I want to know how much money will be spent painting fucking Union Jacks on all the trains.
UK Rail services to come under unified state control
311–320 of 383 posts
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's often cheaper to buy 2/3 separate tickets, for stops along the way of a long journey, than just simply buying straight from A to B.
This is to profit-maximise. Under the rail franchise agreement during the bid process, the terms might mandate that journeys from A to B cost £10, and that journeys from B to C cost £5. There might be no obligation to price travel from A to D via B & C at a particular cost, so a rail operator might make that more expensive. It’s silly from the consumer perspective, but it makes sense for the rail operators to do this…
Thanks for the explanation. I had the wrong idea that it could be due to, for example, if A->B belonged to a different provider than B->C, providers not reaching an agreement on what % to take each, for the journey from A->C - hence increasing the overall cost for covering demands from both.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#313The elephant in the room is that UK rail is too complex to be managed in siloes and it should be renationalised for the national good and to save money.
Japan managed to do it just fine. Completely private, excellent service, fastest trains, huge infrastructure.
As far as I've seen, Japan is the only country that can make a complex rail system work with private actors. There are many factors for this, including:
1. Japanese rail operators are in most cases multi-industry conglomerates that own land, surrounding infrastructure, hotels, retail, and more.
2. The national investment in rail in Japan is much greater than that in the UK.
3. Modern post-war Japan was literally built around the rail network, and this was not accidental nor a matter of happenstance. Rail access is ubiquitous across urban and suburban areas (not just in Tokyo,) and even rural rail services are in a different category than those in the UK.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#314Hurrah! 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…
How are customers on trains supposed to vote with their wallets? It's not as if you can set up competing parallel networks running trains side by side between identical destinations at varying levels of speed and comfort. Capacity is physically constrained , especially on an ancient network like the UK's. Timetable slots are scarce and have to be centrally coordinated and managed. There is no sparkly market magic tha…
I agree wholeheartedly. I would add that the real problem is that the current UK political class is too spineless to take on the responsibility of running a rail network without going broke. So they will continue to maintain some degree of chicanery to provide for plausible deniability when the trains don't run or the system goes bankrupt.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's hard to argue I should be putting my hand in my pocket to pay for the train fare for my neighbour so they can earn a London wage. People do complain about the fares but the trains are full so it's questionable whether they are too high. If I'm looking at it from an environmental perspective I'd argue the other options (cars, planes) are too cheap.
Interesting that you see rail as a method to earn a wage. I think it's positively evil for society that someone on minimum wage can't visit family or relations because they can't afford the fare. That hurts everyone.
>Interesting that you see rail as a method to earn a wage.
Because that is the reality for the majority of rail travel. Off-peak is an afterthought.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#316I still hate Thatcher.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Average speed of 60 mph? Is this 18th centurely where rail competes with horse carriages? You do realise that a country needs 21st century rail service to be competitive interbationally?
You can pay a £20 premium each way to up that to about 100mph average. Competition and choice is great.
Quality services and products are great, choice for the sake of choice has no value.
Otherwise we would bring back bloodletting, leeches and snakeoil salesmen to get more choice in cancer treatment.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's any voting system that genuinely gives you three choices to lead government at every election. Even in proportional systems, you might be able to select someone who more closely represents your interests and can advocate them in parliament, but the government is probably going to be led by one of the same two parties over time. If party A and party B are both ideologically inclined to fuck up ra…
> but the government is probably going to be led by one of the same two parties over time. Finland has generally had 3 major parties ducking it out usually around 15-25% for each. 1995 was last time single party got over 30% of seats. Depends a bit on time which exact ones they were. English wikipedia doesn't have the historic list, but Finnish does https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduskunta#Kansanedustajat_puol... Divi…
Population size is a big problem. The more you scale up a democratic system, the more it becomes difficult to bootstrap and maintain a coherent political movement that can have a realistic chance to win an election, in what is probably a logarithmic scale. So the bigger the country, the more entrenched the options will be, which eventually boils down to two sides when you approach certain thresholds (one for the current government, and one against it).
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone coming from a country (Italy) with nationalised railway I always found the trains in the UK to be pretty great. Sure, you have a few delays but it's eons better than what I had in my country. I never understood why people were complaining about trains in the UK. Italy added a private offering some time ago, which I personally never tried, but my friends back home always praise them for working - unlike Tre…
The trains in the UK seem ok in terms of the number of services and reliability, but they're so expensive. It's almost always cheaper to fly or rent a car than it is to use the train for anything approaching long distance.
Prices fell with privatization (and efficiency went up).
The ownership structure doesn't matter. The UK has lots of publicly-owned and privately-owned transport systems that work well. The problem has been management. This is unlikely to change that.
I live somewhere in the UK that already has publicly-owned rail. Not as bad as the South-East, but it is still bad. I have no real idea how...but they manage it. EDIT: it actually hasn't transitioned yet...so we will see.
Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control
#320Good. 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
Given the currently UK leadership, I can't imagine this going to be anything other than a nightmare of bungling and corruption that I will be reading about in Private Eye in years to come.