alt Hacker NewsThe U.S. used to have a vibrant private transportation industry. The cities killed it. NYC is a great example. The vast majority of the NYC subway system was constructed by _two_ private companies (!) in the 19-teens(!) in competition with each other(!!). The city regulated them and kept them from raising fares in the 20s and 30s. By the 40s the city had to rescue and acquire them because they could not survive on artificially-low fares. And until the 50s there was a vibrant trolley car and bus network between Brooklyn and Queens. Today only the city runs buses, and there is much less capacity per-capita between Brooklyn and Queens.
It's the same nationwide, roughly. There is nothing like Buenos Aires' private bus system in the U.S. because the cities don't allow it.
It didn't have to be that way. But in the U.S. the federal government has no power to nationalize, the States do but are in competition with each other so they don't do it. But the cities?
The cities can totally "nationalize" the transport industry, and they do and did all the way up until ride sharing came along to destroy the hyper-regulated taxi industry. Ride sharing grew fast enough that the cities did not have time to quash it and now they can't without incurring the ire of their citizens.
Now finally comes the ride sharing industry to -let us hope- finally destroy the cities' stranglehold on public transportation.
Replies
kindly, what would make you believe that the private, highly-likely-to-ignore-or-skirt-regulation ride sharing industry would produce a mass-transit product that remains price/service-competitive in an american city?
i have zero trust in the private sector to do anything that won't turn into a gated community, become abandoned, or rely on labor that they won't exploit worse than what they already do with "the gig economy".
we can have the private sector provide public good but we don't have the regulatory infrastructure in place to enforce that, and the more we strengthen the private sector at the expense of the public sector, the further we get away from that, and the closer we get to Biff's America.
One thing to remember is that a lot of streetcar companies were started by developers who wanted to make their developments convenient travel from downtown. Many of them would have needed to consolidate or shift to remain financially viable.
The thing which killed transit was the massive subsidies for private car ownership and especially coding transit riders as poor/black. Cities didn’t kill transit because they loved traffic, it happened because much of the tax base moved out to the suburbs and generations of city planners prioritized private car travel over transit at almost every turn.