311–320 of 478 posts
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…
Which part of the UK out of curiosity?
The problem with this assement is that it misunderstands the role of the private sector. Yes, those crashes happened, and they were disasters, but they were only partially down to rail track being privatised. They were a result of systemic under investment both pre and post privatisation. THe _other_ key thing that needs to be remembered is that rail is highly regulated. To the point that both price, timetables profi…
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…
Fun fact: DB (Germany public-private national rail company) has become one of the UK's biggest train service providers - even the Queen's train was under their service. DB (Schenker) buys stakes in transportation all over the world - with German tax payer money: A fact that many Germans do not like given the very poor train service in their own country.
By the way, Cargo is the mode of operation where most profitable rail companies are. Hence the dualism of loss-incurring Amtrak and profitable North Amercian freight operators as well.
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You can't privatize what can't make money in itself. By that I mean, rail is beneficial to the entire economy of a country. This profit is not something a rail company can benefit from but a country can. Serving low traffic areas are a loss business but vital for a country to grow. Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town t…
In the Japanese model the rail company also owns land around the station, so they capture more of the value of rail transport. Rail in the UK does not capture all the value it delivers, so subsidies would be a pragmatic solution.
Today
The number of passengers on the railway is far ahead of the number in the 80s and 90s.
There is a persistent belief in the UK that privitisation of the railway was bad, yet it led to great things -- the constant Chiltern line investment, massive competition on the west coast mainline (you can walk up to the station and get a train from Manchester to London for £50 return taking about 3h30 -- it cost more than that and took the same time 30 years ago), Marylebone serving 16 million passengers a year pre-covid
There's been bad things too -- companies have failed and the government has chosen to bail the shareholders out rather than letting them fail and simply taking over, standard privatise the profits socialise the losses. Cross Country routes are screwed as it's a series of local services masquerading as a long distance one. Nationalisation doesn't help there.
But when we compare with German and French systems we see just how good the UK system is, despite the insanely cheap commuting (15, even 10p/mile) being subsidised by occasional long distance travellers.
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,…
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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).
Our ports in the US, which affects the cost of endless goods, are still running with 1950's level tech because the unions are so strong (and have heavy mob ties).
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That's interesting: it reminds me of the results we're seeing from workplace democracy in Germany. Companies with workers on their boards are significantly less likely to go bust than companies where only investors' opinions matter. But of course, whenever someone else's opinion matters, investors use their wealth to try to change that. Rich people seem to prefer worse outcomes as long as they get to be in charge.
Yes, the desire for power is as important as the desire for capital.
At that point you start trying to accumulate power instead of money, and of course money is a by-product for power.
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You try it, you get a visit. Same way it's always been.
> You try it, you get a visit. Same way it's always been. In that case, there's no obstacle. This is exactly what happened with containerization, and guess what? The ports that did containerize, including some ports constructed from scratch specifically because existing unionized ports blocked containerization, replaced the ports that didn't.
So sure, there's no big deal, just pay the mob. People do argue for that.
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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?
Given where it was published (a magazine backed by statisticians associations in three countries) it would have been very damaging to the author's (a professor at Imperial College) reputation to have been sloppy about conclusions.