> Privatizing operations is not privatiying a monopolistic infrastructure. Indeed, which is precisely what I tried to explain in my parent comment. > Europe o

> Privatizing operations is not privatiying a monopolistic infrastructure. Indeed, which is precisely what I tried to explain in my parent comment. > Europe opened up rail services for competition in the 90s, although it took a long time for it to be implemented. For better or worse, in many countries it's still implemented on paper only. The incumbent state railways have fought long and in many cases successful rearguard actions to delay competition for as long as possible. > There are different models being used throughout the EU, the UK's franchise-model isn't really used very much. One common model is that a regional public transit agency contracts out operations of different parts of regional rail networks to private (or possibly public) bidders, and it´s pretty transparent to the users -- since the regional transit authority will ensure common branding and ticketing. Yeah, this is how many municipal or regional authorities tender out bus lines. I think it's also the model the UK railways are moving towards with the introduction of the (cringe) Great British Railways and the end of the franchising system (hastened by the covid crisis): https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/19/uk-rail-overhaul-privatised-great-british-railways- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/19/uk-rail-ove... > It´s not a very "dangerous" model, since the public maintains control over most aspects of the rail network that matter, it doesn't really privatize gains and socialize losses, it just sort of forces a race to the bottom on the profit margins of rail operators. OTOH, since essentially everything except the running of the actual trains is controlled by the state, there is precious little space for that purported private sector inventiveness and dynamism to make any impact. So what's the benefit instead of just the state directly owning everything and hiring people to run in? Union busting? Answering for my own country, the state railways which runs all passenger rail [1] (except for the capital city regional trains which are run via a tendering process similar to how bus services are run), and the state railways seem supremely uninterested in improving regional rail around other cities than the capital, despite interest from other regional transit authorities. With some "real" competition on the rails, other regional authorities could set up tendering for regional rail as well. [1] Which comes back to the comment I made above about "on paper only". Yes, in principle other operators can operate on the network, but the state company just got a renewed decade long contract from the government to provide essentially all passenger rail service in the country - who's gonna compete with a heavily subsidized operation like that?