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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

#421

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

Yeah that sounds about right. I can't think of many situations where privatizing safety critical operations hasn't ended in disaster. Safety at that point ceases to be a priority and just another number on the sheet to crunch. If the lawsuit is cheaper than the savings from cutting corners, that's the move to make.

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

Yeah, this is often the biggest loss of mass layoffs in the name of short term profits. Esepcially since the situations also tend to cut training programs. You're slashing a pipe for some quick water at the cost of draining the rest of your plumbing system. while firing the plumbers in the process.

I wish we could switch back to incentivizing long term portfolios and planning. It's reckless at this point.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#422

Post by Reason077 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #389
Reason077 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the French high speed rail network (LGV Atlantique, LGV Rhône-Alpes, LGV Nord, LGV Méditerranée, LGV Est, etc) was inaugurated in the 1990s and 2000s. This alone would have been responsible for a big increase in French rail traffic. UK rail infrastructure certainly received improvements during this era too, but besides HS1 it was mostly just renewing and upgrading existing tracks. Nothing like the thousands o…

If you just look at France it may be tempted to conclude it must be TGV, but that's the same methodological problem: it grew in most of Europe by comparable amount in the period. Also TGV is nice, but it doesn't explain why TER and Intercité (the two slower-speed regional networks) also experienced an influx of passengers during the period. It's not TGV, it's not privatization and it is not Wiedervereinigung , it's a…

> "Also TGV is nice, but it doesn't explain why TER and Intercité (the two slower-speed regional networks) also experienced an influx of passengers during the period."

I don't entirely disagree with you, but rail lines don't function in isolation. If you introduce a new high speed main line, there is a network effect: connecting services will also see a boost in traffic from people travelling on other lines to reach the new one.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#423

Post by fy20 »

joshuaissac wrote: post #6
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.

It's hard to measure this. British Telecom lost its monopoly around the same time it was privatised. Is today's (very competitive) telecommunications market more a result of privatisation or of the loss of BT's monopoly? Another way to look at it would be, are BT's customers better off now, than when it was a government company?

Not directly from privatisation, but in 2006 BT was forced to split the infrastructure part of their business into a separate company (OpenReach). They were forced to allow other providers to use their infrastructure, which during the broadband-era led to pretty healthy competition.

I'd say the issues today (fragmented services offerings, high prices, low speeds) are more due to under investment in the infrastructure (keeping copper for too long) - which could have just as easily happened if it was government run.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#424

Post by hexbin010 »

martinald wrote: post #330
hexbin010 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many operators do an "operator-specific, 10/20p cheaper" ticket because it means they receive 100% of the revenue, rather than just a portion of it. That's exactly what TPE are doing in this instance. That practice should have been abolished long ago - it's totally anti-passenger. GBR will likely solve this with removing the cheaper ticket, instead of making the cheaper ticket a generic ticket, of course :-)

Let's see. I don't know how far they will go with this - are they going to have LNWR the same price as "Avanti" for example, despite one being twice as fast?

Not quite but that fare is such an anomaly, I can see its price being hiked a fair bit, or it replaced entirely with singles-only, which is effectively a massive price rise as we've seen the Gov do with LNER. I'm actually surprised it's lasted this long.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#425

Post by thaumasiotes »

alwa wrote: post #355
thaumasiotes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the most obvious next “what” to my mind would be accidents that did not result in fatalities.

This makes no sense as a criticism of "as measured by accidents". The fix for measuring by accidents is to measure by accidents?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#426

Post by thaumasiotes »

nandomrumber wrote: post #301
thaumasiotes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Accidents aren’t a cause of danger, they’re the result of it.

That is meaningless nonsense.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#427

Post by Ekaros »

palmotea wrote: post #391
fransje26 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 shoul…

Don't we have already solution for this? It is called pension. Extra executive compensation should be set up as pension, which starts paying at usual pension age. And it must be locked to only be shares of the company. And it should work by automatically selling to open market the shares locked up until the expected life expectancy expires.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#428

Post by deanishe »

palmotea wrote: post #391
fransje26 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 shoul…

I don't think you can make management take a long-term view when shareholders have a short-term one, tbh.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#429

Post by qcnguy »

n4r9 wrote: post #410
qcnguy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahead in what sense? More successful internet startups or tech economy? I don't think so, but that's how such buildouts were pitched as justified.

Ahead in internet speed...

Which is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself... UAE has higher median home bandwidth than the USA but nobody is claiming UAE has somehow uniquely benefited from that.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#430

Post by qcnguy »

elliotto wrote: post #412
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…

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.

No. The idea that more bandwidth to the home=generically futuristic economy and outperformance is exactly the kind of bad central planning that makes socialist countries poor! It's the kind of mistake privatization was intended to fix (and did). The Soviets made the same mistake decades earlier when they overbuilt steel mills.

The USA is the world leader in computing and many parts still have notoriously poor bandwidth to the home today. The link between home fiber and economic performance is very weak.

Bandwidth upgrades need to consider the whole equation, including cost of infra upgrades of different techniques and demand. Remember that fiber was over built during the dot-com bubble and ended up going dark because there wasn't enough demand to consume it, not even on the backbone.

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