by panick21_ | 2025-05-14 08:39:26+00:00
Quite the perspective. I'm not unsympathetic to the idea of private owned and operated public transport.

And those kind of system do sometimes produce some good effects. But they are nowhere near as good and advanced as some of the more managed ones. And even in those countries you mentioned, they are only part of the solution.

There are some things the private market simply can't do when it comes to public transport, or at least not unless you want all city streets and traffic infrastructure to be privately owned as well. How that would look like in practice for a large city is speculation as it doesn't exist.

To have a real efficient public transport system, you need lots of things. Large investment for things like tunnels and underground stations. After a certain size city, you basically need that.

Also private buses can't reserve bus lanes and are thus often stuck in private traffic, resulting in very low speed. The same goes for things like signal priority. Safe dropoffs and so on.

Many of those private systems used many very unsafe practices, caused lots of accidents and many other issues. Like just stopping everywhere and anywhere to drop people of on the streets. Its certainty not as glorious as you make it out to be.

And there are many other problems with those system. They work for locals who are used to them, but often they are very hard to understand for anybody not local. And often they are absolutely terrible for people who are not your typical traveler, like people in wheelchairs, white children or other issues. So its a position of privilege to say 'just walk out onto the 4-lane road, hail down a private bus and jump into it quickly'.

These system also didn't have centralized pay management systems with integrated fairs for different transit modes. That's hugely inefficient.

> Centralized systems are sluggish dinosaurs. They are inevitably both corrupt and unresponsive.

Funny, the two countries knows known for amazing train travel, Switzerland and Japan are very centralized in terms of planning, even when in Japan operations are partly private. And in terms of many of the things mentioned above, more centralization has improved things.

I do not believe buses and trains across Switzerland would be as reliable predictable to every village above 50 people in all the mountains.

Even in some Latin American countries, introduction of BRT style systems has increased rideship and speed. Introduction of those system were very mostly successful.

And of course the US, that partially has functioning public transport has not produced such an amazing public transit systems. That's partly because of regulation but its also because of large issues around land use and primacy of the car in transport planning.

> population playing Uber with its busses

There is good reason most bus system aren't operated like Uber. Maybe its an idea for some limited additional capacity but that's about it. Its a microoptimization.

There is lots of research on public transport and startups like Uber claiming they can do everything better is simply nonsense. In fact, its corrupt politicians who often get lobbied into giving public money to 'fake innovative' startups like Uber instead of investing into public transit that is far more proven and provides far larger capacity.

Go around the world, test all the public transport system in all cities, and tell me honestly that those that are centrally planned aren't better.

Even in Latin America, Chile in the example I read, where the BRT introduction was mismanaged, most people ended up preferring it and the system has increased total usage.