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You might the Wikipedia page on the impact of British Rail privatisation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en

by eru 1y ago

You might the Wikipedia page on the impact of British Rail privatisation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics straight after privatisation, you might think the change would be universally acclaimed. High fives all around. Instead, it's one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done. I especially like the almost miraculous recovery in rail's share of passenger transport. Or just the very first graph on the page, that shows the total number of passengers.

pjc50 1y ago
> Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics .. one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done This is a classic of metrics driven management, isn't it. Customer satisfaction isn't in the metrics so people stand around saying "well they should be happy!" Mainly about the cost, but the overcrowding on certain lines and the unreliability are also major factors. Commuters end up using the train because they're more or less forced to - you're not going to drive into rush hour London, and there's nowhere to park; and that's also a matter of policy to get people on the trains for sustainability reasons. The "playing at shops" market setup exacerbates the problems. Original comment says "costs have gone down due to competition", but since the UK's operators are little regional monopolies they don't actually compete. The operators own neither track nor rolling stock; most of the money flows to the "train landlords", the ROSCOs. Privatising the track, through "Railtrack" was the big disaster. They cut maintenance, but when you enshittify railways eventually people get killed, and nationalization was inevitable after Hatfield.
- eru 1y ago
  They managed to increase rail's share of overall transport. Reversing long running trends from before. > Commuters end up using the train because they're more or less forced to [...] Rail transport had been losing passenger share. Did the private companies somehow figure out how to 'more or less force' people to take the train? Why couldn't the government rail do that before?
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > Why couldn't the government rail do that before? They didn't want to. Privatisation was the era of Thatcher and Major, the discovery of North Sea oil reserves, and of the same general desire to culturally align with US (including car culture) that to the uban design found in Milton Keynes 30 years earlier.
grues-dinner 1y ago
I agree privatisation did indeed cause a massive revamp of train usage, and I feel like the nostalgia is sometimes rose-tinted and misplaced because 80s BR by all accounts was pretty bad even in the context of the UK in the 80s. On the other hand, from about the 90s onwards there was a huge increase in London employment relative to the rest of the country, and also a huge (5x or more over that time) house price increase in London. This pushed a lot of people into the commuter belt. and As you basically cannot drive into London from there, those miles can only be provided by rail. It would be interesting to know how much of the effect is in the South east, and how much is showing labour migration into a rail-centric region after industrial sectors outside the South-east were dynamited in the 80s. And privatisation does usually have a cycle: influx of cheap capital in a boom phase, followed by a slow ratching squeeze as you struggle to exceed that great initial growth every year thereafter.
- jstanley 1y ago
  Could you have it backwards? Viable rail transport could have increased the amount of people who can work in London, and increase the radius in which they can live.
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    Indeed, it's possible. It's probably a mutual thing, and the existing rail-centrism of London would certainly have helped fuel the financialisation of the UK economy. You couldn't build Canary Wharf if no one could get to it. London always had the better railway lines anyway, privatisation or not. In particular, radial London commuter lines mostly escaped the Beeching cuts. Post-industrial financialisation in London was the crown jewel of the 90s economic strategy. So it feels (feels/reals alert) unlikely that it was specifically the railways being private that led to the boom, but injecting private investment right then could well have been some grease on the wheels. Of course every private cash injection comes with the long term squeeze as the initial YoY becomes hard to sustain over decades.
    - eru 1y ago
      > London always had the better railway lines anyway, privatisation or not. Well, they were first privately built, anyway. At least most of them.
pydry 1y ago
>Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics straight after privatisation, you might think the change would be universally acclaimed. High fives all around. Instead, it's one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done. I could tell at the time that they were itching to tell a narrative like yours coz they sent me a survey asking me about every aspect of the service except price and value for money, the one thing I and everybody else who routinely used the service was most furious about. As a narrative shaping device it does seem to have not been completely wasted though.

by eru 1y ago

pjc50 1y ago

> Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics .. one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done This is a classic of metrics driven management, isn't it. Customer satisfaction isn't in the metrics so people stand around saying "well they should be happy!" Mainly about the cost, but the overcrowding on certain lines and the unreliability are also major factors. Commuters end up using the train because they're more or less forced to - you're not going to drive into rush hour London, and there's nowhere to park; and that's also a matter of policy to get people on the trains for sustainability reasons. The "playing at shops" market setup exacerbates the problems. Original comment says "costs have gone down due to competition", but since the UK's operators are little regional monopolies they don't actually compete. The operators own neither track nor rolling stock; most of the money flows to the "train landlords", the ROSCOs. Privatising the track, through "Railtrack" was the big disaster. They cut maintenance, but when you enshittify railways eventually people get killed, and nationalization was inevitable after Hatfield.

eru 1y ago
They managed to increase rail's share of overall transport. Reversing long running trends from before. > Commuters end up using the train because they're more or less forced to [...] Rail transport had been losing passenger share. Did the private companies somehow figure out how to 'more or less force' people to take the train? Why couldn't the government rail do that before?
- ben_w 1y ago
  > Why couldn't the government rail do that before? They didn't want to. Privatisation was the era of Thatcher and Major, the discovery of North Sea oil reserves, and of the same general desire to culturally align with US (including car culture) that to the uban design found in Milton Keynes 30 years earlier.

grues-dinner 1y ago

I agree privatisation did indeed cause a massive revamp of train usage, and I feel like the nostalgia is sometimes rose-tinted and misplaced because 80s BR by all accounts was pretty bad even in the context of the UK in the 80s. On the other hand, from about the 90s onwards there was a huge increase in London employment relative to the rest of the country, and also a huge (5x or more over that time) house price increase in London. This pushed a lot of people into the commuter belt. and As you basically cannot drive into London from there, those miles can only be provided by rail. It would be interesting to know how much of the effect is in the South east, and how much is showing labour migration into a rail-centric region after industrial sectors outside the South-east were dynamited in the 80s. And privatisation does usually have a cycle: influx of cheap capital in a boom phase, followed by a slow ratching squeeze as you struggle to exceed that great initial growth every year thereafter.

jstanley 1y ago
Could you have it backwards? Viable rail transport could have increased the amount of people who can work in London, and increase the radius in which they can live.
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  Indeed, it's possible. It's probably a mutual thing, and the existing rail-centrism of London would certainly have helped fuel the financialisation of the UK economy. You couldn't build Canary Wharf if no one could get to it. London always had the better railway lines anyway, privatisation or not. In particular, radial London commuter lines mostly escaped the Beeching cuts. Post-industrial financialisation in London was the crown jewel of the 90s economic strategy. So it feels (feels/reals alert) unlikely that it was specifically the railways being private that led to the boom, but injecting private investment right then could well have been some grease on the wheels. Of course every private cash injection comes with the long term squeeze as the initial YoY becomes hard to sustain over decades.
  - eru 1y ago
    > London always had the better railway lines anyway, privatisation or not. Well, they were first privately built, anyway. At least most of them.

pydry 1y ago

>Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics straight after privatisation, you might think the change would be universally acclaimed. High fives all around. Instead, it's one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done. I could tell at the time that they were itching to tell a narrative like yours coz they sent me a survey asking me about every aspect of the service except price and value for money, the one thing I and everybody else who routinely used the service was most furious about. As a narrative shaping device it does seem to have not been completely wasted though.