Comment by pm215 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pm215 | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's a couple of things about typical foreign experiences of UK public transport to note (some of this may not apply to you in particular, of course):

(1) Most tourists visit largely London and its near surroundings. Public transport in (and to) London is generally much better than other parts of the country.

(2) A lot of the downsides don't manifest if you're a relatively infrequent user and you're largely travelling at off-peak times. As a UK resident who doesn't commute on the railway, this also includes me -- my experience of trains is generally good because I travel at quieter times and I don't travel so often that unreliability is a regular experience.

(3) If you ignore the costs (by not being a taxpayer or because you're less price sensitive for infrequent travel and especially for holiday travel), then you're ignoring the large part of the argument which is "this privatization had massive inefficiencies and costs".

FWIW, the UK government pays about half of the 25 billion/year cost of the "operational rail industry" (source: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-indust...). I couldn't find the equivalent stats for Portugal with a quick search, so I don't know how that compares.

London is particularly notable because it escaped forced privatisation of e.g. bus services. In London all the buses are red and work the same. You do not care whether your bus is a "Big Corp" bus or a "Tiny New Outfit" bus, they're both red, they both take Oyster, or credit cards or whatever, they're the same, the bus service is controlled by Transpot for London which responds to an elected Mayor. In most UK cities by contrast there are multiple, privately owned bus companies. The local government can try to persuade them to run services it wants but they don't have to, and indeed if the local government won't do what they want they can just fold up the service and go home, too bad, the government have to contract with a for-profit business and if nobody wants to do it then too bad no buses.

Until relatively recently (things have improved in Scotland especially and now increasingly in English cities) it would have been illegal to do what London does anywhere else. My city really wanted a single card that works on a bus or a train anywhere in the city, they couldn't persuade anybody involved to actually do that and the cards went away without ever being actually useful.

> You do not care whether your bus is a "Big Corp" bus or a "Tiny New Outfit" bus, they're both red, they both take Oyster, or credit cards or whatever, they're the same, the bus service is controlled by Transpot for London

Irish urban buses are like this in principle; they're branded TFI and operated by either Bus Eireann (state-owned) for non-Dublin stuff or Dublin Bus (state-owned) or GoAhead (private) for Dublin stuff. Only way to tell these days is a small notice on the door. However, you do care whether your route is Dublin Bus or GoAhead; if it's Dublin Bus it will probably merely be late, whereas if it's GoAhead it will probably be _very_ late or just cancelled. Is this not the case in London; ie are the operators all about the same in terms of level of service?

The government funding is interesting. It excludes HS2 for one thing.

The funding for oeprating companies varies a lot, according to the chart on page 6, 3p per passenger kilometer for Thames link, 30p for Scotrail, -1.1p for west coast.

Mmm, presumably big infrastructure projects like HS2 don't count as "operational" expenses. (Personally I put the huge costs of HS2 down to our complete inability to build anything in a reasonable timeframe and budget, rather than to privatisation in particular. The usual ludicrously long and extended consultation/legal objection/appeal process plus political meddling in the specification plus other stuff all factor in here.)

Yes, and a lot of money has been going into infrastructure, but its dominated by HS2.

Yes, its not anything like a uniquely British problem, its widespread. Bigger projects are a lot more difficult to run, and governments are drawn to big projects.

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