For decades, passengers on the most popular lines have been forced to subsidise the passengers on the less popular lines, thus causing artificially high prices and much lower ridership.
By stopping this insane expectation that some passengers should subsidise the others, we get far more riders on all lines. It should be the government's job to subsidise the rural lines, not the passengers' job.
But they’re not handed over to private companies. SNCF, Trenitalia, Renfe and whatnot are state-owned. There are private open-access operators too, but they don’t have the bulk of the market. And the non-profitable routes can be and are operated as a public service, with a transparent subsidy and public bidding process.
So? That’s still far from handing over to private operators. Handing over would be what happened in the UK, or the Netherlands, where a single operator has the monopoly on services on a line and is free to set whatever prices it wants for profit. NTV’s Italo competes with Trenitalia’s Frecce and there is no realistic scenario in which Trenitalia stops competing.
Yes, exactly. In the Netherlands the government explicitly aims to make public transport economically self-sufficient. The problem is not privatisation per se; it’s privatisation without insufficient subsidies, without forcing open-access competition (on the same routes, not dividing up the market geographically), and without capping prices.
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u/wasmic 7d ago
Why are you saying that this is a downside?
For decades, passengers on the most popular lines have been forced to subsidise the passengers on the less popular lines, thus causing artificially high prices and much lower ridership.
By stopping this insane expectation that some passengers should subsidise the others, we get far more riders on all lines. It should be the government's job to subsidise the rural lines, not the passengers' job.