I pointed out that this regrettable situation occured because there were TOO MANY classical music listeners in the Bay Area, not too few. He did not seem to grasp the point. The point was, that if there were fewer classical music lovers around, the commerical stations would not be able to turn a profit, hence would not exist, so the Bay Area would be served by a public classical station instead. There are a number of interesting questions raised by this analysis.
Public stations serve areas with few listeners, commercial stations areas with many.
So there's no obvious reason why public stations should survive where commercial stations can't. L. Wherever a commercial station will make a positive profit, it will exist. Wherever a commercial station exists, public stations cannot exist. There is some minimum potential listenership for a commercial station to exist. This is the breakeven listenership, call it bcom, where the station makes zero profits, so we assume it doesn't bother to exist.