Transport Politic offers a little background and some advice on John Mica's ill-conceived favoratism of private enterprise in public infrastructure:
The Bush administration, as we chronicled a few months ago, has repeatedly pushed to sell or lease public assets to private companies.
But having high-speed railways run on privately-owned tracks is a bad idea. The most compelling argument for this is that infrastructure cannot act as a competitive entity in the free market. If you build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and then sell or lease the tracks to a private company, no competing company will build its own tracks over the same route. There is simply not the market or the financial means for that to happen, and it’s the reason why it makes sense to continue the public ownership of, for example, the interstate highway system or the New York City Subway.
Keeping the track in public hands also ensures political accountability. For instance, if a section of track passes through a neighborhood and residents there complain of unreasonable noise, the elected government is more likely to respond with the construction of noise walls than is a private company, because there’s no motive for increased profit in building such a wall. Even if the neighborhood were to boycott the rail system, the collective loss in ticket revenue would be less than the cost of building the wall, so the company would be unlikely to do so, at least unless pushed to do so by the government.
Similarly, if poor management bankrupts the owner of the track, a vital public utility that cannot be shut down, government would be forced to subsidize the track’s operation, even as the private owner escapes accountability. The government does not go bankrupt, and as long as there’s public interest in supporting a railway system, the tracks will continue to be funded, no matter the economic situation. This is necessary insurance for infrastructure.
Indeed, mainland Europe’s highly developed rail system is publicly owned. The European Union’s competition laws are opening services up to private companies (we will discuss this further later in this post), but the infrastructure itself remains under the control and ownership of the national government.
The benefit of having governmental control is efficiency; nations decide to invest in new high-speed rail lines and simply hand the money and right-of-way over to the public infrastructure owner. The government is also responsible to the citizens for the maintenance of the lines; when several French TGVs were delayed because of problems with overhead catenary earlier this year, an infuriated public pushed for the government to invest more in the electrical systems, and it did. Would that have happened if there were a private owner? The public’s ability to ensure the continued quality of the tracks is improved with the government in power.
