I would rather a private company build it, or in a public / private partnership, so we at least have some semblance of breaking-even if not a small profit.
Our current train systems are so woefully wasteful, inefficient, prone to breaking down, and so on that simply giving the same corruption more money would be extremely unwise.
I see no real reason why public transport must be necessarily profitable. It's a common good that tax payers enjoy. You'll have profitable legs, but you'll also have legs that are used by a few folks from a village who need to get to the city once a week, and those will never be profitable. A private company would probably not build there.
Exactly, public transit doesn't need to be profitable.
IIRC there are studies showing that unprofitable public transport is positive for economy and profitable if you'd look at it as whole economy in general.
Because without the need to be profitable, you get gross incompetence, corruption, and waste. See: California HSR, BART expansion, NYC subway expansion.
The power of the market forces private businesses to offer quality service. A privately run subway would never allow drug addicts and thieves run rampant on the train like they're allowed to in NYC and the Bay.
Pro tip: if I feel scared for my life or property at any point during a transit, you've already lost against a car.
There's "unprofitable"*, safe, quality public transportation in hundreds of European towns and cities, suggesting the common cause of those issues is not the "lack of profit motive", it's uniquely American.
* Unprofitable meaning, they don't earn enough revenue to pay for the service to run. However, they do provide economic benefit to the area far in excess of their government subsidy.
But those deaths are 1) rational and 2) avoidable by defensive driving. By rational, I mean they make sense - drunk driving, unsafe driving, and speeding [1]. By contrast, you never know if someone on the subway is a mentally deranged person (frequently experience this on BART), a robber out to take your shit, or just someone who's being aggressive because they're trashy (also frequently experience this).
Per mile, cars make me feel the safest. And that's what matters for what I (and others) end up selecting for my form of transportation. Obviously, I'm probably never going to die on the subway due to a train crash. But I could be seriously hurt or my property taken from me - and it wouldn't show up in the stats as caused by the subway because it's just another crime that happened to occur there.
Have you really never been unsettled and felt unsafe due to mentally deranged people at night on BART/NYC subway?
