The Indiana toll road deal was for $3.8 billion over a 75 year concession which amounts to $50 million a year, which is 0.18% of the state’s $28 billion budget.

Private commuter buses are subsidized in NJ in that they use mostly public free roads and mostly publicly owned bus stops. They also, IIRC, get their rolling stock for $1 a year provided that the buses are used for commuter service.

You brought up the health effects of idling so it a fair game issue. Buses idling unnecessarily on the publicly owned and maintained streets pollute the commons of the publicly shared air which has been shown to have a causal link to respiratory health problems.

Does someone have the same right to bury contaminated waste on their property which ends up poisoning the aquifer that provides the water for their next door neighbors?

Amtrak was created by government fiat. The government made the same decision back then that they did with the private auto industry recently – regulate them down to their knees, buy up as many weakened companies as possible and operate them in a top-down manner. The unions survived bankruptcy proceedings then as they did recently, and today we have a national railroad service with only one weakly profitable line and ravaged by inefficiency and mismanagement, with acts of Congress required to make any changes. Ours is a hallmark of how NOT to operate a railroad of any stripe – government owned or private – and everywhere else in the world, LITERALLY EVERYWHERE, there are railroad systems which make any American system look laughably ridiculous by comparison.

As for idling, whether it affects people’s health is outside the scope of this discussion – I am concerned more with the fact that the government decided it’s OK to restrict where and how long a privately-owned bus legally parks while waiting for passengers or while the driver is off-duty. I’m also concerned with government regulations that are choking the life out of private bus lines just as much as they did with private passenger rail lines.

Re: Megabus and idling – the linking of particulates from diesel exhaust to asthma and other respiratory ailments has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt for quite some time.

Only if you also privatize the highway system.

Perhaps we might consider the possibility of slashing tax rates for privately-owned & operated commuter rail and bus lines instead of burning millions of taxpayer dollars on the public option for commuters. Privatize the MTA and NJ Transit and PATH and, oh hell let’s just shoot the moon and privatize Amtrak too while we’re at it. Get the government out of the job of moving people from point A to point B. It shouldn’t take an act of government, be it federal or state, to obtain new cashflow for a business as ridiculously simple and easy to run as a railroad or bus line, and the taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for any upgrades or repairs or other such things, especially if their input isn’t taken into account when the decisions are made.