Unfortunately as it stands in some places the infrastructure is awful. Take England for example; catching a train to London takes about 20 minutes for me, however there are often 10-15 minute delays that you now have to start accounting for, you also have to sit in a cabin with someone blaring their music that isn’t to your taste. Hopefully you’re not in a cabin with a toilet, because it’s going to stink of shit.
Now the return journey, fingers crossed it’s not cancelled otherwise you have another 40 minute wait for the next train! Last train home is a real anxiety inducing experience, will you be getting that train home or has it been cancelled? This is unfortunately all too common here. Sadly because public transport is for profit rather than a necessary service we have someone trying to do the bare minimum to make that money, and then pay the bare minimum to their staff who don’t give a shit. It all begins to unravel and people just have a better experience sat in that morning traffic which is a more consistent and pleasant experience to the public transport.
The problem is once they started to turn public transport into for profit, there is little way to turn back. They invite private companies to build the network, do the operation, now how can they go back to be non profit to be a public service to the people ? Unless they do subsidise fares which will look like they are siphoning money from government to private companies. It’s a no winner situation. If the government wants to nationalise the public transport they will have to spend a significant amount of money to buy them off , which may or may not be affordable to them.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}