Year in Review: All Aboard Florida speeds along

If there is a Florida transportation winner of 2014, it most certainly is All Aboard Florida.

All Aboard Florida is the “proposed” high-speed rail service that would operate along the Florida East Coast Railway, but with a late October groundbreaking on the line’s Fort Lauderdale station, the project seems to have moved from “proposed” to underway in 2014.

The Coral Gables-based company began construction on what will be a 60,000-square-foot station at a 4.8-acre site adjacent to Florida East Coast Railway. In addition to $1.6 billion in federal loans the company applied for, All Aboard plans on borrowing $405 million to finance the project. The key features of All Aboard are:

• To connect Miami and Orlando in less than three hours
• Save time25 to 30 percent of time from existing travel options
• Provide relief to the state’s congested roadways

Service for the high-speed rail is slated to begin in South Florida by the end of 2016 and will eventually connect passengers to Orlando by the beginning of 2017.

The entire economic impact of the Miami-to-Orlando railway project is estimated at $6.4 billion and is expected to create 10,000 jobs across Florida during its construction phase. By 2021, the project projects 2,200 ongoing jobs.

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Story by: Nina Lincoff – South Florida Business Journal – Dec 19, 2014, 6:00am EST
Photo courtesy: Biz Journals

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