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The counterfactual isn't "JNR collapses entirely without privatisation". Hell, it's not "JNR collapses after privatization due to existing debts". There are so

• mlindner 5y ago
  > It should be pointed out that privatization of JNR involved a lot of stuff! Regional breakups, the debt load, there's so much stuff going on there that assuming that privatization happened in an orthodox way is much more succumbing to propoganda than my statement. I don't disagree. And I'd throw in the dissolution of the JNR labor unions that were preventing mass layoffs (some half of JNR's employees were laid off in the process of privatization) also heavily helped things.
  • rtpg 5y ago
    Yeah that's a good point, union-busting is a qualitatively different strategy that is much less doable as a public institution. There's also some quantitative stuff around payment of the management class. I don't believe that you need to pay someone millions of USD for them to do a good job, but there are plenty of important jobs done by public servants that would benefit from simply paying people more and getting access to people trained up in private industry.
  • fomine3 5y ago
    Seriously rotten union was one of a big reason for JNR privatization.
• ant6n 5y ago
  That's what happened in Germany. The rail system was made debt free, turned into a for-profit company, but kept in ownership of the federal government. Overall I'd say it's doing much better than a completely private system would. In Canada CN Rail was made debt fee flogged for 2B on the stock market. After 30 years it's now worth much more, so it's been great for shareholders. But a lot of branch lines were cut, freight prices increased as much as possible, and there has been zero movement on passenger rail, both urban and Intercity (well, except Toronto bought a bunch of rails in their city, a tiny fraction of the CN Network for a significant fraction of the privatization gains..) Privatizing monopolistic infrastructure doesn't usually work well.
  • jabl 5y ago
    > Privatizing monopolistic infrastructure doesn't usually work well. There's the option of keeping the natural monopoly part (the rail network itself) in (semi-)public hands and then allowing private train operators to pay for time slots to run their trains on. The counter-argument is that this creates a very complex interface between public and private, with lots of opportunity for grifting via misaligned incentives. And the experience in the UK doesn't seem that fantastic, with the most recent development being the state taking over much more responsibilities like designing timetables and ticketing, with the private train operators essentially reduced to providing the trains themselves and the train personnel. Of course the EU is trying to recreate the UK model EU-wide, we'll see how that goes..
    • iggldiggl 5y ago
      > The counter-argument is [...] There's also the fact that trying to establish any serious amount of competition within a specific route pretty soon runs into capacity limitations, especially since open access operators seem to focus mostly on faster long-distance trains, meaning that on mixed-traffic railways they'll conflict with both freight and regional/local trains. To maximise the capacity of a route, you need to coordinate the schedules of the various trains, which is of course an anathema to the dogma of free, unrestrained competition. Another thing is that since its impossible to offer direct connections from anywhere to anywhere, especially at anything like a reasonable frequency, the railway system must rely on connections. Attractive connections with not too long waits are only possible between a very limited number of trains. Something like the integrated clockface schedule in Switzerland works only because there's one set of long distance trains that need to be taken care of and integrated with the schedules of regional trains and even other non-railway public transport. > Of course the EU is trying to recreate the UK model EU-wide, we'll see how that goes.. At least the UK kept a common ticketing system with through-ticketing still available from anywhere to anywhere, plus – albeit with some teething trouble – somewhen in the last decade or so they finally settled on accepting that split tickets purchased independently by a passenger in order to save some money should get the same protection in terms of passenger rights (most importantly: if you miss a connection through no fault of your own, the railway needs to accommodate you, i.e. the ticket remains valid on later trains, you get a taxi/hotel/… if it was the last train of the day, alternatively you have the right to abort the journey and claim a refund, etc. etc.) as through-tickets bought in one transaction. In the recent EU passenger rights reform, the parliament did try mandating something similar re more through-ticketing, but a number of member states were apparently heavily opposed to this (unfortunately including Germany it seems), so sadly it was dropped…