It’s often said that certain services like public transit have to be publicly owned allegedly because they are “common pool goods”. Most of these services run at a considerable financial loss as well. Rather than turn a profit, the response is almost always to force taxpayers to cover the deficits, however much they grow. But it doesn’t have to be that way. As the folks at the Mises Institute point out, private ownership of mass transit was actually a reality at one time:
For example, the golden age of the New York City subways was at the beginning in 1904. That’s when a private management company built much of the system—because the city was at its debt limit and couldn’t do it—and made a lot of money, helped clear slums in Lower Manhattan, and created what was called “an engineering marvel” by author Robert Caro in the book The Power Broker, a biography of uber-builder Robert Moses.
Later the subway system was taken over by the government because the private management system—over 37 years—was never able to raise the nickel fare. The government took over and started to wreck the system.