You know, I have a suspicion that the reason the US has poor government services compared to other countries is in large part because too manypeople in the US believe government services are poor.

If the wrong people get in charge (and very likely if the ideology is widespread) they make little effort to improve things other than to cut costs.

Competition usually improves things, it's true, but natural monopolies are still problematic.

Government services in the U.S. are both bad and expensive. The NYC MTA spends seven times as much money to build subway per mile than London or Paris. It spends about twice as much per passenger mile for subway service as London's Tube. We spend more per student than almost anyone else on schools. Why would someone in the U.S., confronted with the evidence, believe that government services aren't poor?

The US government should model its train service after Europe, since Europe clearly knows what it’s doing and the US clearly doesn’t.

Also, would you then be consistent and argue that the government shouldn’t be spending so much on highways for cars, since it’ll just waste that money too?

A key reason for American trains being bad is that demand is different. (Which to some degree is caused by offer)

The USA has large areas of sparsley populted land where flying for long distance, and car for the the closer area are hard to beat. This is way different from more densly populated Europe and even more densly populated Japan (especially when excluding Japan's motain regions)

If there were drive more more trains this would first require massive investment in infrastructure, to build both: the medium distance lines through populated area (for example along the east and west coast) as well as a network of connecting services fading out in the suburbs of the hub. Hardly anybody wants to go from hub to hub. If they need an car for "the last mile" anyways it's likely they won't take the detour to the train station and then having no way to continue on the other end ... If instead they can drive the complete distance.

Successful railways need a network connecting complete regions providing enough potential for a frequent service.

Building that requires huge support by politics/society.

Or Japan. Privatize Amtrak completely.

The UK is case in point evidence that private railroad operations will not make it cheaper. Rail travel in the UK is insanely expensive and delayed.

Japan’s rail lines were almost entirely developed by the government, and transferred to private companies later.

Private enterprise is great when taxpayers pay for the expensive part.

And, while Japanese rail service in general is pretty much as good as anyplace in the world, the Shinkansen is not inexpensive. It's nonetheless popular because HSR is a good match for the distances between a number of populous cities.

There's no reason to think that what makes train service in Japan better than in America is related to it being privatized.

I have total faith that we could privatize Amtrak and have it be just as execrable in comparison. And then it would be sold off for parts, some assholes would get tremendously wealthy, and we wouldn't have any passenger rail network at all.

>>Government services in the U.S. are both bad and expensive. The NYC MTA spends seven times as much money to build subway per mile than London or Paris.

This has basically nothing to do with the fact that it is government-run.

I don't know if you noticed, but building massive infrastructure cost a shitload of money for private enterprise as well.

London and Paris both involve massive infrastructure, too.

I've been listening to the Revolutions podcast recently, and I'm currently in the post-french-revolution series of European revolutions. Kinda funny - France tried setting up some guaranteed-work promises and implemented them through a series of National Workshops, where you could theoretically show up, do some labor for the country, and go home after a full day with subsistence wages.

Of course, the people proposing/pushing for the idea and the people implementing the idea did not share a lot of membership, so the implementers put a person deeply opposed to the project in charge. Of course, no projects of use got approved, most of the projects that did get approved were obviously pointless and tedious, and they were constantly thousands of jobs short or what was needed to employ everyone who wanted work anyway.

So yeah, that's why we have the "digging and filling holes" analogy for useless make-work. Ideas are fine and all, but it doesn't matter for shit if you have an antagonist implementing them.

There is no good economic rationale for long distance trains. The only part of Amtrak that is actually profitable is the NEC, the rest of it generally loses money.

The federal highway system must be even worse then. It brings in zero revenue and costs way, way more than the trains.

Don't forget the usage tax we all pay for the highways via the Federal fuel tax. But I suppose that is not directly considered revenue.

Unfortunately that usage tax doesn't even begin to pay for maintenance and is subsidized from the general budget. Transportation funding is pretty bad in the US.

Exactly, how much does the EPA cost enforcing clean air and water standards?

In other words, it doesn't enjoy the level of government subsidies that other forms of travel currently do?

Yes, exactly.

The question I'd ask is, other than preserving the way of operating that amtrak has, is it worth the subsidy - I'd say yes, preserving the knowledge of how to operate LD trains is important, so is offering the rural communities it serves transportation, I'd like to expand rail service even.

Other governments do it just fine.

Who? In most of Asia trains are privatized. In Europe, the passenger rail companies are in various stages of privatization. Rail in the UK is more or less privatised. Deutche Bahn, SNCF, Trenitalia, DSB, etc., are private companies. The government is involved in the sense they are the largest or sole shareholder, but they are run as for-profit corporations. For example, they compete in other countries. Many, such as SNCF, are on the path to further privatization: https://www.railway-technology.com/features/french-rail-refo.... Amtrak, though legally an independent corporation, is in practice operated like a government agency.

Nearly all the privatized rail systems share the characteristic that the government (in some fashion) still owns the underlying trackage/right-of-way.

This is not a bad model: the public retains the land and tracks, and provides them for private enterprises to run trains on, subject to some sort of coordination so you don't have wrecks.

That's similar to how many airports work, how the Interstate Highway System works, etc.

However, for historical reasons it's not how the US system operates, and it would be very difficult for the government -- absent a lot of spending that I doubt the public has the appetite for -- to acquire the land and rights-of-way.

On routes where Amtrak actually controls the underlying trackage, it operates quite well. Where everything goes to shit is when Amtrak operates on others' track.

If we really wanted a good passenger-rail system, what we would need to do is build dedicated passenger rail lines, totally separate from freight rail. The two types of trains are so different today that it doesn't make sense to run them together. High speed passenger trains do best on banked track, and not having freight trains around for them to run into allows you to use lighter rolling stock. Acela trains have been described as "rolling bank vaults" because of the collision protection they have to have -- simply because they're liable to collide head-on with a fully loaded freight train. There's no good way around it, except to stop mixing the two up.

> On routes where Amtrak actually controls the underlying trackage, it operates quite well. Where everything goes to shit is when Amtrak operates on others' track.

No it doesn’t. Amtrak owns the lines between Baltimore and DC. I used to commute it every day for two years and it was awful. Amtrak struggles to adequately maintain the northeast corridor, because as a result of government-imposed mandates, its operating profits from there go to subsidizing service on lines nobody uses. Similarly, Amtrak is just shitty at logistics and operations—planning around track work, giving updates about delays, keeping trains in working order, etc. Again, they have no mandate to turn a profit (unlike government owned rail lines in Europe) so they run like the DMV, rather than a rail carrier.

Quasi-public to be accurate.

That said, Amtrak came into existence because most of the private rail companies had failed or were failing. Had the federal government not stepped in, we'd arguably have no long distance passenger rail service outside the Northeast Corridor (where Amtrak basically makes the money that it then loses on pretty much every other route in the country).

UK network is run by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Rail and the train operators are on government franchise. More importantly though it's pretty much universally recognised in London that TfL (the tube and overground) is much better and more reliable than the rail companies, and TfL is a government body directly.

In the UK, a government entity owns the rails. But the actual operation of train service is contracted to fully private companies.

No personal attacks, please.

It's hard to tolerate dishonest disagreement, but fair enough.

Deutsche Bahn is a "private company", but with 100% of stocks owned by the state. That’s in all relevant metrics state-run.

The German government is the shareholder and appoints the board, but Deutsche Bahn is otherwise operated as a private company. For example, it operates at a profit, its CEO is compensated comparably to other corporate executives, and it competes with other rail operators both inside Germany (it has subsidiaries that compete to operate regional train service), and internationally. Amtrak is operated, for all intents and purposes, like a government agency. It operates at a loss, its CEO is compensated like a government officer (no incentive to cut costs to boost bonuses), Congress exerts significant political input into operational decisions, it does not compete with anyone inside or outside the U.S.

Germany also has many fewer freight trains than the US. Their rail network is optimized for passenger use, and it works well.

The US rail network is optimized for freight hauling (and it's largely owned by freight railroads and maintained at private expense, and those railroads turn a consistent profit). It also works well -- for its intended purpose.

If you want to move 3000 miles at 45 MPH remarkably cheaply, and you happen to be (or live in) a cargo container, the US rail network is built just for you!

Competition is a bit of a red herring - it's not as if anybody is stopping anybody from starting their own train service in America tomorrow. The reason Amtrak is run like a government agency is because if they didn't offer routes at a loss, nobody would run those routes at all.

DSB is NOT a for profit company in the normal sense. They rely on huge public subsidies to survive.

Amtrak isn't a government agency though. It's a public-private partnership AFAIK

Amtrak is a corporation owned by the U.S. government. That structure is typical for rail operators. What's different is that Amtrak is operated like part of the government, while European rail operators are actually operated like private companies. For example, the CEO of Deutsche Bahn is paid like a private CEO, while the CEO of Amtrak is paid like a senior government officer (and right now, actually, not being paid at all).

which is the government-run train service?

Could be wrong, but I think India and China rail is government run.

Maybe but the parent post is a bit confusing.