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UK Rail services to come under unified state control

bbc.com

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Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#91

Post by kitd »

flipbrad wrote: post #69
OJFord wrote: post #48

Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets. There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a p…

I'm sorry to say, but these plans still see routes being operated by private companies awarded multiyear contracts...

Pricing and scheduling are to be centralised though AIUI

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#92

Post by audunw »

matsemann wrote: post #12

Norway's railroad also went "private" a few years ago, and have butchered it up into (not all): - we have a directorate of railway deciding where to build tracks, what providers must adhere to, their timetables etc - one government owned company building - one government owned company building and maintaining the tracks - one government owned company owning the trains - another one maintaining the trains - one govern…

I feel like the decision to do this is based on an outdated idea about how to do business effectively. Take car makers. It used to be that the winners were outsourcing everything except their core competence (engines and assembling/marketing vehicles). But these days it seems like vertical integrated companies are the winners, with Tesla being a good example in the car industry. I think politicians that have pushed for this was inspired heavily by all this out-sourcing happening at the end of the previous century.

It's not that vertical integration is good everywhere. But neither is avoiding vertical integration. You have to use your brain and look at what's beneficial in a given market. And train operation strikes me as a place where vertical integration is essential to long term success and efficiency. If it was actually a free market, I'm sure that it'd converge to a few vertically integrated companies with monopolies in large geographic areas.

I'd also argue that government owned corporations have become better at operating efficiently. Business has almost become a science. You're not as reliant on brute force through competition.

And when government corporations are more expensive, it's usually just because they treat their employees better.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#93

Post by zelos »

mvzvm wrote: post #5

Good. This is wildly overdue. The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail ) was a crime of the highest corruption. Edit: Link broke? Edit 2: Thank you @bogdan https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

Following the link from that page, the impact of privatisation is debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Reduced subsidies (per journey), massively increased passenger numbers, improved satisfaction and (apparently) a slower rate of season ticket price increase than under British Rail would appear to be some of the positives.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#94

Post by jabl »

What is actually changing here? The article says GBR will be responsible for ticketing, prices and schedules, which makes sense that you can buy a ticket for anywhere on the rail system regardless of which company happens to operate which line at whichever moment.

What I don' understand, is that the article says that the 'government has ended rail franchising', which AFAIU was the process where private companies bid to handle certain routes. Now this is to be replaced with 'concessions', which AFAIU is a bidding process where private companies bid to operate certain routes. What's the difference?

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#95

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

cosmodisk wrote: post #76
rich_sasha wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also “leaves on the track”, my personal favourite. Sometimes I struggle to believe trains were invented in the UK!

This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries. My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflat…

Most systems with wet leaf problems use sand dispensers for added traction.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#96

Post by KaiserPro »

steve_gh wrote: post #54

Note: I have spent the last 7 years working in consultancy, much of which has been involved with both Metro Rail (eg TfL) and Heavy Rail in the UK. There are certainly some messy aspects to UK Rail, but the current system was not nearly as bad as made out by some posters , and there are some very good arguments against further centralisation. A lot of the problem as I see it has been the misalignment between Network…

The timetables bit is key here.

the reason a lot of services failed so horribly in 2018/2019 was because as OP pointed out, greyling fucked up the timetabling.

Not only that, they decided to pick a fight with the unions on southern rail, which turned out to end in a messy stalemate.

https://www.londonreconnections.com/ has some good references.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#97

Post by Stranger43 »

JI00912 wrote: post #79
OJFord wrote: post #48

Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets. There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a p…

> awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer. Well... the incentives really aren't different for the government.

Actually they are because unlike shareholders who cares more about dividends then efficiency and service levels the government have stakeholders who care about efficiency and service levels.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#98

Post by tomxor »

flipbrad wrote: post #69
OJFord wrote: post #48

Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets. There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a p…

I'm sorry to say, but these plans still see routes being operated by private companies awarded multiyear contracts...

Perhaps, but:

> The government says the new system should look more like Transport for London, with multiple operators under one brand, offering greater accountability when things go wrong.

If it introduces more accountability, it's basically doing it's job. Multiyear contracts do not mean no accountability. I'm not a regular passenger but my understanding is that reliability of current service is generally poor with little to no recourse.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#99

Post by fnord123 »

samatman wrote: post #29
fnord123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There exists a private hospital in a country of superior quality to a public hospital in the same country" is a weak claim. Even weaker is "there exists a private hospital in the world of superior quality to a public hospital also in the world".

I'm fairly certain that the claim you're replying to is that private hospitals in the countries in question are consistently better than public ones.

If that was the claim, then why consider African hospitals instead of any hospital?

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#100

Post by madaxe_again »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #95
cosmodisk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries. My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflat…

Most systems with wet leaf problems use sand dispensers for added traction.

And there’s the rub. Is that network rail’s problem, or the operator’s? Network rails’s rails... operator’s train wheels, leaves in the middle. The leaves are undefined, and are therefore probably nobody’s problem but the passengers’.
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