Correct me if I’m wrong, but Amtrak is private, though. It’s publicly subsidized, but it’s not a government agency AFAIK. Same for the post office. Part of the problem with Amtrak, though, is that the state of passenger rail in the US is still down in the septic tank, largely due to almost 100 years of government subsidized car-centric development and heavily subsidized air transit development. You’d have a very hard time attracting private investors interested in a conventional passenger rail mass transit scheme, I think.
Also, everybody benefits, even this fucking douche, when public transit is high quality and affordable. Even if a private company did offer high quality, affordable mass transit, the insatiable drive for ever increasing profits will eventually cause them to enshittify one or both and put us right back here. This is really just another attempt to transfer public wealth into private portfolios, though it’s a little more of a joke compared to privatization efforts in Europe because we basically haven’t been investing at all in public transit for the last fifty years
It’s quasi-public, which is weird. It is subsidized, but just barely (they have like 95% farebox recovery), so i don’t think it’s even responsible to call it subsidized like road and air travel.
I bet if there was enforcement of train priority laws, they could even be a revenue generator. Philosophically, I dont think they should be, though.
Edit: lmao, at those rates, Amtrak is less publicly subsidized than a lot of fortune 500s
I’d be cool with Amtrak turning profit as long as the revenue was always re-invested into better train sets, better routes, more frequent service, cheaper tickets, employee pay and benefits, etc etc, and never just routed to rich fucking assholes who already have more than they know what to do with.
They really can’t. They inherited hundred year old falling apart infrastructure that is one of the things keeping them from providing good service. There’s no way to make enough profit to rebuild all that infrastructure enough to become profitable on most routes in the first place. They are literally slower in places than they were almost 100 years ago
tl;Dr fuck off and eat shit, idiot
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Amtrak is private, though. It’s publicly subsidized, but it’s not a government agency AFAIK. Same for the post office. Part of the problem with Amtrak, though, is that the state of passenger rail in the US is still down in the septic tank, largely due to almost 100 years of government subsidized car-centric development and heavily subsidized air transit development. You’d have a very hard time attracting private investors interested in a conventional passenger rail mass transit scheme, I think.
Also, everybody benefits, even this fucking douche, when public transit is high quality and affordable. Even if a private company did offer high quality, affordable mass transit, the insatiable drive for ever increasing profits will eventually cause them to enshittify one or both and put us right back here. This is really just another attempt to transfer public wealth into private portfolios, though it’s a little more of a joke compared to privatization efforts in Europe because we basically haven’t been investing at all in public transit for the last fifty years
It’s quasi-public, which is weird. It is subsidized, but just barely (they have like 95% farebox recovery), so i don’t think it’s even responsible to call it subsidized like road and air travel.
I bet if there was enforcement of train priority laws, they could even be a revenue generator. Philosophically, I dont think they should be, though.
Edit: lmao, at those rates, Amtrak is less publicly subsidized than a lot of fortune 500s
I’d be cool with Amtrak turning profit as long as the revenue was always re-invested into better train sets, better routes, more frequent service, cheaper tickets, employee pay and benefits, etc etc, and never just routed to rich fucking assholes who already have more than they know what to do with.
They really can’t. They inherited hundred year old falling apart infrastructure that is one of the things keeping them from providing good service. There’s no way to make enough profit to rebuild all that infrastructure enough to become profitable on most routes in the first place. They are literally slower in places than they were almost 100 years ago