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Your comment proves my point, not disproves it. To remind you, here's the quote we're talking about: > not every service requires market forces to operate effe
by ropeadopepope 8y ago
Your comment proves my point, not disproves it. To remind you, here's the quote we're talking about:
> not every service requires market forces to operate effectively
private companies = market forces, even if they're government contracts.
- amaccuish 8y agoYe, and as someone from the UK, I can confirm they're terrible, and don't work effectively, because your god of market forces doesn't work in transport
- ropeadopepope 8y agoI don't worship market forces and I have no idea if it works in transport or not. I asked for an example of a successful service that works without market forces and I haven't seen anybody provide one yet.
- willyt 8y agoNo-one is suggesting having no market forces anywhere. Market forces are an excellent way of ensuring a good selection of high quality fruit in a fruit market. And they may well be a good way for deciding who manufactures, supplies and operates the buses in a city. I just don’t think they are efficient for deciding when, where and how often the buses should operate as this experiment was tried in the U.K. across many cities outside London in the 80s and it led to chaos. As to examples of centrally planned public transport, London Underground, Paris Metro, Berlin U-Bahn. The only example of centrally planned transport I can think of that’s not operating effectively is the New York subway, but that’s because of a general problem of political corruption in the US. None of these systems operate without market forces, because they use them for things like purchasing trains, cleaning services, engineering designs. They just don’t use them for planning when and where the services operate.