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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

#351

Post by littlestymaar »

dash2 wrote: post #332
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm in the UK and services seem worse to me. I also remember pre-privatization British Rail. It was unbelievably awful. The basic fact about rail privatization is captured in this chart. All else is commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

The British rail privatization was so successful in increasing passenger numbers it also increased the number of passengers taking the train in France (despite French rail still being state-controlled).

Or maybe, just maybe, there's another underlying casual relationship that explains why train use increased a ton in the 90s and 00s in both countries (and other European countries too, by the way, AFAIK passengers count also increased in Germany in that period). Who knows.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#352

Post by constantcrying »

paganel wrote: post #13
InTheArena wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends, do you travel through any of the airports in Europe, use many of the train services in Europe, get power from spain, portugal or (non-nuclear) France? Fly on a Airbus, or a Boeing with RR engines? There are legit reasons to be skeptical of privatization, but yes. It works well when it works. Dogmatic responses (free market == everything, only government and unions can provide service) are not helpful.

Airbus is by all intents and purposes a (multi-)State controlled company with privatized profits. You don’t get to have hefty defense contracts in countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if you’re de facto a private company, which they aren’t.

>You don’t get to have hefty defense contracts in countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if you’re de facto a private company, which they aren’t.

This is false. Saudi Arabi buys equipment from private companies. Most US Defense contractors are private companies, of course countries all around the world buy from private companies.

The defense contracts of Airbus have nothing to do with them being partially state owned.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#353

Post by dghlsakjg »

usrbinbash wrote: post #260
drstewart wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Time to retract your entire little rant. https://techrights.org/n/2025/08/22/Enshittification_of_Airp... You were saying?

Did you read the source you posted?

It basically provides a bunch of graphs that confirms that flying is safer than ever, even as more people than ever fly at cheaper fares than ever. Embedded within the actual data is an unsubstantiated rant about enshittification and the danger of flying (despite the evidence they chose indicating the opposite), and a tangent about github.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#354

Post by card_zero »

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…

From the start, in 1994, there was this arbitrarily imposed structure with Railtrack owning all the track, and all the private companies leasing. The original plan was that this Railtrack thing would be publicly funded, and that's where that structure came from. Slowly over three years, then, the railway went private. Railtrack wasn't private until 1996. Then the railway was "properly private," but not really, because of this track-monopoly structure imposed on it by legislation, Railtrack being in effect government-run and a "private" company somehow too. Five years later (2001) there was bankruptcy, administration and re-nationalization of Railtrack (into "Network Rail") anyway.

Lurking in the background the whole time was the RMT, the National Union of Rail [etc.] Workers, led by "communist/socialist" Bob Crow, a moderate in the union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Crow

So if this is viewed as an experiment in private ownership, experimental conditions were extremely messy and any conclusions are invalidated by cultural complexities and compromises.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#355

Post by alwa »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #279
croes wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like what? Accidents are the only source of danger in the system.

The study at hand seems to have considered only fatal accidents. Probably for good statistical reasons. But the most obvious next “what” to my mind would be accidents that did not result in fatalities.

Followed closely by safety-involved “incidents” that were reportable somewhere (internally or to a regulator), but that luckily didn’t result in an accident that time.

One imagines these must get really hard to measure reliably the further they get from concrete death records.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#356

Post by Dennip »

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,…

Something you are not accounting for is that rolling stock is fully private still, and a huge huge chunk of the profits. Operators don't make much money, the govt owns and runs the rails themselves, but the rollling stock is where a lot of the money goes

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#357

Post by pipes »

roguecoder wrote: post #280
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…

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.

That's a pretty broad statement about rich people. How do you define rich?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#358

Post by dghlsakjg »

SoftTalker wrote: post #251
deafpolygon wrote: post #245

Public transportation needs to be a public cost, paid for and funded by tax payers and not for profit. When transportation is subsidized but privately owned, then you will see maintenance neglected in an effort to raise shareholder value.

Public transit in the way we are used to it also cannot be run "for profit". There is no public transit system where fares cover all the costs, never mind generating a profit. Riders would refuse to pay a fare high enough to do this. Airlines barely make a profit. I'm not sure about intercity rail globally but in the USA, Amtrak relies on government subsidies to operate. All the private railroads gave up passenger se…

This all hinges on people utterly ignoring the expense of maintaining the road system.

If you factor in the spending on highways and road systems that can support high speed private vehicles at no direct cost to the end user, other forms of transport get incredibly competitive. Highway spending alone accounts for a quarter of a trillion per year. That doesn't account for spending at lower levels of government for streets and other car infrastructure.

>Plus the public will still want some sort of authority figure on the bus or train.

There are plenty of driverless transit systems. It is a very solved problem.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#360

Post by buellerbueller »

BJones12 wrote: post #283
jhonof wrote: post #178

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. 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.

Perhaps not, but you also get the infrastructure, which is worth something.

Would you get the same net result if you put the money in an index fund and then bought the infrastructure? That's the actual comparison.

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