Yes, because our post office is doing great in comparison with its private competition these days.
In practical terms, USPS package shipping rates are typically 1/2 to 1/3 of those of an equivalent service from a private carrier. It's often cheaper to send something via USPS 2-day than via UPS/Fedex ground service. Their bulk rates are even cheaper - Media Mail is usually the only cost-effective way to ship textbooks for example. And Fedex/UPS simply have no service that competes with first-class or second-class mail.
In fact USPS's service is so effective that UPS and Fedex actually piggyback on their service to save money. Fedex and UPS will get the mailpiece to the local post office and the post office will handle the last-mile delivery. This is called SmartPost service and I can tell you from experience that the private carrier's involvement significantly worsens the quality of service. It often spends multiple weeks in the hands of the private carrier and I've noticed significantly more damage to mailpieces with it. They also provide subpar customer support on these packages, you cannot refuse delivery or do other basic postal operations with these packages. The opinion of the private carriers essentially seems to be that the blame will fall on the postal service so quality of service is irrelevant.
Nobody is perfect, and all carriers are subject to variation in the quality of the last-mile delivery. If your USPS or UPS or FedEx guy is particularly terrible then you will get damaged packages.
Keep in mind the USPS has locked in one massive customer that continues to rely on post mail instead of electronic communication for virtually everything - the U.S. Government. So while yes, the USPS may produce better outcomes for the last-mile delivery, it is most likely being subsidized by the U.S. Government using their services to communicate virtually everything to 330 million U.S. Citizens. In that regard, UPS and Fedex are saving money off the back of taxpayers when they use the USPS to deliver packages to homes beyond their most profitable routes.
It is! The US Postal Service is required to operate under rules designed to financially destroy it (never mind that private shipping services often use USPS behind the scenes -- privatization would lower costs by making them, um, do more work and have to invest in more of their own infrastructure), and still manages to to keep working well.
Make UPS or FedEx or DHL operate under even a rough facsimile of things like the USPS pension-funding requirements, and they'd issue you a tracking number for their bankruptcy proceedings.
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/top-10-things...
I seem to recall that British Railways was privatized basically by having politicians cut funding, then claim privatization would fix the problems that underfunding was producing...
Mildly.
Privatization puts the burden on the people who use it.
I'm from the happiest country of railway users (Finland), and I can tell you that also here, lots of people complain about the national railway service, both about reliability, speed and price. ([1] is a joke on announcements of VR, the train operator, about four seasonal outages in train service due to spring, summer, autumns and winter (clockwise).)
And the (government-owned) railway company here offers train travel that is more expensive than in Britain (just checked my most recent trip, 37 € is the cheapest fare for a 250 km distance that is equivalent to London-Manchester).
[0] http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_382a_sum_en.pdf
Do you not wonder why they didn't ask?
There is a quick comparison:
http://budgettraveller.org/uk-trains-cheap/
And a more thorough one, but a bit old (2009):
http://d3cez36w5wymxj.cloudfront.net/migrated/fares__ticketi...
The point with UK train travel is that
1) commuting to London is expensive (not that surprising considering how congested it is) and
2) if you book in advance, travel is cheaper than in comparable European countries. If you purchase ticket in the train, it is more expensive.
I live it. Take it from me: the fact that somebody could try and judge how people felt about our train service and "forget" to ask about prices is kind of like hearing somebody say that Guantanamo is not so bad because the weather's nice.
I don't even travel on trains much these days because it's so expensive - I check on the odd occasion but I usually I go by coach, horrible though it is. The dominant coach operating company has recognized this and bumped up their prices too.
>There is a quick comparison
This quick comparison points out that if you are willing to travel when nobody else is travelling you can fix your travel plans twelve weeks in advance then you can get a fare I would describe as "sort of reasonable".
If you do the same kind of wrangling to get a flight you can end up flying half way across europe for 10 pounds. That 19 pound ticket to the airport still isn't exactly cheap, it's just not, well...
You might note that author of that article used the exact same phrase I did to describe prices the rest of the time: eye watering.
The best part is that many of those "cheap fares" are only there because the regulators force the operating companies to show them (they would be gone in an instant if there weren't a legal requirement for them to exist) and they are often very well concealed and useless for most people's needs. If privatization weren't being kept on a very, very, very long leash it might be even worse.
>The point with UK train travel is that
Is that it is privatized and the rail operating companies are ripping us off blind. End of story.
>if you book in advance
You can get a flight for 10 pounds and still end up spending twice that on your train to the airport, booked just as far in advance. Yay?
But for Britain, here's actual regulator data:
http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/21591/rail-far...
This compares actual prices with the rest of Europe (from 2009, but still relevant): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/46...
Is 4x higher prices a reasonable reflection of the higher cost of doing business in the UK or simply price gouging? What do you think?
But hey, as your report points out people are relatively happy with the level of information provision by station staff. So it's fine.
What would help this discussion would be to see stats of how fares, delays/cancellations and customer service satisfaction have developed since 1990.
Not everyone agrees that privatisation was so bad. Wikipedia:
Former Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen general secretary Lew Adams moved to work for Virgin Trains, and said on a 2004 radio phone-in program: "All the time it was in the public sector, all we got were cuts, cuts, cuts. And today there are more members in the trade union, more train drivers, and more trains running. The reality is that it worked, we’ve protected jobs, and we got more jobs."
At least the popularity of train travel has increased: the number of passenger kilometres has nearly doubled in Britain between 2000 and 2014 (from 38.2 billion km to 62.4 billion km).
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
It might, yes, which is why the ~12x (not sure of the exact difference but it's an order of magnitude for sure) difference in average price between London and Bucharest train prices is so outrageous.
>Not everyone agrees that privatisation was so bad.
No, the people who profited from it don't.
>Former Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen general secretary Lew Adams moved to work for Virgin Trains, and said on a 2004 radio phone-in program: "All the time it was in the public sector, all we got were cuts, cuts, cuts. And today there are more members in the trade union, more train drivers, and more trains running. The reality is that it worked, we’ve protected jobs, and we got more jobs."
This is all part of the privatization playbook - #1 defund public services, #2 say "aren't things shit? privatization will fix this!" #3 privatize. It's happening right now with the USPS. It happened to the UK post office a few years ago.
Once privatized you've got a licence to price gouge.
>At least the popularity of train travel has increased: the number of passenger kilometres has nearly doubled in Britain between 2000 and 2014
People commute longer and from further away due to rising house prices. It's not like people are suddenly bigger fans of getting on a train these days and getting up at 5 in the morning to go to work.
It's quite hard to argue for more spending.
It's an advantage of being in the private sector.
It's not hard to argue for more spending to the public. The public want that. It's hard because the political system is rigged against politicians who do so (for an example see all of the dirty tricks campaigns levied against Corbyn).
But having 69 % growth of train travel during a 15-year period where population growth was 10 % seems to indicate that the service has scaled well. Sure, train commute may not be fun but at least it makes it possible to have a job.
Individuals acting en masse are no longer just individuals. There's no rational reason why people wouldn't respond to prices.
>They both are symptoms of the same thing: population growth
They are symptoms of four things:
* Population growth
* A political decision to drive up the price of housing (described as "the wealth effect" by central bankers).
* Wealth inequality - when Roman Abramovich occupies a house in central London he takes up 30-60x as much space as the average person.
* A political decision to give favorable tax treatment to land ownership leading it to be treated as an asset of a similar class to gold. Meaning it is hoarded. Meaning row upon row of empty new build housing in central London.
* Defunding local councils (Happened under Thatcher) meaning they couldn't afford to and eventually stopped building council housing.
The forces that created these conditions were neither impersonal or inevitable. They were the result of a succession of more and more right wing governments (both Labour and the Tories) implementing deliberate policy.
Zoning is only part of the problem. It's the most promoted problem because it gets in the way of land developers turning a profit. They don't give a shit about wealth inequality or the "wealth effect" and they'd prefer land kept it's favored tax treatment so they can effectively keep selling bars of gold to foreign investors.
Overall, I have hard time believing wealth inequality has significant impact on how many people can live in city centers. The number of housing units has a significant impact. Roman Abramovich and Prince Whoever may have more space than they need, but overall impact of the space taken by the very wealthy is small. Their negative impact is probably larger in the jobs that they offer, which then attract new people to move in. And as you can see, London, like many major cities, has population growth.
Assuming jobs and other pull factors remain the same, distributing wealth differently would just mean that different people compete of the same housing, but still there are not more houses. House prices going up helps the problem in that there is more incentive to build new houses (and more tax revenue from property taxes).
Regarding tax treatment, I expect you would favour a Land Value Tax, and there you've got me with you, along with both leftists and neoliberals.
Feast your eyes:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/24/revealed-for...
This isn't the only one it's just the famous symbolic one. I've walked past tons of others. Some neighborhoods have basically emptied out because the property owners are mostly or entirely absent. I remember Mayfair and Sloane Sqaure are noticeably much less busy these days than 10 or 20 years ago.
>Roman Abramovich and Prince Whoever may have more space than they need, but overall impact of the space taken by the very wealthy is small.
It's not small at all. While the wealthy get bigger and bigger spaces the middle classes are squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces. I live in a room in a house because I can't justify the cost of a whole flat. Many more people these days share rooms. Meanwhile the wealthy have townhouses that could easily be split into 4 flats for 4 families and the ultra-wealthy have enormous mansions that could house 50 or 100 people and often live in them two weeks a year. The most extreme example - Buckingham Palace - occupies enough space to house maybe 5,000 people (in skyrises).
Anybody who wants to buy (most people don't want to rent for the rest of their lives) is forced further and further out. Hence trains became more "popular".
>Their negative impact is probably larger in the jobs that they offer
Please. Nobody believes that "job creator" schtick over here. For every Elon Musk creating jobs there's about 1,000 Philip Greens destroying jobs.
>And as you can see, London, like many major cities, has population growth.
The price rise in the centre cannot solely be accounted for by the rise in the number of polish and Romanian cleaners. They have taken to sharing rooms on the outskirts rather than occupying mansions next to Hyde Park.
>Assuming jobs and other pull factors remain the same, distributing wealth differently would just mean that different people compete of the same housing
It means different people compete for the same space. It would mean fewer mansions that could house 100 people (they would be converted) and fewer people sharing rooms and much, much less unoccupied housing.
>House prices going up helps the problem in that there is more incentive to build new houses
It actually doesn't help that much currently. As you can see St George's Wharf was basically turned into the equivalent of unused bars of gold housing almost nobody.
>(and more tax revenue from property taxes).
Property taxes are part of the problem. They are kept very, very low. If they were raised the tendency to treat property like gold would go down. Fewer empty properties.
>Regarding tax treatment, I expect you would favour a Land Value Tax, and there you've got me with you, along with both leftists and neoliberals.
Leftists yes. Neoliberals no. Blair & Blairites and the Tories and the rest of the neoliberal establishment have never advocated for it and never will. Corbyn has. Not coincidentally the establishment want to see Corbyn's head on a spike.
I notice in some countries quality of delivery has dropped dramatically, worse reliability and transit times. The UK for example. I talked with a customer who acknowledged my feeling and said the workers were demotivated by the restructuring which seems to last for over a decade.
In The Netherlands, our former national postal service PostNL is treating its workforce in the most egregious ways of all former monopolies.
Consequently I found the Russian postal service to be fast and reliable, especially considering the vast distances serviced.
15 years ago, there was some corruption in Africa, South/Middle America.
Not any more.
The reason being that if a business/organization declines in quality, competition always exists to step in and serve those whom the organization previously served. When you have government controlled monopolies, private competition is literally killed off because the private competition's tax dollars typically go to subsidize the government entity serving the same customers. This keeps prices low, but it does nothing to address the quality of the services being provided, which oftentimes degrades over time (this is partially why most Fortune 500 companies weren't on the list 20 years ago).
When the government steps in and serves a group of people in the marketplace, there is rarely a mechanism to give consumers an alternative should the government entity fail to provide adequate service.
No, the market is fully deregulated. GLS (Dutch) isn't any better either.
This is practically a super power.