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It's interesting to read this from a UK perspective. National rail services in the UK have been privatised for many years and all national rail services are run by private companies. Most of the UK rail franchises are European owned (Deutsche Bahn, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Abellio, SNCF). MTR own 50% of of the London Overground rail franchise - one of the better run rail services.

Overall, privatisation has been a disaster for the UK rail industry (in my opinion). Despite the fact that we have some of the highest rail passenger numbers in Europe, we also have the highest fares in all of Europe and poor to mediocre services.

Our rail services are incompetently (and greedily) run and the political will to change this is depressingly weak (across all political parties).

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Not sure if that's a totally fair assessment. Arguably privisation may have led to the increase in numbers: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/GBR_rail_...

I've had the same realisation in Japan: rail and postal services have been privatised there as well and they work supremely well. It made me think that good/bad service stems from culture more than from government vs. corporate organisation structures.

There are two ways to privatise: to create a competitive market (liberalisation) or simply to outsource the execution of what is essentially still public policy (to provide quality public transport).

Japan is an example of the latter, the UK is a strongly ideologically (Thatcherite) driven attempt at the former. And those almost almost fail when it comes to infrastructure.

Not so much a matter of culture but ideology.

The whole private versus public debate is a red herring: in the end, these services depend completely on a functioning government taking full responsibility for the outcome, regardless of how the outcome is achieved.

I don't agree fully. With the rail network I think it's pretty much the same in Japan as in the UK - since you have one set of rails going from point A to point B for most (A,B), it's not a liberalisation in either countries. With postal services we have to look at packages and letters separately - the former market is completely liberalised, for the later JP still has a de facto monopoly - that doesn't mean you're not allowed to create your own letter mailing service though, it's probably just that you can hardly match them at their price point.

So I don't think Japan's case is that much different from the UK from a market perspective and I'm not quite sure whether the ideology is that different either - if you (as in the premier minister responsible for it) don't have a free market ideology, why putting privatisation on your flag at all?

The infrastructure in the UK is owned by Network Rail, which is a central government body.

The failure has been the privatisation of the ToCs (train operating companies), and the lack of competition between them. There are many other places in the EU where the incumbent was split up into smaller, state-owned companies and then the ToCs have been opened up to competition, with good results. The problem with the British situation is there is essentially a monopoly granted to a single company for a number of years — and this doesn't give much incentive to invest.

You can't have real competition with networks, be they road, rail, telephone, internet

Internet? Then why is Google driving down prices wherever it rolls out fiber?

Because they cherry pick densely populated areas. They're not providing a universal service.

Where do you draw the line? Air travel/airports? Mobile data networks?

Competition fails where the cost of redundancy is prohibitive, which leads to either large scale partitioning (local monopolies) or monopoly (global monopoly). It doesn't really make sense to build several rail lines connecting city A to B. The same goes for telephone lines -- in all but the most dense centers, the infrastructure cost is so dominant that redundancy doesn't make sense. Now for mobile data for example, you can, for a more modest investment, cover large areas with cell towers, so direct competition occurs.

The United States is still limited to only four competing firms when it comes to mobile networking, thanks to the limited amount of available wireless spectrum and high costs for the access to that spectrum.

The metro in Tokyo is really expensive though. It costs almost 1000 yens for a one way trip from the suburb of Tokyo to central Tokyo.

Err, no, the maximum fare on the Tokyo Metro is Y310 (~US$2.5). Y1000 is enough for a trip of up to 60km one-way on JR, or even longer on cheaper private railways. Of course, in Tokyo there are people who commute that far, but that's definitely at the expensive side of the spectrum.

Actually, Tokyo is so huge that "suburb" could mean anything from Shibuya, to the second largest city in Japan (Yokohama). It all depends on what we mean by "Tokyo":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area#Various_def...

Yes, but you don't take into account the fact that you have to pay again when you change line.

Only if you change line to a different operator, and there are transfer rebates.

Last time I lived in Tokyo, my hourlong commute that took me literally across the city (Yoyogi-uehara to Nezu) cost all of Y240 one way. This was on the cheaper side, but I'd wager the average commuter pays somewhere around Y500-600 (private railway plus metro), plus it's normally the employer that pays for the teikiken (commuter ticket) anyway.

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