Putting America Back on Track: The Case for Public Rail Ownership, is a short (11 minute) overview of the many flaws, pitfalls, and drawbacks of the privatel...
It was never nationalized in the first place, well except for that one time during WWI.
“Privatize the profits and socialize the losses” isn’t really a bad idea when it comes to rail. The external benefit of rail infrastructure - in economic terms - far outweighs the internal benefit. Even an unprofitable railway makes a lot of money for the area it serves simply through its existence.
The problem is that if the railway is privately owned, it’s rare for it to be financially sustainable unless there is some significant traffic with relatively low overhead and little competition. Pair this with the U.S. railroad industry prioritizing operating ratios over profits and you get a situation where railroads will actively discourage potential traffic because of its complexity despite said traffic being profitable. Meaning that things that should be going by rail are instead forced to go by truck.
The ideal solution to this is to keep the infrastructure in public hands, which will remove the burden of internal benefit from the infrastructure owner. This will help allow rail transport to improve dramatically. Private companies will still be able to operate trains, however their overhead and complexity will be significantly reduced because they no longer have to be burdened with infrastructure management, and will also only have to operate certain types of trains, rather than one company running the whole railroad. This means that it will be easier to ship things by rail in a similar manner as you would ship by road today.
Guy uses our roads of example for public access. But come Oklahoma were they have been privatized our roads and working on doing all of them. It the nightmare he has invasion. What really fucked up is they are owned by foreign company.
Exactly they are shit and raised the cost of the tolls. I live near the Tulsa area you can’t get to many places conveniently without taking a toll road. And they are shit.
We privatized Americas rail system for the same reason we privatized everything: privatized profits and socialize losses.
We’ve even been giving the owners of the rails money that they’re supposed to be using to maintain them, and for decades they just dont it.
Then we have massive toxic spill accidents because they didn’t maintain the rail or cars and they don’t follow guidelines.
And so they get fined, but that’s just a cost of business as long as insurance pays out.
There’s no logical reason for critical infrastructure to be privately owned.
It was never nationalized in the first place, well except for that one time during WWI.
“Privatize the profits and socialize the losses” isn’t really a bad idea when it comes to rail. The external benefit of rail infrastructure - in economic terms - far outweighs the internal benefit. Even an unprofitable railway makes a lot of money for the area it serves simply through its existence.
The problem is that if the railway is privately owned, it’s rare for it to be financially sustainable unless there is some significant traffic with relatively low overhead and little competition. Pair this with the U.S. railroad industry prioritizing operating ratios over profits and you get a situation where railroads will actively discourage potential traffic because of its complexity despite said traffic being profitable. Meaning that things that should be going by rail are instead forced to go by truck.
The ideal solution to this is to keep the infrastructure in public hands, which will remove the burden of internal benefit from the infrastructure owner. This will help allow rail transport to improve dramatically. Private companies will still be able to operate trains, however their overhead and complexity will be significantly reduced because they no longer have to be burdened with infrastructure management, and will also only have to operate certain types of trains, rather than one company running the whole railroad. This means that it will be easier to ship things by rail in a similar manner as you would ship by road today.
Guy uses our roads of example for public access. But come Oklahoma were they have been privatized our roads and working on doing all of them. It the nightmare he has invasion. What really fucked up is they are owned by foreign company.
Oklahoma’s roads are notoriously terrible. Even the expensive toll roads aren’t great.
Exactly they are shit and raised the cost of the tolls. I live near the Tulsa area you can’t get to many places conveniently without taking a toll road. And they are shit.