Letting profiteering run wild when it comes to essential public service has rarely worked out well.
Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#12I don't understand why the operation of the line wasn't tied to performance along certain metrics, like "percentage of cars at overcrowding", customer satisfaction, etc. Annual review, Drop below acceptable threshold on any of these metrics and it triggers a rebidding process and someone else gets to run the line.
In Britain the government solicits bids to run the trains, and what a shambles it is. For two months, the wife was commuting weekly between Cambridge and Edinburgh, and the train wasn't on time even once. And then we move to Edinburgh, also by train, and everyone gets to take the bus from Berwick onwards, because the engine of the previous train had actually caught on fire, blocking the tracks.
It seems that with large, complex infrastructure even switching operators doesn't work, because with a switch you lose all the informal knowledge needed.
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#13Great article. Introducing privatization into networks and expecting solving the centralized government laziness by markets ia a bit naive since on networks you won't have competition. You are only introducing a market of 1 monopolistic player. At that point thr outcome is the same - the uncompeted excess profits being eaten by a corrupt government or by a monopoly company. If you want competition on networks then co…
If network time were bid on at time of usage, would that begin to move things in the right direction?
This is the idea of introducing a complex bureaucratic layer in order to introduce elements of competition into the system. In principle it can work, but such a system was tried with British rail privatisation and resulted in lots of situations where the incentives for the private operators led to really bad service on key lines for many years.
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#14I don't understand why the operation of the line wasn't tied to performance along certain metrics, like "percentage of cars at overcrowding", customer satisfaction, etc. Annual review, Drop below acceptable threshold on any of these metrics and it triggers a rebidding process and someone else gets to run the line.
That makes sense, but it's a moving target. The company will optimize for the metrics at the cost of everything else.
Private but paid by public funds is always a tricky place to fall into.
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#15I like how people blame privatization for these issues, but then if you read things carefully you'll see that at all points the state exercised measures of control over the supposedly private company that not only prevented the resolution of the issues, but significantly constrained the companies options.
This example is just another one in the very long list of cases of this sort of thing happening.
I have yet to see a single example where the market has failed without government intervention being directly involved in causing the failure. It's really quite astounding.
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#16Great article. Introducing privatization into networks and expecting solving the centralized government laziness by markets ia a bit naive since on networks you won't have competition. You are only introducing a market of 1 monopolistic player. At that point thr outcome is the same - the uncompeted excess profits being eaten by a corrupt government or by a monopoly company. If you want competition on networks then co…
Japan has multiple lines that go between the same stations that are privatized. Works perfectly fine there.
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#17Although I'm not a peak rush hour user, I love Seoul's Line 9. It has the best logo, the best station arrival jingle, and the stations are generally clean and sparkling new. Sinnonhyeon station, right in the middle of Gangnam, curiously has an entire unusable mezzanine/cavern level that you pass every time you take the escalators down to the tracks. Seems the station was overbuilt for capacity, but the line itself can't support more passengers.
A public/private partnership seems more the way to go: municipality funds development of the line but lets private sector entities operate it according to agreed-upon standards and performance objectives. That's the way it works in Stockholm, Hong Kong, and many other cities. On the other hand, if it's all publicly operated, then what's the incentive to keep improving things since your only stakeholder is the public and you're a monopoly anyway.
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#18Fascinating story that highlights the issues with privatised transport systems (or worse: mixed private/public). Reminds me of the clusterfuck that is the British rail network. That said, the Northern and Central tube lines (London) are often crowded/hellish like this and are public, I dread to think how awful the tube would become if privatised!
The obvious counter example is Japan's hundreds of privatized railway companies compete with each other in numerous local, regional and national markets.
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#19[deleted]
Re: Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
#20Great article. Introducing privatization into networks and expecting solving the centralized government laziness by markets ia a bit naive since on networks you won't have competition. You are only introducing a market of 1 monopolistic player. At that point thr outcome is the same - the uncompeted excess profits being eaten by a corrupt government or by a monopoly company. If you want competition on networks then co…
Yes, it should be noted that if you live in somewhere like the UK or the US, the "bad" lines, 9 and 2, are technical and organisational marvels with no parallel in your country. From the end user standpoint they operate amazingly well. They're cheap, clean, safe, reliable, convenient. They're crowded at rush hour. Line 9 is so crowded at rush hour that there was this one time, a few weeks ago, that I wasn't able to get on a train and had to wait 3 minutes for the next one. That's how bad it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯