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Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

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Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#341

Post by ianburrell »

drstewart wrote: post #200
usrbinbash wrote: post #116

All privatizations of public infrastructur and services are failures, simply due to the discrepancy between the interests: The public wants: Cheap, reliable, quality services. A corporation wants: Maximized Revenue. The two inevitably clash. No matter what business, no matter what country. Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETT…

>Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETTER FOR USERS (that is: The Public, not investors) after being privatized. I'll wait. You won't have to wait long: flying. Shocked? You shouldn't be. In the 70s, you'd have to pay thousands of dollars to fly across the country. Now you can get a flight between NYC and London for $200. Time…

Air travel wasn't provided by the government before deregulation. The airlines have always been private companies. They were heavily regulated and run as public utility. Deregulation increased competition but nothing was privatized, the CAB was eliminated.

Air travel is also not privatized these days. The airports are nearly all owned by government entities.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#342

Post by constantcrying »

wood_spirit wrote: post #2

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.

>Does any country have any success stories?

Both Airbus and Volkswagen were set up by Governments. T-Mobile is arguably quite successful.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#343

Post by fransje26 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #183
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 incorrect. The biggest accidents - Potters Bar, Hatfield, Southall - happened in the years immediately after privatisation, before passenger numbers had grown much. The problem was more that - in typical privatised fashion - the industry was treated as a cash grab, and property speculation and other side quests got more management attention than running a safe railway. That first incarnation was so bad it was…

> The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge.

That's always the loss. In privitisation, in out-sourcing, and in downscaling engineering teams by firing senior engineers. And it's great for the those in charge of the budget cuts, because it is a loss that is very difficult to quantify financially, and will only show over a longer period of time. Typically, well after they cashed-out and left.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#344

Post by bryananderson »

hshdhdhj4444 wrote: post #35
sschueller wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail. I think the difference is that the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state and leased out competitively to private train operators. It’s kind of like the airline model.

Italy has not exactly privatized high speed rail. The public rail operator Trenitalia is by far the largest high speed rail operator in the country. And it’s great.

What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo.

Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#345

Post by fransje26 »

luesterklemme wrote: post #181
mentalgear wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DB Schenker was sold recently. So your point is not entirely correct anymore. Also yes, it did invest tax payer money but was profitable doing so.

> DB Schenker was sold recently

Ah, the traditional privatize the profit, and nationalize the losses then. Great.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#346

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#347

Post by thebruce87m »

dickiedyce wrote: post #33

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…

My wife uses ScotRail to commute and has no complaints. Yes, there’s the usual weather related stuff but nothing too bad. She probably has the same number of issues with her commute as I do by car - my journey was twice as long tonight as the road was covered in chickens after a crash.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#348

Post by skippyboxedhero »

KaiserPro wrote: post #115

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…

For some reason, people also tend to ignore the many other cases where this is also true: telecoms, energy, water, etc.

The problem is that there is massive political gain to both sides so we will likely keep rotating through the same options. In either case, the exact same people are in control, and no-one will ever ask whether the issue might be the people.

I also think that people fundamentally misunderstand why they were privatized: the public cost was massive, it was ever growing, and there was no capacity to fix this. Any discussion around money was completely impossible. Can you think of any part of the government where this is true? Actually, can you think of any part of the government where this isn't true? The government struggles to do bin collections, they struggle to police effectively, nothing works...and people assume that the problems will magically be fixed if they are given more control.

I think the lack of investment is a side-effect btw. There is a massive issue in the UK with management, it stretches across government, the larger public sector, and the private sector. It is true that in regulated industries, regulators have created bad incentives for the private sector, this is true generally of the incentives that government creates for the private sector...but even outside of those areas, it is generally quite bad. One of the sources of this problem is the complete and total obsession with politics outside of the outcomes that it creates i.e. the purpose of politics is politics, not running things effectively.

There is no real way to fix this (and we have done almost everything possible to make it worse).

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#350

Post by ant6n »

trelane wrote: post #204
mentalgear wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the very poor train service in [Germany] Amtrak has entered the chat. (It was originally scheduled to enter the chat at 2:42 AM, but was delayed until 6:01 AM.)

3 hours, that’s not even a drlay.
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