211–220 of 478 posts
As a Scot who travels on Scottish, English, and Welsh railways, and on Swiss and German railways... Scotrail (now in Public ownership) is pretty good. And I say that as someone in the Highlands, which has had the worst of it in the last 30 years. There's been recent investment, and even the re-opening of closed lines and finally new stations where they've been desperately needed (Inverness Airport, Kintore, Laurencek…
As always this is grossly oversimplifying. As well as the misleading safety stats, as graemep has noted, it ignores that journeys just absolutely exploded under privatisation [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail ]
As always this is grossly oversimplifying. As well as the misleading safety stats, as graemep has noted, it ignores that journeys just absolutely exploded under privatisation [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail ]
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.
In the UK the airline and telecom privatisations were largely successful (BA, Rolls Royce, BT, etc). BP did okay too. For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground. MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making C…
Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.
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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.
I think rails should be public, like skies and roads, and train companies should pay for their usage.
Depends - some got wealthier. :) Although, even with this in mind, it seems as if the UK really has a notoriously bad railway system. Most countries in the EU of a comparable size have a better railway system as such, even though they also have their own problems. One of the best in Europe is in Switzerland - the swiss really are clever. And also not in the EU.
This just isn't true on any measure (apart from affordability and true high speed penetration in some countries). Affordability is really driven by how much the operators are subsidized by the govt. It's hard to calculate this on a like for like basis as some subsidy goes to the track operator and some to the train operator, and in eg Germany you have a hugely complex set of subsidies and fare zones in operation from…
The total costs might be the same, but if paid out of the taxes, the cost is distributed progressively. People who earn more will pay more to keep the trains running. In the UK, the cost is regressive by definition, because the portfolio manager who earns 1 million pounds a year will pay the same expensive ticket fare that the nurse who earns 40k a year, but for the PM it's a trivial expense. And the portfolio manager can work from home, or just drive in to work if they fancy, the nurse cannot. The nurse is forced to use an aging, unreliable and at the same time really expensive train.
And the service itself is positively atrocious even in London when it comes to any non-mainline route. It's a complete tossup whether the trains will have severe outages due to strikes, engineering works or the frequent signal failures.
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> But then they timed their strikes for the Xmas season in order to maximise the suffering and economic damage it would cause. Well, that's the point of going on strike. Don't blame the drivers, blame the rail company. > It's not a stressful job It actually is, there aren't that many jobs where you are literally responsible for hundreds if not nearly a thousand (ICE-4 has 918 seats alone plus probably 100-200 standin…
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> 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…
The idea is usually to de-skill workers and also to try to make their contractual terms worse. 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 rou…
I suspect the move from public to private ownership did adversely affect the upgrades of those, as well as electrification on several key routes.
If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already. And at least in NL if you have a set of routes in a certain direction / route set - drivers would get route familiarization both for the main routes and for the bypasses.
The privatisation of the commons will endure as our generations' greatest folly. I look at the Australian NBN as a great example of a project that is not economical for a private business to entertain - it requires "The Government" to build. How do we reason with this in the capitalist system?
Things really went downhill after 1773 (first Inclosure Act)