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This is precisely why US public transport is stuck in the 1800s. And why EU public transport is stuck in 1950s.
All while China has public transport from 2030s and nearly more subway railways (by total length) than the rest of the world combined. Of course, this is not meant to glaze China. Just to give credit for building public transport without a profit incentive.
Are roads profitable?
if they’re toll roads
When people say public transport isn’t profitable they conveniently seem to forget all the subsidies and tax exemptions the alternatives receive
“it’s not profitable”
“that’s ok, I’m not looking to make profit, I’m willing to ride it for free.”
IS this accurate, though?
Anyone who lives in or knows Europe is well aware that it’s much cheaper and faster to fly over HSR on that continent. If you have time and don’t feel like dealing with airports/planes, the train is a preferable option, but it comes at more cost.It’s not true in general. It can be cheaper, but it can be more expensive. Source: I have traveled either plane or HSR twice a week for the last ten years, journeys between 200 and 500km. Anything longer than that I always fly, for time reasons (I try to avoid sleeping in hotels so I can be with my kids the next morning).
In general, it depends on the distance, country and day of the week. Italy and Spain are great for trains, Germany much more hit and miss, but you can still get 19 or 29 euro tickets. Ryanair used to offer those but it’s much more rare nowadays. I have no data for France but I hear TGV is also good and they are working on reducing domestic flights.
For my typical journey (usually booked with short notice, 1 to 3 weeks) I pay a maximum of 220 euros for train, the average a bit lower, and about 500 for flights, average maybe 400. And this is comparing first class, flex ticket for train versus economy class cheapest ticket for plane.
Full disclosure: the train price includes a 50% discount that I get for 400 euros a year (BahnCard50). The ammortized price of the card is well under 10 euros a ticket.
Fun fact: you can get a BahnCard100 which gives you a 100% discount on tickets, so flat fee for a while year. My company policy does not allow this. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Isn’t Airplane Kerosene heavily subsidized here? I feel like trains would be cheaper if they were given a fair chance.
Airplane fuel is basically untaxed worldwide due to the Chicago convention. But also infrastructure costs for HSR are very high and scale with distance whereas the opposite is true for planes.
Sounds plausible. I’ve no idea.
In Germany, HSR also has to pay fees to use the rails (while cars get to use roads for free). Plus there is always a push to make it profitable, which results in constant rising prices.
Mass transportation should drop the pretenses of being a business and stop demanding a fare from people riding it.
That would solve a lot of problems, and make the system way cheaper.
Exactly. We don’t expect freeways to be profitable.
yup. make it a government service.
I gotta be honest, HSR is one of the things I have no idea how it could possibly be built by anarchists. You’re never going to get every single person along the route to agree that it’s a good idea.
Yeah, cant even do that under capitalism. One the biggest things holding up high speed rail in Texas are all the landowners who are vehemently against it.
Usually the state can declare eminent domain and force a sale. Varies by jurisdiction though.
Yeah exactly. There are multiple reasons why HSR is so difficult in the US vs China or even Europe but higher protections for land owners is one of them.
Of course, an anarchist society would not have land owners per se, but it would presumably be even more deferential to the desires of people who are using that land. CA HSR still forces people off their land, it just gives them legal avenues to object and slow down the process. But what if they could just say no indefinitely?
If you want long, linear, contiguous infrastructure like rail or highways, it virtually requires overriding some level of objection from people who live or work along that route. So then does a society that fully protects individual autonomy simply not build such infrastructure? This would pose a challenge for modern logistics, although I suppose water and air freight would still be quite viable.
The sad part is here in Texas, imminent domain could take the land and pay a “fair price” to the landowner. But we only do that to poor minorities in order to build football stadiums for private companies.
Neoliberals: Correct. That’s why the only possible way to have HSR is if you give the railroads infinite land to develop and interest free loans. Then if you’re lucky, they’ll subsidize the unprofitable railroads by renting out the most expensive land in the city as exorbitant rates! Or maybe they’ll cut rail service and raise ticket prices anyway! Shame there’s no alternative.
A nice private-public partnership, with a contract guaranteeing profits for the private investors and the public pays for it through taxes.
Yeah a great way to give a private business a bunch of tax money for providing the cheapest shittiest possible service without losing the contract. Private businesses will always pursue maximum profit because that’s what they’re structured for, so they will never prioritize the quality of their product or service over that. The only reason to privatize public transit is to give a juicy overpriced government contract to the friend/relative/favorite lobbyist of some corrupt politician. Even if it doesn’t start out that way, just wait a little while. Capitalists going to capitalist. It’s only a matter of time before that kind of organization is bought out by some private equity firm that will enshitify it.
Well, it can be plenty profitable. It just exists in a world of other transportation methods that are heavily subsidized.
Rail produces externalised goods, the same way that not having rail, i.e. suburbia + truck traffic gridlock, is producing externalised costs and opportunity costs. Short term thinking, colloquially called “being stupid” and incentivised by capital-centric political economy, doesn’t even recognise the concept of externalised good: “but I’m paying for people I don’t like” - first-day-in-society people complaining like 12 year olds that they have to do the dishes sometimes.
I don’t even go to school why should I have to pay for it! (Benefits materially from ubiquitous public education daily)
I’m not sick why should I have to pay for other people to go to the doctor! (Benefits materially from people being generally healthier than people without healthcare daily)
I prefer the freedom of my huge SUV why should I pay for people to take the train or ride their bike without the fear of death by car! (Benefits materially from people using other forms of transit daily)
I wish these people could think more than one step beyond the immediate personal cost.
Neolibs: The market seeks efficiency
Also neolibs: The market can never provide <product> because it’s too cost-effective
The market can never provide <product> because it’s too cost-effective
Except that’s the exact opposite of the problem with rail. The cost of construction is too high, and if you charged the fare that it would require to recoup those costs in some reasonable amount of time, your ridership would drop, making you need higher fares, etc.
It’s not cost effective from the perspective of a private person who builds/owns/operates the railroad. That’s why the private sector has such a hard time extracting wealth from it. It only becomes cost effective from a government perspective, since the government would benefit from all economic activity the railroad facilitates.
Because the market controls almost everything, anything that isn’t good for business, doesn’t get to exist. Might be one of the reasons everything is going to shit.
I think people need to start defining what they mean with “high speed rail”, because in Europe the high speed rail connections between larger cities are about the only ones profitable, so much so that it goes at the expense of regional medium speed rail connections. In addition the construction of the rail lines that allow to go faster than 200km/h are highly profitable as well and the money spend on that is missing for the maintenance of the normal speed regional rail links.
But I acknoledge that in many places regional rail that goes between 100 and 200 km/h is considered high speed rail.
The US really needs both. I’m only kinda aware of what you mean by medium rail, so I’ll describe the four kinds of rail we have here.
First you’ve got subways and the like. It’s generally a city itself, and largely concentrated in the urban core. Great examples are like NYC or Washington DC both of which are world class, less great examples are like Baltimore. These often overshadow busses in their areas.
Then you’ve got metropolitan area light rail systems, which hit suburbs though may require first and last mile bussing/hiking and may not hit every area. Seattle is a great example of this, with their building a light rail system largely connecting major districts of the city, suburbs, and cometropolitan cities. These and the subways can blend together, and can be thought of as the two extremes of short range rail.
Regional rail is what I suspect you mean by medium rail. It’s also similar to metropolitan rail. The northeastern corridor is our only example. It’s administered in conjunction between the state departments of transportation and Amtrak (the federally owned rail corporation). If you live in it you can just take a train to the city or town you want to go to. It just works and is a good end goal for metropolitan rail, but also only in one region.
Then there’s long distance rail. It’s all Amtrak and it fucking sucks here. It’s slow, it’s expensive, and it shares tracks with freight. Amtrak is routinely hindered from improving it. There are major cities it only departs from in the middle of the night. We focus on replacing it with high speed rail specifically at corridors not served by regional rail. The main proposals are New York to Chicago, both of which have local rail, or Los Angeles to Seattle which would hit multiple major cities with local rail.
You also have some major cities with none of these like Columbus. Regional rail isn’t really on the table in much of the country right now so the focus is largely on high speed rail and metropolitan rail here. High speed to replace airplanes and uncomfortably short flights/uncomfortably long drives and metropolitan for commuters and alleviating traffic.
High speed to replace airplanes and uncomfortably short flights/uncomfortably long drives
Yeah, those are profitable in Europe, but at the expense of everything else and they soak up all the state funding for rail infrastructure development. But they only go between major cities and rarely stop on the way because otherwise they can’t compete with flights time wise.
Except it does, they just dont have the ability to zoom far enough out. HSR vastly increases your potential labor pool, which applies downward pressure on wages which allows you to save on expenses.
That only works if the entity doing the saving on wages is the same entity that builds/maintains the railroad. Even then, in order to scale the wage savings up to the cost of building that railroad, you would need that entity to have millions of workers. Which means that the railroad should be built and owned publicly.
What they’re really saying is “I’m an ignorant dipshit who doesn’t understand how subsidized highways are.”
how are highways subsidized at all when they are built by the government? that’s not what a subsidy is.
you sound like an, and i quote “ignorant dipshit” when you call highways “subsidized”
