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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

This would be fine if government projects like this had any sort of accountability. As is, these systems can become infinitely inefficient while claiming "we just need more money to fix it". Privatization seems to be the only way to enable accountability.

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Privatization doesn't fix that; the state just ends up continuing to chuck money every time the companies (who are now in charge of critical infrastructure, and thus can't be allowed to fail) cry poor. It ends up being less efficient with a bunch of extra money flowing to the private sector. At least this is the Australian experience.

Perhaps we need to try the Tokyo model, with multiple competing subway/rail companies.

But unfortunately most cities are nowhere near the size and prosperity of Tokyo.

> the state just ends up continuing to chuck money every time

Then that's not a private entity, that's a government funded contractor, with the government shelling out the money with no accountability.

The endless streams of private contractors blowing through deadlines, budgets and billions of dollars on government contracts doesn't really agree with that assertion.

A lot of that happens because the government provides the contractors with an endless stream of money and refuses to use the accountability mechanisms in the contracts when they mismanage their tasks.

As a currently popular example, most of the contracts around SLS, with Boeing and other companies, are like this. They consistently mess up, have quality and speed issues and overrun costs, and the government never exercises the option to cut their profit share, even when the overruns reach several times the original agreed upon cost.

The government is also to blame for this. If you look at well regarded public transportation construction companies that have bid out contracts in the US they say it's more dysfunctional than a 3rd world country.

I don’t think it’s about accountability, after all democracy has more or less the same accountability mechanisms as a publicly traded company.

Given the massive public interest, there is probably at least an order of magnitude more oversight of public offices than there is for private companies.

In the end it’s the same challenge that every team, department, company has to solve: how to have people that care about their job?

Here my impression is that that’s often not the case, leading to the effects you described.

Given the often severely reduced pay in public jobs, compared with industry, I don’t find that overly surprising, you get what you pay for.

Sorry, but you are wrong. The best possible railway system I’ve been on, SBB is wholly owned by Switzerland itself.

I would not describe it as “infinitely inefficient”.

A profit motive is often a decent replacement for a sense of social responsibility. That sense of responsibility has never been there in the government of New York.

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