A great look at what Brightline did and why they did it...

Brightline used well documented travel demands to test alternative investment scenarios for ones that offered the best cost/benefit ratio (both to builased and operate)and refined technical and design parameters to get to a system that would be most likely to meet the observed demands, with fares, travel times, and freqencies to make a potential postive "return on investment" (aka "profit").

The CAHSRA ignored all of that sound market/demand based cost benefit (cost versus travel demand trade off's) analysis to "create" a "high speed" alternative, regardless of CA's many various observed travel demands in north south travel. CAHSRA's fiasco is based solely on an arbitrary travel time assumption, with no regard to cost/benefit (to ride, operate or build), or to real fare elasticity, freqency, and travel time tradeoffs, to determine that it must "a priori" be the most expensive and fastest "technology and design" as the first and only criteria, and then design a system where neither the costs nor "return on investment" were (and still aren't) even a passing consideration.

The lesson that should be learned, from the differing experiences and outcomes of Brightline and the CAHSRA, regardless of if it is a public or private investment in infrastucture, is that bad planning (like the "private" project in Indiana...) almost inevitably leads to bad projects... Plenty of poorly planned, bloated, and costly highway and transit projects could learn the same lessons from these contrasting examples "case studies" in HSR...