At 07:48 PM 6/5/2002 +0100, James Heartfield wrote:
>Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu>
>
>"If you starve public enterprises, whether mass transit or public
>education, fewer people will be attracted to it except by necessity."
-I can understand someone making that statement in the UK, whose public -transit system is a national disgrace. Ditto for the US. But not for the -continental Europe, whose rail based system is both technologically and -economically superior to anything that happened in the auto industry.
Research I have read has explained these differences based on whether private companies or the municipal governments owned outlying land. Where government owns the land, mass transit pays for itself as new areas around mass transit hubs jump in value, thereby paying for mass transit expansion. Where private developers own the land, government cannot capture the positive externalities of mass transit (as was often true in the US), so mass transit had a much harder time in the US.
The railroad development of the 19th century understood this phenomena well, if in a privatized manner. Railway companies were not just given the rights to run trains, but given large swathes of land around train development, since the growth in new towns and associated rents around the railroad hubs helped pay for the track construction (and then some of course).
-- Nathan Newman