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It's run by government because private transit companies largely went bankrupt or otherwise bowed out of the business. I mean, we already know that private transit fails.
No, we don't know anything of the sort.
Private rail companies were run out of business by government regulations, absurd union rules and automobiles. 100 years ago the government controlled rail ticket prices then the automobile became a reality. Then union rules kept productivity very very low and governments beat them to death with high taxes.
If we had a free market today, private rail systems could be very successful.
Taking money from the working poor to subsidize the upper-middle class or rich just never made sense to me. YMMV.
And yet that's what many many government programs do. You don't see solar panels on trailer park houses and you don't see a Tesla parked in a neighborhood with $100,000 houses. All "green" programs transfer from the working class to the rich.
The private bus article has a number of inconsistencies as well as some cherry picking facts. It also seems the service they provide works best with small numbers and in areas that have inconsistent transit options.
A key point in this article is this.
"At $2 a ride, he needs to get 14 people in the van on the 5.6 mile trip from downtown Brooklyn to King's Highway to turn a profit." That is just to turn a profit, not everyone is commuting a minimum of 5.6 miles, therefore some people the transportation would actually be losing money to take a person. So then the question is, do they take them or not because it isn't profitable.
I remember a number of times I would just hop on the subway for a stop or two and then hop off. This was easy to do because it got me to where I was going a little faster than on foot, and I had a transit pass that made it so I could use transit whenever I needed without it costing me $2 per trip.
In that nature, offering unlimited transportation, which is something many people in NYC use for commuting, would be impossible to do as a private service without the risk of losing money.
As for Japan, there is a nice fun fact in that article, if the transit system isn't for a metro of 35 million people, then it probably won't turn a profit.
"Many third-sector railways outside of the Tokaido megalopolis are now in peril as their stabilization funds dwindle and further subsidies become unsustainable." So that means for smaller markets, a private transit system would probably be unsustainable and would end up dying off without heavy public subsidies.
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