Quote:
Originally Posted by Qbranch
One last thing, for this post... I'll submit this to the awesome knoledge base that is CD: Why are so many public transportation companies unprofitable? After reading this thread it seems that this phenomena of bankruptcy isn't limited to any one kind of public transportation. Is there a fundamental flaw?  |
Transporting people, even back before World War II, never really had high profit margins, especially in comparison to freight rail traffic.
Highways aren't really much better. Unless one has really high gas taxes and only toll routes, I doubt they would ever be profitable
and highly efficient. You might get one, but not the other. (If someone is operating a toll highway to make a profit, they would rather have the entire highway sit in traffic jams, as everyone will still eventually get to their destination but they'll have a lot higher amount of cars per mile on the highway, and hence more revenue.)
And if the auto/oil companies were the ones who had to finance, build, and maintain the entire highway infrastructure like the railroads do with all their infrastructure, these industries wouldn't be profitable either.
And as we are seeing now, the end of cheap oil is slowly gnawing away at the air travel industry, and they are starting to declare bankruptcy left and right. I doubt you'll see many profits from them in twenty or thirty years, unless they focus on only business passengers or they find a cheap non-petroleum-based way to fuel aircraft.
Don't get me wrong, you can still make profits off transporting people. But most of these profits come from business class passengers, as opposed to the general public.
Whether we like it or not, the world is running out of oil. China and India are surging ahead economically, and will in twenty or thirty years will leave even America's consumption of oil in the dust. The best thing we can do now is find as many possible ways to wean ourselves from oil (hybrid/electric cars, more trains, more renewable energy power plants, etc.), before it becomes a lot of people all seeking the small amount left. That is how world wars start, and I really don't want to see the day when nations with hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons get desperate for oil.
(Thus it becomes easily understandable how Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts against Global Warming).