Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Public transit can be privatized and run for profits. Good example is Japan metro and train networks. Bad ones are bus routes in latinamerica.
Germany's partial privatization of public transit, led to major issues like underinvestment, frequent delays, and high costs for passengers, underfunding, and profit-driven management.
The trolley system in early 20th century US cities died due to issues related to privatization. It's been done; doesn't work.
Well, it's more like the model was unsustainable. The trolley system was originally built by neighborhood builders as a neighborhood amenity to attract buyers. When the neighborhood was all sold up, the builder would hand the system over to the city, who would then fund the maintenance of the system via ? which was fine and dandy for a while because rail infra doesn't need half the maintenance asphalt does, but once you had enough of these lines aging out and piling up maintenance issues all at once and the city having done almost no planning to fund said maintenance, the cities would reliably just say "fuck it, let people drive" rather than try pulling teeth via passing a tax or something. From here in 2025, I'm ready to send a terminator back in time at them over it, but I can see how they arrived there in the context of their time.
The problem is that if the profitable routes are private, who will run the unprofitable ones? This is effectively siphoning money away from the profitable public transit routes placing more of a burden on transit agencies.
That being said, even if it's 50% cheaper than a normal uber I doubt anyone will use it.
If there's already public transport on the route, why would anyone chose a presumably more expensive Uber-bus?
The fragmentation of railway companies is horrible to deal with. Tokyo is a mix between JR and Keisei and you need to buy a separate ticket for each.
At least they run really well.
There are actually more operators than just JR and Keisei, but transferring between any of them is usually very quick and painless if you have any of the major transportation network cards in Japan, or associated NFC app. Only tourists actually buy tickets at the machines.
However, it does tend to cost more than sticking to one operator.