And they actually continue to expand their service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

British Telecom lost its monopoly around the same time it was privatised. Is today's (very competitive) telecommunications market more a result of privatisation or of the loss of BT's monopoly?

Another way to look at it would be, are BT's customers better off now, than when it was a government company?

If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit.

This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.

There are legit reasons to be skeptical of privatization, but yes. It works well when it works.

Dogmatic responses (free market == everything, only government and unions can provide service) are not helpful.

For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.

MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making Chinese state owned enterprise (SAIC). Still makes popular, cheap and not very reliable cars though.

The privatisation of BT meant that there was no specific monopoly on ISPs during the Internet boom. While the privatised BT had a monopoly on the wires - customers could choose from hundreds of different dial-up and, later, ADSL ISPs.

Similarly, the privatisation of the mobile phone networks means that the UK had some of the cheapest airtime contracts in the EU. Yes, there are still gaps in network coverage, but there were at the peak 5 different MNOs for customers to choose from each competing and driving down prices / increasing coverage.

Energy has been mixed. Companies like Octopus have provided things like real-time electricity APIs. I can't imagine an organisation like British Gas launching something like that. Similarly, if your power supplier has crap customer service, you can move. And people do! In that sense, it has been a success.

Pickfords was also privatised. People forget that house-moving companies were nationalised during WW2. The liberalisation of that market has been a success.

You can argue about things like Rolls Royce, BP, British Airways etc. But I don't think they offset the utter failures of privatising water, trains, etc.

Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town to build the next unicorn from his home benefits the entire nation. Not all talent is in the cities.

1. Internet Service Provision

Britain chose to separate the intrinsically geographic monopoly of Last Mile Copper Loops from its existing non-intrinsic monopoly telephony provision. British Telecom, which had once been publicly owned, was obliged to distinguish "BT Openreach", the part of their company which inherits the local loop monopoly and which also offers (non-monopoly) long distance network transit and other useful stuff - from the consumer facing BT, which is a fairly ordinary PLC. I know a BT employee, the regulators really care that they can't collude with Openreach.

This means that the tiny company providing my Internet access (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't need to own a large brick building down the street, or even a cabinet in that building, or negotiate a deal with a monopoly behemoth who can set their own terms unfairly. Instead, they pay Openreach to move packets from my home to a nearby city, and then they can choose to pay Openreach or its competitors to move those packets from the city to their routers. BT Openeach is a monopoly, but it's an ordinary public company just with a lot of regulations to ensure it behaves equally for A&A as it does for its owners BT. BT isn't a monopoly but it does have lots of customers, I think its services are crap or alternatively that they're too expensive (A&A is more expensive but much, much better, if BT were much cheaper than they are maybe that's a good deal for somebody)

This arrangement means most UK residents have dozens of potential reasonable ISP options, with a range of pricing and terms, including lots of "All you can eat" type packages, even if they don't live in a big city. People like me who do live in a big city get slightly more options (a Cable TV company, a local fibre startup), which can go cheaper and higher bandwidth, but only a few people are stuck with a single practical option as is common in the US - basically only people in very rural areas, and usually their option is community owned, so it may not be cheap but it's at least owned by actual people who might care.

2. Energy

Britain separately privatised the gas and electricity supply. Now on the surface this is lunacy because of course that's a geographic monopoly. But they're not complete idiots, so what was actually privatised was mostly the customer service/ end user billing part of the problem. My gas and electricity come from the same place as my neighbour, inevitably because they're the same pipes and wires, but my bills and my customer service are from my choice which happens to be Octopus.

Does this achieve anything useful? Eh, maybe. I don't think a local energy monopoly would be anywhere close to as good at either customer service or billing. Octopus seem to have some idea what they're actually doing. On the downside these firms have ended up costing tax payers a bunch of money because of course when one goes bust the gas and electricity are still working but the government is on the hook to ensure somebody else handles billing them for it and that's complicated. This happens far too often when there is stress on the financials of these firms e.g. the Ukraine situation fluctuated energy bills with little notice.

Edited: fix s/citizen/resident/ what matters isn't your passport but where you live

https://mdta.maryland.gov/Partnerships/tp3Overview.html

I don't know enough to say if Seagirt is considered a success but I do know Baltimore's port does very well. The Purple Line is/was a failure.

I think many of the telephone operator privatization worked pretty well in most places and buildup of user business for those companies and more competition, mostly from formerly public operators competing in other markets. But it also depends on the country.

Some of the airline privatization seems to me also sensible.

In my country (Switzerland) government owned some banks or partly old them and sold some stock in them, witch seems sensible to me.

Some water infrastructure was privatized and regulated in many countries and for the most part this has worked fine, maybe not in Britain.

Denmark seems to have done quite a lot of privatization and it was mostly considered pretty well done.

I was really surprised how much of this was done all over Europe, often by 'left' governments. Once you start researching you find more and more.

Would be the work for an economists thesis or something to try to do a full accounting of this across all European nations.

Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).

water/electricity/gas have been abject failures

railways have been a mixed bag

some things are better (quality of service is much better), some things are worse (subsidy and cost)

but a good chunk of that is under direct government control, and has been for a very long time

the only private bit is/was the train operating companies

they essentially just put a driver in the cab, and collect the fares and send them to the government

they don't maintain the track, they don't set the fares, they don't set driver pay, they don't control the service pattern

if your train service sucked during the last few years: it's probably the government's fault

Most complaints in the UK are about cost of tickets. They are very valid complaints imo, the cost of getting a train in this country can be absurd. There would be a really positive attitude towards train travel in the UK and our rail system if it wasn't trying to bankrupt you every time you use it.

As a whole though, at least out of major cities London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester, the rail system is great.

(1) Most tourists visit largely London and its near surroundings. Public transport in (and to) London is generally much better than other parts of the country.

(2) A lot of the downsides don't manifest if you're a relatively infrequent user and you're largely travelling at off-peak times. As a UK resident who doesn't commute on the railway, this also includes me -- my experience of trains is generally good because I travel at quieter times and I don't travel so often that unreliability is a regular experience.

(3) If you ignore the costs (by not being a taxpayer or because you're less price sensitive for infrequent travel and especially for holiday travel), then you're ignoring the large part of the argument which is "this privatization had massive inefficiencies and costs".

FWIW, the UK government pays about half of the 25 billion/year cost of the "operational rail industry" (source: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-indust...). I couldn't find the equivalent stats for Portugal with a quick search, so I don't know how that compares.

Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average.

But that's the average picture, the winters get so much worse for my route. There's a tunnel just before our station which frequently has water pouring through when it rains heavily which means no trains can run until it stops. Several times I've left my house with all the trains listed as running on-time and arrived at the station to be told by the (very nice) guard that he doesn't expect there to be any trains through until mid day.

They also get very crowded, at least on my route. They're meant to send a 3 carriage train but will frequently end up with only 2 carriages because they had a problem with one of them. This usually delays people boarding which means the resulting journey is around £8.40 for no seat and a 10-15 minute delay.

The UK rail sure isn't the worst in the world by any stretch. When a journey goes well it's seemless and I'm a big fan. But a lot of the time it feels like you're being bent over, especially when after several weeks of reduced services due to strikes you're suddenly met with a price hike of 5% with no improvement in the services reliability. All of that is just when you're talking about commuting as well. Any time I'm forced to head to London it's a miserable emptying of my wallet.

All of this is just my daily experience, but I'm so sick of this failed experiment. Each year it costs more, the service is just as unreliable, and the profits all leave the UK.

Maybe my expectations aren't reasonable, but it's something I'm effectively forced to use daily because of house prices.

As someone else mentioned, London (and really urban commuter services in general) are essentially separate; the problems are _primarily_ around the regional/intercity stuff.

One specific consequence of the privatisation. Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train.

I mean, no-one can tell me that’s a sensible way to run a railway.

(Mind you, this still beats Dublin airport, which currently has no rail at all, and under current plans will have _two_ separate rail lines around 2040-2050, and maybe a tram. Though, if that happens, at least the same ticket will work for both…)

Trains get delayed and cancelled very frequently. They leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere because there's a technical issue fairly regularly: it's not a daily occurrence, but it's frequent enough that people will just go "ahhh classic british rail".

Trains are often packed, with literally nowhere to sit for hours-long journeys.

And this poor quality of service is very expensive. I know adults in their late 20s - early 30s with a fulltime job that choose to take the coach even though it's twice as long, because it's much cheaper. An ex-colleague was living outside of london, and spending £16k a year on train for commuting (you'd expect a big bill, but £16k is insane).

I'm sure there's plenty of countries that do worse, and as an infrequent traveller you'd probably be fine, but it's just... not great

This is in fact an interesting by-product of privatisation: train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them. They consequently became more expensive. A somewhat fun side effect of the free market, especially given the prevailing assumption that moving public sector employees into the private sector would drive down their pay and conditions.

Yes and that's as it should be, a fully loaded high speed intercity train has more souls on board than most commercial aviation planes (apologies pet peeve of mine because our media keeps banging on about how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid).

A bad day at the office for me is I break production and cost the company some money, a bad day at the office for them is considerably more serious - it's a lot of responsibility.

I would have thought rails are massively subsidised. Do you have any numbers on what they get?

Well, and profit, which is straightforwardly inefficient.

I must be an engineer for a different Network Rail

It's a question of perspective. I've spent my life in countries where I've seen my taxes being spent relatively well, I feel the benefits of it daily both as a private citizen and a founder. Everywhere I've lived, when transport, utilities, healthcare and education, even part of the media, were publicly managed, they were simply better and cheaper.

But I understand that this is not universal and that most governments don't operate effectively for their taxpayers. And that, yes, if the whole system is set up for it, private solutions can also thrive and be superior. I suppose it's hard to privatize public services effectively in an ecosystem that doesn't support private enterprise as much.

DB (Schenker) buys stakes in transportation all over the world - with German tax payer money: A fact that many Germans do not like given the very poor train service in their own country.

DBs state is probably too unique to draw any conclusions (attempted privatization stopped just before IPO, so now it's lot of different state-owned private organizations with degraded infrastructure). But the stations are actually fairly straight forward: the platforms and the means to get there are still publicly owned, but 80% of the station buildings have been sold off to private operators. The bigger ones are glorified malls that are exempt from laws about shopping hours, the smaller ones mostly just decay

Where I think privatisation went wrong (the core concept of having private operators bid on franchises is ~right imo) is the state lost a lot of 'management' knowledge that was in British Rail. This has really killed us because we don't know how to build complex civil engineering projects anymore, and _the management_ of them gets outsourced to large contractors like Arup at eye watering costs.

They also have a terrible conflict of interest as if they manage it well, they often get paid much less than managing a slow moving disaster of a project.

I think this needs to be solved first, not getting the state to operate train fleets.

There are EU competition rules that require separating operations from infrastructure, but it is and always has been fine to do this as separate divisions under the same publicly owned umbrella.

Affordability is really driven by how much the operators are subsidized by the govt. It's hard to calculate this on a like for like basis as some subsidy goes to the track operator and some to the train operator, and in eg Germany you have a hugely complex set of subsidies and fare zones in operation from various levels of government.

I don't expect the other European systems to be any cheaper - it's just hidden in the tax system instead.

Where the UK shines imo is two things. 1 is the frequency of many services. It's rare to have less than 2 trains per hour on an intercity route, and often far more.

This compares to France (outside TGV) which is atrocious. Non regular timetable with often 2-3 hour gaps on trains.

Spain (even on the high speed lines) is even worse. Some _high speed lines_ can't even manage an hourly service. This has got far better recently on high speed lines with private competition, but outside of that the timetabling is terrible.

The other is some of the ticketing options. Firstly, there is a no questions asked delay repay feature which means you get a substantial portion of the ticket refunded if there is any delay for any reason, starting at a 15minute delay. Obviously no delays are better than a refunded one, but I've had some atrocious delays in mainland europe and no option to apply for a refund.

The other is no composlary reservations (though I'm not sure how long this will last). If you have a valid ticket, you can get on. In many EU countries if a train is out of seats you don't even have the option to buy a ticket and stand. Combine this with poor timetables on many routes and it can cause huge problems if you are travelling at short notice.

Netherlands and Switzerland good for sure - better than the UK I would say. But Germany/France/Italy/Spain have a lot of issues.