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> When public buses charge fares, private operators and alternative transportation services can compete. If they can move people more efficiently or cheaply, th

> When public buses charge fares, private operators and alternative transportation services can compete. If they can move people more efficiently or cheaply, that is valuable information. > When buses are “free,” competition evaporates. No private operator can compete with zero. You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle. Well, they can - maybe the free buses have bad stops because allegedly nobody can evaluate whether they're good or not. Maybe to someone, a $3 van ride is worth more than the free bus ride. This is sort of inconsistent, and I don't really understand why the assault-theory even rated a mention.

DemocracyFTW2 8mo ago
Agreed. > You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle Which is the way that things are tending to evolve into in much of Europe because after decades of touting and mandating "private-public partnerships" and mandatory "open-market" policies, now communes and cities find it difficult or impossible to maintain their municipality-based and owned utilities, including gas, water, electricity and public transportation, because they get basically forced to sell to the lowest bidder. In electricity, that's frequently simply the biggest and baddest competitor like Vattenfall or RWE, replacing century-old locally-owned operators that have had very good track records across two world wars and generations of consumers, operators that never had ANY need of being replaced, except for neo-liberal demagogues and improved opportunities of syphoning off profits from the public into already rich private pockets. It's just stealing made legal.
bko 8mo ago
I suppose at the margin they can compete. But there's also a lot of uncertainty when adding a single route can wipe out your entire business. Also private services often pick off the most profitable opportunities leaving the leftovers most undesirable services to the public option. Consider student debt. If you're going to Harvard MBA or Yale law school, there are private options like Sofi that will give you a rate better than federal loans, and that serves as a selection bias and leaves the worst highest risk loans that no private lender would fund to be backed by the government. Or another example: Google Analytics. It's awful service in many ways, but because they're free and can afford to be free, they captured 80-90% of web analytics. I would not want to compete with GA.

DemocracyFTW2 8mo ago

Agreed. > You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle Which is the way that things are tending to evolve into in much of Europe because after decades of touting and mandating "private-public partnerships" and mandatory "open-market" policies, now communes and cities find it difficult or impossible to maintain their municipality-based and owned utilities, including gas, water, electricity and public transportation, because they get basically forced to sell to the lowest bidder. In electricity, that's frequently simply the biggest and baddest competitor like Vattenfall or RWE, replacing century-old locally-owned operators that have had very good track records across two world wars and generations of consumers, operators that never had ANY need of being replaced, except for neo-liberal demagogues and improved opportunities of syphoning off profits from the public into already rich private pockets. It's just stealing made legal.

bko 8mo ago

I suppose at the margin they can compete. But there's also a lot of uncertainty when adding a single route can wipe out your entire business. Also private services often pick off the most profitable opportunities leaving the leftovers most undesirable services to the public option. Consider student debt. If you're going to Harvard MBA or Yale law school, there are private options like Sofi that will give you a rate better than federal loans, and that serves as a selection bias and leaves the worst highest risk loans that no private lender would fund to be backed by the government. Or another example: Google Analytics. It's awful service in many ways, but because they're free and can afford to be free, they captured 80-90% of web analytics. I would not want to compete with GA.