8 ms·

Controversial opinion: Public transport should be publicly owned.

by bleep_bloop 3y ago

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
They were at one point, but capitalism said everything needs to make a profit.
- PicassoCTs 3y ago
  The pyramid scheme grinds to an halt, if it does not. Everything goto join the MLM scheme, or those running the whole affair get a existential crisis.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    Central banking and social security are the MLM schemes. Free markets, if we had them, would rebalance that kind of thing.
    - 411111111111111 3y ago
      Sure, but completely unrestricted free markets would also reintroduce slavery etc. to the modern world. Free markets are great at reducing inefficiencies in a world in which no participant decides to coordinate with other participants for profit. which obviously doesn't work, just like communism doesnt work at societal scales.
    - govolckurself 3y ago
      [dead]
tfourb 3y ago
It technically is in many places around Germany: The national railway infrastructure is owned by a government-owned entity, as is the main railway company. Many municipal public transport systems are also owned directly by the municipalities themselves, although there are also some semi-privatized systems and the national railway company also owns shares of municipal public transport systems in many major cities. Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid. In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.
- okr 3y ago
  I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > The tax burden is already so high It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      >It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'. That's blatantly false. It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university. What worker productivity do you think society is loosing out on here? We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs. The labor they provide and experience they earn in the social system is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables in a restaurant or flipping burgers at McDs instead.
      - eska 3y ago
        It seems like you do not realize that the 30 year olds who don’t flip burgers and make more than minimum age were once those 19 year olds whose career you’ve delayed by 1 year.
        ChuckNorris89 3y ago
        It's the system the democratic voters have voted to keep.
thanatos519 3y ago
Even more: Public transport is a public good which should be funded by fossil fuel taxes and provided to users without cost.
- BasedGroyper99 3y ago
  Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.
  - josefx 3y ago
    Only if you assume a road network of infinite size which goods and various services can traverse without any interference from private car owners. Which a short look at any given city during peak hours should disprove and those roads are not free either.
  - hannob 3y ago
    If you take the train and not the car, you cause a lot less externalities.
    - BasedGroyper99 3y ago
      It may be the case that I cause a lot less externalities, but I don't think that affects the definition of a public good. If I visited my friend by using a motorcycle, I'd cause less externalities too, but I don't think motorcycles are public goods. Same with scooters, e-bikes and normal bikes.
      - werlrndkis 3y ago
        Because reality requires these things of us but we should minimize the impact. You’re just stringing words together to look smart; physical reality calls the shots. Your attempt to conjure some immutable truth in Anglo gibberish is banal
      - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
HPsquared 3y ago
It depends on the quality of the government and administrators.
timellis-smith 3y ago
Theres a really interesting graph showing rail usage under both public and private ownership in GB. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png/700px-GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB... I'll let you draw your own conclusions From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail
- dsfyu404ed 3y ago
  [dead]
- matthewmacleod 3y ago
  Nobody should be drawing any conclusions from a graph like that, since it provides no useful information allowing anyone to draw any conclusion about anything. If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  Doesn't really cover a lot of things you'd want to know like price, satisfaction, reliability, etc. - all of which, I believe, are strongly negative compared with 30 years ago. Also doesn't tell you if it's long distance or commuter or both - which is an important distinction since many more people commute these days. In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > price, satisfaction, reliability Do these matter if ridership is falling?
    - zimpenfish 3y ago
      > Do these matter if ridership is falling? If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes. But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)
inglor_cz 3y ago
In Europe, ownership of public transport is a pretty wild mix, and corporations that are publicly owned (or indirectly so) do not seem to work substantially better than private corporations that won public contracts. Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous. Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.
lakomen 3y ago
Well, the problem is, especially in Germany. If someone is a "Beamter" which can't be fired, has low income, there's no motivation to make a good job. It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" . In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free. A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too. Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.
- Escapado 3y ago
  I won't dispute that there is corruption and that there are still Nazis and right wing forces around - especially if you look in certain german states. But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye". Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for? When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement. And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
  - helge9210 3y ago
    > Why can I not do that online with my ID? > Why is she even typing it at all Social function of work. If you do it yourself, what will she do? If you come up with a solution freeing hundreds of people doing some monkey jobs some in Germany will consider this evil, since people are losing their means of earning salary. This is more difficult with the officials, since they have guaranteed employment. [Edit: typo]
ivan_gammel 3y ago
Ownership is no more than a collection of rights on what to do with the owned asset that is recognized by society. Regulate more and there won’t be much difference between private and public property, so ownership is less relevant than financial and incentive framework around public transportation system.
hannob 3y ago
It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case. The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.
- rippercushions 3y ago
  It's hard to overemphasize just how fucked up public transport ticketing in Germany is. As a simple example, you're a tourist in Cologne for a few days, what's the best ticket if you're planning to travel around the city and take a day trip to the nearby city of Wuppertal (but across the Verkehrsbund boundary, alas) to ride the famous monorail?
- redprince 3y ago
  > It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case. Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis. The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits. The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.
odiroot 3y ago
How is it controversial? It many countries this a normal thing. Even in strongly capitalist UK a good few municipalities own their bus system.
cromka 3y ago
[flagged]
- werlrndkis 3y ago
  Omnipresent habit to turn everything into the slightest personal attack is tiresome Social media is a dumpster fire of apes reciting memorized experience. Sorry not-sorry reality is not thinking of you first.
- rnk 3y ago
  Haha - at the same time many libertarians / conservatives want there to be no infrastructure owned by the public! Another way we are at war with ourselves in the good old semi-public private USA.
- Demonto 3y ago
  How is your comment connected to publicly owned local transport?
  - tfourb 3y ago
    Because public transport is owned by the public (or publicly owned entities) in many places outside the US. In Europe, it is the norm, not the exception, as is the case in many other places that have some sort of socialism/social democratic history.
    - konschubert 3y ago
      It's also owned by the public in most places of the US? How do you think the MTA or BART is financed?
- kelnos 3y ago
  Huh? How is the idea that public transit should be publicly owned Americentric? A stereotypical/caricatured Americentric take on that would be to privatize everything.
  - 3y ago
wunderland 3y ago
Not controversial in the handful of countries where public transportation is efficient and ubiquitous. Americans are fed constant propaganda about how publicly owned anything isn’t possible, sold to them by the very people whose profits rely on this being true.
panick21_ 3y ago
That's one of those grand standing issues that many people like to focus on. The reality is the is a wild mix of private, public and everything in between out there in the world. And some system that are increasingly good have combinations of everything. Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point. To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all. Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.
dahwolf 3y ago
Probably, although people would read too much into the word "owned" in that case. It's still going to be operated and supplied by private companies.
Kalium 3y ago
It's very plausible to have public transit systems be publicly owned by a mix of local, regional, and national bodies. Each of which might have their own local goals to incentivize with no regard for what a system on the other side of the country wants. Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.
kccqzy 3y ago
My controversial opinion: most public transport should be free at the point of use. Non-free public transport should be as rare as toll roads. Of course actually running a public transport system cannot be free, much like paving roads is not free. Pay for those with taxes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
switch007 3y ago
People love making this remark still in the UK despite the Government having much more direct control of more rail services than compared to pre-COVID, and the rail network being in an absolutely dire state. Public != good, public != bad, private != good, private != bad

Controversial opinion: Public transport should be publicly owned.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago

They were at one point, but capitalism said everything needs to make a profit.

PicassoCTs 3y ago
The pyramid scheme grinds to an halt, if it does not. Everything goto join the MLM scheme, or those running the whole affair get a existential crisis.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Central banking and social security are the MLM schemes. Free markets, if we had them, would rebalance that kind of thing.
  - 411111111111111 3y ago
    Sure, but completely unrestricted free markets would also reintroduce slavery etc. to the modern world. Free markets are great at reducing inefficiencies in a world in which no participant decides to coordinate with other participants for profit. which obviously doesn't work, just like communism doesnt work at societal scales.
  - govolckurself 3y ago
    [dead]

tfourb 3y ago

It technically is in many places around Germany: The national railway infrastructure is owned by a government-owned entity, as is the main railway company. Many municipal public transport systems are also owned directly by the municipalities themselves, although there are also some semi-privatized systems and the national railway company also owns shares of municipal public transport systems in many major cities. Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid. In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.

okr 3y ago
I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > The tax burden is already so high It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'. That's blatantly false. It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university. What worker productivity do you think society is loosing out on here? We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs. The labor they provide and experience they earn in the social system is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables in a restaurant or flipping burgers at McDs instead.
    - eska 3y ago
      It seems like you do not realize that the 30 year olds who don’t flip burgers and make more than minimum age were once those 19 year olds whose career you’ve delayed by 1 year.
      - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
        It's the system the democratic voters have voted to keep.

thanatos519 3y ago

Even more: Public transport is a public good which should be funded by fossil fuel taxes and provided to users without cost.

BasedGroyper99 3y ago
Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.
- josefx 3y ago
  Only if you assume a road network of infinite size which goods and various services can traverse without any interference from private car owners. Which a short look at any given city during peak hours should disprove and those roads are not free either.
- hannob 3y ago
  If you take the train and not the car, you cause a lot less externalities.
  - BasedGroyper99 3y ago
    It may be the case that I cause a lot less externalities, but I don't think that affects the definition of a public good. If I visited my friend by using a motorcycle, I'd cause less externalities too, but I don't think motorcycles are public goods. Same with scooters, e-bikes and normal bikes.
    - werlrndkis 3y ago
      Because reality requires these things of us but we should minimize the impact. You’re just stringing words together to look smart; physical reality calls the shots. Your attempt to conjure some immutable truth in Anglo gibberish is banal
    - yazaddaruvala 3y ago

HPsquared 3y ago

It depends on the quality of the government and administrators.

timellis-smith 3y ago

Theres a really interesting graph showing rail usage under both public and private ownership in GB. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png/700px-GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB... I'll let you draw your own conclusions From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail

dsfyu404ed 3y ago
[dead]
matthewmacleod 3y ago
Nobody should be drawing any conclusions from a graph like that, since it provides no useful information allowing anyone to draw any conclusion about anything. If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
zimpenfish 3y ago
Doesn't really cover a lot of things you'd want to know like price, satisfaction, reliability, etc. - all of which, I believe, are strongly negative compared with 30 years ago. Also doesn't tell you if it's long distance or commuter or both - which is an important distinction since many more people commute these days. In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > price, satisfaction, reliability Do these matter if ridership is falling?
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > Do these matter if ridership is falling? If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes. But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)

inglor_cz 3y ago

In Europe, ownership of public transport is a pretty wild mix, and corporations that are publicly owned (or indirectly so) do not seem to work substantially better than private corporations that won public contracts. Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous. Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.

lakomen 3y ago

Well, the problem is, especially in Germany. If someone is a "Beamter" which can't be fired, has low income, there's no motivation to make a good job. It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" . In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free. A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too. Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.

Escapado 3y ago
I won't dispute that there is corruption and that there are still Nazis and right wing forces around - especially if you look in certain german states. But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye". Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for? When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement. And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
- helge9210 3y ago
  > Why can I not do that online with my ID? > Why is she even typing it at all Social function of work. If you do it yourself, what will she do? If you come up with a solution freeing hundreds of people doing some monkey jobs some in Germany will consider this evil, since people are losing their means of earning salary. This is more difficult with the officials, since they have guaranteed employment. [Edit: typo]

ivan_gammel 3y ago

Ownership is no more than a collection of rights on what to do with the owned asset that is recognized by society. Regulate more and there won’t be much difference between private and public property, so ownership is less relevant than financial and incentive framework around public transportation system.

hannob 3y ago

It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case. The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.

rippercushions 3y ago
It's hard to overemphasize just how fucked up public transport ticketing in Germany is. As a simple example, you're a tourist in Cologne for a few days, what's the best ticket if you're planning to travel around the city and take a day trip to the nearby city of Wuppertal (but across the Verkehrsbund boundary, alas) to ride the famous monorail?
redprince 3y ago
> It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case. Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis. The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits. The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.

odiroot 3y ago

How is it controversial? It many countries this a normal thing. Even in strongly capitalist UK a good few municipalities own their bus system.

cromka 3y ago

[flagged]

werlrndkis 3y ago
Omnipresent habit to turn everything into the slightest personal attack is tiresome Social media is a dumpster fire of apes reciting memorized experience. Sorry not-sorry reality is not thinking of you first.
rnk 3y ago
Haha - at the same time many libertarians / conservatives want there to be no infrastructure owned by the public! Another way we are at war with ourselves in the good old semi-public private USA.
Demonto 3y ago
How is your comment connected to publicly owned local transport?
- tfourb 3y ago
  Because public transport is owned by the public (or publicly owned entities) in many places outside the US. In Europe, it is the norm, not the exception, as is the case in many other places that have some sort of socialism/social democratic history.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    It's also owned by the public in most places of the US? How do you think the MTA or BART is financed?
kelnos 3y ago
Huh? How is the idea that public transit should be publicly owned Americentric? A stereotypical/caricatured Americentric take on that would be to privatize everything.
- 3y ago

wunderland 3y ago

Not controversial in the handful of countries where public transportation is efficient and ubiquitous. Americans are fed constant propaganda about how publicly owned anything isn’t possible, sold to them by the very people whose profits rely on this being true.

panick21_ 3y ago

That's one of those grand standing issues that many people like to focus on. The reality is the is a wild mix of private, public and everything in between out there in the world. And some system that are increasingly good have combinations of everything. Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point. To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all. Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.

dahwolf 3y ago

Probably, although people would read too much into the word "owned" in that case. It's still going to be operated and supplied by private companies.

Kalium 3y ago

It's very plausible to have public transit systems be publicly owned by a mix of local, regional, and national bodies. Each of which might have their own local goals to incentivize with no regard for what a system on the other side of the country wants. Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.

kccqzy 3y ago

My controversial opinion: most public transport should be free at the point of use. Non-free public transport should be as rare as toll roads. Of course actually running a public transport system cannot be free, much like paving roads is not free. Pay for those with taxes.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

switch007 3y ago

People love making this remark still in the UK despite the Government having much more direct control of more rail services than compared to pre-COVID, and the rail network being in an absolutely dire state. Public != good, public != bad, private != good, private != bad