Controversial opinion: Public transport should be publicly owned.
Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid.
In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.
Should people that live in urban spaces massively subsidize people that choose to live in rural areas for no economically useful reason? Like, some tech bros decide they don't want neighbors and want to live 20 km from everything. Should the city folk subsidize their preferences? Maybe it should be recouped in local taxes? Should that be covered by agricultural tax breaks?
Mostly I think public transit should be a public service. But I don't think it's a given that rich people's preferences should be subsidized just because they want to live in remote or suburban areas.
I also have a version of this from a doctor friend that lives on a "farm" that doesn't grow anything. Who should pay for the roads / public transit to their place? Everyone else? Again, I don't have a good answer. But I'm open to the idea that people that simply want to live in rural areas as a personal luxury should shoulder some of the costs to making those places accessible.
It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
That's blatantly false. It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
What worker productivity do you think society is loosing out on here? We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs.
The labor they provide and experience they earn in the social system is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables in a restaurant or flipping burgers at McDs instead.
Interesting take. Is there any supporting official position on this or just personal opinion?
If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social services systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribute. How do these systems handle the rest of the 9 months every year when the teenagers are unavailable on account of being in school. Why would a healthy society operate at the very limit of crashing down because the natality dropped or parents/teenagers start refusing to provide this service?
Now I've dealt with a lot of trainees in my life. All university graduates, including with PhDs. They all take weeks to months full time on the job until they're ready to do anything productive in the simplest of jobs. I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year (with 9 month breaks) to support a country's healthcare system from collapsing. And that's not even touching on the topic that you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
The government figures and claims are supporting this opinion. In fact, it's been the government's opinion, not mine. I'm just quoting it.
>If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social service systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribut
9 months not 3, and yes, that's socialized care for you and an aging population when you have too many people in need of care, and too little contributions into the system since the economy has stagnated post 2008 and taxes are already high enough and no more money can be obtained this way. And it's not just healthcare work, but all social services like kindergartens, retirement homes, refugees homes, etc. that make use of 9 months of teenage labor.
> I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year
You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR. At least not here. Teenagers are quite smart and quick learners if you treat them well.
>you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
The military service is forced nation-wide (a system kept through democratic vote), while doing social public civil work is the alternative choice if you feel the military is not for you.
And the children get paid for it, and for many it's the camaraderie and opportunity to meet other young people from other parts of the country/city and make life long friends or meet future spouses while learning useful social and life skills and feeling a sense of self worth for contributing to society, especially in the context of the west having a loneliness and depression epidemic among teens. It's also an opportunity for silver spoon kids of privilege families to get to interact with the lower classes of society and soo how others live, through this kind of work.
You're making it sounds like they're prisoners for life, but they're still free to go binge drinking and care free sex in the south of Spain after.
I believe you but since you're passing this on then you/they must also have more than some words in support. When critical systems would collapse were it not for teenagers being asked to work a job it calls into question both the competence of the leadership to lead and of the people to choose them. There's a reason most countries don't do this beyond basic apprenticeships on limited scale. What happens if this year teenagers start looking more towards the military following events like the war in Ukraine, do those civil services come tumbling down? You and the government make this sound like a country being driven at the edge of collapse.
> You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR.
Right? Who could be more qualified to operate a critical emergency vehicle or bring someone back to life than a person who until yesterday wasn't allowed even to vote. What a thing to say...
> The military service is forced nation-wide
Mandatory military conscription is an act of desperation in the face of potential national annihilation. Most countries abolished it and even the ones who kept it start at 18. Is the Austrian civil service conscription an equally desperate move? Or an attempt to raise a "working generation" from as young an age as possible while giving those kids the alternatives "this or the military"?
> and for many it's the camaraderie and opportunity to meet other young people from other parts of the country/city and make life long friends or meet future spouses.
Sure, except literally not because they'd get the very same by going to school or university. They don't need to be forced into a job they don't want because the country will fail otherwise unless it's the only way they'd do it. The only incontestable reason is because it's mandatory, everything else is rationalizing and looking for a silver lining.
Most neutral European countries like Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Austria have maintained it to one degree or another. I don't think it's generally viewed as 'an act of desperation' by most people in those countries or even that unpopular.
For these countries mandatory military service is very much an act of desperation. Maybe the word doesn't ring the right note in people's heads but it's accurate. If avoiding scenarios like in Ukraine doesn't call for desperate decisions I don't know what does.
But discussing the popularity is moot. The people of those countries understand the necessity driven by external factors. They chose neutrality, not their neighbors, so they have to compromise somewhere out of practical need and the desperation of the alternative. This being said you can only assess the popularity of something when it becomes a free choice rather than obligation.
Democratic elections and referendums have assessed this and the majority of the population has voted in favor of this system. For better or worse, that's democracy for ya'.
> the population has voted
But as you said earlier, it's the same population and elected leaders who let critical systems and services degrade to the point where they would stop working without forcing children to work. Even agreeing this doesn't put the people in a bad light decision-wise, in this position it's no longer a choice but a necessity. Hence my incessant question whether the government's statement that "services will fail without child work" is supported by some study or it's just a scare tactic to get people to vote a certain way.
Yes, democracy is about getting the people's vote of confidence. How you earn that confidence is outside the democratic process and could be as simple as "feed them BS".
> Yes, democracy is about getting the people's vote of confidence. How you earn that confidence is outside the democratic process and could be as simple as "feed them BS".
In Switzerland getting people vote is about much more then confidence as we vote regularly on actual issues, not just on people or parties. And because its Concordance system all parties share a certain amount of confidence form the population.
The political discussion about mandatory military services are certainly happening and have been for a very long time. Generally, in a conservative society you need to have a really convincing reason to change something, and in Switzerland at least nobody has come up with a great alternative that convinces many people so the system stays as it it.
I am not supporting this, I only said it's how it works here.
>Right? Who could be more qualified to operate a critical emergency vehicle or bring someone back to life than a person who until yesterday wasn't allowed even to vote.
And yet at their age they seem qualified enough for the US to send them to war in the Middle East or give them access to TOP-SECRET military intelligence[1] before they're even allowed to drink beer. You're needlessly discrediting youths for a cheap shot at an argument. Those people who barely got to vote, as you call them, are functioning members of society, who were vetted beforehand and given 3+ months of full time training and supervision by licensed and more experienced personnel before they get to perform CPR. Also, CPR isn't that difficult or risky, especially when you don't live in a society of ambulance chasing lawyers where everyone sues everyone for the slightest inconvenience.
> What a thing to say...
I'm not saying this, the facts are. Austrian healthcare and social system, with all its flaws, does a far better job serving the majority of the population, especially the poor and the vulnerable, than the American one does. But let's not get into that right now.
>Sure, except literally not because they'd get the very same by going to school or university.
They go to school and university anyway except with social work there's no grades or exams you need to study for making the time served there less stressful and more focused on the social and practical experience. Plus it's a more diverse setting than university where you mostly meet people with shared domains and interests as you.
>Mandatory military conscription is an act of desperation in the face of potential national annihilation.
You're false again. I don't support mandatory conscription but it's how neutral non-NATO EU nations get to defend their neutrality and provide a detergent against aggressors. The military also has plenty of uses even in peace times, such as natural disasters and what not.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/27/politics/jack-teixeira-de...
Ugh, "in support" of the veracity of the statement. You wrote that "the healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function" without the work of teenagers. I just wanted to know if you have any solid evidence of this. I will assume not, suspect that this is the usual political bamboozle people fall for when an explanation is needed, and move on.
> And yet at their age they seem qualified enough for the US
I'm not sure why you'd bring this into the discussion. It's devoid of value as far as whataboutism goes but indeed, I agree that it's very wrong in that case too. How about this: some of the US also considers child marriage and subsequent sexual relations, or hard agricultural work legal starting the age of 12. Hitching your wagon to the "others do it too" argument can backfire.
I'm sure those teenagers are functioning members of society but their function isn't to be forced into adult jobs at that age. If they want to pursue a career in this have them watch and learn, like any other teenager is expected in school or university.
> I'm not saying this, the facts are.
Just follow what I'm quoting. You are saying that "You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR". You're being dismissive of an entire profession as "a child can do it with a bit of training". It's not helping your argument. You actually need more than a bit of experience before driving any car safely, let alone an emergency vehicle in a critical situation. A teenager shouldn't be pushed in this kind of job. They have 40-50 years to do exactly that once they're just a bit older.
> Austrian healthcare and social system [...] does a far better job [...] than the American one does.
That's great. And again I have to say, how does this comparison help? When is it ever useful to compare to someone not doing a good job? This just says you can do worse. Focus on how to do better.
> You're false again.
And yet you go on to confirm that it's how they defend against aggressors, an indisputably desperate situation. That's exactly what desperation means, doing something to prevent/mitigate one of the worst situations a country can be in.
Now I sense that you made some assumptions about me, given the repeated US references. I'm European, my opinion about what the US is doing on internal social aspects, or external military/political aspects could be better. And I lived and worked in Austria for years many eons ago. I hope that helps you put in context what I said. Let me boil it down: let children be children; at the edge of adulthood let them choose where they go and guide them, don't force them, unless there is a desperate situation; use your critical thinking and don't believe (or worse, promote) the vagaries your government sells you when they want something their way.
Anyway, enlightening talk.
Nobody is being dismissive of anything. I'm just showing you proof that 17 year olds can also be professionals in that field because what is a professional, but someone who received professional levels of training and got certified. Guess what? So are those 17-19 year old boys and girls to the same standards of much older people.
In fact you're the one being dismissive and ageist because you think young people can't be trained to do a job just because of their age.
> A teenager shouldn't be pushed in this kind of job.
And yet they seem to be doing it just fine. And they are not pushed, they can choose for which service they volunteer. They can work in kindergartens, but many choose emergency services because of the practical life skills learned there, camaraderie, and other personal reasons.
> don't force them, unless there is a desperate situation; use your critical thinking and don't believe (or worse, promote) the vagaries your government sells you when they want something their way.
Nobody is forcing them, and it's not my government as I'm not Austrian, and the government doesn't benefit from this as the kids don't do work for the government but they provide work for their own citizens, neighbors, etc.
It seems strange to outsiders like you and me, but this is the path that the Austrian society has democratically chosen for its kids and it seems to be working for them. Why judge someone else because they're different? School kids in Japan also clean their classrooms instead of janitors.
The system was abolished because compulsory military service was not a great fit for the kind of army the politicians wanted anymore and cost a lot of money. The health care and social sector has faced some struggles as a result. While some of the vacancies have been filled by a new voluntary service scheme, overall it has contributed to a lack of service workers and it has increased costs.
I have done civil service and must say it was a fantastic time. Basically anyone I know who did it looks back at the civil service fondly, as it is much like university in terms of the social opportunities, but you get some money on the side. Military service on the other hand was reportedly much more of mixed bag (as you'd expect, I guess).
What? I did civil service in Switzerland and while there are some jobs that require CPR courses to be done before hand, in non is it actually expected that you need it regularly. And for absolutely sure will they not let 18 year old drive ambulances, that's utterly insane.
Can you show me prove that in Austria they let 18 year old civil service people drive ambulances? Because I know for a fact this is not happening in Switzerland.
It's not: Do we get a million teenagers or not?
There is a third option:
Let those teenagers join the workforce, use the revenue from the increased societal productivity to hire more professional workers in the health care system.
In case anyone is curious, this appears to refer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst_in_Austria which is an alternative to conscription in the Austrian Armed Forces. Conscription applies to men (but not women), and this alternative civil service option is chosen by ~40% of these young men.
But these people are starting university one year later, which means they graduate a year later, which means these badly needed, highly qualified workers become available to the job market a year later, because they have to spend their time doing some menial job that most of them have no interest in doing. We used to have this nonsense in Germany. Most of the people I know were just goofing off, were drunk or high on the job, or were deliberately destroying equipment, because nobody wanted to be there.
Simply paying normal people to do that work would be perfectly reasonable.
> is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables
Yeah but most people don't actually work minimum wage jobs. Me as a Software Developer spend 6 month cleaning windows. While this was reasonable fun and low stress not sure my window cleaning experience has this great benefit for society.
> not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs
You start your job one year later and therefore spend 1 year less doing it before retirement, not sure how this is difficult to figure out.
Is this even something people voted on directly or is it just one point among many in each party’s total stance to vote for?
https://www.ch.ch/en/safety-and-justice/military-service-and...
If you want to see open positions for the system you can see here (not in English):
https://www.ezivi.admin.ch/ivy/faces/instances/eZIVI/PublikB...
You can search for different keywords to find open positions. For me personally I worked in:
- Hospital as a Programmer (they made position for me)
- In another hospital as Technician (hanging up stuff, changing light-bulls, assessing damage, configuring doors and so on)
- Old people home, I worked for in technical service, including garden work.
- Old people home, I also worked as a cleaner, mostly windows, floors and so on.
In the hospital you can also work as a bed mover for example. You can work directly in old people care and things.
In general there are 100s of position, some position are even going with international aid organization to other countries. A friend of mine did his in archeology departments digging up old stuff. Another friends simply did farm work with a mountain farmer, that's the easiest to get (he in fact simply was to lazy to get a job so they assigned him to a farmer).
Why not just spend a year's worth of taxes on it?
Much more efficient than training a million teenagers to drive the bus every year...
To people who argue like this, I often argued in the past that if I were to contribute on an open source project for one year instead, this would do a lot more good for the public welfare.
The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.
Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis.
The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits.
The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.
It's not a matter of private vs. public.
Japanese punctuality numbers are inflated because their high punctuality of their high speed trains that run on dedicated separated infrastructure. In fact, large reason that punctuality in Switzerland suffers is because international trains that mess up the schedule (looking at you Germany).
And unlike Japan Switzerland is also world leading in using railway cargo transport, that also has to share the same infrastructure.
But in general, its not just about public and private, that a simplified vision. Its something for politicians to talk about rather then talking about the actual details of the system.
While Japan is privately operated, its certainty still under public control.
In fact in Switzerland there are quite a few railway companies for both cargo and people using the same infrastructure. Some of them are semi-private or owned by local governments or a mix of other organizations. The Semi-Private Post office runs its own trains for example.
It should have no issue at all to align German wide but they never did it.
The Munich MVG for example is doing an experiment were you can pay by an app from some us company were you just start and stop your journey with a button and the app gives you the best price.
They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
It's ridiculousl that modern problems are often not technical problems:-(
I completely agree that it is a mess, but it is not really easy to solve with so many stakeholders and so many (sometimes conflicting but valid) different priorities at stake.
But that already works with the »DB Navigator« app by Deutsche Bahn.
You can buy tickets for many local public transport companies. No need to download a custom app.
Errm, you do see the contradiction here, no?
The 49 Euro ticket is actually heavily subsidized which means more tax payer money is wasted that could be invested into the infrastructure of public transport.
Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous.
Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.
A lot of public transport runs on fossil fuels. Especially, since Germany was so »smart« to shutdown all nuclear reactors so that coal has become the most important source of electricity again.
They’re about to double the amount of carbon taxes levied on large trucks. That tax used to be used for building new roads but it’s now all being given over to new rail infrastructure.
Likewise, if you want them to be, so is public transport.
Though, here's a question: I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport — is that just my observations being weird, or is that a true distinction? And if genuine, why?
The fact that long-distance highways tend to be free speaks more to politics than logic, and there are a few notable exceptions (eg Japan) where all expressways are tolled.
And in Switzerland for example you just pay a really high gas tax that funds the highway, plus you have to pay a one time fee and get a sticker, otherwise you are not allowed to drive on the highway.
I think using the train is more like using the car. I can agree that the tracks are a public good, but actually using the train is clearly different from that. Just like the government provides me roads, but not with rides.
> I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport I guess my framework fits that, because while you may need to maintain the air and the airport, the individual flights only help the individual person.
In remote parts of the world, planes absolutely should be classified as public transport. Remote towns in Alaska, for example, are essentially inaccessible without bush planes.
However, planes are expensive to operate on a per-passenger basis, and in most places there are cheaper ways to facilitate helping people move around, especially since most trips from most people are short-distance.
My house has never been on fire (knock on wood), but I'm perfectly happy that my taxes pay for a fire department. I don't often use the park up the street that's currently undergoing a massive renovation/rebuild, but I'm happy that my taxes are paying for the renovation. I don't drive on every single road in the city, but I'm glad my tax dollars make it possible for people to get around even in places where I don't need to go. I don't have kids (and don't plan to), but I'm happy that the taxes I pay go toward educating the kids who live here.
Many public transit agencies are run at a loss; I'm absolutely fine with my tax dollars making up the difference. From there it's just a matter of degree: is it fully funded by taxes, or still partially funded by fare revenue? I'd be fine with the former, too.
You happen to be misconstruing the two definitions of "public good":
> a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization.
> the benefit or well-being of the public.
As such, something can be a "public good" without being "a benefit".
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=public+goods&si=AMnBZoHHbOut...
You’re just stringing words together to look smart; physical reality calls the shots. Your attempt to conjure some immutable truth in Anglo gibberish is banal
If there were no fountain, then many people would get water bottles and that's too big of a hassle.
Defining a public good is quite hard, and any definition will most likely other controversial terms like "reasonably" or "foreseeable" in them. However, I think a public good is something that can be shared by many people in reasonable amounts, and that cannot reasonably be attained by the average individual. It is usually characterized by its scale.
So for example, you can't build your own park, but you can use the public park without blasting your music on max volume.
Right, and if there was no public transit, then many more people would need to buy and drive cars, and that's not great for the public's interest either.
I think there is a difference between providing the opportunity and giving things out for free.
[1] Both because there are higher safety expectations for railways than for roads and because one of the inherent working principles of railways is to bundle individual demand into larger units (a.k.a. trains) that can be moved across the network en bloc. If everybody tried to operate their own individual little train across the network the way you do with driving your car, things wouldn't work out.
Public transit gets consumers to the mall and other shopping areas where they can circulate their hard-earned cash in a capitalist economic system.
Public transit gets individual cars off the road, increases safety of those roads, and makes everybody's transportation more efficient.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB...
I'll let you draw your own conclusions
From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
Dunno about satisfaction but clearly, when people were truly dissatisfied they stayed away and now the primary causes of satisfaction and reliability problems are simply that the network is so in demand it's at capacity all the time, especially London commuter routers. Some of that is driven by the huge increases in population via immigration in the last 20 years but some of it is just that privatized services are better, so people use them more.
Do these matter if ridership is falling?
If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes.
But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)
Certainly there were other problems: the nationalization was downstream of the socialization of the British economy between the end of ww2 and Thatcher, and as can be seen rail traffic (a general proxy for economic health) is in steady decline from then until it rebounds slightly in the 80s before taking off again once put in (mostly) private hands in the 90s.
The reason the graph seems to run a few years ahead of the changes is that actually privatizing and nationalizing something on the scale of a national railway takes a few years to implement between politicians floating the idea and the final handover of power, but the effect on people's motivations and incentives begins almost immediately.
Albeit with the minimum service levels always specified (and consequently paid for in the case of unprofitable services) by the government.
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point.
To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all.
Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.
Of course actually running a public transport system cannot be free, much like paving roads is not free. Pay for those with taxes.
Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.
Free markets are great at reducing inefficiencies in a world in which no participant decides to coordinate with other participants for profit. which obviously doesn't work, just like communism doesnt work at societal scales.
It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" .
In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free. A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too.
Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.
But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye".
Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for?
When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement.
And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
Social function of work. If you do it yourself, what will she do?
If you come up with a solution freeing hundreds of people doing some monkey jobs some in Germany will consider this evil, since people are losing their means of earning salary. This is more difficult with the officials, since they have guaranteed employment.
[Edit: typo]
In fact, in Germany you can see that it leads to government paralysis everywhere. In contrast, they should free "Staatsbeamte" from those stupid jobs and encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands. No jobs lost, but talent attracted. This eventually leads to operational excellence. The current state of affairs is overly defensive and reactionary.
I witnessed at least two panic attacks caused by the implementation of your suggestion to "encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands".
It has very little to do with bureaucracy. It's about supporting the large churches.
In some regions there is a lot of additional (social) pressure to prevent people from leaving the church.
Learning something new every day. How does it work. When and how does one get signed up for this lovely tax