Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure • Hacker News Board

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#81

Post by panick21_ » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #29

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

I disagree and am working on an article arguing that Japan rail privatization represents a failure, as does its much lauded pedestrian friendliness. The premise is basically that Tokyo is the busiest city on planet earth and so should therefore have the best public transit and pedestrian infrastructure by a huge margin, when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars (Shibuya crossing should have been permanen…

> when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars

That's not the fault of the railways but govenrment policy in the 60-80s. Everybody drunk the US coolaid.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#82

Post by gcanyon » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #29

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

I disagree and am working on an article arguing that Japan rail privatization represents a failure, as does its much lauded pedestrian friendliness. The premise is basically that Tokyo is the busiest city on planet earth and so should therefore have the best public transit and pedestrian infrastructure by a huge margin, when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars (Shibuya crossing should have been permanen…

> As for trains, during rush hour trains can be so full you might be squashed against the door unable to move

I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but: is there a reason they can't run more trains or higher-passenger-capacity trains? The demand is obviously there, so the question is: do they like it super-crowded?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#83

Post by wongarsu » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

dickiedyce wrote: post #33

As a Scot who travels on Scottish, English, and Welsh railways, and on Swiss and German railways... Scotrail (now in Public ownership) is pretty good. And I say that as someone in the Highlands, which has had the worst of it in the last 30 years. There's been recent investment, and even the re-opening of closed lines and finally new stations where they've been desperately needed (Inverness Airport, Kintore, Laurencek…

> DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair

DBs state is probably too unique to draw any conclusions (attempted privatization stopped just before IPO, so now it's lot of different state-owned private organizations with degraded infrastructure). But the stations are actually fairly straight forward: the platforms and the means to get there are still publicly owned, but 80% of the station buildings have been sold off to private operators. The bigger ones are glorified malls that are exempt from laws about shopping hours, the smaller ones mostly just decay

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#84

Post by slightwinder » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

dddw wrote: post #47

abracos wrote: post #34

For context: The website is called Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish and naturalised-German Marxist theorist and revolutionary. A very biased source

Tot have a certain political angle does not imply a bias by definition

Everyone is biased by definition. Knowing in which direction someone drifts and how strong they move supports your media literacy.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#85

Post by tome » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #71

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,…

> Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots. Yes and that's as it should be, a fully loaded high speed intercity train has more souls on board than most commercial aviation planes (apologies pet peeve of mine because our media keeps banging on about how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid). A bad day at the office for me…

Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#86

Post by gcanyon » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

fhennig wrote: post #62

spacebanana7 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there’s probably a way in which railways and water are natural monopolies, so are more difficult to privatise.

Yes, it's the tracks. Planes don't need tracks.

> Planes don't need tracks.

But let's all take a moment to acknowledge that it would be awesome if they had them. Can you imagine the shenanigans you could get up to designing a nationwide 40,000-foot-high rollercoaster system?

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#87

Post by panick21_ » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

nyreed wrote: post #36

joshuaissac wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

Do you have some source on this, sounds interesting.

It could of course also have just been a failure if tried to early. So we should just assume this would have worked out perfectly.

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#88

Post by williamdclt » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

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…

Mostly repeating what others have said but...

Trains get delayed and cancelled very frequently. They leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere because there's a technical issue fairly regularly: it's not a daily occurrence, but it's frequent enough that people will just go "ahhh classic british rail".

Trains are often packed, with literally nowhere to sit for hours-long journeys.

And this poor quality of service is very expensive. I know adults in their late 20s - early 30s with a fulltime job that choose to take the coach even though it's twice as long, because it's much cheaper. An ex-colleague was living outside of london, and spending £16k a year on train for commuting (you'd expect a big bill, but £16k is insane).

I'm sure there's plenty of countries that do worse, and as an infrequent traveller you'd probably be fine, but it's just... not great

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#89

Post by RobinL » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

fergie wrote: post #53

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,…

> They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid This is in fact an interesting by-product of privatisation: train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them. They consequently became more expensive. A somewhat fun side effect of the free market, especially given the prevailing assumption that moving public sector employees into the private sector would dri…

Is that true? My understanding is they command very high wages because their unions are strong and they have a lot of leverage: by striking they can impose extremely high costs on the wider economy (not to mention bad press for politicians).

Re: Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

#90

Post by panick21_ » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #7

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.

Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex". If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit. This can be sold as a success story depending…

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.