this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

tl;Dr fuck off and eat shit, idiot

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Amtrak is private, though. It's publicly subsidized, but it's not a government agency AFAIK. Same for the post office. Part of the problem with Amtrak, though, is that the state of passenger rail in the US is still down in the septic tank, largely due to almost 100 years of government subsidized car-centric development and heavily subsidized air transit development. You'd have a very hard time attracting private investors interested in a conventional passenger rail mass transit scheme, I think.

Also, everybody benefits, even this fucking douche, when public transit is high quality and affordable. Even if a private company did offer high quality, affordable mass transit, the insatiable drive for ever increasing profits will eventually cause them to enshittify one or both and put us right back here. This is really just another attempt to transfer public wealth into private portfolios, though it's a little more of a joke compared to privatization efforts in Europe because we basically haven't been investing at all in public transit for the last fifty years

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago

USPS is not publicly subsidized. All of their operating costs come from the services they sell.

[–] evasive_chimpanzee 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

It's quasi-public, which is weird. It is subsidized, but just barely (they have like 95% farebox recovery), so i don't think it's even responsible to call it subsidized like road and air travel.

I bet if there was enforcement of train priority laws, they could even be a revenue generator. Philosophically, I dont think they should be, though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Edit: lmao, at those rates, Amtrak is less publicly subsidized than a lot of fortune 500s

I'd be cool with Amtrak turning profit as long as the revenue was always re-invested into better train sets, better routes, more frequent service, cheaper tickets, employee pay and benefits, etc etc, and never just routed to rich fucking assholes who already have more than they know what to do with.

[–] evasive_chimpanzee 1 points 40 minutes ago

If they are re-investing revenue, it's not profit. I would want them to be able to expand, pay employees better, etc. What I wouldn't want is for them to make money and just pay dividends to shareholders.