05:50 you're already operating the Florida system.
05:52 You're now starting with this one,
05:53 but you've mentioned there are other inner city routes
05:56 that look very compelling.
05:58 Is there another one that looks as doable?
06:00 Because obviously in this case,
06:02 a lot of the regulatory approval was done,
06:04 a lot of the environmental approval was done,
06:06 the land was acquired.
06:07 So this one seems to have many things working in its favor.
06:10 Are there others that both look attractive,
06:12 but also have some of the same elements going for it?
06:15 - Yeah, I think there are actually many others.
06:17 And I think that probably the major development
06:19 between version 1.0 in Florida
06:21 and version 2.0 here in Vegas, LA,
06:23 is moving off an existing rail system
06:26 into an already disturbed transportation corridor,
06:30 which is I-15.
06:31 And so there's lots of highways
06:32 that connect these city pairs that are attractive.
06:34 So the too far to drive, too short to fly,
06:37 the two big population centers,
06:39 that's the secret sauce of this.
06:41 Putting it in the middle of the highway,
06:42 I think actually solves a lot of issues.
06:45 You can basically, you can create your own system,
06:47 you can put a fence around it, there's no rail crossings,
06:50 you can go at true high speeds,
06:51 200 miles plus an hour, so there's a lot of those.
06:53 So when we look around the country,
06:55 there's very obvious ones.
06:56 The whole kind of Texas triangle of Dallas to Houston,
07:00 Houston to San Antonio, Austin there,
07:02 that's one that obviously makes sense
07:04 in terms of the economic profile of it.
07:06 Portland to Seattle and that whole area of the world.
07:09 The Midwest, even like you look at places from Cleveland
07:12 to Columbus and whatnot.
07:13 So I think that there are many, many expressions of it.
07:16 You need to de-risk it by getting one done.
07:18 What the secretary said, I really believe in,
07:19 he's like, "It can't be a second until it was a first."
07:22 Once you have a P&L, you can look at it,
07:23 you can see that the revenue projections are correct,
07:26 you can see that the ridership is correct,
07:27 that's what'll really catalyze this.
07:29 And I think there's a number of places it'll go,
07:30 and I think this first one,
07:31 it's not just the development of the system that's important
07:34 it's the development of the entire industry.
07:36 That's the really exciting, that's the milestone for me
07:38 that I think will be really notable
07:39 when we look back on this in years to come.
07:41 - And what's your ridership target for SoCal to Vegas
07:44 once things are sort of like annualized
07:46 after a year or two of operation?
07:47 - There's about 50 million trips that happen
07:49 between Las Vegas and Los Angeles,
07:50 about 85% of those happen by car, right?
07:53 When you look at the amount of time you save people,
07:55 that's a big indicator
07:56 for how many people are gonna ride your train.
07:57 So simply put, the more time you save them,
08:00 the more you're gonna do it.
08:00 There's few places you're gonna save people more time
08:02 than between here and LA, right?
08:04 That ride is at best a long ride,
08:06 and at worst, it's a lot worse than that.
08:07 So we think that a pretty good percentage
08:09 of the 40 plus million that are on that
08:11 will get onto our train.
08:12 I think our initial estimates around 12 million
08:14 is kind of a stabilized number.
08:16 But I really believe long-term
08:17 we'll have a capacity problem more than a ridership problem
08:19 because I think that this is just such a compelling
08:22 opportunity for people versus driving across the desert
08:24 that I think it'll be really, really amazing.
08:27 - And over time, do you see an opportunity
08:28 to connect from Rancho into actual Los Angeles proper?
08:32 - Well, we are connected on the Metro system, right?
08:34 So basically, you walk across the tracks
08:36 and get under the MetroLink system.
08:37 That's a very active, very, very productive system
08:39 in Southern California.
08:41 Would love to see that get electrified,
08:42 would love to aspire one day to get down there,
08:44 but that's not being a part of the plans right now.
08:47 And I say I'd like to get electrified
08:48 because I'd like to see fewer emissions kind of everywhere.
08:50 And so I think that that would be an obvious choice for it.
08:52 But when you look at the system itself,
08:55 I-15 kind of comes down the pass
08:57 and it goes into the LA basin.
08:59 Everything goes from there.
09:01 So putting a train station right there
09:03 is really a sensible thing, right?
09:04 That's what 100% of the people that drive to Las Vegas
09:07 have to drive past our train station, right?
09:09 So that's a very, very good place to start.
09:10 So the train station itself is not a second choice at all.
09:14 We think that obviously Union Station is an iconic place
09:16 and that'd be a lot of great things,
09:17 but that's not really the destination
09:20 that we view as as important as the Rancho station.
09:23 - Mr. Secretary, what looks like the most promising
09:25 next project after this one?
09:27 - Well, our corridor identification program
09:29 is funding several early planning efforts
09:32 around the country.
09:34 The Texas Central Railroad that would go Dallas to Houston,
09:36 Cascadia Vision that would connect Vancouver,
09:39 Seattle and Portland, Charlotte to Atlanta,
09:41 which given the amount of economic growth happening there
09:44 and just the population layout of that part of the South,
09:46 also incredibly compelling.
09:48 And there's more where that came from.
09:49 Look, we know it's gonna take federal support
09:51 to get some of these projects onto the drawing board,
09:54 let alone turn them into a reality.
09:55 But that's exactly why we need to be working now
09:58 toward that longer range future.
10:00 And to those who say, you know, well, this isn't Europe.
10:02 That's true, it isn't Europe.
10:03 We're doing this on American terms.
10:04 But what we definitely have in America
10:06 are these kinds of geographic layouts
10:08 where you've got lots of city pairs
10:10 that are an uncomfortably long drive
10:14 or an inefficiently short flight apart from each other.
10:17 Those are excellent candidates for high-speed rail.
10:19 - And which of those pairs is your next choice?
10:22 Which do you think looks most compelling?
10:23 - Don't know, we're so focused on this right now,
10:25 we haven't picked, you know, kind of the next one.
10:27 I'll say this, we've been contacted
10:28 by a lot of different governors and whatnot
10:30 that are curious about this.
10:31 I think today is a real milestone
10:33 to see that this is a reality
10:34 that's now happening.
10:35 And I think that there could easily be,
10:37 like I say, a handful of these things
10:38 that turn into real projects from our standpoint
10:41 in the next, you know, 12 to 24 months.
10:42 So it's an exciting time for it.
10:44 - So of the funding for this project,
10:46 5.5 billion from private sources,
10:49 are you one of those private sources?
10:51 Are you putting in your own money?
10:51 - I am one of those private sources.
10:53 I've actually put my money where my mouth is.
10:54 So, you know, I've been invested in this project
10:57 for a very long time.
10:58 And, you know, obviously we think
11:00 it's gonna be a compelling investment.
11:01 I think that in my own life,
11:03 I've tried to find things that I could focus on
11:05 where you're doing well by doing good.
11:07 And something that really makes an impact.
11:08 And I think that the impact from this
11:09 is gonna be long lasting,
11:11 and it's gonna be, you know, prodigious.
11:12 And so I'm just really excited to be a part of it.
11:14 I want it to be successful
11:15 because I want the next one,
11:16 the next one, the next one to happen.
11:18 (upbeat music)
11:20 (upbeat music)
11:23 [BLANK_AUDIO]