alt Hacker NewsPeople on this thread forget that when legislatures cut funding, governments also defer maintenance on the infrastructure; especially since you mention roads and transit: governments tend to underfund both of these. Private companies of course do the same when shareholders demand more profit. It’s the same.
The rest of your point I agree, but good maintenance is not a given regardless of private ownership or government ownership. In fact I would say this is part of being a monopoly: there are no competitors and no market forces to compete on reliability.
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> governments also defer maintenance on the infrastructure; especially since you mention roads and transit
Roads are the outliers here because governments usually have direct oversight on them. They are more infrastructure rather than utilities.
Unlike roads, everything else discussed here (electricity, water, sewage, transit), even when public, is operated by a public company, not the government. Maintenance is part of the company's operating costs and is accounted for in the price consumer pays. And while there is no competition for reliability, there's also no obligation to maximize profits for the shareholders.
> good maintenance is not a given regardless of private ownership or government ownership.
Its not about maintenance, its about pure math and efficiency.
Natural monopolies have 0 advantage in terms of price discovery, therefore there are no market forces. And you get all the disadvantages of a monopoly without any of the advantages of capitalism.
Many purely capitalist countries still advocate for natural monopolies to be goverment run (Norway oil being public, Singapore owning all the land and housing, Spain having public healthcare) and all of those examples beat countries that have privately owned natural monopolies.
The difference is that we elect the officials in charge of the roads.
Of course they all like to push off maintenance as long as possible to avoid tax increases, but they will do them. Private industry will literally choose to wait for failure rather than do maintenance because they've discovered things can last longer than expected and they save more money by waiting for a catastrophe (and they can extra more government funds as they "don't have the resources" to fix a problem. See california's PG&E [1]).
The perfect example of this is the train system in the US and the problem we have with derailments. The US has more derailments than basically anyone else and the reason for this is that the rail owners aren't doing maintenance.
[1] https://www.actionnewsnow.com/news/top-stories/is-pg-e-press...