Railway Age Editorial - Two Tiered Infrastructure System

If you want a proper high speed passenger rail system - and you need one - then you can note the countries that have them. Japan, France, China, Germany are all models. All were planned and mostly financed by the state, as the only human organisation able to take on such projects. Many of them do make a profit. Some were privatised after being built.

The US and Britain which have attempted to get the so-called private sector to do it, have failed.

george matthews wrote:The US and Britain which have attempted to get the so-called private sector to do it, have failed.

Which is exactly why we should get off the silly notion of privatizing Amtrak, and building HSR with private money. You can see what happened in Mexico, when the railroad system was privatized. Regardless on what type of system, if ever built, it will be built with public funds. Would the interstate system of parking lots (as I call it) have been built with just private investment?...

Gentlemen, I don't believe the two sides on this issue are as far apart as some of the exchanges might indicate.

To boil everything down, our infrastucture, particularly the highway and air segments, has been allowed to degenerate, in large part due to an economic system focused primarilty on the short-term.

Meanwhile, after 60+ vears of neglect, the rail network, that porion of the system in which the overwhelming majority of physical plant is supplied by private capital, began to post respectable, although not spectacular returns after the most obvious sources of the distress, obsolete regulation and unrealistic labor standards, were brought to light and corrected. It's worth noting that in the process, the unionized labor force was not jettisoned, although it was drastically reduced in size.

With the single most important component of the old order, petroleum, now in permanent short supply, we have to rebuild our entire transport system to reflect the new realities, and build primarily for the long-term, but that portion of the private sector which has shown the most foresight, and has benefitted from managment of it's own resources, is concerned, and rightfully so, over the prospect of mismangement by professional bureaucrats who refuse to recognize the workings of a free economy, and would be perfectly happy if their incomptence eventually led to de facto nationaliztion.

What we need, in the simplest terms, is to get everyone to the table to devise a method of financing which recognizes the need for both public-and private-sector participation, but in such a manner as to both guarantee the prospect of economic rewards to those responsible for redevelopment of the system and the recovery of the capital by the institutions which finance it.

i think the simplest public / private partnership would be , public owns the infrastructure , private runs the trains .

David Benton wrote:i think the simplest public / private partnership would be , public owns the infrastructure , private runs the trains .

Probably the best way is the public builds and maintains the infrastructure. It then grants rights to run on it to private companies with stipulations such as certain minimum average speeds and headways. Some of the fare money is given to maintain the infrastructure. The rest is used to maintain/purchase equipment, pay employees, and hopefully put some profit money in the CEO's pocket. In general the government seems to be better at building large scale infrastructure but notoriously poor at running it. The private sector is unable to raise capital for large-scale projects but is adapt at running services on already existing infrastructure (trucking and bus companies are good examples). Not so sure about maintenance. For now I'd say let the government handle it in exchange for some payment. The tracks have to maintained to a certain standard and I think public employees with no profit motive will be less likely to skimp in order to save a buck. Of course, there's always graft but that exists in the private world also.