Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Let's Make Mass Transit Free*" video.

  1. Oh, homelessness might be particularly noticeable in the USA, but it's not a solved problem in the rest of the world, (even ignoring the obvious places). Now, it a lot of places it requires more extreme circumstances to reach that point than seems to be the case in the USA (and support for those who have is often better), but it's still a thing which happens.
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  2. Well, not Nothing. They help. fuel and road space usage to number of people moved they're a big step up from cars. Of course, to get the Full benefit you'd have to basically ban cars entirely, (both to get people to actually USE the buses, and to eliminate the traffic congestion which dramatically reduces their performance as a mass transit option) and then get a LOT of buses with implausibly well planed routes... Really, buses seem best used as feeders for larger systems where population density isn't high enough for frequent rail stops in easy walking distance of...everywhere. (what that density limit Is depends on a few different things, of course.)
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  3. Depends on who's in charge of it and how competent they are... Private companies provided a subsidy and insufficient regulation are strongly incentivized to keep the service quality as shit as possible while still justifying ever increasing fares and subsidies. On the other hand, without the subsidies most infrastructure simply isn't profitable. Government run infrastructure doesn't have that particular set of problems, though it does have its own (being jerked around by politicians looking to score points rather than provide effective service, poorly thought out budget reallocations, or having people put in charge who are don't know what they're doing (even more so than people in private business who will generally at least know how to run a business in general, if not that particular service... ) The thing about key infrastructure, is that it's not really possible to just Not Use It, so you can't 'vote with your wallet' if the service is bad enough. You Can vote with your ballot if the government controls it though. ... Of course, this assumes your Government's actually any good, unlike the US's utterly impractical federal government (Chief problem isn't that it's oversized, it's that the entity it's trying to RUN is too big for the way it's trying to do it) and/or often hopelessly corrupt state governments... So, yeah, state vs private is mostly a matter of 'how well can you trust your government to properly regulate a private entity?' vs 'how well can you trust your government to actually run the thing competently itself?' when it comes to public infrastructure such as mass transit... also power, water, telecommunications, the postal service, etc.
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