FEATURE
Tracking the Future Career in Transportation Leads Christine Kefauver to Brightline BY DIANE SEARS
Photography by Julie Fletcher
I believe that in almost any line of work, people innately want to do good things. If their passion aligns with what they like to do and what they get to do, it’s phenomenal what can happen. — Christine Kefauver
18 NOVEMBER 2021 | i4Biz.com
Christine Kefauver saw snow outside her bedroom window one morning in Naestved, about an hour’s train ride from Copenhagen. She was spending her high school senior year in Denmark as an exchange student, and she knew just what to do. She pulled the down comforter up under her chin and planned to stay in for a “snow day.” Her host mother laughed and said, “You’d never go to school here if you did that.” It was quite a change from what she was used to back home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. “The community I was living in was celebrating its 850-year jubilee,” Kefauver said. “I saw how everyone biked, no matter what the weather was. I saw how public policy impacted urban form, how there tended to be one vehicle per household. Between walking, cycling and commuting by train, the lifestyle
in Denmark lent itself to a higher level of personal fitness. There was not this passive riding everywhere. The transit systems worked.” That pivotal year ignited in her a passion for transportation, and she has since dedicated her career to everything from roads and bridges to bus routes to commuter train tracks to light rail lines. Much of that work has been in Central Florida, where she helped plan the SunRail commuter train system. Today, as the new senior vice president of corporate development for Brightline, she is the Central Florida face of a company that plans to bring highspeed rail from Miami to Orlando in 2022 and eventually expand to Tampa. “It’s all part of a larger ecosystem,” she said. “Brightline is not going to solve everyone’s problems, but it becomes the spine that you can begin to grow
