All very good points, but this is just about the MUNI Metro system — the light rail. He does not even touch on the other 90 percent of the system, including the buses and the street cars. That part is even worse than the Metro.
And these MUNI people practically break their arms patting themselves on their own backs because they are on time 70 percent of the time. Woo-hoo!
“The City That Knows How” is only used with the most bitter irony these days. Sometimes I really hate this place …

Wow, I’ve rarely seen someone accuse Daniel of holding back!

…

Take Virginia’s just-completed “Dulles Greenway” toll road. Privately conceived, funded, and operated, this 14-mile extension of an existing limited access highway connects Northern Virginia suburbs with the Main Washington-D.C. area transportation arteries.

It is the first modern highway in America underwritten solely by private venture capital–and the first private toll road built in Virginia since 1816.

continued http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=202

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Portions of I-35 in Oklahoma are toll. Nice road. Even in town, I sometimes find toll roads a better choice than the free alternative.

Revoking licenses doesn’t always keep those poeple off the road. All the hoops (licenses, registration, inspection, speed enforcement, red-light cameras) seem to be more about money than safety. WiFi shows the benefit of no licenses. It is however, FCC regulated.

The Spectrum Should Be Private Property
http://www.mises.org/article.aspx?Id=1662

[There are toll roads that function in lots of places, just as there are commercial railways. The problem is, as with any utility, that there isn't a privatized business model that can build roads where there is no payoff for building them. I grew up in Montana, which desperately needs federal subsidies to build highways through wide open rural areas so we can drive 100 mph between far flung towns. There is no toll system that could have paid for such projects. Once built, the Interstate system also benefits long haul trucking, tourists traveling from Minnesota to Seattle, and enables economic expansion once the network exists. As you might recall, the only way the US got Congress to fund the multibillion dollar Interstate project was to call it a missile defense network during Cold War hysteria of the 40s, used to truck around ICBMs.

What we need is a way to pay for everything else with military dollars, as we did with the Internet. Military high speed trains linking SF and LA. Military higher education so our workforce isn't stupid. Military training so our kids aren't fat. Perhaps the liberal socialist agenda will be delivered by a fascist police state after all! Oh the humanity.

Similar problems exist for phones and cable TV and gas and electricity and water and every other utility that we either deliver as a government service or as a privatized monopoly with regulation. There's a wide range of thought about how much or little the government should be involved, and there are strong answers and facts on both sides and everywhere along the line in between. I just think the easy dogmatic answers are most likely to be wrong, and I like to bring up alternative ways of looking at things to foster dialog about them. - Dan ]

Sydney has lumbering double deck trains that are slow and then slow to load and unload while passengers navigate the stairs. Double decks are OK for medium distance travel (like in Paris), but for inner-city trains, hopeless.

As for those who are down on government running things, private enterprise can be far worse. The people doing Sydney’s ticketing have fallen to pieces. Private enterprise claims that they keep prices down due to competition, but usually schemes to get much more money out of you are in place – have you been to UK lately? It’s just a gross generalization to put the problems down to government, there are incompetents everywhere.

What got a sympathetic chuckle out of me are the curved trains with curved doors that can’t be used because passengers might fall under the train. DID NO ONE THINK OF THIS WHEN THEY SIGNED TO MILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF CONTRACTS? Seriously? Nobody noticed until the trains where delivered?

I doubt it. Americans (especially Californians, it seems) are too addicted to their cars. Americans value privacy more than community, preferring to isolate themselves from each other in their real estate and cars because they feel entitled to the privacy they provide. “A man’s home is his castle” they like to say, but what is a castle but a cold, uninviting fortress to keep “common” people out? They apply the same analogy to their mobile castles.

Is it too late to reverse the terrible effects cars have on cities? I certainly hope not. San Francisco is still small enough to be able to correct it IF the citizens really want to. But I don’t really see a great organized and coherent desire to achieve this.

You never know, they might try public transport ;)