Originally Posted by
KoKoBuddy
You are 100% correct. Amtrak is a great example of govt efficiency. It has lost money every single year it has been in operation. Kudos govt.
USPS loses billions ever year. Kudos again govt.
Both Amtrak and USPS are government-owned corporations. They are responsible themselves for making money. If they don't, no-one other than their own management is to blame.
Social Security and Medicare. They're not losing billions, nah that's chump change. They're in the losing trillions business.
Of course they are. That's the point.
But hey, let's spend a few more hundred billion or a couple of trillion building trains that nobody wants. After all govt is so good at managing large scale projects, they're sure to get it right. The Big Dig was only 300% over budget, but that's not likely to happen again right? Govt has become so lean and mean over the past few years there's no way it could possibly piss money away anymore.
Just ask China how good high speed trains are.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...WRE_story.html
Or other countries that train groupies drool over...
"Such “shortfalls” are all too common. Japan’s bullet trains needed a bailout in 1987. Taiwan’s line opened in 2007 and needed a government rescue in 2009. In France, only the Paris-Lyon high-speed line is in the black. "
Listen. I did not say that every rail project in the world ever would actually make its owner money. I said it could be done if it was handled correctly. This entails doing it efficiently (this part often fails; I've seen a bus lane built, destroyed, built again and then not used for the original purpose) and making it better than the alternatives available for a similar trip.
But even then, it's perfectly fine if some money is lost on the project because what it does is get people out of their polluting, heavy-traffic-generating cars and in some cases, planes. Maybe this is news to you, but money is lost on most if not all government projects. Why? Because they aren't necessarily meant to generate revenue for that government. They're there to provide a service to the public.
Either way, the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (Dutch Railways) are in the business of making money. Lots of it. Because it gets it right, most of the time. (There's an exception in an international thing where they can't seem to figure out that the price premium they're asking makes it too expensive and thus no one will use it.)