4 ms·

I don’t understand it. What did the city rent? What was the profit sharing like? Did the private companies keep all the profits and the city footed the bill for

• ethbr1 3y ago
  This is turn of the century New York. Someone was getting paid from government accounts. ;-) >> “The high operating costs of the pneumatic system ultimately proved its downfall. By 1918, the federal government considered the annual rental payments ($17,000 per mile per annum) made by the post office to be ‘exorbitant’ and endorsed a new alternative with greater capacity–the automobile–as the delivery method of choice.”
• smeej 3y ago
  I'm about as interested in the creation. Did people just go down and install them? Was this an "ask forgiveness, not permission" scenario? If not, how did they get the permission of everyone above? Or how deep do land rights even go? I ask this partially too because most of the highways in my state were originally privately funded and built, and only later funded by government fees. I just wonder what happened to the "let's just go do it" mentality of rallying people to cooperate and getting things done. Almost seems like it would be hard to do worse than the current bureaucratic nightmares.
• IIAOPSW 3y ago
  Public private partnership. The city doesn't have the funds up front, so it contracts the work out but part of the payment is a monopoly on running the service for some number of years. This is how the subway was built using the dual contracts (IRT and BMT). Basically the city paid contractors to build the subway, and paid for it in part by letting them run the subway and collect fares.