Yes, I have (by way of Cocoa Beach). And I've gone about 3/4 of the way several times. I'm familiar with Florida roads and their constant state of construction....

*shrugs* I usually got reasonably close on I-95. Maybe it's a time-of-year thing.

Either way, though, when you get to the other end, unless you live in Miami or you're going to rely on public transit, you'll still need to find a way to get a rental car, but you're no longer at an airport with car rental places, so you'll end up waiting for an Uber or Lyft or cab and going a mile or so to one of the car rental places, by which time you've almost certainly lost most or all of your time savings.

And even if it takes an entire hour longer by car and you're able to avoid extra delays that wipe out those savings, the cost is still exorbitant. Driving will cost you $20 in fuel for everyone in your party, versus $75 per person for the train. For a family of 3, that means the train costs 1100% as much as driving. That's a *huge* cost difference for such a small time savings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed that 4,600 people are riding it every day (which likely means about 150 people per train), but that's probably not even close to being commercially viable. They've already had to massively scale back their ridership projections because people aren't taking it nearly as often as they expected, which is likely because the cost is way too high for the amount of time saved.

And in spite of those high prices, the company is still losing money — on the order of $250 million per year, which makes the shortfall somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per ticket by my back-of-the-envelope math. And they are already $4B in debt.

I fully expect them to go bankrupt. I hope I'm wrong, but I definitely wouldn't buy their bonds. :-)

Nobody. Of course I also can't imagine driving further in a day than I can get on one charge. So it is somewhat of a hypothetical fear. For any trip over a few hours, a train or a plane starts to look very appealing whether you have an ICE or a BEV because sitting in any car for ten hours at a time kind of sucks.

No they're not. Which is why, if you can't self-service via the web site, you might as well give up. However, I should point out that not all call centers are terrible. I called Amazon Music once about a playback on device issue and got quickly to a higher-level support person who was very capable and actually opened a bug report that got fixed.

Right now it seems that 50% of the world is involved in posting pictures of themselves online and making more money than high skilled jobs. It's probably not actually 50% but it does seem that various forms of influencing and/or amateur adult content are an incredibly large part of the US economy. And since most of the call center jobs are already outsourced to other countries, the effect on the US economy of this might be negligible. However, I do agree with your point in general and would have modded you up instead of posting if I had points.

The true information gleaned from this article is that Ford actually makes some EVs...

The documented process is to never answer the phone.

Probably because Netflix is getting more expensive.

Seconds?? Wow, and they were complaining about my two minute average...

I think you mean that more women don't want to put up with abusive men anymore.

Oh, that's a relief, thank goodness. Remember, we don't have to act responsibly as long as anyone else is acting more irresponsibly. Say what you want about my BA in Basket Weaving, but my eggs are MAD well distributed.

You can't blame them for wanting to be near their mother when being born.

Right, but it's worse with Chinese because of the vast number of symbols, even with the mainland Siimplified Chiense. For a long time it was assumed that a practical Chinese keyboard could not exist, but once one was invented it's been a long sequence of improvements and competing methods. There are even contests for the fastest typist, and the winners tend to be the ones using predictive text, and the best predictive text will be going out to the internet. Younger people are using these systems over the older methods (and just like everywhere, older is uncool). So the choice often ends up between using the system that uses the internet and type quickly, or use the system that old people use and type slightly less quickly.

We don't need to rely upon the internet to type English, German, Hindi, or Japanese, even on smart phones. But there are a lot of Chinese who need this if they aren't practiced on the older input methods.

It didn't take Iran's attack to demonstrate this. Ukraine has been using old Gepard guns for exactly this reason. They can't afford to shoot down small Russian drones with modern anti-aircraft systems. Jordan does not have air defense systems and use F16s about which I know nothing. But pretty much any aircraft mounted missile is ungodly expensive so it cost Jordan a fortune to shoot them down. The whole world has seen it happen in Ukraine, could anticipate it happening other places, but still no military seems to have adjusted to deal with this type of threat. Just gross inertia I guess but it's borderline negligent.

You clearly have not driven from Orlando to Miami. Unless you do it at 3am, you are going to be stuck in traffic. Also sitting in a train where you can work is much more useful than sitting in a car doing essentially nothing but complaining about traffic. The $12 billion was *private* money invested by Brightline (okay there was some government money for shared track improvement) And it was worth it because there's a market of people who consider the train an order of magnitude better not because it's faster (this isn't a NASCAR race) but because it turns four hours of unproductive time sitting in traffic into three hours of productive work time. And those people are willing to pay money. Plus the round-trip cost of the train (assuming the IRS reimbursement rate of about $0.50/mile) is the same as the cost of driving. Yes, investing $12B of private money in a product that people want to buy that makes a profit and makes lives better is pretty good.

Most of the Brightline trip is on existing rail that was not setup for high-speed operations. Each and every grade separation was improved. But there are still going to be grade crossings on hundred year old lines (and there's nowhere to put new rail when you get close to Miami) So if you are limited to 90mph for most of the trip it doesn't make sense to try to go that much faster on the new section (total of forty miles).

The idea that the quality of a train is based on how fast it goes rather than how valuable it is to the riders who pay money to take it is something that is recurring in this thread and just doesn't make sense.

Wow, really? What must we be burning, I wonder, that the mountaintops we're also burning have fallen below the noise floor?