Private transportation only works when all forms of it are privatized. A big reason the railroads and transit companies failed in the US was the construction of interstate highways that were free to use.
Rail failed for transit because it's inflexible. Busses already get to be much more efficient than cars and much more flexible than trains. Rail is a fetish.
Rail does one thing really well; it fits a lot of people into a tight space, much tighter than any road or bus lane. A single road lane carries 2,500 people per hour per direction; the same figure for a grade-separated railway track is 30,000 at the low end and 90,000 at the high end. This is vital in places where land values are high and land acquisition for a sufficiently sized highway, parking lot etc. becomes too high.
Rail generally hasn’t failed in places that are dense enough to support it; Europe, East Asia, and even a few North American cities.
> Rail does one thing really well; it fits a lot of people into a tight space
This is negated by its downsides:
- rail is supremely expensive
- rail is even more expensive to relocate
- therefore rail is fixed forever
- which means you can't alter routes to fit changing transit demand patterns
Rail is dead. Rail is a fetish. It's an exceedingly expensive fetish. It's malinvestment for anything other than cargo.
> Rail generally hasn’t failed in places that are dense enough to support it
But not most of the U.S., China, Africa, Russia, etc. Even places dense enough for rail would still be better off making better use of roads for busses.
China and Russia have a lot of railways and use them extensively. In fact China operates the world's largest high speed rail network at 45,000km, and 10,000km of urban rail transit. Russian Railways represents 2.5% of Russian GDP and the Moscow Metro is the 8th largest metro in the world and the 7th busiest.
Africa doesn't really have railways but it also doesn't really have roads because the state of African infrastructure is poor in general.
