Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure • Hacker News Board

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#281

Post by hexbin010 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #261

hexbin010 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train. As of June 2025, there is automatic ticket acceptance…

Huh, this was in August, and there were signs warning _not_ to do that. May’ve been old signs, I suppose.

Oh, yeah, such changes take months or years. I'm sure even today barely half the staff know about the change. Give it another 6 months...

The railways in England and Wales are very adversarial. You have to do a lot of research and fight for your rights. It's about maximal revenue-extraction, not a customer-friendly experience.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#282

Post by ApolloFortyNine » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #29

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

>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 permanently closed to cars 20 years ago).

Tokyo has the top 3 busiest train stations in the world. 8 of the top 15, 9 if you count Yokohama. To argue that they're somehow failing to provide a service, and that privatization is the problem, just sounds insane. [1]

It's 'don't let perfect be the enemy of good' taken to the very extreme. I'm really not sure how to have a productive conversation with this premise.

>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

Heavy emphasis on sometimes since they're often connected at a station if it's busy enough (yes you have to 'exit' a gate then enter another. There's plenty examples of lines in city subways not having tunnels between them as well, and having to walk outside.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#283

Post by BJones12 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

jhonof wrote: post #178

oersted wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder. I think it is reasonable for subsidies to be structured just like private investments rather than a donation. The public should reap the rewards of the money they invest in their country through taxes, just like wealthy investors do. It's a question of perspective. I've spent my life in countries w…

> There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder. Interestingly, Quebec in Canada has been loosely following this model recently and it's working great. Long video but interesting if you like infrastructure stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlHqqA0onn0&t=532s TLDR: CDPQ invests on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan, and has been building inf…

Those infrastructure "investments" will almost certainly not generate the same return for pensioners as putting the money in an index fund.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#284

Post by renewiltord » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #265

graemep wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its available in full online and concludes: > The conclusion from the analysis of the accident data is that there is no evidence for the hypothesis that railway safety, as measured by accidents, has become worse since privatisation. https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j....

> as measured by accidents Suspiciously specific denial. What about other metrics?

I always wondered what personality of software engineers leads to massive grab bag predicates.

    def is_problem(ctx) -> Bool:
        ...1000 lines of various garbage...

Vs.

     def is_specific_condition(ctx) -> Bool:
         ...3 lines of specific predicate...

Now I see. The latter would be suspiciously specific. I wonder if it correlates with belief in the Omnicause.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#285

Post by avelis » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

hexator wrote: post #249

The only rail privatization success story, that being the rail system in Japan, for some reason is not replicated much elsewhere. You make money on development, not running trains. You will never make money on public transportation, nor should you—it's a public service.

Agreed. Transportation is a public service and economic engine. Subsidizing travel to help supply travel to demand is the easiest and likely most affordable thing we can do to ensure economic volume.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#286

Post by woodpanel » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #22

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,…

> This is misleading

Well, what do you expect? Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is a far-left NGO (the N stands for "Near"), the official trust of the German political party Die Linke.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#287

Post by christkv » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

Me and a friend decided to dig into who makes the money here and in the end the big earners are the private equity companies that own the rolling stock and leases it out to the rail companies. The actual rail companies have slim margins. The leasing companies had much bigger profit margins.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#288

Post by paol » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #246

exasperaited wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder. This is in fact the situation in major parts of the UK rail network now; much has been renationalised or has the DoT as sole shareholder. The UK rail system is not now truly privately held; this has been slowly unpicked by both the previous Conservative government and the current Labour governmen…

Nearly a third of Train Operating Companies are now under state ownership; LNER has been state-owned since 2018 and Northern since 2020. I don't know about LNER, but punctuality and reliability on Northern has significantly worsened since nationalisation. Last year, we had the absurd spectacle of the Department for Transport notifying the Department for Transport that the Department for Transport had breached their c…

Truly, the writers of Yes Minister were documentarians. That line could have been straight out of the show.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#289

Post by stonemetal12 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #256

terminalshort wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes knowing this route any more difficult than knowing the route you are driving on a road? Copenhagen has an automated metro system, so this doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem.

So e.g. the UK does not have speed signalling. One yellow lamp illuminated means "Prepare to find the next signal at danger". OK, so, how fast can I go? Well, it depends, your route knowledge might tell you that the "next signal" is up a steep rise, you can go pretty fast, even if it is at danger that rise will scrub off all the speed and normal braking is enough. Or, you might know that there's a sharp bend soon and…

> In daylight there are speed signs but, trains accelerate and brake much more slowly than your car, so while they're a useful reminder you cannot correctly drive the train based on observing these signs.

Did the time it takes trains to accelerate and brake change recently? The time it takes to accelerate and brake should have been considered when placing the signs in the first place.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#290

Post by noir_lord » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #266

rmoriz wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if signalling or mechanical failures occur and manual intervention is required? I will collapse the network, that’s why you see conductor-less operation only in separated environments, like subways (Nürnberg) or DLR (London)

Drivers cannot do much to in those cases anyway. Hit the emergency stop and wait for the mechanic. - computers can do the same thing The better answer is do maintenance such that you don't have those failures in the first place.

We had a mass attack on a train recently, the driver radioed ahead and got his train shifted onto a different line so he could stop the train at the nearest station (which had a police station across the road).

That's the kind of thing that is hard to automate because while you can automate any routine operation (eventually) it's the none routine things that get you.

Planes and Trains have both had increasing levels of automation for decades and that's fantastic, humans are flawed/get tired/get distracted but you still need a human in the loop who can decide what to do when the unknown/unexpected happens and for that human to be effective they need to be able to operate large parts of the vehicle without the automation and understand the basic principles of the system as a whole well enough to decide what they should do that won't make the situation worse.

In planes that's the Pilot in Command, in Trains it's the driver.