"The crapification of everything"?

Privatize, man, privatize. If they piss off their customer base, there's actual consequence, unlike when Uncle Sam pissed you off last night.
 
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We privatized buses some years ago. The quality of service crashed, and the costs shot up. There's a good deal of pressure to re-socialize; it was cheaper and worked better.
 
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Dte, even if say General Electric bought the metro system, what would I do (as someone without a car), not ride it to get to work? I'd have no alternative. Either way, I need to use it, and unless you're claiming some rival corporation would be able to come in with the billions of dollars necessary to build a competing subway and bus system I really fail to see how much good would come from privatizing the system.
 
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Denmark privatised public transport as well, as far as buses go - and it has been nothing but a disaster. My father was a busdriver, so I know what I'm talking about.

That route is the route of greed, and will lead to nothing but inferior service and quality. Why? Because it's about maximising profit and squeezing until there's nothing left to squeese. It's the nature of things.
 
I dunno, DA. I enjoy my package services much better when I use FedEx or UPS as opposed to the USPS. At least with those two I get order tracking, etc, etc, etc.
 
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I think a bus service is more of a natural monopoly than a delivery service, since the network synergies are so high. If you have several private bus services competing with each other, it's going to be much bigger hassle to use than if it's a single, big service -- you'd have different fares, uncoordinated schedules, overlapping services, and what have you.

OTOH a delivery service is simple -- you have basically two parameters, time and cost, and whoever can deliver the best combination wins.

(Our post office does have order tracking, btw, and their rates compare relatively well to DHL, UPS, and what not.)
 
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Well, right, PJ. That's why I don't think a private metro/bus service would work very well, as opposed to package delivery.

Our post office has order tracking too, but it's really crappy. I got my order tracking # two days ago yet according to USPS it still doesn't exist yet - and usually it doesn't work for me until the day it's supposed to be delivered.
 
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You'd end up with an authorized and regulated monopoly, no different than the utilities. Those seem to work fairly well, and the regulating bodies allow for complaints and corrective actions. If Bus With Gus failed to supply proper service, the monopoly could be handed to Ride With Clyde. More likely, Clyde would simply buy Gus out so there's no need for duplication of equipment but you still get the management change required.
 
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That's the theory behind the decision to privatize it in the first place. Trouble is, it *doesn't* work as well as the publicly-run bus system we had before. We've tried to tweak it a quite a lot, but it's just not working. It's more expensive, the service is worse, and the working conditions are worse. Nobody's happy with it, not even the private companies running it, and consistently failing to turn the kinds of profits they're hoping for.
 
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Similar to the MP3 situation brought up above is the move to LCD monitors. People have been more than willing to sacrifice quality to get something lighter and with a smaller footprint. But my 21" Sony Trinitron CRT monitor has a much superior picture as compared to any LCD monitor I've seen. Yeah, it weighs 75 lbs. and has a sizable footprint, but I'll be quite sad when it dies of old age and I'll need to go to an LCD.
 
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Necrosis said:
Similar to the MP3 situation brought up above is the move to LCD monitors. People have been more than willing to sacrifice quality to get something lighter and with a smaller footprint. But my 21" Sony Trinitron CRT monitor has a much superior picture as compared to any LCD monitor I've seen. Yeah, it weighs 75 lbs. and has a sizable footprint, but I'll be quite sad when it dies of old age and I'll need to go to an LCD.
Click to expand...

You must have a different 21" Sony Trinitron than I used to have.

I mean sure, the color and contrast were good, but compared to an LCD, the geometry sucked, there were constant convergence problems, and it wasn't all that sharp — and as it aged, it even lost the color and contrast edge. I would wager that yours is well past its prime even in these respects.

Good LCD's nowadays are as good or better even for color and almost as good for even illumination as the best CRT's ever were. Not to mention that CRT's were *small* — a 21" CRT is equivalent to an approximately 19" LCD, and you can barely even find something that small these days.
 
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