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Comment by perspective1 | Hacker News Reader

You could argue that roads ought to be fully funded according to use and therefore turn a profit. Something like a value-added tax. Just about every other essential business turns economic value into profit-- if Amtrak services were so valuable the business could raise its prices and people would pony up. But its services just aren't that much value-added and passengers have plenty of alternatives. Namely, buses.

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Catch 22. If you underinvest in rail, you end up with trains slower than bus, which makes them a bad option. If you actually invest in rail, you end up in a situation where the rail is faster than bus and has less externality on the environment

Worse: if you underinvest, you end up with an unreliable and cost-inefficient train service that becomes ever more difficult to support politically. Which is exactly what we're seeing in this thread, good news from Amtrak notwithstanding.

This is a common libertarian argument. And I think it'd be very interesting to see in practice. I live in a state with many toll highways and people complain about the cost. But those highways are well maintained. And they complain about the potholes on the free roads. So I think it's more of an issue of people wanting everything for nothing.

One problem with a private road system is that roads take up space and prevent people from using that space for something else. I think that property tax on road surface area would be prohibitively expensive if a private entity were to own it.

Another problem is that building or expanding a road through an already populated area basically requires eminent domain.

Roads would still be built and planned by governments. But privately owned. See Highway 407 in Toronto, which was "sold" (100 year lease) to generate revenue.

Private ownership should be the product of private development in my opinion. Especially when what you'd be doing is granting a monopoly over a public asset.

We should never privatize profits deriving from public investment.

The free market works best with lots of competition. Roads by their nature don't have that.

What happens when a company buys both routes between town A and town B? What free market forces are going to drive down prices?

I do not agree in the least. Roads should be publicly owned and maintained. Private corporations will always seek to squeeze every last drop of money out of commuters because they are effectively a monopoly, especially on very long chunks of highways.

I didn't say I agree with that position. I think it's a terrible one, and the government that sold the 407 was incredibly misguided. But that's how it would work.

Highway 407 is a great example of what for profit highway systems look like: high prices, dynamic pricing, tons of hidden fees. Prices per mile are something like $0.80-1.00USD (for passenger cars), not including a few bucks in fees. When I traveled to Toronto for work, my bill per trip on the 407 was at around $50USD. This was in around 2014 and I imagine that prices have gone up a lot since then.

According to wikipedia, for each dollar collected by the 407, $0.21 goes to maintenance, and $0.79 to profits ($0.66 are paid out in dividends). The 407 collects $1.3 billion dollars annually with double-digit annual growth.

Private roads are economically unsustainable and serve only to leech wealth from society.

And also, tolls are a regressive tax.

Any subsidization of transportation requiring costs such as an automobile, insurance, licensing, and gas are also regressive; making a great argument that tolls should fund public transit (but with opportunity that that goes towards busses, rideshares etc in the private sphere too)

As strange as it is, the average person has many an opinion on roads and road maintenance, but very little understanding of the costs involved and where the money comes from. Also, I agree that everyone does want everything for nothing and complain vociferously if those free things are taken away.

Outside of speherical cows on infinite planes, Amtrak can't collect payments for the positive externalities it creates for the communities it serves.

Amtrak absolutely can. Simply by raising their prices.

The iPhone revolutionized mobile phones and greatly expanded the interconnectivity of the world. And yet nobody is demanding that the general public should subsidize Apple.

They should be dropping prices, not raising them, at least for longer trips. It costs about the same to take Amtrak vs an airplane for a direct connection 750 miles away, which is ridiculous because it should be far cheaper to run a train at 60mph than an airplane at 400+mph per passenger, and trains can carry far more people than airplanes. They also need to be way faster (120mph at least, ideally faster than that) to be a reasonable alternative to airlines.

The only way Amtrak gets to raise rates is if it drastically improves service.

Trains need infrastructure all 750 miles of that trip. Airplanes need infrastructure only at each end of the trip. Thus airplanes are cheaper to run very long distances.

Which are? Having ridden on buses and Amtrak, buses go to the same places and more, cheaper, faster, with more available times, and keeping on schedule (the NE corridor may be faster and on schedule, I'm not in that part of the country-- but that would be the exception). There may be a small pollution difference but its probably negligible.

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