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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting other companies build their own subways?

A subway seems like a natural monopoly to me.

The NYC subway system was mostly privately constructed by 3-ish private-ish organizations, and later joined under a state monopoly. You can still see vestigial underground signage that says stuff like "To IRT Lines" or "BMT Lines -->," referring to now-defunct private subway operators.

This is also why the rolling stock and tracking are visibly different from line to line.

Another vestige is that the lettered lines were owned by one of those companies, the numbered by another

You could contract different lines out to different companies. I think Tokyo does this.

At the very least, though, you could contract out the running of the whole system to a company for five years a time and let different companies compete for the contract every five years.

This isn't a panacea, but it can sometimes help if the main problem is corruption-induced inefficiency as it seems to be for most major cities in the US.

You'd need some kind of long term planning guidance behind that though because anything beyond the most surface level changes or additions to the system is going to take longer than 5 years and what contracting company is going sink millions of dollars into a system they're only guaranteed to be running for the next couple years?

The MBTA in Boston does this with its commuter rail lines. Currently the contract is held by Keolis, before that, a consortium of companies led by Veolia Transportation. You can Google "MBTA commuter rail performance" to see how well that's worked out.

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