I live in a counter-example. The only water and electric utility available is city-owned and I pay triple the amount of my sister and her family that lives in another city yet has 4+ private utility companies all competing with each other. And she has a house more than twice the size of mine!

Bring on the competition!

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andyjohnson0 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How does this system of private competing water companies actually work? Do they each have their own exclusive reservoirs and mains transmission system and water pipes right to their customer's houses/premises? And their own exclusive sewerage systems and treatment plants?

Or are they just reselling access to some ahared legacy infrastructure? In which case any "competition" is very likely an illusion.

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muvlon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The way I understand it in my country is this:

There is only one public water system, every house connects to it. The state tasks specific companies with its maintenance (these are often not utility providers themselves, just construction/maintenance companies).

Consumers attached to that system have a metered connection, but water just flows as long as there's enough overall. Your utilities company doesn't have to move any physical water at all. They just have to eventually "settle" the amount of water that they sold to their customers. They do so by buying and then forwarding options contracts. The electricity and gas companies are the same. They compete on

- trading (who knows best when to buy how much?) and

- consumer-facing marketing

This is how a lot of the modern economy works. Through the power of abstraction, you can run an online store without producing or shipping any items yourself and a delivery restaurant without cooking any meals.

	▲	danans 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> - trading (who knows best when to buy how much?) That seems odd. Does a local water futures market exist. > - consumer-facing marketing If it's all going through the same pipes, what is there to market. Electricity is a different story - it can be traded day ahead and even marketed, but none of that makes sense for water delivered over shared infrastructure.

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john_strinlai 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>4+ private utility companies all competing with each other.

does every house have 4+ water lines, gas lines, etc. running to it?

if not, i'm not sure what you mean.

	▲	geertj 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I imagine this works just like with electricity. You have generation capacity, with commercial entities buying or owning generation capacity and selling the resource to consumers through community owned last mile infrastructure. The sellers need to tally up and reconcile/settle their generated capacity at some frequency (not sure if daily, monthly, yearly).

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fl4regun 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

utilities don't generally "compete" with each other like how most business do - becauase that would mean they own redundant infrastructure. They are more like localized monopolies, because there is usually only 1 that operates for each given address.

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ezst 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

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esprehn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What are the two cities? You'd need to control for a lot of factors to figure out if the competition is the reason or the local market rate is just lower.

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panzagl 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And then an icestorm happens and her bill is $2000?

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briffle 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How do you have multiple Water companies compete?

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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roosterIllusi0n 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Name the city because this makes no sense. You claim private utility companies are actually installing infrastructure? Or are they just resellers that provide nothing?

The only reason cities are having issues with water and electricity is because we cut taxes on the rich. Wages went down and service quality got cut to make the CEOs richer. The US has been coasting on all the infrastructure built in the 50-60s when we had a 90% federal income tax rate and CEOs were capped at making the 2026 equivalent of 5 mil a year. Tax dodging was stopped, everything was funded and life was affordable.

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zoeysmithe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Generally that's not true. Its weird people feel like they must mention any exception. Its the same as "I know someone who lived to their 90s and smoked everyday, so what's wrong with smoking?" People are aware exceptions exist and it doesn't really add anything to conversation to keep bringing them up.

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idiotsecant 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you say the names of the two cities people can intelligently talk about why this is but it's almost certainly not because it's municipally owned.

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oidar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gainesville?

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Synthetic7346 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Does your sister live in another state?