"...doesn't include depreciation..."

ROFL!

Has no understanding of how government (and much utility) accounting really works. When an item is acquired, upon acceptance, it has no salvage value. The government is not in business, and does not pay business taxes on the value of its property, so salvage value and depreciation are invalid terms. Plus: there is no market for used cable cars (other than, perhaps, for touristy shuttle buses, but that market seems to be full at the moment with all the old ones already out there). Their inherent value, if one is totaled by some incident, would be the value of the materials and parts that would be stockpiled by the city for use in building and maintaining/repairing other cable cars. As with million-dollar autos, cable cars (and cable car infrastructure) have either no value other than to operate, or such high value that practically any repair cost is worthwhile. "Value" does not have to be entirely monetary.

The last new cable car was built by the city in the cable car shops! Do you want the people building (for assorted values of "build") BART cars to try to build something that was state of the art in 1906?

Of course, the student who wrote it (I agree with BOB2 there) liberally used the libertarian/Cato keywords: private, and privatize. Those of course are the only answer to the questions Cato asks. So of course it would be published by Cato.

/ROFL