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 that part I didn’t check).
Similar problem with "Deutsche Bahn" in Germany. Probably also the reason why this German political NGO is writing this article. Are there any other countries with similar problems or history in their public transportation-systems?
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, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid. Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots. Their ability and willingness to strike affects both costs and people's willingness to rely on public transport.
The big constraint is lack of subsidies. it probably makes little difference whether the system is privately owned but tightly regulated, or publicly owned so much as willingness to subsidise it. This is also shown by the failure of franchises taken back into public ownership to improve.
How does the govt pick executives or companies for owning the railways?
I am thinking of the three credit bureaus in the US. These companies suck, and offer 0 innovations, but we are stuck them for the foreseeable long term.
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, Laurencekirk). But still plenty more to do.
I visit the south semi-regularly, and worked in London in the 90's. Rail around London seems to have really improved over the last few years.
Swiss Rail (SBB) is still the poster child for a decent rail system. Clean, on time, reasonably priced (compared to UK rail), and easy to use.
What was eye-opening for me was recent travel in Germany (München to Basel in CH)... DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair.
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
I'm undecided if privatisation was a failure. I don't know the counterfactual scenario well enough. The article paints a picture that British Rail was doing just fine, making all capital investments necessary, and at low taxpayer cost. I'm somewhat skeptical that it would continue like that for 30 years. Any better analysis?
The central claim of the article makes sense. Tickets are too expensive and that's all i care about as a consumer. I don't agree with many of the authors arguments and his proposed solutions.
> the case
against fragmented and
privatized operations
focuses on three key
arguments. The first is that
railways are complex systems where commercial
boundaries at engineering
interfaces are a threat to
safety and efficiency. The
second is that railway
operations are geographic monopolies where market
conditions are — at best —
contrived. The third is that
railways are a public service
that cannot fail — hence,
introducing private interests into the railways is
merely a way to sequester
income into private hands
while the state shoulders
the financial risk. In other
words, private interests’ role is simply to extract
profit that could otherwise
be reinvested into the
system.
That is true of most infrastructure. The closest parallel i can think of is the airline industry. It may never be perfect but these problems are solveable.
Next the claim that moving decisions away from Westminster will make things better. That is highly debatable.
Finally the main point. The nationalised railway worked well in the 90s so it would work well today. That is such an obviously flawed argument i won't even bother discussing it. I think the local government in London has far more direct control of local transport and it is horribly inefficient and expensive. Finally look at the ongoing, slow motion train wreck which is the hs2 rail project. At this stage it's just a government employment program for labourers. It's way, way too expensive and they should have pulled the plug on it years ago or drastically deregulated idk. As it is we have the worst of both worlds.
However, it is interesting that Thatcher didn't want to privatise the rails. Does anyone know what her opinion on it was?
It's really an open question - UK's railways were in a poor state & lacking investment when they were handed over. Rail journeys and infrastructure investment did increase in the intervening period.
It's not at all clear that railways will have consistent, adequate funding in the public realm, not least because the government is leery of capital expenditure and is always interested in ways to make debt levels look smaller.
I remember that the UK was forced to privatise Rail in the way that it did because of EU competition rules. I was commuting by Rail at the time and the manner in which it was privatised was considered to be barmy by both myself and fellow passengers.
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.
The privatisation of the commons will endure as our generations' greatest folly.
I look at the Australian NBN as a great example of a project that is not economical for a private business to entertain - it requires "The Government" to build. How do we reason with this in the capitalist system?
I miss being able to spontaneously buy a ticket and travel off to see a friend in another town or city. I did quite a lot as a young man with the help of my 'young person's railcard'. The cost would be prohibitive nowadays because only tickets bought well in advance are cheap.
As always this is grossly oversimplifying. As well as the misleading safety stats, as graemep has noted, it ignores that journeys just absolutely exploded under privatisation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail]
The problem with this assement is that it misunderstands the role of the private sector.
Yes, those crashes happened, and they were disasters, but they were only partially down to rail track being privatised. They were a result of systemic under investment both pre and post privatisation.
THe _other_ key thing that needs to be remembered is that rail is highly regulated. To the point that both price, timetables profit and pay are controlled by the deparment of transport.
The bigger issue is that actually the department of transport doesn't have the specialists needed to run the railways, they are hired in as consultants.
If you compare that to TFL, which operates both private (DLR and some of the overground) and public (most of the tubes, not sure about elizabeth line) and buseses (which are entirely private)
The railways are in the state they are because of poor governance from central government. and poor investment, also from government.
IF they had been publicly owned, we'd be in the same state, because the UK government is not currently able to run services effectively. Unless and until the political classes are willing to pay civl servants competitive rates of pay and trust data, then we will continue to be in a mess.
Yes, privatization is bad, but the lack of effective governance is the hidden crisis here.
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 BETTER FOR USERS (that is: The Public, not investors) after being privatized. I'll wait.
Public utilitis HAVE TO be run by the public, meaning the government. In pretty much every instance where this isn't the case, the provided service is more expensive, and/or less effective for the people.
And that's why I am sick and tired of the old trope "bUt pRivAtE sEcToR mOrE effIciEnt!" Sure. That would be the same private sector that caused almost every non-war related major economic crisis, is it not? I think the "efficiency argument" is already a moot point.
A lot of people in the UK seem to think the trains in Europe are so much better, but that's not the case, at least in my experience. We took an interrail trip a couple of years ago and spent half the time sat on the floor and waiting for delayed trains. If anything, the overall experience was much worse than trains in the UK, especially if you factored in the difficulty in procuring the correct tickets.
Two legacies from the 1980s and 1990s that haunt us to this day are:
1. The idea of trickle down economics; and
2. That public-private partnerships ("PPPs" were a stalwart of Thatcher and Blair) do anything other than simply transfer wealth from the public sector to the private sector. Put another way, PPPs socialize the risk and privatize the profits.
For anyone who pays attention and can think critically, this is the least suprising thing that can possibly happen and was evident decades ago.
For the railways in particular, railroads (technically, train operating companies or TOCs) in the UK have zero incentive to invest in rolling stock, track, signalling systems or stations because they own none of it. So all they do is engage in cutting costs and gaming politics to raise prices to increase profits. That's all that happens.
You can say that British Rail needed reform and funding but PPPs were simply not the answer.
Our Dutch one is too (privatized in 1995, it's one of our biggest employers as well), we have a nice railway system but the car is generally cheaper, even when using it alone. It's always about how much money the railway system is loosing, but I don't see anybody crying about the money our roads are loosing. Isn't it all just transport infrastructure?
> so that decisions about the railways we use are made closer to us
I believe this is a mistranslation of "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by me" or more precisely "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by the sort of people that like attending committee meetings and working their way up the inside of political parties"
The privatisation was very likely botched, however, it was not as if it was done in a secret - the "fire sale" only happened at "rock bottom prices" with hindsight. The nationalisation itself was fairly botched and it is hardly as if the decimation of Britain's railways implemented following the Breeching Report (completed on a nationalised rail system) was particularly effective.
50 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 71.0 ms ] threadDoes any country have any success stories?
I can’t think of any.
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 that part I didn’t check).
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, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid. Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots. Their ability and willingness to strike affects both costs and people's willingness to rely on public transport.
The big constraint is lack of subsidies. it probably makes little difference whether the system is privately owned but tightly regulated, or publicly owned so much as willingness to subsidise it. This is also shown by the failure of franchises taken back into public ownership to improve.
I am thinking of the three credit bureaus in the US. These companies suck, and offer 0 innovations, but we are stuck them for the foreseeable long term.
> the case against fragmented and privatized operations focuses on three key arguments. The first is that railways are complex systems where commercial boundaries at engineering interfaces are a threat to safety and efficiency. The second is that railway operations are geographic monopolies where market conditions are — at best — contrived. The third is that railways are a public service that cannot fail — hence, introducing private interests into the railways is merely a way to sequester income into private hands while the state shoulders the financial risk. In other words, private interests’ role is simply to extract profit that could otherwise be reinvested into the system.
That is true of most infrastructure. The closest parallel i can think of is the airline industry. It may never be perfect but these problems are solveable.
Next the claim that moving decisions away from Westminster will make things better. That is highly debatable.
Finally the main point. The nationalised railway worked well in the 90s so it would work well today. That is such an obviously flawed argument i won't even bother discussing it. I think the local government in London has far more direct control of local transport and it is horribly inefficient and expensive. Finally look at the ongoing, slow motion train wreck which is the hs2 rail project. At this stage it's just a government employment program for labourers. It's way, way too expensive and they should have pulled the plug on it years ago or drastically deregulated idk. As it is we have the worst of both worlds.
However, it is interesting that Thatcher didn't want to privatise the rails. Does anyone know what her opinion on it was?
It's not at all clear that railways will have consistent, adequate funding in the public realm, not least because the government is leery of capital expenditure and is always interested in ways to make debt levels look smaller.
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.
Yes, those crashes happened, and they were disasters, but they were only partially down to rail track being privatised. They were a result of systemic under investment both pre and post privatisation.
THe _other_ key thing that needs to be remembered is that rail is highly regulated. To the point that both price, timetables profit and pay are controlled by the deparment of transport.
The bigger issue is that actually the department of transport doesn't have the specialists needed to run the railways, they are hired in as consultants.
If you compare that to TFL, which operates both private (DLR and some of the overground) and public (most of the tubes, not sure about elizabeth line) and buseses (which are entirely private)
The railways are in the state they are because of poor governance from central government. and poor investment, also from government.
IF they had been publicly owned, we'd be in the same state, because the UK government is not currently able to run services effectively. Unless and until the political classes are willing to pay civl servants competitive rates of pay and trust data, then we will continue to be in a mess.
Yes, privatization is bad, but the lack of effective governance is the hidden crisis here.
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 BETTER FOR USERS (that is: The Public, not investors) after being privatized. I'll wait.
Public utilitis HAVE TO be run by the public, meaning the government. In pretty much every instance where this isn't the case, the provided service is more expensive, and/or less effective for the people.
And that's why I am sick and tired of the old trope "bUt pRivAtE sEcToR mOrE effIciEnt!" Sure. That would be the same private sector that caused almost every non-war related major economic crisis, is it not? I think the "efficiency argument" is already a moot point.
1. The idea of trickle down economics; and
2. That public-private partnerships ("PPPs" were a stalwart of Thatcher and Blair) do anything other than simply transfer wealth from the public sector to the private sector. Put another way, PPPs socialize the risk and privatize the profits.
For anyone who pays attention and can think critically, this is the least suprising thing that can possibly happen and was evident decades ago.
For the railways in particular, railroads (technically, train operating companies or TOCs) in the UK have zero incentive to invest in rolling stock, track, signalling systems or stations because they own none of it. So all they do is engage in cutting costs and gaming politics to raise prices to increase profits. That's all that happens.
You can say that British Rail needed reform and funding but PPPs were simply not the answer.
I believe this is a mistranslation of "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by me" or more precisely "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by the sort of people that like attending committee meetings and working their way up the inside of political parties"
The privatisation was very likely botched, however, it was not as if it was done in a secret - the "fire sale" only happened at "rock bottom prices" with hindsight. The nationalisation itself was fairly botched and it is hardly as if the decimation of Britain's railways implemented following the Breeching Report (completed on a nationalised rail system) was particularly effective.