Does it fulfill its stated purpose as a hop on hop off circulator? I think a lot of people like it, even if its not a particularly good form of cross town travel. Denver's 16th street mall ride is also slow but its an incredibly useful feature.
Maybe the solution is to make it free. The Miami Metromover was an even more dramatic boondoggle until they realized that it cost money to enforce fares from the nonexistent passengers and turned into to a free service. Then a lot of people starting using it as a way to take a short trip a few blocks instead of walking, and in turn that has likely increased land value around the stations.
Of course in Portland the homeless issue might create safety and perception problems if it cost nothing to sit in the climate controlled trams all day and night. Maybe it should be free but the ticket machines remain and everyone is rationed something like 6 free rides in a day. Normal users(including people who happen to be homeless but are respectful of public spaces) would never have to pay but someone abusing the privilege by sleeping on a seat or smoking on the train could be kicked off.
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Exactly. And projects would be built where ridership has the highest potential.
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Why would private investors spend money on something that will never make a profit and relies on unpredictable public subsidies?
I think investors would question the viability of Hong Kong style private transit oriented development. Where actual ridership and operational revenues come close to breaking even. Not enough Americans ride transit, and there are very few if any places where you can imagine multi-tower apartment districts sprouting up on a totally greenfield location with a heavy rail station at the center.
You dismiss streetcars as merely being justified for land development, but in the US I think the M1 Detroit streetcar approach is the closest thing you'll ever get to this idea. And I think in the long run this will face problems when too few people use the line and its no longer new and shiny. Weak local transit lines that are privately funded always have short lives. Tampa used to have a people mover line, there were multiple private monorails and people movers around Kobe and Osaka that closed, The Los Colinas system only sticks around because it has a guaranteed public funding source and DART built a station for transferring to the light rail. If you haven't noticed, transit spending in US cities is a roller coaster too. It goes up, then costs skyrocket or funding falls, and its always contentious politics. Would a company expecting that public subsidy as their main revenue stream feel secure?
Finally this gets to the heart of why we even bother with transit. It is so expensive to subsidize transit trips in most suburbs and towns that in the near future a community owned fleet of electric cars might actually be more cost effective, and have better outcomes in terms of mobility and welfare. Even in city centers there are only really specific circumstances where you absolutely need rail capacity, and almost all of those places have it already.
A reason why I always favored public transit, aside from the utility of people needing to get to work and not overcrowding urban centers with cars, is that it implicitly creates more lively public spaces. But private transit and private development that is just 'mall-lite' may defeat that purpose.
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