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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

#441

Post by aembleton »

iso1631 wrote: post #315

In the 1980s the nationalised railway was considering closing London Marylebone. Today The number of passengers on the railway is far ahead of the number in the 80s and 90s. There is a persistent belief in the UK that privitisation of the railway was bad, yet it led to great things -- the constant Chiltern line investment, massive competition on the west coast mainline (you can walk up to the station and get a train…

> you can walk up to the station and get a train from Manchester to London for £50 return taking about 3h30

To get that price, I've always had to change at Crewe, or buy well in advance. Otherwise, it's £114 return.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#442

Post by Sharlin »

bluGill wrote: post #335
Sharlin wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have a grade separated syste Yeah, that's not realistic in 99% of the cases. > I'm against trams because a bus can do the same thing - and if you maintain the roads to track standards they are just as comfortable. But buses can't do the same thing. The thing about LRT is capacity per driver . Even the fanciest, most expensive buses can take maybe half the passengers a standard 30-40m tram can. It's not even…

In almost all cases you don't have enough passanges to fill a large bus though. And in most of the cases where you do you should be paying 3 drivers to get three buses because that increased service is highly valued by riders. Long before you reach the end of that a grade separeted metro that can go faster that a bus or tram should be built thus getting mose people off the but. Only a few places in the world are left…

There are absolutely zillions of cities in the world where buses aren’t enough on trunk lines but rapid transit metro would be ridiculous overkill, mostly in the 100k to 500k population segment. And in bigger cities with metros there are many routes where a metro expansion doesn’t make sense but buses aren’t enough.

I mean, this isn’t some theoretical question where the jury is still out there, there are countless examples. Cities everywhere don’t build LRT just for fun and because they have too much money! If there aren’t enough people for LRT that just means the town isn’t big enough, which is fair, or there are too few transit users due to car culture or whatever (eg. the US, which is an outlier).

The rail factor is not a hypothesis, the entire point is that it’s a discovered effect. If you haven’t seen it put to test, you simply haven’t been looking.

As one datapoint, I can simply point to the city where I live [1]: the LRT system that opened in 2021 has become exceedingly popular and effortlessly lifted transit use from the covid slump, with total passenger numbers now much higher than in 2019 and quite a bit higher than the rather conservative projections made when the system was being planned. Headways have already been shortened from 7.5 to 6 minutes to respond to peak hour demand, and extension modules have been ordered to lengthen a part of the fleet of 37m vehicles to 47m, adding 30% to the 260-passenger capacity.

On the other hand, another Finnish city of roughly the same size has been equivocating between LRT and BRT for years and years. Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment. It has also become quite clear that the only reason BRT keeps being discussed is that it’s used merely as a political tool to induce analysis paralysis, to delay and hinder any significant transit improvement by those against anything except antiquated car-centric urban design.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampere_light_rail

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#443

Post by aembleton »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #61
wtcactus wrote: post #3

I hear these stories about UK private rail system being terrible for more than a decade now. But, truth is, I go there frequently and the times I had to use it it was quite fine. Lots of trains and they arrived on time (and they were fairly clean). It was much, much better - by any account of imagination - than the public railway we have here in Portugal. And I’m guessing they cost the taxpayers a lot less too (but t…

I live in a city in the UK and use the train to commute daily. Return travel on a peak train costs me £8.40 (arriving at work before 9am), and £6.50 if I go in after peak (arriving at work after 9am). Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of…

> Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average.

That £8.40 will be £6.30 after claiming the delay repay for 30 minute delay. Only happening 30% of the time so that would work out to £7.77

Still it would be better if they were always on time.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#444

Post by M95D »

dboreham wrote: post #10
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1] And they actually continue to expand their service. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

Japan has a culture of running trains on time though. There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service.

> There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service.

They have other problems...

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

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#445

Post by rsynnott »

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?

It’s fairly common in many countries to price discriminate between slow regional and fast intercity routes, even where provided by the same company.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#446

Post by n4r9 »

qcnguy wrote: post #429
n4r9 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not making much sense. Faster internet speeds are obviously good for society, all other things being equal.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#447

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

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…

And thus the cycle continues- the EU stifles meritocracy, bemoans the resulting lack of innovation and entrepreneurship, and resorts to inventing new and novel ways to penalize US companies as a coping mechanism

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#448

Post by KaiserPro »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #364
VBprogrammer wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just not convinced that privatisation of natural monopolies is ever sensible. Especially when failure isn't option, you can't just stop the trains running because some operator spent all of their budget on executive bonuses. It's privatised profits and public liability.

England's water companies are a classic example of why you don't want a natural monopoly to be privatised.

Yes, and the way that they were privatised was markedly different to the railways. The failure point was subtly different (regulatory capture and incorrect powers to say "fuck off thats fraud")

I think the issue is that there you need infra to be at arms length, so that they can make long term decisions free of political interference. (for example can you imagine the noise if "rates" went up by as much as the water bills went up to fund the modernisation of the water system?)

But if you're at arms length, how can you have enough oversite to correct for regulatory capture (ofwat) or failure to build future proof infrastructure (defra). That requires industry experts, who are in government and are trusted to advise. It also require politicians who are willing to take such advice and evangelise it to a skeptical public.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#449

Post by n4r9 »

qcnguy wrote: post #435
joshuaissac wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Planning ahead wasn't the issue. The issue was rationality, or economics if you want to call it that. You don't want to build out infrastructure way in advance of demand, it's just bad engineering and would have imposed huge costs on the already crippled British economy for no gain. In the period we're talking about home computers don't speak TCP/IP at all, there is no web, the highest bandwidth users of the internet…

I'm not sure you know the subject very well. By 1986 Cochrane had already overseen fibre installation in the long lines network - leading to a dramatic drop in maintenance and staffing costs - and had installed fibre to his home. He had a clear understanding of the tech and the costs involved. You don't end up on as big a list of boards and directorships as he has without being savvy with both tech and economics.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#450

Post by qcnguy »

n4r9 wrote: post #446
qcnguy wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not making much sense. Faster internet speeds are obviously good for society, all other things being equal.

No they aren't. I don't buy the fastest internet available to me because it costs a lot more and none of my computers would be able to use it without special upgrades. If I did for some reason upgrade, nothing would get faster because bandwidth isn't the bottleneck for anything I do, latency is (and latency is mostly server side). Most people are in that situation in the country where I live. FTTH can deliver more bandwidth than there is demand for.

I mean, come on. This is HN. Aren't we supposed to be engineers here? Increasing bandwidth only matters if some useful activity is constrained by the lack of it. You can't just say more of X is always a good thing, for any X. Ignoring tradeoffs is the mistake that creates leftism, but there are always tradeoffs.

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