Private companies are the only ones willing to make these investments in infrastructure so they can leverage the data it provides, i.e. BNSF and Buffet.
...because there's an anti-government cult that occupies a disproportionate number of government offices in the country.
"Bad" investments is exactly what government is for: things we'll all benefit from (including but not limited to broad economic contributions) but which market incentives don't align to produce.
This kind of purist thinking is dangerous because it prevents you from observing the facts as they are. For example whatever the root cause of California’s high speed rail problems, it’s probably more complex than “public government is bad”. But you will never find out because you have ideological blinders on.
The key thing is not the sector but whether there’s an effective oversight mechanism. It’s a lot more productive to focus on those feedback loops than trying to assume any sector comes in exactly one universal quality level.
Hard to do when the people who really understand broadband networking are working for ATT, Comcast, and Verizon and not for the government.
Funny enough, it seems like SpaceX has the solution for this and it's rolling out as we speak: https://www.starlink.com/ . Space-based internet that actually works and is actually fast is a game-changer.
Let's see how the telecoms respond to competitive pressure. If anyone can get 100Mbps within a year, I'm willing to bet Gigabit fiber/cable will be available nearly everywhere soon.
This does not defend the appalling incompetence in "managing" the HSR project, I'm just defending the choice of running the train up the Central Valley which I had not understood at the time the project was initially approved.
The Central Valley was chosen as the first construction package area because a lot of the initial money CAHSR got from the federal government had to be spent quickly, and flat ground means that the construction would be the cheapest and quickest construction portion. That the result has neither been cheap nor quick is a pretty severe indictment of the epic mismanagement involved.
Not sure if I'm misinterpreting your comment, or you're being satirical or what.
I was under the impression that it was the government in CA that massively misspent the tax payer billions they were given. As far as I know, there is still no usable "high speed" rail between LA and SF, which is exactly the type of project the left claims they could build, if we just gave the benevolent government more cash.
But maybe I'm in my own bubble, and have not heard the truth.
I'm more familiar with the "great" government infrastructure we've got in my own area. Let's just say the DC metro is garbage, and should've been seized from the corrupt local politicians who've used it as a crony jobs program for the last few decades. But instead, they'll be gifted with tens of billions of more tax payer dollars as part of the various stimulus bills.
Forgive me if I've absolutely no faith in anything the government touches anymore.
do you drive on roads
Free market Capitalism (one form of capitalism) is the only economic system that is compatible with individual liberty, since you oppose that I assume then you also oppose individualism, and individual liberty instead support Authoritarianism and collectivism
Have you heard of the call on the left to “abolish the police”? I have never heard this from libertarians. Do you support abolishing police and prisons? Because that seems to me a far more oppressive institution than, say, income tax. The United States has the largest prison population in the world, I cannot imagine anything worse for individual liberty than that. Also, what about people’s freedom to do what they want with their time? Americans work the longest hours in the western world and have some of the worst labor protections. Libertarians are obsessed with freedom to consume but have little interest in protecting people’s freedoms at work. If the government monitored how long you were in the bathroom, that would be insane, but when an Amazon warehouse in a small town in Alabama does, it’s “the free market”. Libertarians hate when the government takes your money, but love when your boss takes your money, libertarians hate lazy people who don’t work, but have no problem with people who in inherit wealth and live off their investments. They love free speech and free association, but hate unions: which is a freely chosen organization of workers representing their interests. I could go on, but I fully support individual liberty and freedom, which is why I’m a socialist.
The "who will build the roads" trope is common statement for people that support government largess, is ironically poor example of "good government" and completely ignores reality that in most area's the government does a VERY VERY VERY poor job at road maintenance while charging the citizens an obscene amount of money for that poor service.
If a private home owner assocation paid the amount of money most governments do per mile of private road they would be in the civil courts suing that contractor.
BTW many communities in the US do have private roads in them, maintained by the owners of the homes in those communities
Here in the DC area, we have the subjectively WORST traffic in the country now (DC, Boston, etc. might argue otherwise). Regardless, they've built almost 0 new capacity in the last decade EXCEPT for toll roads.
Yep, the main road I use in the DC's "tech corridor" in NOVA is a privately owned (by a foreign company, to boot) toll road whose prices have at least doubled in the last 5-7 years. Before Covid, I was getting alerts for $40 top-ups on my EZPass weekly, it seemed.
They used to have incentives for hybrids and EV cars to use the multi-user lanes (much less traffic during rush hour), but I believe they let those expire and now they use price-by-demand algorithms for the costs to use express lanes. They are almost insulting how high the prices will be at peak times - e.g. $20 to use express lanes for 1.5 miles.
As for residential roads - well those are already paid for with gas and local taxes. Interestingly, my state's sales tax is 30% higher than when I was a kid. Prop taxes go up every year due to exploding house prices, but I see absolutely no new services they're providing with all this extra cash. Do you, in your city?
In order to bid on a project, the government needs three bids from three from three different companies.
In my county, we have continual road, sewer, communications work. It's almost like it's never ending work that doesn't get completed?
I live in the lovely liberal enclave of Marin County.
I noticed, in my county, there is one company that gets All the work. (A very old company. If you live here you know it's Italian name.)
A few years back I started looking at the competing three bids. I looked up the heads of the companies that were bidding.
What I found was surprising.
In many cases the three companies that bid on a government job had a family member, related to the company that gets all our county work, on their contractor's licenses.
It looks like the Italian family sent their kids/grandkids to Sacramento to pass a very easy test, and had them set up "separate" companies.
Why--so at bidding time the three companies would be eesntially bidding against themselfs.
The winner of the "rigged" bid gets the contract essentially for the Italian family that gets all the jobs, and keeps the never ending road infrastructure jobs going.
The companies must share equipment, and employees? I guess it's all legal?
So---if you ever wonder why one company seems to get all the contracts, it might now be that it's the best company.
I do understand it takes millions in machines to build projects, and not every company has the equipment.
I just feel like the system is rigged, and not more efficient than many government run projects.
When there no real competition, and politicians who are way out of their expertise, granting the OK for a huge job; the private company can pretty much do whatever it wants, and blame the slowdown on the, "infarculator of the ground water table rod of thelvin, and that's why it's taking so long Chief?"
(Some projects have Performance Bonds. Many do not require them. Those ongoing projects where they seem to did up a road, and repair it, then dig it up again; most likely don't have Performance Bonds.)
Yeah, all those evil libertarians that run the west coast /s
NE corridor has decent passenger rail. CA has laughable passenger rail. Both are as blue and pro-"fix problems with government" as can be. I know sample size is only 2 but this does point to the cause of the discrepancy being elsewhere.
I agree that "picking up the shit nobody else will" is the kind of investment government should be making but clearly just "removing the anti-government cult" isn't enough to make passenger rail succeed.
Not in any useful way: freight delays passenger trains in the US with impunity.
http://blog.amtrak.com/2019/05/why-are-amtrak-trains-delayed...
The only significant thing that wasn't freight related, is they split the train in Albany when you are going to NYC or Boston. The second train had some issues, so it took a bit to get a different one, so we were sitting there without power in like, July for an hour or so.
For example, on the San Jose <-> Oakland commuter line (which has existed for decades!), Amtrak runs trains with top speeds of 120mph (or was it 85?) at something closer to a top speed of 45mph.
Edit: Also, the freight line routes no longer make sense. For instance, they run through a pedestrian plaza in Jack London square to an ecological restoration area in south bay, where most factories have been shut down. (There are still salt ponds, but that salt evaporation plant is slowly being shut down in an ecologically responsible way, as I understand it).
I think they should give the freight company imminent domain rights to run a line due east (to sparsely populated areas), allowing the freight lines to run unimpeded by Bay Area rush hour and pedestrians. In exchange, the freight lines would give their existing right of way to commuter rail systems.
Also, while I’m dreaming, Bart would be converted to standard track width, and they’d restore the Palo Alto to Santa Cruz commuter rail lines. Then, all the systems would be put under a single authority, and all the transfers between the existing systems would be timed transfers.
Should be "eminent".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eminent_domain
It's amazing to see the trains running at-grade right through a busy downtown street in Oakland; I feel like I've never seen that anywhere else! (Except in Inception as part of a nightmare, maybe.)
Due east from where? San Jose?
Having just driven that way last week over Hwy 130 - it is rugged mountainous terrain that would be quite expensive to develop with rail. Pretty though, and worth the drive in the spring for those who live in the south bay if you have a reason to take the long way out to the valley.
My personal experience is that having taken Amtrak from NYC a huge number of times, it's never been meaningfully delayed leaving Penn Station. But that it will get delayed en route, as the train comes to a halt and the conductor announces we're waiting for a freight train. We wait for 10 or 15 minutes, the freight train takes a couple minutes to whiz by, and then we start moving again.
So I don't know what priority Amtrak has on paper, but in reality Amtrak trains that leave on time are delayed by freight.
So much so that for my return trip where I catch a train that's already been en route for 8+ hours, it's virtually always 30-90 minutes late.
The number of times it has not been delayed by freight after that, crossing upstate New York, numbers in the single digits.
For some reason eastbound seems to fare better, but still no guarantees.
They also own sections of other lines - including the New Haven-Springfield line[1].
I'm under the impression that China subsidizes the cost of train tickets because it's viewed as an economic multiplier and sociatal benefit. As an American, it'd be pretty cool if America could do this. It'd also be helpful for tourists to visit smaller train connected cities rather than flying from 1 hub to the next.
We should build out more rail with the same logic.
I don't think this reflects the current thinking in Washington about Amtrak. I wasn't able to find its P/L history, but has it ever made a profit? I can't remember hearing that it did.
Only assuming ticket sales needed to cover all operations, which definitely need not be the case.
Since when? Source? They were always getting preempted when I used it.
[0] - http://blog.amtrak.com/2019/05/why-are-amtrak-trains-delayed...