Florida’s financial system runs on infrastructure. Roads, ports, airports: these are the arteries of commerce, and sensible enterprise leaders know {that a} state’s competitiveness is barely as robust as its capacity to maneuver folks, staff, and items effectively. That’s why I’m championing passenger rail right here in Florida. Rail is an amazing asset that Florida companies and leaders ought to prioritize by supporting and investing in its future.
Multiple million passengers rode Amtrak by Florida in 2025. A million journeys by 18 stations spanning the state, by communities the place Florida companies want staff to indicate up, prospects and vacationers to reach, and expertise to take root. It’s a significant piece of Florida’s mobility infrastructure, and it deserves the identical critical consideration from the enterprise neighborhood that we lengthen to port expansions and freeway investments.
Passenger rail is basically about connectivity—linking communities, labor markets, and companies throughout Florida and past. Amtrak doesn’t simply transfer folks between stations; it connects Florida’s rising financial system to the nationwide community that helps tourism and expertise.
The Florida Chamber’s 2030 Blueprint units a transparent goal: join all main inhabitants and financial facilities to regional, nationwide, and international markets by high-capacity corridors. Our inhabitants is rising sooner than our infrastructure can maintain tempo. Our workforce housing problem is actual. Our congestion prices are rising. Each viable mode of transportation that strikes folks reliably (releasing our roads for commerce and decreasing the friction of development) is a software for reaching that high 10 international financial system we’re constructing towards.
Rail drives that financial system in methods which are straightforward to quantify. In 2025, Amtrak directed practically $89 million in procurement to Florida companies in communities massive and small throughout the state. It employs greater than 700 Floridians and paid out over $68 million in wages in-state. It’s investing $42.8 million in ADA accessibility upgrades at Florida stations and maintains gear services that maintain expert trades jobs in communities statewide. That’s the sort of place-based financial exercise that compounds, and helps native suppliers, anchors employment, and circulates {dollars} by our communities.
Florida’s tight labor market makes each dependable transportation possibility a recruitment and retention software. The Auto Prepare alone carried 267,000 passengers final yr, giving households and retirees a sensible, reasonably priced strategy to relocate to Florida. Nationally, Amtrak ended 2025 with a file 34.5 million journeys and $2.7 billion in ticket income, each all-time highs proving that demand for passenger rail is a sturdy shift in how People select to maneuver.
Amtrak President Roger Harris captured the chance most clearly, “By prioritizing reliability and the client expertise, we’re laying the inspiration for the subsequent era of passenger rail in America.” That basis runs by Florida. The enterprise neighborhood has each a stake and a voice in ensuring it will get constructed.
Florida has outcompeted each state within the nation for expertise, funding, and alternative. Our transportation infrastructure ought to be no completely different. Florida’s financial system runs on mobility.
Passenger rail strengthens commerce, attracts funding, and offers staff and companies the connectivity they should thrive. The selection is obvious: make investments now in a dependable, fashionable rail system that helps Florida’s development—or threat falling behind as congestion and demand outpace our infrastructure. Rail isn’t a luxurious; it’s a wise, forward-looking funding in Florida’s future.
T. Michael Hines is a former president and CEO of Challenger Consultants, Inc., a agency that labored with Florida landowners and companies on eminent area issues associated to main public infrastructure tasks. An avid passenger rail champion, he has additionally served in quite a few federal, state, and civic management roles spanning greater than three a long time.
