Yes, what you are describing is basically the UK railway. Network rail (government) subcontract out maintainence and build to the private companies (Alstom etc..) and then lease track access to private companies (Virgin trains etc...). The UK has possibly the most overpriced railway in the world, at least in this instance it fair to say 'it didnt work' unless you want to pay 300usd to get from london to glasgow in economy.
Note that the system was fully private for a while (Railtrack PLC), until they went bankrupt. I think it's going to be expensive whether it's public or private, for complex reasons probably related to "legacy" hardware. If it was fully deregulated then the operators would immediately shut down all the tracks within 100 miles of London to build houses on them.
I believe all European countries are required to have separate track and train operators for railways with some structure for competition in rail. It's just that most of them manage it better than the UK.
The UK telecoms industry was privatised and has ended up with BT Openreach operating most of the wires, leased out with local loop unbundling (LLU) to a variety of broadband providers. It works OK although not brilliantly.
In Japan the railway companies (which are pseudo private in the way a lot of things are in Japan) run the railways effectively at or below cost and the profits are made on property development and leasing on the surrounding land.
In the UK the railway companies try to run profits on railway operation while the taxpayer subsidizes them and the surrounding land is owned by property developers who are making profits that are staggering.
The Conservative government is also doing stuff like donating 38 million pounds to govia thameslink in profit compensation for a strike they triggered.
It's taxpayers and passengers subsidizing property developers' and TOC profits, and the government/TOCs seems to be trying to get the TOC wage bills down so that TOCs and property developers can make even more.
No, the most sucessful train company in Europe, the swiss doesn’t. And those who have go e for separate companies have just bad experience with it. This separation is mostly ideologially driven with no proven benefits. Right wing parties will push through anything their economic text books say is smart regardless of pracrical results and experiences.
"I believe all European countries are required to have separate track and train operators for railways with some structure for competition in rail."
Not really, in some countries the railway and train operators is the same company, strongly controlled by the government and operating without big problems.
It's my understanding that the problems in the UK started when they stopped using that model.
And it went bankrupt at the cost of fixing some fundamental problems that contributed to at least two nasty rail accidents. The government decided it didn't want to continue to be responsible for the maintenance. Would rather feed subsidies to a company that would take the heat for issues.
> The UK has possibly the most overpriced railway in the world
The UK railway is still subsidised by the tax payer -- while some routes like Manchester-London make a profit, this profit is reinvested into loss making routes like the Welsh Valleys which help keep communities alive (the operating companies take about 3%, so a £100 ticket without a private company taking money would at cheapest be £97)
There is plenty of competition on the Glasgow-London route, including two Coach companies, Plane - multiple companies and routes, driving, two direct train companies (albeit with similar branding) and a third overnight.
The $240 peak time one way fare comes out at 58 cents per mile. It's valid on any train, just walk up and go.
For almost all trains it's actually $183 return, or 22 cents per mile - valid on any train other than the first arrival into London in the morning and the first couple out of London in the morning.
A train from Washington to New York will set you back $1.14 per mile, with less flexibility.
Im not sure I understand your 3% point, are you saying Virgin pay more into Network Rail on the WCL and this wouldnt happen if government owned/controlled?
Interestingly, I can take a 3.5-4hr train from Penang to Kuala Lumpur for $12, made by Siemens I believe, traveling faster than the Pendolino/Voyagers, and with a similar level of comfort (I do think the seats are bit narrower though), so in comparison I consider the UK crazy priced unless you get some off-peak deal (still not great).
I suspect if still subsidized then it's probably very inefficient, I dont know but I certainly dont feel good paying the train ticket prices in the UK even the off-peak saver.
Nothing to do with the trains themselves, everything to do with the tracks and their maintenance. There's a pie chart in that PDF I linked elsewhere which shows that about 50% of the cost is network rail, 30% staff and 20% train leasing. I suspect the UK could maintain it for a lot less if it could pay Malay wages for the track maintenance and train staff.
UK railways have been chronically mismanaged for years. Better comparison would be against other European countries.
>I suspect the UK could maintain it for a lot less if it could pay Malay wages for the track maintenance and train staff.
They could probably also do it by whacking the extremely wealthy landowners surrounding major train stations with an extra tax.
After all, if the train station made your land valuable, you should be paying for that. In Japan this helps pay for infrastructure. It's practically criminal that in the UK it does not.
Indeed, a land value tax would be very equitable. If society needs to build a power plant near you, which lowers the value of your land, then at least you don't have to pay as much in tax. If they build a new transport hub nearby, which triples the value, then you have to pay more.
I'm hardly an expert, but Germany and Japan are the obvious examples to look for best practices. Really the UK comes off badly compared to most European countries. Worth noting that Abelio (Dutch state-owned) and DB Freight (German state-owned) operate in the UK.
(anyone in the age range eligible for InterRail, I would highly recommend spending a month travelling the railways of Europe)
Germany subsidies its rail network by €17b a year. The UK subsidises by €4b.
In the UK we have decided to go for lower taxes and lower subsidies. We do that while still subsidising lines that are good for the country but not profitable (old mining towns in south wales which would collapse if people couldn't commute to Cardiff etc, cornish rurual lines which attract tourism and offer transport for local residents who may not have 1 car per adult, etc). This means that on the profitable lines which would make commercial sense (say Manchester to London, or some London commuter lines) we have to charge more.
Remember commuter tickets are twice the price of business tickets - as they are paid after income tax (which varies from 33% to 60%). When I was offered a job based in the office, I wanted an extra £10k a year for the commute -- £2200 for the ticket, £3300 for the extra tax to pay for that ticket, and £5k for the time out of my day. They decided that I didn't actually need to be based in an office after all, and I go (to that one) about once every 3 months, which costs them £20 return (but would cost me £45).
This is offset by the massive discounts. A season ticket from Nuneaton to London, 206 miles a day, about 1 hour in each direction, is £9000 a year, for 230+ days of travel, or 47,000 miles. 19p per mile. If you're willing to take a little longer and travel on London Midland it's £6500 per year, 14p per mile.
On the other hand, a day trip from Nuneaton is £154 in peak time, £104 on the slower train. That's 74p per mile - 3.5 times the price of the commuter.
There's a constant claim from the left that train fares in the UK are overpriced because the train operating companies take a profit of about 3% of the revenue.
There is a profit margin to be made on any savings, I'm sure that if Stagecoach or First or whoever could cut costs enough to make more money they would. We have very old infrastructure, laid down in the mid 19th centuries, and very crowded lines. Building a new line is a mammoth task, and expensive, as we've seen from HS2. Rail staff are hardly cheap too - a virgin trains driver earns £51k, top 10% of earnings in the country.
I pay £11 per day for my 35 min commute into central Edinburgh (I work from home a lot so season tickets don't make much sense) and given that parking in Edinburgh would be £25 a day £11 a day looks like a bargain given that the station I commute from in Fife is 10 mins drive away from where I live and has free parking always available.
That doesn't sound too bad, but I don't think that's representational of most routes and hence most travelers, in that if you stand outside Euston, Glasgow or Edinburgh before 8.30am and ask people what they paid to get to work and if they considered it value for money you would likely get a lot of expletives
However they don't take commuter bus services, or drive, or ride a bike, or move closer to the office, or change job location, or change job times.
The media has driven this culture of people believing in 'rip off Britain'. If people were commuting 100 miles a day for the cost of a cup of coffee they'd still say it was a rip off (although oddly it would be the commute, not the £4 latte)
I suspect I would be much less happy with the service if it wasn't for the fact that I am far enough out from Edinburgh so that the train is relatively empty so I can pretty much always get a seat (and a window seat on the side with the best views).
Two stops in from where I get on the train fills up dramatically and there are often people standing.
free parking what socialist paradise is this - a while back I looked at buying a flat near my local rail station - I reckoned I could have covered all my property taxes or a large chunk of my mortgage from renting out my unused parking space
I've heard this before but I'm not sure I believe it. They have a pretty huge incentive to make it seem like they aren't making a lot of profit, and it is easy for them to do so (just like Hollywood accounting).
Well if you believe that Labour, Coalition and Tory governments have all conspired with all the train companies to somehow hide profits from the public and from their shareholders, that's not really something I can argue with.
No, the railway "permanent way" is far more expensive to operate. That's the problem. The UK railway network has rather a lot of 100+ year old bridges in it, along with some less ancient but still pretty old signalling equipment.
That (plane operating costs > rail operating costs) may not be the case when you take into account the cost of maintaining the physical infrastructure (hundreds of miles of railroad) compared to that of airports (a few hundred metres of tarmac).
True. But if Heathrow you'll pay 20gbp (or is it 25gbp now?) on Heathrow Express to get from central London to the airport unless you take the slow tube.
> A train from Washington to New York will set you back $1.14 per mile, with less flexibility.
The trip is approximately 226 miles. With sufficient advance purchase, the Northeast Regional coach fare is $49 each way and the Acela is $168 each way. I have never seen an NER fare greater than $200 each way. How did you arrive at $1.14 per mile at all, let alone thinking it's typical?
I looked at the next train they were selling a ticket, which was the closest I could come to the flexibility you get on a £182 ($240) London to Glasgow ticket that came close to the "$300" mentioned by the OP.
I've checked again for tomorrow morning, $295. Perhaps I'm using the site wrong: https://imgur.com/TnuOGt3
295/226 is $1.30 per mile.
I'm ignoring the slower trains, non flexibile, booking in advance etc, as that wasn't what was raised. There are slower options for London-Glasgow that are nowhere near the full price (for example £57 tomorrow morning if you go via Edinburgh - saving £130).
I've just checked my emails - last time I took this train (albeit from NY to Washington), in March 2013, it was $498 for 2 tickets - $249 each.
This is for a far less flexible ticket than I get in the UK. For my $240 I can travel London to Birmingham, have the day there, and then continue to Manchester, have a meal and stay in a hotel overnight, then get a train from Manchester to Glasgow the next morning.
Washington to New York is half the distance, and nearly twice the price, as London to Glasgow.
> I've just checked my emails - last time I took this train (albeit from NY to Washington), in March 2013, it was $498 for 2 tickets - $249 each.
That price is far from typical for this service. The prices I quoted are what I just pulled off amtrak.com for a Friday NY-DC train on 12JAN18. A couple months ago I purchased a ticket from Fredericksburg (south of DC) to NY with only a few days in advance for only $130. Thee ten-trip option my sibling poster mentioned gives you the same flexibility you mention there. Please do not base your idea of the cost of rail travel in the NE US based on one very overpriced trip.
Edit:
Just saw your screenshot. That $295 is for the Acela (which is premium service). I just ran the same search, and midday trains are running about $152 for the NER and $168 for the Acela. The one you chose is literally the most expensive non-first class ticket you could book tomorrow.
If I was going at midday I'd get a $80 London to Glasgow ticket. The comparison was as close as possible to the fully flexible any train any time Glasgow/Euston high speed route that sitepodmatt brought up. It's still not as flexible as a UK train - you can't stop off in Phillidelphia for a few hours on your way you New York for example, can you even buy a ticket 5 minutes before the train leaves on that train?
I still don't see his $300 ticket, the only thing I can think of is that he's looking at a return ticket, but then that doubles the price on the Accela.
I was about to chime in similarly; a ten-ride ticket for NYP->POU is $0.38 per mile and you can take any train without reservations; an off-peak MTA ticket for the same leg costs $0.21 per mile. $1.14 per mile sounds high.
Those prices are a bit high for typical UK season tickets. 85 miles Poughkeepsie to NY 90 minutes, similar distance + time and number of trains per day to Salisbury to London (88 miles). A weekly season there (so 10 trips) will set you back £131, or $175, 20c/mile, half the price of Poughkeepsie to New York.
"a ten-ride ticket for NYP->POU is $0.38 per mile"
I'm only going on what you said.
MTA.info says this ride is 247.50 for a 10 trip ticket, with a trip of 85 miles that would be 247.50 for 850 miles, or 30c/mile.
From what I can see when doing a like-for-like comparison between the UK and the northeast US, the US is surprisingly pricier than the UK.
Now to be fare the Salisbury weekly season is valid for 10 journeys (or even 40), but only over 7 days, where as the Poughkeepsie one is a carnet, you can do 3 days one week, 2 days the next, and that's better, but for the Monday-to-Friday person, I'd rather be paying the Salisbury-London fare than the Poughkeepsie-NYC fare. (I'd rather be going into NYC, just without the fare)
NYP is New York Penn Station, the Amtrak station. Metro North leaves New York out of Grand Central Terminal. Sorry; the phrasing, while unambiguous to someone commuting from the Hudson Valley, was definitely confusing to most everyone else.
Metro North also sells a weekly pass for $166.75. Unlimited rides during a calendar week. The 10-ride ticket has two prices, for peak and off-peak. Peak-hour 10-ride is $247.50, as you said; off-peak is $157.25.
Very few people actually buy a weekly pass on Metro North; either you are commuting infrequently (eg, weekend commutes) in which case you want a 10-ride ticket, or you are commuting daily, in which case you want a monthly ticket. A monthly pass between Poughkeepsie and GCT is $521. If you commute 20 days per calendar month, your per-mile cost is $0.16 / mile.
Actually, since there is confusion, going back to the very beginning --
For the train route I myself am familiar with, the line between New York and Poughkeepsie, two different train systems serve the route, Amtrak (the company that does the nation-wide train service in the United States) and Metro North, a commuter-rail line associated with New York's MTA, via their Hudson Line.
I started with the Amtrak costs because the New York <-> DC train is an Amtrak train; most daily commuters will be using the Metro North, as it is cheaper.
Part of the problem is that you can't have "real" competition, e.g. two train companies can't operate competing franchises on the same line, at the same time. I get terrible service and pay high fares on my Southern Railways route, but I can't opt to use a different carrier without moving house. But if my broadband provider decides to raise their prices by 5% next year, I can move to a different provider with a single phone call and a few minutes of downtime.
lhopki01's point is that we suspect you are talking about USA in your post, where the GP was talking about the UK, which has a much healthier market for high-speed internet.
To be fair this might not be obvious, if you missed the context of the thread and unless you are familiar with "Southern Railways".
> Switching to DSL is not a realistic option when most of the country has broadband.
DSL is broadband. I've been using DSL for over 17 years (and, while away from home, using combinations of cable & satellite), and I watch plenty of TV & listen to plenty of music on it. It really does work great for me.
Again which country are you talking about? The majority of UK broadband is ADSL2+. There is cable in some areas but not all. In all areas with phone lines there are multiple providers giving around 20Mb/s. They all use the same phone lines because of local loop unbundling. In areas with fibre to the cabinet there are again multiple providers all using the same fibre. The only service in the UK that doesn't have local loop unbundling is cable.
"In all areas with phone lines there are multiple providers giving around 20Mb/s."
I don't know about the rest of the UK but I don't think that is the case in Scotland - once you are any distance from a city or town the speeds can drop dramatically and that's not even in the Highlands or Islands. Certainly when we were looking at houses about a year ago there were quite upmarket new houses in Perthshire that had no broadband at all.
Are there non-subsidized railways that break even, what's their quality?
The problem with rails is the same with roads.
Yes, AnCaps/Libertarians/Voluntarists/goldbugs think that "yeah, if the State weren't meddling in the market, people would form a corporation to build a [toll] road/rail", but of course, the same network effects would lead to very fine roads between major population centers and abso-fucking-lutely nothing else, because why would anyone connect a mining town in Wyoming anywhere? The mining company will use big all-terrain vehicles on dirt roads and that's it. Maybe they'll lay a track for the coal itself.
And I'd even argue, that yes, even if rail operates at a net loss according to GAAP, that doesn't mean socially it is a negative. The same applies to broadband.
However, maybe ... maaaybe not everyone should live so far from each other, so infrastructure TCO and commute times and energy use (and GHG emissions) would be lower.
In the railway context I believe SRT is government operated including track and trains so they follow a mandate rather then regulation. I took a new train from BKK to Hua Hin a few months ago, quite a pleasant ride to be fair. The cables are a problem, but I suspect it led to faster broadband and FFTH rollout, to give an example I was one of the first True customers and they ran a coaxial cable about 0.25km to the house, it took less than two hours, you couldnt do that if it was underground. Sometimes these things work.
Government maintained track system that lease track access to private companies is problematic system because of several points where that relationship breaks.
1: Rail maintenance dictate quality, but is shared between all competitors.
2: Rail is located on ground owned by the government. There is no practical or legal option to operate a private rail network.
3: Lack of distinguishable features to compete, high barrier to entry, and a limited number of companies create an environment thats prime for oligopolies. High price, low service.
In contrast to Internet service providers which:
1: Quality of service is generally not dictated by
the back bone network.
2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first.
> 1: Quality of service is generally not dictated by the back bone network.
If by that you mean that it is not the only thing that matters, then yes. But if the backbone is bottlenecked then of course quality will suffer.
> 2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first.
Is that actually the case?
Getting a dedicated line between any two buildings tends to be no problem, so why would doing the same on a larger scale be a problem all of a sudden?
> 3: Low barrier to entry could allow for many ISP.
That's only really possible if the last mile can be leased from either the municipal or some other company (sort of like the government maintained track system).
Otherwise the barrier is exactly this last mile, which is the most expensive part of the whole thing (which is also why a lot of small rural ISPs use wireless as last mile access instead of wired connections).
Virgin Trains at least are nice and if you book well in advance very reasonable deals are to be had. We paid ~42 quid from London to Manchester in first class, one way. Alas we bought the tickets month' in advance and, of course, non-refundable.
For shits and giggles I tried to figure out what the same ride costs like when you buy the ticket 30 minutes in advance. And there we come to 280£ each, which is completely ridiculous. It's not that good (2nd ist still ~90quid)
Now, don't get me started on Northern. Filthy, Expensive, Clueless and slathered with a heavy dose of disorganisation.
I think you can honestly say that privatizing trains in the UK was an experiment going horribly wrong.
