It becomes a campaign issue (or does if it is an issue), which is what I mean is 'strictly better'. Not great, probably, but not worse in any other way that I can think of, and that is a positive (to whatever extent).

And what happens when party A fucks up and you vote in party B who also fuck it up your are officially out of options.

The tender approach for time limited monopoly was just terrible though and had no good incentives at all, and so I'm not really sure a government monopoly will be much worse.

In decent voting systems, you vote in party C.

I don't think there's any voting system that genuinely gives you three choices to lead government at every election. Even in proportional systems, you might be able to select someone who more closely represents your interests and can advocate them in parliament, but the government is probably going to be led by one of the same two parties over time. If party A and party B are both ideologically inclined to fuck up rail, getting party C elected as a junior partner probably won't change that.

And if you're just hoping to replace party A entirely with party C, FPTP is one of the better systems as long as you're not in a country where election laws are set up to ensure that the Democrats and the Republicans are going to win almost every election. But that's a question of candidacy laws and incumbent rights; changing the voting system in the US won't suddenly cause other parties to get elected.

Anyway, the fact that party A fucked it up and party B is fucking it up doesn't mean party A lacks incentives to improve it tomorrow. Perhaps they fucked it up because their leader was incompetent, and now that there's been a change in leadership they will be motivated to improve.

> but the government is probably going to be led by one of the same two parties over time.

Finland has generally had 3 major parties ducking it out usually around 15-25% for each. 1995 was last time single party got over 30% of seats. Depends a bit on time which exact ones they were.

English wikipedia doesn't have the historic list, but Finnish does https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduskunta#Kansanedustajat_puol... Divide by 2 to get the % (there are 200 members)

Population size is a big problem. The more you scale up a democratic system, the more it becomes difficult to bootstrap and maintain a coherent political movement that can have a realistic chance to win an election, in what is probably a logarithmic scale. So the bigger the country, the more entrenched the options will be, which eventually boils down to two sides when you approach certain thresholds (one for the current government, and one against it).

France has had a million parties. Romania, too. Italy, same. If there's a will, there's a way. Most of the time there's no will.

If there was only one issue to vote on. However party C will have some other negative that I hate that party A is best on and party B is okay.

The only system that doesn't have voting negatives to me is one with a population of less than 10 where I'm sole dictator. Any population more than that and someone will get mad at me and kill me. Republics with some form of voting are the best option I know of for large populations of people who aren't "mind numbed robots" with no ideas of their own, and there is room to tweak the voting system. However they are still terrible for getting good results.

Indeed the government has incentives to spend time, money and energy on campaigning. Unfortunately running things is a different matter.

Ultimately both governments and private entities can run things efficiently. And both governments and private entities can run things badly. The UK government has an excellent recent record of running rail franchises when it has had to step in and bail out franchises (it ran it profitably, and with excellent customer feedback on service), so it's a good bet that it'll do better than the existing providers for the time being.

It is the same people who worked for the franchises working under government control - it is the senior management who go but the actual doers are the same.

Incentives on one is to maximize profits, which in a monopoly means just extracting more money and spending less.

Incentives on the other is electability (or ideology, perhaps rare), which at least has the possibility of meaning doing a good job.

Look how much hay Mussolini made from running the trains on time (which wasn't even the case, they just padded the schedule).

> which wasn't even the case, they just padded the schedule

Well, if I'm a company using rail for freight or a worker depending on the rail to get to work, it already is a massive improvement if I can at least rely on the train being where it should be at the announced time. Improving the schedule for faster travel or shorter intervals is another thing, but predictability alone makes my life easier.

Both are important, but for different things. If the trip time is too long nobody will take the train. If the train isn't predictable nobody will take the train. You get a bit of leeway in different situations though. The longer the trip the less either matters because what else can you do? If you are only going a few meters it needs to be here now (whenever now is - on time in 1 minute is too late!), and it only needs to be faster than walking that distance. In between you get some ability to do things.

In the Swiss case on time is critical because they want people to depend on their next train being there when they get there. They assume most people will get off one train and get on another (or a bus) so they all meet in the same place at the same time. Early does nothing for anyone unless the bus/train they are meeting is early and leaves early. This is one good way to run a system. The other is run so many trains/buses that whenever you arrive there is another waiting for you that will leave as soon as you can get on. This second way to run a system is much faster and better for everyone - but the costs are significantly higher though and so nobody can afford to run a large system that way. (large cities often can run this way and should where they can). Note that system is the key word here. If you only have one train the considerations are different.

Too right. It's always frustrating if your train is 2-3 minutes late and just as you step off the train you see your connecting train leaving its platform and know you now have a 20 minute wait for the next one. The could definitely do with a bit more padding for those situations.

Thankfully I don't have to take the train very often - especially these days lol

What really happened is the trains continued to run the same way they always had, but the Ministry of Propaganda said they were running on time and people believed them. It sounds cynical, but that's only because it worked.

Perhaps also because it's still working.

LOL Switzerland (i.e. extremely punctual society) actually does this with their rail system. There is a time buffer in the rail schedule for each of the stops. If a train is running late, and is /expected/ to be late, according to the estimated time of arrival, the train adjusts its speed, going faster, to arrive at the originally planned scheduled time. Failures on the rail system are of course rare.

If they're way late, they'll skip stops too, so they don't ruin the schedule for the whole network for the day.

A few people in one town having to wait an extra 20 minutes ensures hundreds of thousands have a predictably on-time system.

Late at night, if one of the regional trains is late to a local hub, the local trains wait for it to arrive so you're not stuck getting home.

In general though, I'm so used to the trains being on time, I start tutting if it's even a minute late

Yeah, my last visit to Switzerland they announced one of the trains would be three minutes late and apologized for the inconvenience.

Meanwhile, I've arrived in NYC fourteen hours late on Amtrak.

I think all rail systems have some small buffers build in.

On the polish site which tracks punctuality of trains, you can often see train delayed for some time, which decreases delay by every stop, eventually ending with smaller delay or on time.

http://infopasazer.intercity.pl

That's just good planning.

Actually they are because unlike shareholders who cares more about dividends then efficiency and service levels the government have stakeholders who care about efficiency and service levels.

It would certainly simplify the structure. At the moment it's all contracts and metrics and fines and lawyers when things go wrong. Perhaps the end to the ultimate metric for whether operators get fined or not being whether trains are on time which leads to bizarre situations like trains switching platforms at the last minute and leaving empty due to all the passengers being on the wrong platform.

And getting flat out cancelled when it's cheaper to take that hit than try to get passengers to where they're going in spite of the delays.

The government already had to care about that. They were losing votes to promises of nationalisation under Corbyn in 2017.

This looks like an attempt to present a kind of Potemkin nationalisation to mollify the anger of people with £1k+ season tickets and cement their hold on voters drawn away from Starmer in the last election (who meekly dumped rail nationalisation as a policy).

But they could do nothing about it because of the arms length principle, putting things under government control shortens the chain of responsibility.

This measure might be too little to really matter but the fact is that when you don't have an market(and for passenger rail you kind of don't) outsourcing operations to for-profit organisations provide nothing but a venue to funnel cash out of the system to private shareholders.

When there is an functioning market that is not tied to an government backed/guaranteed service it does make sense to subcontract work to private enterprise, but unless the government contracts represent a relatively minor portion of the subcontractors revenue and the subcontractor don't have more then say 20% market share, there is no functioning market, so all you end up with is an mercantilist structure of public risk and private profits if you still insist on pushing the task to private enterprise.

I also question whether outsourcing is cheaper too. Once you add in all the overhead in managing the contracts and contractors, plus the profit for the companies, I struggle to see how this is a better deal for government (and by extension the taxpayer).

When the government will take away your franchise in a few years - as just happened here - that is the only sane thing to do.

Shareholders aren't stupid enough to invest in something long term unless their investment will have a return. Companies invest when there is a long term profit from the investment that makes it worth it. With governments all over the world having a history of nationalizing railroads, there is no rail investment that can be made with a time-frame beyond 7 years - and rail is up front expensive enough you need a lot more than a 7 year time frame on most investments.

Most of the railroads in the US were funded by 150 year bonds. (your history class talked about the government giving railroads 10 miles of land on each side of the track - but that was only a few routes in the west that got that, most rail in the east the railroads had to buy the land at market price). I assume most of the rest of the world was similar.

Companies don't deserve free bailouts. If they go bankrupt the government can reasonable expect something for paying their debts.

Removing the incentive to make profit does not create incentives to improve efficiency and service. The government has no such incentives.

>does not create incentives to improve efficiency and service.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess you've never used the for-profit rail services of the UK then.

(I know this is quite snarky, but to elaborate, there is no incentive for the TOCs, because a operating a stretch of railway line doesn't have any competition. You don't need to be efficient or give good service because customers do not have an alternative choice of train they can use.)

Having an incentive to make profit doesn’t create incentives to improve efficiency and service. A private companies incentives are the profits, and anything else is just in order to serve those.

Yes, they do, campaigning on a program of better services and then not delivering anything is very much against career politicians' interests.

This was part of the reason why a lot of previously nationalised stuff was privatised in the first place. MP's would get people complaining to them about the quality of their phone lines from BT for example.

It all moves in cycles, I could well imagine the same situation happening again in 20 years.

The timeframe for changes is so long that this has zero chances of affecting any politician's career

Yes, but they're still judged for their actions, so they'll lose voters if they do nothing or take actions that will be widely criticised by the press.

Hahahahaha

Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.

Efficiency leads to profits and thus dividends. The government cares more about politics than efficiency. Look the the problems southern have had because the government insisted on getting rid of guards - they effectively nationalised southern (GTR) years ago because they refused to let the private sector run it how they wanted.

Compare with chiltern who converted the Chiltern line from a service about to shut down under the government in the 80s to a leading toc massively increasing service and options

Chiltern Railways were great, and were one of the few TOCs that genuinely competed for passengers against other railways, as Chiltern, Virgin (now Avanti) and London Midland (now West Midlands / London Northwestern) all operated competing services between London and Birmingham.

Back in the day, Chiltern had express peak-time services to Birmingham which were only marginally slower than Virgin's high speed trains. But Chiltern was much cheaper and would serve you a cooked breakfast and proper espresso coffee at your seat - in standard class!

The white paper extols their open data promise which will allow (for example) "Personalised travel offers, like free coffee when a service is delayed"

I don't get this kind of argument. Efficiency doesn't mean a good service. It means to minimise the costs in meeting your contractual requirements. It's not unusual for a company to be set up specifically to bid for a government contract since they're so lucrative and so hard for the government to respond to: a very profitable approach is to compete for a contract and then offer the shittiest service for which you are not subject to penalties. In some cases the senior management of reputable public transport service providers with decades of service provision have basically just upped and left the country before the contract is even through.

The free market certainly provides benefits, but there needs to be some meaningful recourse to removing your custom while the provider depends on it. Otherwise, it's simply not a free market at all, no matter the circumstances that surrounded the bidding process.