> serious question - does a profitable private passenger railroad company that actually owns/maintains tracks, stations, etc exist without subsidies anywhere at all in the world?
Hong Kong, Japan. But my point is narrower than that. I’m not saying governments in general cannot run decent train service. I’m saying Americans cannot. We’re culturally defective in that respect.
> even if the trains were self driving, for the 10y or so I lived there before this, there was still a conductor, so not sure if this is really a good argument..
They had a conductor for safety. But the self driving trains made the ride very smooth and allowed tighter headways. Even after 10 years, Metro conductors cannot properly stop at stations. To avoid overshooting the platform, they stop way short, and then jerkily inch into position. When I was growing up, headways on the orange line were 6 minutes and the WMATA trip planner was accurate. Today, it’s 8 minutes, because they can’t sustain the 6 minute headways. And they had to revise the trip planner a few years ago to increase the predicted travel time between stations. If you look at Metro advertising from the 1980s, station to station trip times today are 30-50% longer.
