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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

#451

Post by iso1631 »

aembleton wrote: post #441
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.

Sure, change at Crewe.

Back in BR days it cost £45.50 off peak (over £100 today inflation wise) and took about 3 hours, but sure you didn't have to change.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#452

Post by qcnguy »

n4r9 wrote: post #449
qcnguy wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your faith in the British establishment is touching but misplaced. Being given a long series of fake (sorry, "visiting") academic roles and board seats is exactly how you'd expect them to protect a former government official.

He wasn't savvy with tech. I just demonstrated that. He claimed it was "patently obvious" you couldn't deliver data over copper just a few years before the tech to do it was invented.

He wasn't savvy with economics either. BT was a basket case when he was running it, which is why they had to lay off over 100,000 employees the moment they were privatized. And again, he claimed you could make FTTH cheap by scaling up cable manufacturing, which is not only economically nonsensical but is obviously nonsense to anyone who thinks about it for a moment.

The moment BT had to actually deliver value matching the prices they charged, they could no longer justify FTTH nor could anyone else, because it was irrational. That's why the project got cancelled. Stop trying to force a left wing narrative where none fits: if FTTH was such a great idea in the 1980s other companies would have done it. None did, because it was the wrong call.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#453

Post by panick21_ »

fulafel wrote: post #438
panick21_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really true, running things in the government also cost a huge amount of opex. Sure you do get one time payment and the resulting company will have to be hired but it will usually also have to start to compete. This could potentially result in more or less opex. Running an airline just so you don't have opex seems a bit silly to me for example.

Well, the brits eventually decided against it after a thorough investigation found it to be a waste of money - "a January 2018 report by the National Audit Office found that the UK had incurred many billions of pounds in extra costs for no clear benefit through PFIs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_finance_initiative#End... Another antifeature is the lack of transparency. The costs and operations of the privat…

Britain is also uniquely bad at government contracting. As we can see in detailed studies about cost of transport engineering.

As with everything things can be done well and can be done badly. And it really depends on this exact situation and the exact contract.

And both well done likely not that different in cost and other factors need to be included.

In terms of transparency having an isolated outside of government structure, you can potentially be more transparent as you can get detailed contracts down to item levels and have all those things be public. This is done in other nations when it comes to transport projects. But it of course depends on the government writing the contract to demand the level of transparency.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#454

Post by linkregister »

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?

Sure, "rich" means different things in different contexts. In this case it's a shorthand for the much smaller group of people who control large companies and can move major levers impacting employment and trade. Admittedly it's ambiguous, as so many English terms in common use are.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#455

Post by thaumasiotes »

alwa wrote: post #431
thaumasiotes wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don’t mean it as a criticism! I think that their choice to study a dataset of accidents resulting in fatalities—was reasonable, and that it was admirable to reiterate that qualifier in the conclusion. I’m also sensitive to the parent commenter’s point that the choice of indicator was kind of narrow. But it makes sense to me why academics might choose a narrow but highly reliable dataset, and try to be very transpar…

> I’m also sensitive to the parent commenter’s point that the choice of indicator was kind of narrow.

But you're not. We can separate the parent comment into two claims:

(1) The indicator was accidents;

(2) The indicator is too narrow.

You've supported (2) by pointing out that the parent commenter's idea of what the choice of indicator was was completely incorrect. But everything they said was wrong! They were wrong about the indicator, and they were wrong that the indicator they called excessively narrow was excessively narrow. They weren't saying that the paper judged by a criterion that was too narrow, independently of what that criterion was. (1) and (2) are both claims you can mine out of the parent comment, but they're not claims that were made separately in the parent comment.

"Accidents" covers everything you might want to know about. It's crazy to say that looking at accident rates is "suspiciously specific". It's crazy because it's as nonspecific as you can get.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#456

Post by croes »

renewiltord wrote: post #284
croes wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I always wondered what personality of software engineers leads to massive grab bag predicates. def is_problem(ctx) -> Bool: ...1000 lines of various garbage... Vs. def is_specific_condition(ctx) -> Bool: ...3 lines of specific predicate... Now I see. The latter would be suspiciously specific. I wonder if it correlates with belief in the Omnicause.

More of the opposite

This be enough if there is metric that shows worse safety:

The conclusion from the analysis of the accident data is that there is no evidence for the hypothesis that railway safety has become worse since privatisation.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#457

Post by iggldiggl »

julik wrote: post #219
tialaramex wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is usually to de-skill workers and also to try to make their contractual terms worse. In one very small way I actually sympathise on the railways, let me be specific, this is a long story: The person driving the train clearly needs to learn how to drive that particular model of train, I think that's likely true basically everywhere. The UK's railway systems are however also reliant on drivers knowing the rou…

Most European railways require a driver to have done some route familiarization for most routes, which tends to work fairly well. What does not work very well is that the UK has very patchy and antiquated train safety systems (AWS / TPWS are somewhat rudimentary and deployed - by far - not everywhere) and signaling. Even speed restrictions in the UK are placed very, very tightly and you better know them by heart beca…

> AWS / TPWS are somewhat rudimentary and deployed - by far - not everywhere

I don't think that's quite true. AWS is rudimentary, true (only forces acknowledgement of warning signals, but otherwise no speed supervision, braking curves or trainstop functionality), but AFAIK deployed almost everywhere, the only major exception I'm aware of being some complex but slow-speed station layouts.

And TPWS… while it doesn't do everything that a truly modern train protection system could do, together with the British practice of long enough overlaps (i.e. an additional safety distance beyond a stop signal that needs to be kept clear, too, in case of an overrun) it's still quite reasonably effective at preventing dangerous overruns. And its deployment has been indeed more gappy, but AFAIK junctions and major speed restrictions, where the biggest risks are, are still quite comprehensively fitted. The biggest gap are automatic signals on the plain line, but then again there haven't been many accidents at those.

> If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already.

Part of that goes a long way back. One of the most fundamental differences is that the UK still does route signalling, whereas Germany completely switched to speed signalling at the beginning of the 1930s.

Route signalling means that the signals indicate the route the train will take, but not the exact speed, so if you want trains to operate safely but without excessive dawdling, route knowledge is a must.

Whereas with speed signalling, the signals directly indicate the safe speed for proceeding, so route knowledge, while still useful and necessary for other purposes, is no longer quite as crucially relevant. Consequently, in the UK ad-hoc diversions without route knowledge are quite taboo, whereas in Germany, emergency diversions due to short-notice incidents are mostly (except for some specific lines with more complex requirements) allowed, albeit with a speed restriction of 100 km/h.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#458

Post by iggldiggl »

Sharlin wrote: post #442
bluGill wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment.

Plus maybe another legitimiate niche in developing countries where drivers' salaries are cheaper relative to capital investments cost.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#459

Post by iggldiggl »

bluGill wrote: post #191
cogman10 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I have a hard time squaring away. A train will likely always need to be manned, there are, in fact, checks that have to be made by a person and can't be made by a computer. However, it seems like the part of actually driving the train could be nearly completely automated. The train is on a rail, about the only thing a person is needed for when the train is in motion is to push a stop button if thing…

If you have a grade separated system - which you really want anyway - there is nothing that could get in the way. 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.

> and if you maintain the roads to track standards they are just as comfortable

If you maintain a road to track standards, it's likely also just as expensive. (Definitely not cheap, because an intensive bus service will hammer a road quite nicely.)

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#460

Post by iggldiggl »

epolanski wrote: post #76
sschueller wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't privatize what can't make money in itself. By that I mean, rail is beneficial to the entire economy of a country. This profit is not something a rail company can benefit from but a country can. Serving low traffic areas are a loss business but vital for a country to grow. Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town t…

In many European countries trains do make money. The model should be that rails are public and are leased to private operators. The private companies pay for the maintenance and such, and then are free to do what they prefer.

> In many European countries trains do make money.

Only if you discount the infrastructure subsidies, I think.

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