[sgrove]

An alternative comment (that would likely be more useful and spark more interesting conversation) might focus on listing the ways in which you see public transportation in SF as broken, and thoughts on how they might be sustainably (and profitably) fixed.

[negrit]

Public transportation in SF is not perfect but it's far from being broken. I lived in 10 different cities on 3 different continents. Got to ride the best public transportation(London, Tokyo, Singapore, ...) and worst(LA, Manila, ...). SF isn't bad at all.

The only issue is a non issue: Richer people can afford private drivers(Uber/Lyft/Whatever). It's nothing new, it just became more affordable in the past years. And public transportation isn't suppose to be profitable. It's about letting everyone move around a city for a very affordable price.

[jfb]

It's not clear to me that profitability is a useful metric in thinking about how to fix public transportation, unless one is running a transportation startup.

[msandford]

Well it's useful in the sense that if an alternative transportation company as opposed to a city enterprise is able to turn a profit, that would indicate something.

I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on the mass transit side of things.

Overall it would be great if people could start up private bus lines that they believe are underserved which the city would then later take over. If you structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which established the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of good.

Now, how would you prevent this from turning into a tollway that's only going to charge for 20 years but 50 years later it's still for-pay? By making the city pay an external entity rather than keeping the revenue. They'll keep their word -- at least when it comes to paying the bus startup -- very rigidly if it's an outflow. How would you ensure that they then lower the price once the royalty is done? That's harder. I guess at least the scam would be more transparent that way.

[TheOtherHobbes]

>If you structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which established the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of good.

This is very much how the UK's rail franchising system fails to work.

Rail is complex because you have obvious economies of scale when you have the same entity managing rolling stock, tracks, other resources, and R&D.

The UK's rail franchising is the worst of all possible worlds. Economies of scale are impossible because separate companies own the rolling stock, run the rolling stock, and maintain the track. And no R&D happens at all now.

Worse, companies regularly scam the gov by collecting subsidies while they can and giving up franchises early when they're expected to start repaying some of their profits.

So this is not necessarily a good model.

>I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on the mass transit side of things.

Why should public transport be profitable? It provides a valuable economic service, in that it moves employees to and from work.

Demanding that it should make a profit is like demanding that pedestrian walkways or the freeway system should make a profit.

Infrastructure is a public and corporate good. You can certainly debate who benefits from it the most, and who should pay for it on the basis of the economic value of those benefits.

You can also debate if perhaps it's not as innovative as it could be - something which is often true of both public and private transport systems.

But there's no obvious non-ideological need for it to be run on a for-profit basis.

[msandford]

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I would like MORE bus service and cities are generally run by fear of screwing up or looking stupid. It would be nice if enterprising people could start new routes, and then once they prove profitable then they would be turned over to the city who would use their own rolling stock to run the route.

This would enable the people starting the bus route to then do market analysis and use the same buses to go start yet another new route which could then either be profitable or not, and then get taken over or not. So you're organizing the company to take the risk and that means the city doesn't have to, which means that some kind of progress might get made in less than a person's lifetime.

Yes I do realize that profit != socially useful in all contexts. But I think in this case if a bus route can be run profitably there's going to be a substantial correlation with useful, because I can't think of a way that buses have been able to hack capitalism to extract rents without doing any useful work.

[davidw]

Perhaps you could substitute "doesn't generate too big a loss" for "profitable".

[mvc]

I don't live there yet but I will in a couple of weeks and have been researching where to live. One problem from my point of view is that there appears to be no monthly pass you can get that works from the places that one might reasonably want to commute from (e.g. Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley)

[jfb]

Clipper should work, no? You can use it on AC Transit, BART, MUNI, Caltrain, &c.? It's a stored value card, rather than a monthly pass, but that's hardly a problem.