A reminder here: to get a reliable railway you need to invest in the infrastructure. Germany didn’t (enough) for 2 decades. Now finally it’s catching up. Whether the trains on that infra are publicly or privately run isn’t central to on-time performance.
Reposted from
Olaf Storbeck
Olaf Scholz mocked British railways over “broken tracks and bad trains”, claiming that "nothing works any more” in the UK. Turns out: Germany rail problems have become so bad that Deutsche Bahn long-distance service is less punctual than even the worst operator in Britain. www.ft.com/content/d3b6...
Comments
Perceived "wisdom" from successive uk govts treasury is thats a nono.
When in fact we can choose to provide some new money.
#Mmt.
The €14 billion cash injection Deutsche Bahn is about to receive for selling its only profitable asset - Schenker - none of that cash will be spent by DB on improving rail infrastructure.
But the crux of Scholz‘s argument is wrong: what’s private vs. what’s publicly owned in German rail isn’t the central question.
But some nationalised natural monopolies perform worse than other private natural monopolies
@jonworth.eu has posted examples of how some nationalised rail perform worse than some private rail and vice versa
Jon identifies investment as a key factor which is surely right.
For natural monopolies, the other key factor isn’t ownership, but effective (and external) regulation so that the goals of profit-taking, or empire-building, are subordinated to the primary goals. (Customers and Costs)
But it can be a good idea nonetheless - but the main issues to fix are decision making skills of rail executives and investment funds available and political will to allow rail to thrive.