Most other countries have subsidized or even free mass transit systems and they realistically don't expect them to be profitable, but helping people/goods to be moved is considered more important.
It is one of those natural monopolies where privatizing stuff doesn't really work.
Here is a good map of "farebox recovery ratio" (the percentage of operating costs funded by fares): https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/gallery/Map_World%20.... Quite a few asian systems recover more than 100% of operating costs, and a couple of European systems do, but no American ones. London's public transit system, for example, gets 25% of its funding from the government. The NYC MTA is at 45%.
However, there is one way to make it work privately, and that's to capture some of those economic benefits by buying the land around stations. If someone buys some relatively cheap land near a city and then builds a train line from there to the centre, the value of that land increases and so they can charge higher rents on any housing, offices or shop units built there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintetsu_Department_Store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isetan#Subsidiaries