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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

#461

Post by iggldiggl »

martinald wrote: post #164
shevy-java wrote: post #75

Depends - some got wealthier. :) Although, even with this in mind, it seems as if the UK really has a notoriously bad railway system. Most countries in the EU of a comparable size have a better railway system as such, even though they also have their own problems. One of the best in Europe is in Switzerland - the swiss really are clever. And also not in the EU.

This just isn't true on any measure (apart from affordability and true high speed penetration in some countries). Affordability is really driven by how much the operators are subsidized by the govt. It's hard to calculate this on a like for like basis as some subsidy goes to the track operator and some to the train operator, and in eg Germany you have a hugely complex set of subsidies and fare zones in operation from…

> The other is some of the ticketing options

And despite privatisation, a national fare system with through ticketing between operators was maintained.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#462

Post by iggldiggl »

aubanel wrote: post #416

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_...

> despite taxpayer money investment logically dropping

Did it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GB_Rail_Subsidy,_1985-201...

paints a slightly more complex picture.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#463

Post by iggldiggl »

mhh__ wrote: post #263
usrbinbash wrote: post #116

All privatizations of public infrastructur and services are failures, simply due to the discrepancy between the interests: The public wants: Cheap, reliable, quality services. A corporation wants: Maximized Revenue. The two inevitably clash. No matter what business, no matter what country. Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETT…

This is only "true" because anything run efficiently by the private sector is so demonstrably better than any communist-fantasy alternative that no one bothers arguing any more. Should Tesco be run by the government? I use Tesco more than I take trains. May be of note also that the best train in London (the Elizabeth line) is run by a tendering process

> May be of note also that the best train in London (the Elizabeth line) is run by a tendering process

But that tendering is just internal between the state and the operator – fares and service levels on the other hand are set by TfL (and probably also the DfT to some extent, especially on the GEML and GWML sections).

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#464

Post by iggldiggl »

drstewart wrote: post #200
usrbinbash wrote: post #116

All privatizations of public infrastructur and services are failures, simply due to the discrepancy between the interests: The public wants: Cheap, reliable, quality services. A corporation wants: Maximized Revenue. The two inevitably clash. No matter what business, no matter what country. Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETT…

>Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETTER FOR USERS (that is: The Public, not investors) after being privatized. I'll wait. You won't have to wait long: flying. Shocked? You shouldn't be. In the 70s, you'd have to pay thousands of dollars to fly across the country. Now you can get a flight between NYC and London for $200. Time…

Competition dynamics for air traffic are different. Railway infrastructure can only support a very limited number of competing companies before you run out of capacity, and especially on classic mixed traffic routes it is very easy to run out of capacity. Once that happens, rail operators have to start competing for paths instead of directly for passenger, which can definitely lead to misalignment of incentives.

On top of that, there's the problem that it's physically impossible to run competing services at exactly the same time. This means that for customers with schedule constraints (i.e. you need to arrive somewhere specific by a certain time at latest), competition becomes much less effective, because you're no longer able to freely choose among the competing operators, but are instead forced to simply take the train that arrives at the right time.

A similar thing is for journeys that involve changes of trains – it's physically impossible to have attractive connections (i.e. without hanging around the station for ages) between more than one or at most (if that) two operators per route, because trains running along the same line always have to be separated by at least two or three minutes.

With air traffic it's different. While airport and air space capacity isn't quite unlimited, it's still not as limited in the way a mixed traffic railway is. Plus a much higher proportion of air traffic is holiday traffic and other long-distance journeys where even a few flights per day would be considered frequent service, so competition is much less limited by that fact.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#465

Post by dash2 »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #339
dash2 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK and services seem worse to me. I also remember pre-privatization British Rail. It was unbelievably awful. The basic fact about rail privatization is captured in this chart. All else is commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

That chart doesn't normalize for population, service levels, social changes or any number of other extremely important variables. Any facts taken from that chart need to be extremely caveated.

What do you think happened exactly at the time the railway was privatized? Suddenly the population shot up?

This is like looking at the light map of the border between North and South Korea and saying "ah, but they aren't controlling for longitude!"

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#466

Post by dash2 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #351
dash2 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK and services seem worse to me. I also remember pre-privatization British Rail. It was unbelievably awful. The basic fact about rail privatization is captured in this chart. All else is commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

The British rail privatization was so successful in increasing passenger numbers it also increased the number of passengers taking the train in France (despite French rail still being state-controlled). Or maybe, just maybe, there's another underlying casual relationship that explains why train use increased a ton in the 90s and 00s in both countries (and other European countries too, by the way, AFAIK passengers cou…

Cool story. Got evidence? I googled for a minute and found this official document:

"Thus, as shown in Figure 3, the modal share of rail has oscillated between 7 and 10% for almost 30 years, with a low point reached in 1995 following several years of crisis, and a maximum reached in 2011."

https://www.autorite-transports.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/0...

Here's Figure 3. https://share.google/images/58s3sPR3bQ1LbQEHT . Where's the increase?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#467

Post by dash2 »

buellerbueller wrote: post #336
dash2 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the UK and services seem worse to me. I also remember pre-privatization British Rail. It was unbelievably awful. The basic fact about rail privatization is captured in this chart. All else is commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

My commentary is this: It looks like around 1982, the trend reversed, well before the privatization. My takeaway is that whatever the government had done under nationalization was successful at addressing the concerns that existed and contributed to a downward trend that began before nationalization.

There are lots of wiggles in any graph and you can always take a wiggle and say "ah the trend was reversed". Privatization showed a steady growth in passenger numbers for decades. Nationalization didn't.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#468

Post by buellerbueller »

dash2 wrote: post #467
buellerbueller wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My commentary is this: It looks like around 1982, the trend reversed, well before the privatization. My takeaway is that whatever the government had done under nationalization was successful at addressing the concerns that existed and contributed to a downward trend that began before nationalization.

There are lots of wiggles in any graph and you can always take a wiggle and say "ah the trend was reversed". Privatization showed a steady growth in passenger numbers for decades. Nationalization didn't.

The trend is not a "wiggle." It is the slope of a local region, around which the "wiggles" bounce.

Sure, I agree: privatization continued the trend that nationalization established.

My point is simply this: the graph on its own doesn't indicate anything causal, but your original comment implied that the graph is enough to prove that privatization caused the growth.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#469

Post by dijit »

Aloisius wrote: post #384
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 UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK. It wasn't given away. Fiat Ferroviaria purchased the patents for it. Mind, the UK wasn't the first tilted train (that would probably be PERC in the US) or even the first actively tilted train (either SNCF in France or Deutsche Bahn in Germany).

> It wasn't given away. Fiat Ferroviaria purchased the patents for it.

Those patents were sold in 1982 for the princely sum of £1.

This was the pattern that Thatcher presided over, selling national systems for a nominal £1 fee.

I think that is essentially giving it away.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#470

Post by dash2 »

buellerbueller wrote: post #468
dash2 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of wiggles in any graph and you can always take a wiggle and say "ah the trend was reversed". Privatization showed a steady growth in passenger numbers for decades. Nationalization didn't.

The trend is not a "wiggle." It is the slope of a local region, around which the "wiggles" bounce. Sure, I agree: privatization continued the trend that nationalization established. My point is simply this: the graph on its own doesn't indicate anything causal, but your original comment implied that the graph is enough to prove that privatization caused the growth.

Sure. The graph on its own doesn't prove causality. The graph, plus a little basic common sense, does give strong evidence of causality. Specifically, there's no other plausible alternative for the sudden dramatic turnaround in the mid-80s and sustained growth thereafter.
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