The UK's Failed Experiment in Rail Privatization

Wendover Productions · 2.1M views · 2021-03-09 · 20:28

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Overview

Wendover Productions explains how UK rail privatization worked and why it failed. It covers the fragmented operator and infrastructure structure and why market forces apply poorly to rail.

On Hacker News

Recommended in privatization and rail threads as a clear, well-sourced explanation of the UK rail mess.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2021–2024

Topics

Transit, cities & urban planning Tech industry & business models

What people said

sweezyjeezy · 2023-07 · Recommendation
> I believe the best way to make this work is by keeping the network itself in public hands and then having a competition of contributors to the network Even then it doesn't always work out - UK rail services have that system - the infrastructure is maintained by a public body [1], but the operators are private. UK rail is quite expensive, and mediocre in quality compared to our EU counterparts. One of the issues is that it's basically impossible to have competition on a single rail journey joining two large cities - there's aren't enough tracks to support it without making it unprofitable for operators. So rail networks bid every few years on sections of the rail network, and then have no competition for their term. Again the incentives that make the free market efficient are just not there. A nice video that summarises this mess here: [2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]
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apexalpha · 2021-05 · Recommendation
I've found that these two YouTube video's do an okay job explaining the actual 'market forces' actually at play here: [LINK] [VIDEO] It takes a bit of understanding why regular market forces kind of can't apply to a system like rail transport.
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dangerboysteve · 2021-05 · Recommendation
the people on the Wendover YouTube channel did a video on this back in March which explained the issue really well. [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Wendover Productions, played through YouTube.

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