Quote:
Originally Posted by eternallyme
What would ridership need to be for VIA Rail to be self-sustaining? That should be the goal.
|
As stated before. There is a reason passenger rail was nationalized. Because even during the heyday of rail travel, the rail companies wither made very tiny profit or no profit at all. That is why they gave up passenger rail.
In fact the book Transport for Suburbia has a great write up on this. In Europe, passenger rail was nationalized as early as the late 1800's in some countries.
But in Canada and the USA, passenger rail was not nationalized until the private companies almost collapsed.
This led to a situation where the private rail companies in North America never really cared about building a rail network that was attractive, because they just thought of their riders as captives. once cars came to the mainstream, the railway companies continued to provide sub-par service, instead of trying to build attractive service like they did in Europe.
This led to even more declines in revenue, and the governments taking over.
Anyway our rail systems were nationalized for a reason. Even in Europe they don't pull a profit.
In fact, did you know what while public transit as a whole has a cost recovery of around 60% Canada wide. In nations like France, the cover recovery is only in the 30% range. That is approaching American level cost recovery.
As a country we are either going to invest and provide proper funding for public transit including national rail service. Or we are going to continue our underfunding(and Canada is underfunded to a great degree. Our 60% cost recovery is a symbol of underfunding).
If the government has no problem spending $3 billion extra a year on jails. Then why not spend more on rail, health care, etc?
It is about priorities.