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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

Privatize it. Like it was originally built.

London Underground was privatised, then the government had to step in to rescue the firm that went bankrupt...

Fine. Sell it to some investment firm, let the new owners run it with zero empathy, pay off whoever they need to pay off to kick out the union, reduce headcount, cut benefits, sell off assets and all the other things you expect and investment firm worth anything to do when it acquires something. Then in a decade when that becomes untenable and the public demands the state take back over the state takes back over and inherits a much different and more workable mess than it has at present.

The hole is very deep. There's no way out that isn't slow and painful.

Tokyo subway is privatized and is very very good.

What works in Japan may supremely fail in US.

This article looks promising, but then think about the disaster that is the private ISP industry or the red-light camera industry in the US. The US is bad at privatization, we tend to turn it into exploitative subsidies of crony capitalists. http://marketurbanism.com/2010/12/22/japanese-transit-and-wh...

Who would buy it? The system has $40 billion in debt, plus pension obligations, plus union contracts. The only way to make money on this privately would be declaring bankruptcy and hoping for a good settlement.

Completely agree -- not to mention that the reason it stopped being privately owned in the first place was that the original companies went out of business.

Wasn't there some story about the city prohibiting them from raising fares? I don't have a source though.

I wasn't aware of this, so I looked around a bit and found this [1] from a book about the history of the subway system. Apparently they kept trying to raise it, but were blocked by the mayor, Walker. Of course, the first order of business after it was taken over by the state was to raise the fare.

Edit: found the underlying case, [2], but it looks less than straightforward -- the fixed fair was a condition of the leases on the right-of-way of the train system, and the attempt was made to charge a second fare when a certain boundary was crossed.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=LYSVd43vZwQC&lpg=PR13&ots=...

[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/279/159/case.htm...

Even in model Japan privatized rail, the govt still regulates fares.

The city is going to have to eat the debt/pensions anyways. Privatize so they can get help paying that debt, and system improvements can’t be held hostage anymore.

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