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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

> Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service

There's a huge number of dollar van systems all around the world, they're usually profitable, sometimes profitable enough to wage wars against competitors.

Public buses: Big, amenities, lose public money. Private minibuses: Small, rough, earn profit.

Moreover, they can totally turn the table with regards of quality of life. Village where my granma lived had a bus from the city maybe once per for hours. Now it has some bus still, but also a minibus every 15 minutes! That's a game changer.

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Is there anywhere to compare the wages, credentialing, and insurance of those drivers to those of a city's bus system?

It's easy to earn a profit when you don't pay taxes or have to worry about liability insurance.

You say "credentials and insurance" I hear "red tape and rent-seeking".

UPD: But yes, they do have some paperwork. Its relevance is open to the debate. However, same applies to any paper coming out of public bus system.

You say "red tape and rent-seeking", and I hear "fly-by-night operators, fraudsters and scammers".

How bad your police should be before you can be profitably scammed by a bus?

Police aren't there to prevent the first offense - only to clean up afterwards. Regulation (read: licensing, etc) is more pre-emptive in heading off some of these issues.

There's only so many minibuses. It's not an infinite number, so obviously, first offences occurence will be naturally limited by this fact.

Regulation also costs society money, indirectly taken from your wallet. You spend a lot of money without even solving a problem, because there's no certificate for honest person.

I would say, regulation costs 10x of cleaning up afterwards, which you still have to do. I would wait for the first offence if it was me.

We wouldn't want fraudulent bus rides, now, would we.

It's more like unsanitary or unsafe vehicles and dangerous drivers who are either unlicensed or violent.

Having ridden public transit in the USA, dollar vans that I have ridden elsewhere have a long way to go before their sanitary status deteriorate as much. I'm talking about scary sticky floors everywhere. Light rail in Sacramento is ghetto on the wheels, and don't pretend blaming it on poverty since dollar vans were in much much poorer areas than CA.

If anything, driver of private vehicle cares more about their vehicle, it being private. Who cares for public ones?

driver of private vehicle cares more about their vehicle, it being private

That's how it starts. But then one bus driver figures that if he gets together a loan, he's able to buy a bunch of buses and hire a bunch of drivers and scale up his income.

Next thing you know, he's trying to evade liability when one of his dodgy buses has an accident, or he's trying to avoid repaying the loan, or he's cheaping out on driver skill. If the whole house of cards falls down, he sets up another shell company via a relative, transfers the assets across via a sale, and continues on his merry way.

The private bus owner with the well-maintained bus goes out of business because the he's outcompeted by the scale efficiencies of the fly by night operator.

You can obviously hold a call for bids on dollar van routes, so that the best routes go to most capable companies and upstarts have to choose between less desirable routes.

Other than that, you could write same things about bakeries and not buses. But we still have a lot of inexpensive private bakeries around.

We already have highways full of private vehicles with no rules about responsible upkeep. Bus operators have an incentive to keep their vehicles working and not get wrecked.

There are dollar vans in NY, that supposedly regulated and still profitable. It's really weird how developed world mostly ignores third-world model of private mini-buses.

I’ve been on a third-world minibus. In comparison to developed nation public transport, it was overcrowded by a factor of two, it only set off when it was full and not to any timetable, and (from what my partner told me after living there for years back when she was a teenager), most of the drivers constantly consume stimulants so they can work for 15-hour days.

(I would also describe the minibus as poorly maintained, but that’s by European standards — I was really surprised by the poor condition of American vehicles on each of my three visits, and it didn’t seem significantly worse than an American vehicle).

This depends on a country, I've seen some where it's municipal bus, that is overcrowded, and mini-bus is a more "premium" service. But anyway, do you think you should force them to pay twice the price by removing the overcrowding? It's just a revealed preference, like with airplanes, people prefer price to comfort. Modern startup in this area can experiment with a different price for standing/sitting.

If this jitneys are really worse, there is no need to forbid them, municipal buses will outcompete jitneys.

No one is forbidding "jitneys". What is being discussed is maintaining certain safety standards that, as an individual, one might not consider significant enough to care about, but on a societal level, make everyone's lives better.

For example, someone can undercut you on price by taking risky shortcuts. Therefore your product or service won't sell, but as a society, it's better for everyone that certain standards are met. Hence, regulations on electrical work and plumbing, etc. Same thing with driver's training and sleep minimums.

Real life example is the recent bus crashes in New York City from overworked or underpaid Chinatown buses.

Are you talking hypotheticals? Because in reality private jitneys are mostly forbidden in US, not regulated.

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