They can't.
> The only way to lower prices is nationalise the entire industry and replace privatisation with direct investment, on the basis that transport infrastructure is a social cost with significant indirect benefits, and cannot possibly be run as a self-sustaining profitable business on a national scale.
Hear hear!
I'm not sure if you realise you're agreeing with me, but yes, exactly, I agree with you, that was my (intended) point too; I wrote:
> bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets.
Note the '(impossible)' - I mean that in the sense that I'm generally pro 'leave it to the free market', but that that only makes sense where you can have effective competition, which as you say, you can't with national (especially physical, electricity for example is fungible and so abstracted that it mostly works being privatised on the consumer/payments end at least) infrastructure like train lines!
In some hypothetical land where there's multiple lines, multiple services by different operators at the same time competing on service and price, great, I'm all for that, let them compete, don't nationalise it, let people vote with their feet and wallets. But we live in the real world; they can't.
To an extent, this does exist on some routes. Both LNER and Grand Central operate trains up the East Coast Main Line, for example. Then there are destinations served by multiple routes, like Cambridge, Oxford, and Bedford, where each route has its own operator.
Competition is impractical for most journeys, though.
- Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effects per distance of rail (there's no penalty separate than time delay for traveling through other cities first).
- Japan has perhaps the best policy around land use in the developed world. See https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-... for some details. This helps greatly with density and clustering around rail stations.
- The privatization was triggered by the fright around Japan's big deficits after the 80s boom, and perhaps still maintained with some fear of that. That doesn't make it a good idea, of course, but I'm willing to call it more "defensive neoliberalism" than "offensive neoliberalism", but maybe that makes it a little less ideological given that Japan was the poster child for all the neoclassical economic doomsday predictions?
- https://pedestrianobservations.com in particular says the privatization and and general being spooked about more debt holds back some construction on paper, but since the rail is so well established already and operationally profitable, there is less to screw up.
In conclusion, I'd say that because Japan gets everything adjacent to rail policy so absolutely well done, and the rail network was already functioning so way, it continues to succeed not because but despite privatization.
2) we can do much better with planning, however I’m not sure Japanese planning is the answer, when I lived there I thought most of the accommodation was horrendous. Europeans wouldn’t accept it.
3) is JR Rail etc. private? It seemed too cheap!
4) how is rail profitable in Japan, but not profitable in the UK. It’s cheaper there and far far better!
1) Mountains actually helping is my own pet theory, I should disclaim. Japan does seem to have wild swings in density, while England seems to have people/towns strewn about everywhere and London feels kinda sprawly at certain scales. That said UK obviously has cities / regional clustering at the scale of HSR.
Someone should do a proper (fourier?) analysis of sprawl at different different scales and how that effects rail at different scales and until then my theory is just idle speculation, and in any event I don't think Britain can or should blame it's geography when other flat parts of Europe do better, and the Anglosphere clearly sucks at rail on the whole.
2) So Europe is kinda of anti-modern avoiding dense downtowns / CBDs, America is downright evil with it's single family homes, but weirdly still has tall towers people curse driving too. East Asia is largely "correct" in having dense workplaces and living places, which you want if your goal is both less car trips and classic max GDP growth.
I don't think the UK should be like Japan in al respects, but London is emphatically way to evenly low-rise, housing is not cheap enough I hear, and all those rich people LARPing landed gentry commuting 3 hours from their quaint South England rural hamlet is a sure sign something weird's afoot.
If they get rid of the green belt because no one wants to build taller, I will be sad.
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group the story is maybe more muddled than I thought, or maybe that's just the terminology for historical reasons.
4) Well, that I think goes back to the unique economics of rail. I think good rail becomes profitable, but profitable bad rail doesn't become good or isn't even possible!
Not all Japanese live in city with great train/public transport network. Most people outside Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, is heavily depends on their car. (Remember there are 8 practical car manufacturers in the land). Just referencing Tokyo would be good.
Their traditional approach to life, higher degree of respect for authority, and job-for-life structures, make the Japanese case fairly unique and difficult to replicate.
No, but there are usually National Express or other coach services available on many routes. For longer routes like London - Manchester you can also fly.
You can also drive yourself - peak time fares are so high that if there is more than one of you travelling it's often cheaper to do this even if you have to rent the car. You can also pay a taxi firm to drive you, which again will often be cheaper than peak fares for more than one person.
There are still limits on how much competitiveness that brings to the market (Operators have very little control over delays) but it would encourage the operators to compare in terms of on train service (and potentially ticket prices as well).
Yes, you could. There is an East Coast Mainline and West Coast Mainline and they competed loads over the London-Edinburgh route.
But I think in this age of high-speed trains, overhead electrification and 4+ wide tracks, railways are well and truly a natural monopoly.
But natural monopoly is not about can't have competition, it's about being thoroughly uneconomical to have competition.
I've done that route dozens of times in the past. I think it's stretching things to say they are in competition though. For Glasgow it was 40 minutes faster to go up the West coast (if you don't mind the smell of the toilets on the Pendolino) and similarly the East Coast was faster for Edinburgh because it avoided going all the way out to Carluke and back. Of course that missing out the majority of people using those trains were using it starting at an intermediate station, making any competition slightly moot.
Capacity is physically constrained, especially on an ancient network like the UK's.
Timetable slots are scarce and have to be centrally coordinated and managed.
There is no sparkly market magic that will make these constraints disappear and somehow give customers more choice about where to go, when, and with whom. And there is no chance whatsoever that operators can compete on price.
The only way to lower prices is nationalise the entire industry and replace privatisation with direct investment, on the basis that transport infrastructure is a social cost with significant indirect benefits, and cannot possibly be run as a self-sustaining profitable business on a national scale.
The idea that competition for passengers will somehow make profitability possible is a dilettante-level view that has no insight into how the industry actually operates.
We've already had decades of this kind of thinking, and the result has been mediocre services, vastly increased direct subsidies, and ballooning fares.