| The driver is not allowed to open the door anywhere but at a bus stop, the company running the bus forbids it. Quite strictly, actually. I think it is mainly because of insurance things. It is the same in a traffic jam when you are on the bus and the next bus stop is just a few meters away, and the bus is stuck and nothing moves -- impatient people will get angry because they want to leave the bus, but the driver is just not allowed to open the door except when the bus has properly reached the next bus stop. Some bus drivers do open the door on some such occasion, but they can really get into trouble if they are caught doing that. |
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| ▲ | rsynnott 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It will often be a company owned by the state. In Ireland, most buses are run by CIE, a state company. In Dublin, for the last couple of decades, some routes have been run by GoAhead, a private company (Dublin Bus (part of CIE) and GoAhead tender for the routes). It's been a fascinating experiment in privatisation; the buses all use TFI livery, so the only way to tell whether your route is run by Dublin Bus or GoAhead, besides looking it up, is that if it's Dublin Bus, it'll just be late; if it's GoAhead it won't show up at all. For all that people complain about public sector inefficiency, private companies turn out to be very, very bad at competing with the public sector. | |
| ▲ | ido 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's usually a company owned by the city or the state, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Verkehrsbetriebe | |
| ▲ | dathinab 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | in EU it's normal - a company run the busses - its partially of fully owned by the city/state, i.e. NOT private investors, not private liquidity, no one expects any payouts - its commonly a special form of "company", e.g. "Anstalt des öffentlichen Rechts" in this case which you can roughly read as "installment/company based on public-law" Practical that is "mostly" the same as state run when looking at it from a distance. But with some differences. Like it's still a company, has it's own company structure, it's own bookkeeping, it's own employees etc. This leads to a much more clean separation when it comes to budged managing, and where possible removes/reduces direct political influence into daily operations (just direct one, indirectly through ownership etc. there is very much still influence, but this makes it somewhat less suspect to damage from changing political parties non stop changing directions). Through things can get far more complicated then just one company, in one legal form. | |
| ▲ | MisterTea 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Depends. NYC busses used to be a mix of municipal and privatized companies that were part of the Transit Alliance. In addition to city owned and operated buses you had four private companies: Green Bus Lines, Jamaica Buses, Triborough Transit and Command. Around the mid 00s they were all absorbed into the MTA. Living in south Queens the Green Bus Lines were a big part of my youth as I took the Q41 to school every day and the Q11 on weekends to the mall. | |
| ▲ | master-lincoln 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Normally municipalities own companies that do the public transport service in Germany | |
| ▲ | klausa 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | They're usually private companies owned by the cities. | | |
| ▲ | master-lincoln 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Can something be private and owned by a state? Isn't the definition of private: non-public? And wouldn't the government in a democratic state count as public? | | |
| ▲ | freehorse 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | "Public enterprises" are different kinds of enterprises, with different structure and governed by different regulations/laws than private enterprises. "State owned private enterprises" have all the structure etc of a private enterprise, their only difference being that they are owned (fully or by majority) by some state body. | |
| ▲ | PurpleRamen 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, it can. Many public services in Germany are legally private companies, which just happen to be owned by public entities. Main reason seems to be that they can act more flexible and independent of public rules. On a more nasty side, it's also easier to sell them partly or full, if necessary. And in some cases they simply started as private companies and were bought up by the state for various reasons. | |
| ▲ | klausa 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Public company" is a very specific thing; the BVG is state owned, but very much not a public company. | | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 2 days ago | parent [-] | | In the US, “public” can be short for a private business with publicly listed shares on a stock exchange anyone can buy, or public can mean an organization owned and operated by the government. | | |
| ▲ | overfeed a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > public can mean an organization owned and operated by the government. Would you consider In-Q-Tel - wholly owned by the CIA - to be a public venture* through ownership by a government agency, or a private one, because the public has no opportunity of ownership or control? I'm convinced it's the latter. * Let's ignore it's non-profit status. Any CIA shell-/front-company is an even better example | |
| ▲ | klausa 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Perhaps the fact that we’re having this discussion on HN shows the kind of media I’m likely to consume, but I’ve never seen it used in the latter sense. TIL, I guess! |
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