Could you have it backwards? Viable rail transport could have increased the amount of people who can work in London, and increase the radius in which they can live.
Privatization didn't increase capacity, did it? It certainly didn't build any new lines.
I'm not sure it injected any capital either, subsidy was maintained throughout? Arguably paying dividends while receiving public subsidy has been taking capital out of the system.
> Privatization didn't increase capacity, did it? It certainly didn't build any new lines.
I don't think they privatised the rails themselves, only the trains.
Upthread comment: >[privatisation is] one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done
In New Zealand, a lot of the political fallout from privatisation came from older people who love trains and talk a lot of crap about how good they are. They are uneconomic in New Zealand, regardless of how efficient people think they should be.
Voters don't like reality (few have any working knowledge of business), and most politics seems to be about finding alternative acceptable ways to present reality to voters.
And why is that?
I think it's probably also correct to say that New Zealand could sustain a larger passenger rail network if made the right investments. For example, Auckland <-> Hamilton <-> Tauranga could profitably support at least a few trains per day in each direction... _if_ it was electrified, with passing loops where needed, and with well-sited stations, and with the ability for trains to run into Britomart or at least Newmarket (both being stations close to central Auckland). However, there's a chicken and egg problem: unless you make investments like that, the service you can offer will be pretty crap and no one will want to ride your slow trains.
Sure, but what does any of that have to do with TOCs? They're badly run, transient shells, which are given money by the government.
It should be illegal for any company to take public subsidy and pay dividends at the same time.
> I don't think they privatised the rails themselves, only the trains.
See the sad history of Railtrack Plc.
London always had the better railway lines anyway, privatisation or not. In particular, radial London commuter lines mostly escaped the Beeching cuts. Post-industrial financialisation in London was the crown jewel of the 90s economic strategy. So it feels (feels/reals alert) unlikely that it was specifically the railways being private that led to the boom, but injecting private investment right then could well have been some grease on the wheels.
Of course every private cash injection comes with the long term squeeze as the initial YoY becomes hard to sustain over decades.
Well, they were first privately built, anyway. At least most of them.