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Comment by hnbad

It's all fun and games until the perpetual state of neglect leads to the failure of a safety system and someone gets hurt. But I'm sure letting the rail system fall into disrepair to the point of people dying is saving a lot of tax money.

Surely the lesson people will take away from this is that rail infrastructure is an important public good worth funding properly and worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.

Surely the lesson won't be that this is evidence that said corporation's inefficency needs to be fixed by cutting out more of the few profitable chunks of the natural monopoly to be sold to the lowest bidder until it become so defunct you can make a case for selling it for scrap entirely so people can personally pay for individualized transport instead of sharing a public good, because the market demands monetization.

parent hnbad 4 days ago

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