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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

The big mistake was in assuming a public transport system could be profitable. Almost none are. Many of the best public transport systems in the world barely scrape by and are continually at risk of collapse. The benefits to businesses, improved mental health of passengers, reduction in pollution and traffic are all external benefits to the community which are not accounted for in the transportation systems budget. Some governments recognize this and so continue to subsidize their transportation systems. Countries like the US which demand that everything be run like a corporation will continue to fail to realize any benefit removed a step of two away from this quarter's profits.

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Well they would most all be in better off shape if they did not waste their resources on heavy rail. About the only need for such is to airports, past stadiums, and possibly central commercial districts. However their cost per mile to install, maintain, and operate, all wreck budgets. Worse many bus routes get co-opted to serve rail nodes which worsens the bus experience and not really help the rail.

The key reasons buses are better is that they can go where people need to go and are not locked in to where they are built out at.

The sad part is that in many parts of the world ridership doesn't increase much with the cost going down, even to free. hopefully autonomous fuel cell / battery cars and buses will make point to point more manageable and viable overall.

Rail is much more reliable then buses since it doesn't compete with car congestion, plus you can make it run much more frequently, both of which are very important for adoption.

Totally agree. Unless you do it like SF with its T line and have intersections that serve both train and car and give the car precedence ...

Not if your rail isn't grade separated. You can just as easily build grade-separated for buses or, even easier, have bus-only lanes.

> Rail is much more reliable then buses since it doesn't compete with car congestion

That is not true in some places. MN built its light rail in such a way that interacts with normal traffic quite a lot (including killing people because of a really badly designed interaction on a former turn). I get the feeling someone in the planning office had taken no lessons from street cars.

I'm guessing you mostly mean light rail, since there's not a lot of money going into urban heavy rail. There are a couple of reasons why these can be better than buses:

- You can invest around them. Because unlike a bus, a tram can't just be upped and moved somewhere else developers are able to build housing and services confident that there will be service.

- They are easier to segregate and run at speed so that you can run limited stop services that are credible. I suspect this is what you are getting at with airports, but I'm not sure why you think an airport is the only reasonable use for fast limited-stop operation

- They can carry more people easily. 2 or 3 car trams are the norm, and the smoother ride and increased safety means that it is much safer to carry lots of standing passengers

- People like them. You can actually get people out of cars onto a tram, where faced with a bus they will assume that it is going to be dirty and they will be robbed (however untrue that is)

You may be assuming 'public transport' = government-run monopoly transport: government-run services almost never make money, but that's not a transportation issue. This econtalk podcast has a interesting discussion about how Chile moved from private to public: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/07/munger_on_the_p.htm...

Looks like there's an essay too: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Mungerbus.html

> The benefits to businesses,

Businesses, especially consumers, are helped more by the mobility of a car than public transport

>improved mental health of passengers

1. This is not an external benefit. This, if true, should mostly be reflected in people's willingness to take public transport. Of course, people taking public transport are in my experience usually of the most dubious mental health. So that's concerning.

> reduction in pollution and traffic

Fair points.

Traffic is by far the best case for running public transit at a loss, IMO. Though it must be weighed against spending that money on more freeways.

There are benefits, though not as many as you are listing, and we should be weary of running them at too much of a deficit.

In general the idea of running things as a business is not to say they should be run at a profit, it's to say they should be run efficiently like a free competitive market typically does.

This is not an external benefit. This, if true, should mostly be reflected in people's willingness to take public transport. Of course, people taking public transport are in my experience usually of the most dubious mental health. So that's concerning.

What you'll find is that people use public transit in cities where its convenience outweighs the convenience of a car. In cities where that is untrue, only those who can't afford a car use public transit.

Which is to say that public transit isn't somehow magically better than auto travel by virtue of some fixed aspect of public transit.

It's better when it's better, which may sound like a tautology, but is actually just kind of an obvious truth, evidence for which is available all over the world.

I'm not sure it's just convenience but rather some combination of convenience, cost, and just preference. But your basic point stands. The vast majority of people will use public transit when it works better for them personally given their other options on a given day. This tends to most commonly occur in cities that have relatively good transit systems (for the trip in question) and congestion that makes the same trip by car relatively unpleasant/slow.

You need to do some travelin'! Your perception of mentally questionable people taking public transportation may well apply in the USA, but in other countries it's simply not the case.

In big Russian cities it is way more convenient, cheaper, quick, and as pointed out -- mentally relaxing -- to take a tram or subway than to drive your car in the insane traffic. The clientele on said public transport are, for the most part, friendly, and you will see men scrambling to help old ladies or women with strollers onboard.

> Businesses, especially consumers, are helped more by the mobility of a car than public transport

This assumes that everyone has access to a car, and that all automotive commutes are possible during "rush hour". Many businesses directly benefit from public transportation by expanding the labor pool to those who would otherwise be unable to commute.

> Of course, people taking public transport are in my experience usually of the most dubious mental health

For a brief moment I thought Mrs Thatcher had risen from the dead and signed up to HN. Whew.

In general the idea of running things as a business is not to say they should be run at a profit, it's to say they should be run efficiently like a free competitive market typically does.

Sure, but the alternative to inefficient government spending on mass transit isn't some free market solution; it's inefficient spending on automobile infrastructure.

Or why not efficient government spending?

Do governments have to be inefficient? Can they be designed better?

In general, a free market competitive approach is always preferable where possible, but I think there is room to add better incentives in government as well.

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