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I 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 force

• willyt 8y ago
  No-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.