The problem is generating that capital. Most Americans simply don't care enough about transit for a politician running on the "Moar railways" platform to get elected.
Most of our passenger rail mass transit systems got built before reliable auto transportation became cheap. Now that cars are ubiquitous, the political will isn't there anymore.
I'm sorry I didn't spell out what I thought was a common-knowledge topic.
None of this is criticism; for exactly the reasons I discussed I don't see any practical alternatives to collective action at the governmental level.
Not quite - I think that's why you've got so many replies. The comment you were replying to said "subsidised" not "private", which are different things, so it looked like you were answering a question nobody had asked.
You can have unsubsidised state mass transport and subsidised private mass transport. Although not having a subsidy is rare, there are a few state services which are required to run at operational breakeven.
Please explain this further.
I'll say again those are the extremes, but it's a common local- or regional-interest story to read about someone holding out for more money because they're the last parcel needed for some development or something. Usually it's an easy "little guy sticking it to The Man" story for the local news human interest segments.
There is at least a sense in which turning down y is irrational. Of course it doesn't have to be irrational, but if they believe they would be better off with y and are simply trying to get more, there is some degree of unreasonableness involved.
You still can't, because in a society with strong property rights, all the land is owned by somebody, and unless you're out west where one person might own the vast majority of the requisite right-of-way, you have basically no chance of every acquiring all the rights at any reasonable price. Geometry is conspiring to incentivize people in the middle of any given path to hold out for more money by holding the prospect of failure over your head. Reality has even shown that many people irrationally overestimate how much they can squeeze from you, so you realistically face the prospect of many people believing they are the last holdout and trying to squeeze you for so much that it renders the entire project economical.
Thus, the only conceivably private public transport must run on the roads anyhow. Anything else is going to be created by some form of government action; in some sense calling it "subsidized" is almost misleading in that it's entirely created by the government in the first place, even if half-privatized after the fact.
All the instances you name are situations in which one singular entity owns all the land, and thus doesn't have the problem of having to coordinate with dozens of irrational people all trying to squeeze you for cash.