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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

You can't privatize what can't make money in itself. By that I mean, rail is beneficial to the entire economy of a country. This profit is not something a rail company can benefit from but a country can. Serving low traffic areas are a loss business but vital for a country to grow.

Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town to build the next unicorn from his home benefits the entire nation. Not all talent is in the cities.

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In the Japanese model the rail company also owns land around the station, so they capture more of the value of rail transport. Rail in the UK does not capture all the value it delivers, so subsidies would be a pragmatic solution.

Why should I, a taxpayer, subsidize rails?

It's sarcasm, many drivers don't realize that the public subsidizes them too, but have such silly arguments.

No, it's actually a good question. If the rails are private, why should the public subsidize them?

For clarity's sake, I think railways should be public, and paid for with a combination of taxes and fares.

I think rails should be public, like skies and roads, and train companies should pay for their usage.

That sounds like an excellent idea. However I think rail transport depends more heavily on quality infrastructure. If a state doesn’t maintain its roads well and allow potholes to develop, it is probably rare for that to cause a fatal accident (I’ve heard of potholes causing damage to cars but not deaths). But improperly maintained rails lead to derailments and deaths.

Potholes do regularly result in cyclists' deaths.

You may still need a public train service or subsidies of some kind to make sure unprofitable but vital routes get served

That's how it was in wild west US as well. The rail lines got massive land grants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railway_Act_of_1862

This is one of the ways the US funded rail infrastructure in the 1800s.

So they're basically a real estate company with a rail transport component?

Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail.

I think the difference is that the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state and leased out competitively to private train operators.

It’s kind of like the airline model.

They've been doing that here in Norway as well for regular trains.

The result is that the train operators get f'ed in the a by poor track maintenance and old trains. It has been so bad that when the trains run people joke it's "train for bus".

Also us customers can no longer buy one ticket that gets us from A to B but often have to contend with 2-3 different operators.

Italy has not exactly privatized high speed rail. The public rail operator Trenitalia is by far the largest high speed rail operator in the country. And it’s great.

What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo.

Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).

> Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail.

I think whether privatization helps or hurts depends a lot on how corrupt or inept the government is, ie. the more corrupt or inept, the more privatization can probably help.

> the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state

...so, a bit like Network Rail, then?

Railway privatization is resolved in East Asia where they are also major real estate developers that plop luxury malls and apartments ontop stations. See the HK MTR as an example, which is far better than the average European subsidized metros.

The real problem, as always is NIMBYism and the western aversion to luxury malls and mass consumerism, which ends of in a self-reinforcing cycle of increasingly miserable public sphere as nobody wants to engage with it or make it better.

In many European countries trains do make money.

The model should be that rails are public and are leased to private operators.

The private companies pay for the maintenance and such, and then are free to do what they prefer.

That is the UK. The big issue has been:

* Government is unable (for various reasons, the primary one being massive levels of corruption) to invest in expanding capacity. Demand on certain routes is multiples of the capacity that exists. * The trains are owned by private companies, this was a bad idea. * Operating companies have had to put prices up because of all the things outside of their control. Government has been happy to let them take the blame, it has allowed things to be moved into public ownership, more power, more control. * No-one is making any money because the idea is for no-one to make any money. Making money is dirty so operating companies make no profit, and prices are sky-high.

> In many European countries trains do make money.

Only if you discount the infrastructure subsidies, I think.

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