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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

You know, I have a suspicion that the reason the US has poor government services compared to other countries is in large part because too manypeople in the US believe government services are poor.

If the wrong people get in charge (and very likely if the ideology is widespread) they make little effort to improve things other than to cut costs.

Competition usually improves things, it's true, but natural monopolies are still problematic.

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Government services in the U.S. are both bad and expensive. The NYC MTA spends seven times as much money to build subway per mile than London or Paris. It spends about twice as much per passenger mile for subway service as London's Tube. We spend more per student than almost anyone else on schools. Why would someone in the U.S., confronted with the evidence, believe that government services aren't poor?

The US government should model its train service after Europe, since Europe clearly knows what it’s doing and the US clearly doesn’t.

Also, would you then be consistent and argue that the government shouldn’t be spending so much on highways for cars, since it’ll just waste that money too?

A key reason for American trains being bad is that demand is different. (Which to some degree is caused by offer)

The USA has large areas of sparsley populted land where flying for long distance, and car for the the closer area are hard to beat. This is way different from more densly populated Europe and even more densly populated Japan (especially when excluding Japan's motain regions)

If there were drive more more trains this would first require massive investment in infrastructure, to build both: the medium distance lines through populated area (for example along the east and west coast) as well as a network of connecting services fading out in the suburbs of the hub. Hardly anybody wants to go from hub to hub. If they need an car for "the last mile" anyways it's likely they won't take the detour to the train station and then having no way to continue on the other end ... If instead they can drive the complete distance.

Successful railways need a network connecting complete regions providing enough potential for a frequent service.

Building that requires huge support by politics/society.

Or Japan. Privatize Amtrak completely.

The UK is case in point evidence that private railroad operations will not make it cheaper. Rail travel in the UK is insanely expensive and delayed.

Japan’s rail lines were almost entirely developed by the government, and transferred to private companies later.

Private enterprise is great when taxpayers pay for the expensive part.

And, while Japanese rail service in general is pretty much as good as anyplace in the world, the Shinkansen is not inexpensive. It's nonetheless popular because HSR is a good match for the distances between a number of populous cities.

There's no reason to think that what makes train service in Japan better than in America is related to it being privatized.

I have total faith that we could privatize Amtrak and have it be just as execrable in comparison. And then it would be sold off for parts, some assholes would get tremendously wealthy, and we wouldn't have any passenger rail network at all.

>>Government services in the U.S. are both bad and expensive. The NYC MTA spends seven times as much money to build subway per mile than London or Paris.

This has basically nothing to do with the fact that it is government-run.

I don't know if you noticed, but building massive infrastructure cost a shitload of money for private enterprise as well.

London and Paris both involve massive infrastructure, too.

I've been listening to the Revolutions podcast recently, and I'm currently in the post-french-revolution series of European revolutions. Kinda funny - France tried setting up some guaranteed-work promises and implemented them through a series of National Workshops, where you could theoretically show up, do some labor for the country, and go home after a full day with subsistence wages.

Of course, the people proposing/pushing for the idea and the people implementing the idea did not share a lot of membership, so the implementers put a person deeply opposed to the project in charge. Of course, no projects of use got approved, most of the projects that did get approved were obviously pointless and tedious, and they were constantly thousands of jobs short or what was needed to employ everyone who wanted work anyway.

So yeah, that's why we have the "digging and filling holes" analogy for useless make-work. Ideas are fine and all, but it doesn't matter for shit if you have an antagonist implementing them.

There is no good economic rationale for long distance trains. The only part of Amtrak that is actually profitable is the NEC, the rest of it generally loses money.

The federal highway system must be even worse then. It brings in zero revenue and costs way, way more than the trains.

Don't forget the usage tax we all pay for the highways via the Federal fuel tax. But I suppose that is not directly considered revenue.

Unfortunately that usage tax doesn't even begin to pay for maintenance and is subsidized from the general budget. Transportation funding is pretty bad in the US.

Exactly, how much does the EPA cost enforcing clean air and water standards?

In other words, it doesn't enjoy the level of government subsidies that other forms of travel currently do?

Yes, exactly.

The question I'd ask is, other than preserving the way of operating that amtrak has, is it worth the subsidy - I'd say yes, preserving the knowledge of how to operate LD trains is important, so is offering the rural communities it serves transportation, I'd like to expand rail service even.

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