Hacker News Reader

Comment by ropeadopepope | Hacker News Reader

> not every service requires market forces to operate effectively

Can you name a service and a city/country that operates effectively in the manner you state?

Swiss Federal Railways: "88.8% of all passengers reached their destination - measured from departure station including any necessary changes - with less than 3 minutes of delay" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Railways

From wikipedia

> The company is headquartered in Bern. Formerly a government institution, since 1999 it has been a special stock corporation with all shares held by the Swiss Confederation or the Swiss cantons.

That certainly sounds like market forces to me.

Not sure what it is about that quote that tells you that. It's still 100% owned by Swiss government, just split between regional and national governments.

NB: This isn't meant to refute your point, as it's contrasting against a totally different competitor (large, corporate monopoly, nothing like market forces) and not necessarily providing free/subsidized service, but I've always found it surprising.

At least in Northern California, municipal utilities, seem to be quite competent. Notably, in the SFBA, Santa Clara and Palo Alto have lower rates [1] and better service than what PG&E offers in all the surrounding communities. Santa Clara even built its own modern, local, efficient generating facilities.

I also heard from my telecom friends who grew up in more rural Northern California that there were towns (and surrounding rural areas) who ended up building and operating their own phone systems and that call quality (due to engineering/maintenance), features, and cost were always better than a neighboring community's service from AT&T or GTE, until, inevitably, it was privatized and sold off.

[1] Palo Alto's electric rates haven't been so great post-Enron, but still better than PG&E AFAIK.

In Istanbul we have both public (bus, metro, tram, "vapur" across the bosphorus) and private ("minibus" which are smaller private busses, taxi, "motor" across the sea). If we ignore shitty traffic on main roads, the former is a million times better than the latter, almost all the time. The "minibus" are hated by everyone for their stereotypically agressive driving/behaviour, but preferred by many because you can get on/off anywhere, can pay w/ cash, and sometimes it serves some areas traditionally better than the bus network.

Having visited Germany only a few days, their public transport was quite timely & effective. And most of it if not all is public.

https://www.bkb.admin.ch/dam/bkb/de/dokumente/Oeffentliches_...

> This Good Practice Guide provides information on improving urban public transport. It showcases how cities in Sweden, Finland, France and Germany have improved the environmental and social standards in urban public transport through the competitive tendering process or through preparations for competitive tendering.

> Competitive tendering refers to the awarding of an exclusive right to operate a route, or a network of routes, to an operator (or possibly a consortium) following a competitive process. Along with, or instead of an exclusive right, the Authority may also grant subsidises to the successful operator in compensation for the fulfilment of public service requirements.

"... following a competitive process." That certainly sounds like market forces at work to me.

Pretty much most of Western Europe. Uk train services are expensive and unreliable, but they are run by private companies.

Your comment proves my point, not disproves it. To remind you, here's the quote we're talking about:

> not every service requires market forces to operate effectively

private companies = market forces, even if they're government contracts.

Ye, and as someone from the UK, I can confirm they're terrible, and don't work effectively, because your god of market forces doesn't work in transport

I don't worship market forces and I have no idea if it works in transport or not. I asked for an example of a successful service that works without market forces and I haven't seen anybody provide one yet.

No-one is suggesting having no market forces anywhere. Market forces are an excellent way of ensuring a good selection of high quality fruit in a fruit market. And they may well be a good way for deciding who manufactures, supplies and operates the buses in a city. I just don’t think they are efficient for deciding when, where and how often the buses should operate as this experiment was tried in the U.K. across many cities outside London in the 80s and it led to chaos. As to examples of centrally planned public transport, London Underground, Paris Metro, Berlin U-Bahn. The only example of centrally planned transport I can think of that’s not operating effectively is the New York subway, but that’s because of a general problem of political corruption in the US. None of these systems operate without market forces, because they use them for things like purchasing trains, cleaning services, engineering designs. They just don’t use them for planning when and where the services operate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com