Thread: VIA Rail
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Old Posted Jul 21, 2022, 5:22 PM
swimmer_spe swimmer_spe is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by roger1818 View Post
I agree. The main advantage of a free market economy verses a regulated monopoly is that the completion will tend to drive the prices down. What made Greyhound's regulated monopoly challenging was the requirement to continue to operate unprofitable routes. In theory the extra profits, from having a monopoly, on popular routes would help pay for those unprofitable routes, but as ridership dropped, they no longer fully covered those costs. What we are seeing with deregulation is that operators end up running only the profitable routes, unless they receive a subsidy to cover their losses.
The problem we have is some groups of people think that every service delivered must pay for itself. The reality is many things do not, and cannot pay for themselves unless you make it unreachable for the people you want to reach. The honest reality is the government is there to provide certain services that the public needs.
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