121–130 of 478 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots?
Where's the contradiction?
Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories? Does any country have any success stories? I can’t think of any.
Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).
It implies railways were les safe post privatisation. This is misleading. There were more accidents and deaths, but that was because of a huge increase in miles travelled. Deaths per billion kilometers fell consistently before and after privatisation. A lot of the problems lie in tracks and their maintenance, and the tracks were re-nationalised many years ago. It is not efficiently run (see HS2!). They are expensive,…
> They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid This is in fact an interesting by-product of privatisation: train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them. They consequently became more expensive. A somewhat fun side effect of the free market, especially given the prevailing assumption that moving public sector employees into the private sector would dri…
In one very small way I actually sympathise on the railways, let me be specific, this is a long story:
The person driving the train clearly needs to learn how to drive that particular model of train, I think that's likely true basically everywhere. The UK's railway systems are however also reliant on drivers knowing the route. A driver must be familiar with exactly the rails their train will pass over to get from A to B, knowing what to expect ahead for some distance at all times. So it's possible that Jim, who is sat in a coffee room right now can drive a 450, but he doesn't know the Waterloo to Portsmouth via Southampton crazy bypass that's in place due to track work, so he is not able to drive the Portsmouth train that's right there, full of passengers and will now instead be cancelled because the scheduled driver did not arrive. In many of the world's railway systems route knowledge is not crucial (it might be good but it's not required).
However, because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding-ding,_and_away the modern rulebook also requires that the Guard have route knowledge. In contrast to the driver this is much less valuable, but it means that now your Portsmouth train maybe has to be cancelled because although the driver intended was available or the standby could do your route, the only available Guard knows the ordinary Portsmouth route, not the weird one.
I think this is a situation where we should fix systems instead rather than hoping that route knowledge for guards makes it work. But this means the guard is arguably de-skilled and less valuable than before.
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> Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots. Yes and that's as it should be, a fully loaded high speed intercity train has more souls on board than most commercial aviation planes (apologies pet peeve of mine because our media keeps banging on about how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid). A bad day at the office for me…
Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid This is in fact an interesting by-product of privatisation: train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them. They consequently became more expensive. A somewhat fun side effect of the free market, especially given the prevailing assumption that moving public sector employees into the private sector would dri…
Is that true? My understanding is they command very high wages because their unions are strong and they have a lot of leverage: by striking they can impose extremely high costs on the wider economy (not to mention bad press for politicians).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots?
> Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots What is inconsistent about those two things? You can simultaneously believe that train drivers and airline pilots deserve to be paid more.
I hear these stories about UK private rail system being terrible for more than a decade now. But, truth is, I go there frequently and the times I had to use it it was quite fine. Lots of trains and they arrived on time (and they were fairly clean). It was much, much better - by any account of imagination - than the public railway we have here in Portugal. And I’m guessing they cost the taxpayers a lot less too (but t…
(Nearly?) all of the the "private" rail operators in the UK are actually the national operators of other countries - Germany, France, Italy and I think Netherlands. The national rail operators mostly know how to run a decent service, but in the UK passengers pay multiples of what those operators charge in their home country and the service is definitely not as good.
The EU basically mandates privatisation of railways.
They require track and trains to be run by different operators (DB InfraGO in Germany, ProRail in NL, etc) to the train operators.
They then require (nearly?) all passenger rail operations be available to private companies to bid on. The EU is taking the Netherlands to the ECJ over the fact the Netherlands won't allow it: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
Also the EU requires open access operators access to said separate tracks. That's why you're seeing all the competition in high speed routes (especially) in the EU. They have to pay a track access fee but are free to request to run whatever route it is.
The last point (well, all are really) is a big problem for many national operators as they make a lot of revenue from 'premium' intercity operations that cross subsidies the local trains. A lot of that "margin" is going to be eroded by the competition.
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Japan has a culture of running trains on time though. There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service.
And even if there was they couldn't thanks to unions and some of the strongest worker protections in the developed world. That doesn't even touch on the loss of face for proposing such a thing.
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Why should I, a taxpayer, subsidize rails? It's sarcasm, many drivers don't realize that the public subsidizes them too, but have such silly arguments.
No, it's actually a good question. If the rails are private, why should the public subsidize them? For clarity's sake, I think railways should be public, and paid for with a combination of taxes and fares.