What people tend to forget is that "free" normally means, no way to hire as many employees are necessary, no way to pay what they want or need, no way to keep the infrastructure or expand it. As usual in everything involving Government, Free would mean more expensive with a lower quality than now.
Generally, I agree. My gut says the rail system is a special case.
You cannot have 10 companies competing on the same stretch of rail, which leads to weird attempts to bring the 'market' into play. I'm thinking of the UK in particular.
fair point. But I think having the ticket 1 euro/day (365 euros/year), as in Austria, and investing the 2.5 billion Euro in the infrastructure itself (improving trains, hiring and training employees, increasing the offer) would be much better than making it simply "almost free"
I think what gets missed is the market signal or imperative to respond to that signal. But then, I'll make the uninformed assertion that private rail companies aren't that good at that anyway, and/or the industry doesn't lend itself well to that.
And if rail was "free" I'd definitely use it more. It's not necessarily about the money, although that matters, it's the freedom to "just go" (ignoring there'd probably still need to be a booking system due to high demand)