[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.