> Maintaining the road system on an inadequate budget is a lot harder than maintaining a fibre optic system, and yet municipalities do a passable job at that.
They do a pretty crappy job of it, in general. The relevant metric here would be congestion, i.e. are they maintaining adequate capacity to prevent people from being stuck in traffic?
There are a lot of arguments people will make for how they should be preventing traffic congestion (e.g. add lanes vs. facilitate more housing construction so people aren't driving as far), but on the question of whether they've succeeded in preventing traffic congestion, the answer is no.
They also spend rather a lot of money on it.
> That's a major point of my analogy -- having the road system being anything but a monopoly is stupid, yet the road system has largely destroyed the railway companies which are not a monopoly.
But the main reason for this is politics. Trucker unions see rail as competition so they lobby for laws that keep people using trucks. Rail has a significantly lower cost per ton but projects to build new rail lines etc. are opposed because they would compete with truck routes.
They do a pretty crappy job of it, in general. The relevant metric here would be congestion, i.e. are they maintaining adequate capacity to prevent people from being stuck in traffic?
There are a lot of arguments people will make for how they should be preventing traffic congestion (e.g. add lanes vs. facilitate more housing construction so people aren't driving as far), but on the question of whether they've succeeded in preventing traffic congestion, the answer is no.
They also spend rather a lot of money on it.
> That's a major point of my analogy -- having the road system being anything but a monopoly is stupid, yet the road system has largely destroyed the railway companies which are not a monopoly.
But the main reason for this is politics. Trucker unions see rail as competition so they lobby for laws that keep people using trucks. Rail has a significantly lower cost per ton but projects to build new rail lines etc. are opposed because they would compete with truck routes.