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> A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs This argument doesn't seem to me as if it's fundamental. Politicians are at least in theory incentiviz

> A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs This argument doesn't seem to me as if it's fundamental. Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected. On the flip side, companies are only incentivized to reduce the cost charged to consumers (or in this case, companies shipping freight) in the face of competition, and long-haul freight has a massive up-front investment cost of building out rails, so there won't ever really be that many choices. This is akin to the highway robbery ISPs can still charge, even though they are private companies and the moat of laying fiber isn't nearly as extreme as that of laying rail > following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs Won't it be equally true that private and public corporations will have to follow laws? That seems identical. > A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 I'm trying to ask if there's a fundamental reason here, not a bag of anecdotes, and we were also talking about freight, not commuter trains, so that comment isn't particularly relevant to the comment tree you started about freight specifically.

mlindner 5y ago
> Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected. Politicians are incentivized to give lip service to reducing cost, not actually reduce costs. They only need to look like they're more likely to reduce costs than their opponent, assuming the voter actually cares enough in the first place. Further, it assumes that politicians even know how to reduce costs when they have no experience what-so-ever in running a train company.

mlindner 5y ago

> Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected. Politicians are incentivized to give lip service to reducing cost, not actually reduce costs. They only need to look like they're more likely to reduce costs than their opponent, assuming the voter actually cares enough in the first place. Further, it assumes that politicians even know how to reduce costs when they have no experience what-so-ever in running a train company.