The End of Public Transit?

People tend to forget that many of the most effective public transit systems were originally built out by private companies and then acquired by governments after the private company went bankrupt. A good chunk of the public transit systems on the East Coast at least are the result of the railroad boom & bust at the turn of the 20th century. Transportation at scale, is not all that profitable in the long run. Yet people still depend on it. That's why government is involved in the first place.

It's probably not a bad pattern - let private companies innovate and rapidly build up the new networks and then have public administrators step in when the private sector fails to turn a profit.

Reading a related article, about "super commuters" who use the Megabus to commute to NYC from Philadelphia ( http://www.villagevoice.com/news/meet-phillys-super-commuter... ) - it's another example of a private company filling in a gap in public transit infrastructure, albeit less high-tech. Might lead to improvements of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor at some point, or dedicated BRT lanes on I-95, who knows. Either way it's a private business demonstrating increased demand, and the public sector will eventually catch up.

Uber works in the US because we're trying to solve a problem that is often separate from the ones transit solves. Transit needs density and fixes much of the congestion that comes from density. In most of the US the density just isn't there. Or there's a dense core, but people don't live in dense places, so the transit would have to connect the dense core to the vast, diffuse web around it.

How much of this is actually the private sector doing something cheaper and how much is startups using VC funds provide service for less than it costs them?

> The End of Public Transit? > Start-ups are proving more efficient than government in areas like transportation. Should some services be privatized?

As usual, the answer to a headline is no.

Transportation is not something I trust to private entities without major government oversight. And in general, even with that oversight private entities primarily look to make a profit, which the government isn't as concerned about (e.g. the city of Townsville isn't concerned with shareholders like Megacorp Inc. is). I think public-private partnerships work well -- see Japan's JR, Korea's Korail -- but completely privatized transportation would be a detriment to society because the priorities of profit vs need would be skewed.

For example, I can imagine a future where "private" transit (the private version of public transit) is ordered by phone, but will only pick you up if enough people want it in a specific area. This kind of thing happens a lot: look at how many bus stops are passed by later at night in SF. I can also imagine that if public transit became private, some bus lines would stop running at certain times because it's less profitable, because profit is a major concern in a company.

I also don't like the idea that transportation isn't essential and therefore should be given to private companies, as alluded to in this article: "Rather than spending millions to operate multiple transit lines and modes—while losing money—the government can spend less and leave the headaches of running those systems to someone else. It can use the savings to pay for other, essential, government services." For many people, transportation is an essential service, one stop removed from the base needs such as food and shelter. I'm maybe being a little pedantic about the wording, but I would argue that transportation is essential, albeit less essential than something like running water.

It's easy to forget that a lot of the services that exist in SF around transportation are heavily VC funded, and are running in the red most of the time (look at Lyft, Uber). This lulls us into a false sense of security thinking that, "this is cheap, it will stay cheap forever." Most of these services are subsidized by VC money and when that money starts to dwindle and profit becomes a bigger concern, prices will go up and the equation isn't as simple as it might seem now.