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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

#411

Post by pipes »

linkregister wrote: post #404
pipes wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Laughable that this is interpreted as a slur against r*ch people. It is a banal observation that power corrupts. Societies with constructs to check power experience better overall and individual prosperity in general.

The point I'm trying (and obviously failing) to make is that "rich people" is a very broad definition to the point of being completely meaningless. About 7 to 8 percent of my Americans have a net worth greater than 1 million dollars. Is that rich? By some standards, yes.

You mention constructs to check power? What do you mean?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#412

Post by elliotto »

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…

I don't quite understand this post. Wouldn't rolling out fiber infrastructure early have been proved to be visionary and made the UK a serious technical force?

In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#413

Post by circuit10 »

epolanski wrote: post #130
thesuitonym wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's actually a good question. If the rails are private, why should the public subsidize them? For clarity's sake, I think railways should be public, and paid for with a combination of taxes and fares.

I think rails should be public, like skies and roads, and train companies should pay for their usage.

You may still need a public train service or subsidies of some kind to make sure unprofitable but vital routes get served

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#414

Post by carstout »

welshwelsh wrote: post #232
pjc50 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That certainly happened, but at the same time the ticket prices have consistently gone up above inflation, so what we're missing is the causal link - why did journeys go up so much? Was it in fact other transport policy to get commuters out of cars?

Ticket prices going up is actually good for mass adoption. If they are too low, you will see people riding the train who are only using the train because they are too poor to afford a car. That makes middle class people want to avoid the train. Also higher revenue often means better service, which for most people is more important than the price.

Having used the UK rail service both public and private the "better service" is optimistic. The too poor to afford a car is more associated with buses. You need to be rather fortunate to be poor and able to use the train to get to work. Maybe in London using the tube but working office hours it will be cheaper to buy a car or move. I would suggest the main driver in the leap in passenger numbers isnt the far superior private sector offering but instead the massive leap in house prices forcing people to move out of London.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#415

Post by cassepipe »

pipes wrote: post #411
linkregister wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughable that this is interpreted as a slur against r*ch people. It is a banal observation that power corrupts. Societies with constructs to check power experience better overall and individual prosperity in general.

The point I'm trying (and obviously failing) to make is that "rich people" is a very broad definition to the point of being completely meaningless. About 7 to 8 percent of my Americans have a net worth greater than 1 million dollars. Is that rich? By some standards, yes. You mention constructs to check power? What do you mean?

1 million means you can stop working for 20 years and get around 4000 dollars per month which should be well enough to feed yourself, go out and get a roof on your head. Of course that's not even counting the revenue you can have this money generate for you while you are sitting on your ass.

So yes, I'd consider them rich. If you can totally stop working for more than 5 years I'd say you are rich.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#416

Post by aubanel »

Other sources indicate that privatization was a huge success!

The number of passengers dropped after nationalizations, and exploded after privatisation (despite taxpayer money investment logically dropping)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_...

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#417

Post by nyreed »

joshuaissac wrote: post #396
qcnguy wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

Hmm, I didn't realise that's why the rollout was stopped. (Which doesn't really make sense as a given reason anyway because wouldn't the fibre just have become part of openreach anyway.

So I think new technology is generated through research funding, either public sector (universities) or R&D depts in private companies (today companies like Apple, previously old school companies like pre-Welch GE). I guess BT was more like the latter, except state owned.

In telecoms there's also a universal service obligation, which does not make economic sense when driven purely by profit motive. Cost of rolling out fiber to a small village will probably never be recouped. Thats why FTTH w/ Virgin Broadband was only available in cities for a long time, and expensive.

In the US where telecoms have regulatory capture, and no public access telecom network, you see stories of rural communities trying to fund their own infra. It's expensive.

Cost of rollout and universal service can be helped by rolling out at scale, building the factories, reducing unit price etc.

So all this together.... I think private companies _can_ have the foresight to do this kind of forward planning... But a big nationwide rollout of a public good? Where is their financial incentive? They would provide an environment for the acceleration of future commerce and technological development. But if they don't make money from it, why would they?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#418

Post by cycomanic »

nandomrumber wrote: post #403
cycomanic wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Singapore... People like to complain about public systems as if problems wouldn't exist in privately owned ones.

One of those is a city state, and two of them have a population comparable to Sydney, one comparable to New York. In other conversations it’s widely argued that those four probably don’t map very well to the larger, more diverse in every way, Western Democracies. That leaves Germany, which has its problems. If Germany hadn’t shut down their nuclear power plants they could have had 94% low emissions electricity by now…

Ah yes, not a real scotsman

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#419

Post by ant6n »

woodpanel wrote: post #313
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.

Just looked through DB's annual report. There's no mentioning of any passenger rail operations in UK. It's "just" DB Cargo. So I don't understand what this "fact" has anything to do with passenger transportation in Germany. 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.

DB Cargo is producing more losses than the other branches, i.e. passenger rail. It doesn’t generate profits like in the US (shorter trains, more single rail car traffic, shorter distances, infrastructure held up to higher standard thus more expensive, lower priority compared to passenger rail)

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#420

Post by nandomrumber »

cycomanic wrote: post #418
nandomrumber wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of those is a city state, and two of them have a population comparable to Sydney, one comparable to New York. In other conversations it’s widely argued that those four probably don’t map very well to the larger, more diverse in every way, Western Democracies. That leaves Germany, which has its problems. If Germany hadn’t shut down their nuclear power plants they could have had 94% low emissions electricity by now…

Ah yes, not a real scotsman

Haha, yeah true. I did have a self critical thought along those lines.

Maybe there’s an argument to be made that large countries should be broken up in to smaller, more manageable geographic / population sizes.

Trust busting style.

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