The Black Ball Line was at no time able to pay their workers a living wage for humane working conditions. When the Inland Boatmen’s Union got strong enough to demand wages and decent hours, the game was over for the Black Ball Line.

Yes, who would have thought the government-subsidized private railroads “couldn’t” provide cheap parcel service? I’m all for spurring market adoption of new technologies, but there are clearly bad eggs in every basket.

However, I’m not convinced that all services run off public money are any more inefficient or than private ones, or even more heavily subsidized considering publicly funded roads or single-source contracts. Certainly some public institutions are notoriously badly run, but so are a lot of private companies. When these private companies have a nearly guaranteed revenue stream (newspapers before 10 year ago, textbook publishers, manufacturers of patented vaccines, etc.) they rot and their customers wince and fork over the cash.

By the way, as far as professional sports go, American football actually has some good business principles:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6859210

There used to be a ferry company in Puget Sound called the Black Ball Line. By the mid-30s they had a virtual monopoly in providing ferry service. And they still couldn’t make a profit. That’s why we have state ferries today. “Private enterprise” simply couldn’t do the job.

The same thing goes for parcel post. By 1910 the American people were fed up with the high prices and low quality services they got from private shipping companies. It took a full-court national effort to overcome the lobbying by the shipping companies but the people did it, and USPS Parcel Post was established.

Stringing together grey-bearded homilies like “massively subsidized” and “top-heavy government” doesn’t make any wheels go ’round- except maybe in the head of the speaker.

And furthermore, why are WE paying for the stadiums? Why are we putting up public money to earn Allen a bunch of cash? We let the Seahawks rent our stadium for 850,000 a year, but for nosebleed season tickets, I see they cost about 1000 a seat! But I suppose that’s neither here nor there.

We have a huge sunk investment in those facilities and markets. If the Seahawks lose money and move out of town, we suddenly have an empty stadium.

And if KCMetro can’t make money filling buses with $6/seat riders in off-peak service, it’s time to just give up on the whole bus idea.

This is nothing more or less than the Bush gang seeing a place where they could slash a neck vein and draw off a few buckets of blood for themselves. The public built the whole kit and kaboodle and now, with a simple rule change, the Bushies are adding a stiff surcharge for their own pockets because, hey, it’s not like the public can afford to let the whole situation crumble.

It’s the same old “private enterprise” game we’ve seen before. The public paid with land-grants to build the railroads- paid twice as much, actually, as it would have cost the government to build the roads. Then the private railroads squeezed the shippers and employees until the nation was repeatedly and violently thrown into catastrophic depressions- which, conveniently enough for the railroads, gave them the excuse to go bankrupt, stiff half their shareholders and bondowners, and re-emerge with twice the capitalization they had before.

If you don’t learn from history, you will repeat it.

Now, the USPS and FedEx do compete on packages, express letters, etc. I don’t see why, if Metro was interested, they couldn’t compete without subsidy in a similar way.

Also, doesn’t Metro add extra regular route buses from Park and Rides to DSTT for “special events”?

If Metro is opporating the gameday service at a profit, it’s a net money-maker, regardless if it’s other services are subsidized.

The only way true market forces would come to bear is if the subsidised transit options butted out entirely (as the law says) and multiple private companies played against each other.