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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

#391

Post by palmotea »

fransje26 wrote: post #343
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…

> 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…

> 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.

IMHO most executive pay should be locked up for decades by law, and they only get a middle-class wage stipend in the interim. And I mean really locked up, such that a significant fraction should only be payed out as long as 20 years later. And that pay gets forfeited if the organization has too many problems.

It'd help disincentive smash-and-grab management like you describe (because weakening the org would jeopardize the locked up pay, and would help a big with succession (because their pay would depend on the successor's performance, too).

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#392

Post by Workaccount2 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #300
Workaccount2 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mob part.

The mob used to be a major issue in American politics. Today it isn't. Are you arguing that it's grown more powerful with that change?

I'm arguing that if you are someone who tries to bring change to the ports, like the developer contracted by the government to do an assessment, you will get a visit, most likely at your home.

They won't kill you or rough you up, but they will tell you what your assessment will find. And reiterate that they are at your house, where your family lives.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#394

Post by dave333 »

Privatisation was awful from the traveller's point of view having to figure out which company to deal with. It would have been much better to micro-privatise each train - selling off the dining car franchise to a commercial operator or allowing a commercial company to add a coach to a train for a given fee.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#396

Post by joshuaissac »

qcnguy wrote: post #231
nyreed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories equipment and expertise were instead exported to South Korea, enabling their widespread fiber penetrance. That delayed fiber rollout in the UK by decades. Was that a success? Could be they were too early to justify the cost? But without someone pushing ahead, w…

It was that kind of delusional decision making that justified the privatization in the first place. Rolling out fiber nationwide in a world where the web had only just been invented and everywhere else in the world was connected via modems would have been catastrophically expensive and supplied bandwidth nobody would have been able to use. The idea the internet could have skipped straight from 33kbaud to fiber speeds…

> Rolling out fiber nationwide [...] would have been catastrophically expensive

It seems like they had managed to bring the cost below copper:

> In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper

> we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham

But the British government was concerned:

> BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do

> So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949

This might be an argument for privatisation, because the government was still in full control of the company when they prevented the fibre rollout. Would the owner of a private company squander such an advantage over concerns for their competitors?

On the other hand, would a private company have had the capability to plan this forward in the first place? We do see that from Big Tech companies (e.g. Apple silicon) but could BT have done it under private ownership?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#397

Post by Peanuts99 »

tialaramex wrote: post #54
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.

I'm the wrong person to try to steelman this, but lets have a go anyway with a couple I know well: 1. Internet Service Provision Britain chose to separate the intrinsically geographic monopoly of Last Mile Copper Loops from its existing non-intrinsic monopoly telephony provision. British Telecom, which had once been publicly owned, was obliged to distinguish "BT Openreach", the part of their company which inherits th…

I live in the UK and would have to agree with these two. LLU was very successful but also forcing Open reach infrastructure like ducting to be used by Altnet companies such as Cityfibre who want to build out their own networks. I'm with a very small ISP too (Idnet - wonderful company), who provide a fast reliable service over FTTP for less than £26 a month.

On energy, we have many companies competing and offering really diverse products. Octopus were once a small little upstart but they became top dog by providing decent support, incentives and new products such as tariffs that track the wholesale rate - including negative pricing. They've got a REST API that you can use to pull all kind of data out for various home automation use cases - I can't ever imagine a government run company providing that.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#398

Post by renewiltord »

dh2022 wrote: post #367
renewiltord wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with people asking for evidence is that they often are expecting me to do a lot of work to give them a better world model, when they nonetheless have no intention of accepting any evidence. So I have a guideline of good faith: you can hire me and I don’t mind doing it for you; or you can go read up on the subject, reach some understanding of what these things are, and we can discuss; or you can go do some…

TLDR - rene wiltford cannot be bothered to provide evidence.

That's absolutely correct. I don't work for free. But you have my name wrong. I certainly didn't build the perpetual motion train Snowpiercer.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#399

Post by iso1631 »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #374
iso1631 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have $100m your life isn't going to measurably change if you increase your wealth to $1b or $10b At that point you start trying to accumulate power instead of money, and of course money is a by-product for power.

I think proxy is probably a better word than by-product "for" power. Or did you mean by-product OF power?

Yes, of, indeed.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#400

Post by rmoriz »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #294
bluGill wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of railway operations knows that this isn't at all true. For example, I've been on a Glasgow bound train where the driver was instructed to pass the signal at danger following a lengthy signoff process. Some scallywags had stolen wire for copper.

this. Railway signalling is a complex topic and totally different in Europa vs. the US. ETCS is another big step forward in terms of automation, but we don't see driverless trains. In Germany we have Linienzugbeeinflussung (LZB) since 1959 in tests and 1963 in early real life operations. LZB enforces dynamic train separation, speed limits and breaking but does not implement full automation. ETCS is the successor which does not require a cable in between the rails but balises.
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