Sunrail was a project with modest net public benefit entailing substantial ongoing public subsidy ~ the kind of thing that I'd be expected to support but that a purportedly Conservative Governor would be against. The Florida Express HSR project was a project with larger net public benefit entailing no ongoing public subsidy whatsoever ~ the kind of thing that I and a purportedly Conservative governor ought to be agreeing on.

And yet the purportedly Conservative Governor supported the first strongly after axing the second on the back of a report from a partisan think tank reaching the conclusion it always reached irrespective of the evidence.

Since, after all, the purportedly Conservative Governor is no such thing: while pandering to the Take Everything Away party in pursuit of their support among his primary base electorate, he true fidelity is to the Giveaway to Oligarchs Party, the same old, same old GOP.

A little bit more from Robert Mann:

Keep in mind that FECI, Flagler and Florida East Coast Railway are separate companies. The State of Florida, Port Canaveral, Sunrail, Tri-Rail, The Southeast Florida Corridor Project, CSX and Norfolk Southern ultimately, will all be players.

This does indeed seem to be a strange bankshot consequence of the massive giveaway to CSX in buying the corridor from CSX while it retains trackage rights, helping it to finance the infrastructure upgrade that it required.

The side-effect of that a crucial section of corridor that the FEC needed to connect into the CSX system in service of the expected increase in multi-modal container freight was in public hands. Which seems likely to be part of why the owners of the railway that was among the first to abandon passenger rail service, on the excuse of union sabotage in its brutal union busting fight ... turned around and said, "hey, we'd like to run a passenger railway".

The plan is sufficiently different from the Express HSR system that the Republican party smeared and lied about for partisan political advantage that they can pretend that "oh, its not the same thing". And, actually, no, its not: its a bit slower. But entering into a lease and operate service contract for three passenger trains rising to five to seven as the system expands ... that's an awfully cheap price to pay for access to the right of way that they need and quite likely the state government footing part or all of the bill for the upgrades and new track that they require for their 40 mile connector.

The strange thing, though, is that this is likely to be a quite nice state intercity passenger rail system.

And when property speculators are setting up intercity passenger rail systems in pursuit of windfall gains in property values as well as benefits for their freight business ... that's a quite substantial change from the way things were going through the entire second half of the 20th Century.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.