UK Rail services to come under unified state control • Hacker News Board

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#351

Post by OJFord » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #301

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…

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…

> How are customers on trains supposed to vote with their wallets?

They can't.

> The only way to lower prices is nationalise the entire industry and replace privatisation with direct investment, on the basis that transport infrastructure is a social cost with significant indirect benefits, and cannot possibly be run as a self-sustaining profitable business on a national scale.

Hear hear!

I'm not sure if you realise you're agreeing with me, but yes, exactly, I agree with you, that was my (intended) point too; I wrote:

> 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.

Note the '(impossible)' - I mean that in the sense that I'm generally pro 'leave it to the free market', but that that only makes sense where you can have effective competition, which as you say, you can't with national (especially physical, electricity for example is fungible and so abstracted that it mostly works being privatised on the consumer/payments end at least) infrastructure like train lines!

In some hypothetical land where there's multiple lines, multiple services by different operators at the same time competing on service and price, great, I'm all for that, let them compete, don't nationalise it, let people vote with their feet and wallets. But we live in the real world; they can't.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#352

Post by Ericson2314 » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #336

toyg wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does Japan do it? Can we try to copy them because it’s very good. My 45 minute journey into Tokyo from Chiba was around £125 per month.

Piecing together the story from https://pedestrianobservations.com and other places, I would not imitate Japan in this regard.

- Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effects per distance of rail (there's no penalty separate than time delay for traveling through other cities first).

- Japan has perhaps the best policy around land use in the developed world. See https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-... for some details. This helps greatly with density and clustering around rail stations.

- The privatization was triggered by the fright around Japan's big deficits after the 80s boom, and perhaps still maintained with some fear of that. That doesn't make it a good idea, of course, but I'm willing to call it more "defensive neoliberalism" than "offensive neoliberalism", but maybe that makes it a little less ideological given that Japan was the poster child for all the neoclassical economic doomsday predictions?

- https://pedestrianobservations.com in particular says the privatization and and general being spooked about more debt holds back some construction on paper, but since the rail is so well established already and operationally profitable, there is less to screw up.

In conclusion, I'd say that because Japan gets everything adjacent to rail policy so absolutely well done, and the rail network was already functioning so way, it continues to succeed not because but despite privatization.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#353

Post by yrro » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #152

Y_Y wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas this seems to be best served by bus nowadays. The buses are comfortable and cheap, and connect several places in Oxford to Victoria coach station.

Actually the Oxford to London bus services have been shutting down because of falling passenger numbers and traffic congestion. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888

A lot of those passengers went over to Stagecoach's competing Oxford Tube service, which served a couple of different stops within London, but (in my experience) offered a much more frequent service.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#354

Post by andy_ppp » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #352

andy_ppp wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Japan do it? Can we try to copy them because it’s very good. My 45 minute journey into Tokyo from Chiba was around £125 per month.

Piecing together the story from https://pedestrianobservations.com and other places, I would not imitate Japan in this regard. - Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effec…

1) I don’t believe for one second that Japan has better geography than the UK for rail

2) we can do much better with planning, however I’m not sure Japanese planning is the answer, when I lived there I thought most of the accommodation was horrendous. Europeans wouldn’t accept it.

3) is JR Rail etc. private? It seemed too cheap!

4) how is rail profitable in Japan, but not profitable in the UK. It’s cheaper there and far far better!

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#355

Post by abainbridge » Thu, May 20, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

markus92 wrote: post #339

abainbridge wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't transport by plane just cheaper to provide than rail? You don't need to maintain railway lines, bridges, tunnels, points, overhead power lines, signalling or intermediate stations. Routing congestion is reduced because planes can move in 3D. There is no rolling resistance and air friction is reduced due to flying high-up where the air is thin. Airports are built away from city centres, where land is cheap. The…

The energy requirements are vastly different, rolling stock is a lot cheaper than airframes etc.

Good points. A 737 costs about $90M and seats about 162 people. Let's say it lasts 10 years and does 4 journeys per day, that's 14600 journeys in its life. So $38 per journey is needed to pay for the plane. A train costs $15M and has about twice as many seats. So, yeah train wins.

According to https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml Trains are about 8.5x more energy efficient than planes. So yeah, trains win that too. For context, planes do about 80 MPG per passenger.

On the other hand, building HS2 might cost £75 billion. It might carry 100 trains per day, so 32000 passengers per day, if all the trains were full. That's 11.7M per year. If it runs for 25 years without costing anything more, that's 292M passenger journeys, so £256 per passenger journey.

I _think_ that demonstrates that the infrastructure costs are larger than the costs of extra energy requirements and airframes. But we're clearly into "it's complicated" territory, so I concede.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#356

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 20, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #198

smcl wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded, this article is quite misleading. The UK fares always seemed quite unpredictable to me when I used them, with variances similar to those you see when booking flight tickets. Maybe the fares have an extra component based on demand? If I look for second-class tickets from Edinburgh to Montrose (which I went on semi-regularly) @ scotrail.co.uk on 1st June I see prices that fluctuate from £9.30 to £24.60. Maybe…

Yes, train fares are based on demand, same as plane and coach fares. Same as they are in Europe (The Paris-Dijon journey in a months time is between €31 and €71 depending on what time you choose) For walk up fares , Edinburgh to Montrose is 100 miles each way, an "off peak" return (so any time after 0930) is £34 if you limit yourself to LNER trains or 17p/mile, or £41 return for a choice of LNER or Scotrail trains. I…

[deleted]

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#357

Post by smcl » Thu, May 20, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #209

smcl wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded, this article is quite misleading. The UK fares always seemed quite unpredictable to me when I used them, with variances similar to those you see when booking flight tickets. Maybe the fares have an extra component based on demand? If I look for second-class tickets from Edinburgh to Montrose (which I went on semi-regularly) @ scotrail.co.uk on 1st June I see prices that fluctuate from £9.30 to £24.60. Maybe…

The article actually explains this, with different options > For travel today, bought at the station, immediate departure, outside the peaks... And > If travelling today in the business peak hours... It acknowledges that finance bros travelling from Manchester to London for a 9AM meeting and traveling back on the 1630 will pay more. That doesn't affect most people The summary makes it quite clear. The big picture is…

Yeah I’d known about peak/off-peak, but it always seemed odd that there was such a wide range and that there were so many differently priced tickets within that range and I never knew the formula. An even longer journey I take here (Brno-Prague) seems to always be either 205kč or 245kč (£7-8.50).

I know British rail travel is more expensive, it’s the (to me) unpredictable ticket pricing that I would like to decrypt

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#358

Post by gsnedders » Thu, May 20, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

vmateixeira wrote: post #312

Closi wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, there's long been a centralised system to attribute the costs to different companies (IIRC, the system is ultimately the descendant of what the British Rail regions and later sectors used to split fare revenue between them).

There's no negotiations between the companies here, though they could ask the regulator (the ORR) to intervene if they believed the algorithm gave unfair results.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#359

Post by Ericson2314 » Thu, May 20, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #354

Ericson2314 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piecing together the story from https://pedestrianobservations.com and other places, I would not imitate Japan in this regard. - Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effec…

1) I don’t believe for one second that Japan has better geography than the UK for rail 2) we can do much better with planning, however I’m not sure Japanese planning is the answer, when I lived there I thought most of the accommodation was horrendous. Europeans wouldn’t accept it. 3) is JR Rail etc. private? It seemed too cheap! 4) how is rail profitable in Japan, but not profitable in the UK. It’s cheaper there and…

I am no expert in the slightest (I would check the things I linked), I'll try to answer

1) Mountains actually helping is my own pet theory, I should disclaim. Japan does seem to have wild swings in density, while England seems to have people/towns strewn about everywhere and London feels kinda sprawly at certain scales. That said UK obviously has cities / regional clustering at the scale of HSR.

Someone should do a proper (fourier?) analysis of sprawl at different different scales and how that effects rail at different scales and until then my theory is just idle speculation, and in any event I don't think Britain can or should blame it's geography when other flat parts of Europe do better, and the Anglosphere clearly sucks at rail on the whole.

2) So Europe is kinda of anti-modern avoiding dense downtowns / CBDs, America is downright evil with it's single family homes, but weirdly still has tall towers people curse driving too. East Asia is largely "correct" in having dense workplaces and living places, which you want if your goal is both less car trips and classic max GDP growth.

I don't think the UK should be like Japan in al respects, but London is emphatically way to evenly low-rise, housing is not cheap enough I hear, and all those rich people LARPing landed gentry commuting 3 hours from their quaint South England rural hamlet is a sure sign something weird's afoot.

If they get rid of the green belt because no one wants to build taller, I will be sad.

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group the story is maybe more muddled than I thought, or maybe that's just the terminology for historical reasons.

4) Well, that I think goes back to the unique economics of rail. I think good rail becomes profitable, but profitable bad rail doesn't become good or isn't even possible!

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#360

Post by gsnedders » Thu, May 20, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

CaptArmchair wrote: post #167

jabl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand what's the difference between the old franchising system and the new concessions. Can you ELI5?

So, this is about control. Largely, the two systems are alike. They both grant permission to an organization to operate a railway service. The difference is in how the relationship is defined. Franchising typically is about giving license to a franchisee allowing them to use intellectual property, know-how, products and so on in exchange for a fee and adhering to a set of obligations. The franchisee then is free to s…

> Franchising typically is about giving license to a franchisee allowing them to use intellectual property, know-how, products and so on in exchange for a fee and adhering to a set of obligations

Note that over the past 15 years or so, the franchises have had much more in way of obligations set on them from on-high (the Department of Transport, Transport Scotland, and Transport for Wales) than British Rail ever did, and in many ways the service provision is much more micromanaged by political motives than has historically been the case.

That said, due to the nature of franchising it was often the franchisee that took the blame for the franchiser's decisions in setting the contract (and _many_, nay, _most_ of the problems with the GB rail network come from government decisions).