As opposed to the privatization of water utilities, which was such a resounding success?
Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
131–140 of 478 posts
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#132Earlier 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 What is inconsistent about those two things? You can simultaneously believe that train drivers and airline pilots deserve to be paid more.
> You can simultaneously believe that train drivers and airline pilots deserve to be paid more. But that's not what noir_lord thinks. He/she specifically said > their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid [my emphasis] which implies that train drivers are currently paid the correct amount.
It doesn't imply anything, they explicitly said they think it's fair:
> how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid
You are the one who is implying something.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#133Two legacies from the 1980s and 1990s that haunt us to this day are:
1. The idea of trickle down economics; and
2. That public-private partnerships ("PPPs" were a stalwart of Thatcher and Blair) do anything other than simply transfer wealth from the public sector to the private sector. Put another way, PPPs socialize the risk and privatize the profits.
For anyone who pays attention and can think critically, this is the least suprising thing that can possibly happen and was evident decades ago.
For the railways in particular, railroads (technically, train operating companies or TOCs) in the UK have zero incentive to invest in rolling stock, track, signalling systems or stations because they own none of it. So all they do is engage in cutting costs and gaming politics to raise prices to increase profits. That's all that happens.
You can say that British Rail needed reform and funding but PPPs were simply not the answer.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> It's not a stressful job and like you said they get paid pretty well I’m curious as to the criteria there. A train driver must, surely, be more stressed than a software engineer? They’re in charge of a moving vehicle that carries hundreds of people. And yet software engineers will still often make more than train drivers do.
The reason i made a point about low stress conditions is because i do actually appreciate that driving a train is not as simple as i imagine. I might have said that they are basically truck drivers (just without 90% of the driving part) whose entire job is sitting all day sometimes pressing a button that says go and pressing a button that says stop and a 12 year old could do it. But that would be overly uncharitable and wrong. They are after all responsible for hundreds of lives and thousands of tons moving at great speed. Are they good people? No. Are they overpaid? I believe so.
Just to clarify a point. My main complaint isn't even that they are overpaid. If their bosses want to fleece everyone, why can't they? It's more the absolute selfishness of their actions that bothers me.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#135Earlier 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).
Yes. This was literally a case study for my Sociology degree in the '90s.
(I would also mindfully say that there is a lot of subtle political propaganda in the UK around this issue- the powers that be want the public to blame train drivers for the failures of privatisation)
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#136Does 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.
Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex". If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit. This can be sold as a success story depending…
PFI has been an absolute disaster in Scotland: not only incredibly expensive, but there were some substandard construction issues that became very public when a wall in a school simply fell over (fortunately outside hours so no injuries!)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-3...
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#137It 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,…
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Happy workers don't strike.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#138Does 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.
> Does any country have any success stories? Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).
That's the same model we have in Canada here mainly. Provinces pay for the service, but family doctors and most other practitioners are private businesses that then bill the government based on a set fee schedule.
The exception I guess is hospitals which are kind of a mixed structure of some kind and doctors in them are salaried employees not businesses of their own.
The problem with this approach is it intrinsically creates conflict between the doctors and the gov't about how fees are structured, and the patient gets stuck in the middle. That and inconsistent standards, structure, and quality. Couple that with conservative governments that sometimes have ideological antipathy to socialized medicine generally, and there's a recipe for difficulties.
I'm given to understand that the NHS in the UK is not like this, and most doctors are salaried?
I could be getting some details wrong.
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1] And they actually continue to expand their service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
I disagree and am working on an article arguing that Japan rail privatization represents a failure, as does its much lauded pedestrian friendliness. The premise is basically that Tokyo is the busiest city on planet earth and so should therefore have the best public transit and pedestrian infrastructure by a huge margin, when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars (Shibuya crossing should have been permanen…
There are problems with rail privatization but I don't think this is one.
> Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train.
I believe this is the result of different private companies operating physically separate lines, rather than some privatization activities? For example, Shinjuku has stations of JR East (result of JNR privatization), Keio (private), Odakyu (private), Toei (public), Tokyo Metro ("private" but owned by Japan gov and tokyo metro gov). Sure, JNR privatization is controversial but without that, Shinjuku is still a mess of different operators.
Are you suggesting the government turn back time and banned private companies owning rail or they should buy out and nationalize all rails companies?
> A government managed system wouldn't have this issue
Well, if it's 2 different government levels and 2 entities, the issue still exists. For example, to transfer between Tokyo Metro and Toei Subway, you might need to tap or a transfer ticket https://www.tokyometro.jp/lang_en/ticket/types/connection/in...
It's also possible for public and private companies to cooperate. Keikyu main line (private) does through running on Toei Asakusa line that allows the subway to have connections to both airports through private rails.
Nowadays, with IC cards, transferring between systems is a breeze. For the walking distance, nothing much you can do besides moving the track itself (done sometimes) or station redesign with better walkways and tunnels (done often).
Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
#140I remember that the UK was forced to privatise Rail in the way that it did because of EU competition rules. I was commuting by Rail at the time and the manner in which it was privatised was considered to be barmy by both myself and fellow passengers.
This is just another “bendy bananas”-tier myth. The UK was never forced to privatise because of EU competition rules, see, for example, France, an EU member state that retained publicly owned railways during the same period.
There are EU competition rules that require separating operations from infrastructure, but it is and always has been fine to do this as separate divisions under the same publicly owned umbrella.