Foremost, I believe separate fares, with neither price ceilings nor floors, are the heart of competition. The uniform nickel fare was used to the detriment of the IRT and BRT/BMT.

The TWU will still be around after privatization, but like it’s airline division, a strike in one company doesn’t imply that there will suddenly be an industry-wide or system-wide general strike.

That 1/3 of the system that’s hamstrung by a strike will still have to answer to it’s employees, as well as it’s aggravated customers (who are now using their competitors en masse), the city, state and federal governments, but now it’s worried shareholders, lenders, and subcontractors.

From my understanding, the current state of the Tokyo and Hong Kong systems argue in favor of partial if not complete corporate governance.

I agree wholeheartedly that the profitability of the Hong Kong Metro prior to privatization and the immaculate state of the Moscow Metro are testaments to well run public sector agencies. They should be rightfully applauded. But going all the way back to my very first argument, I don’t see any hope of the MTA, as is, to come close to these levels of quality. I feel the MTA simply does not have the incentive to do more than keep the system on life support.

Dissolve the MTA; and even if our subways become semi-privatized like Tokyo, I’ll still argue for deregulation and competition, but that’s me.

As an aside:

The new tracks and tunnels of the Dual Contracts system were laid out by the city’s Rapid Transit Commission and the Board of Transit Control (not the IRT and BRT). Where the IRT and BRT ran duplicate routes is due to the street grids of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Indeed, I feel the duplicate routes helped add capacity to Lower Manhattan, Midtown, and Downtown Brooklyn.

Don’t get me started on the IND

Alon, I feel that this debate will run longer than a Subchat.org thread. Shall we agree to disagree?

In addition, what you propose for the unions will not happen, and if it does, it’ll be a disaster. Workers often have industry-wide unions, certainly in the case of public transport. If unions were merely company-wide, then the companies could play their workforces against one another, forcing them to engage in a race to the bottom. The most effective form of collective action, the strike, will become toothless if it can only affect one third of the system at a given time.

And this assumes the corporate governance will improve with privatization or competition. There’s nothing that suggests it does. In Tokyo, both the private rapid transit systems and the public one run profits. In Hong Kong, where the single corporation running the system was privatized in 2000, the system’s been running operating profits since before privatization. Moscow Metro, which is quick, efficient, and popular, has always been public. In New York itself, competition has generally hurt the system by encouraging duplication of routes; this was most evident with the IND, but even before the IND the routes were set by the city, rather than by the private operators.

The separate fares (is one of many ways that) will reinforce competition as the 3 companies use discounts and premiums to meet demand and/or increase ridership.

Why three companies instead of two? Give the customer more real choices I always say, besides if the employees of one company were to go on strike (as non-municipal employees have a right to) then the other two (along with it’s other competitors: the LIRR, Metro-North, and PATH) could pick up the slack.

I’d split the subway system along the lines of the IRT, BMT, IND, and SIRT. Lease their operations and maintenance to private firms. They can set their own fares, but would have to compete for customers, tenants, employees, and ad space.

Make the bus routes non-exclusive and allow non-subsidized, private vans, buses, etc to operate along them, after of course, passing an annual inspection of City, State, and Federal standards for safety and integrity. They too can set their own fares, have Metrocard readers installed, but must compete for customers, employees, and ad space.