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Comment by robk | Hacker News Reader

Nationalized rail was shit here come on.

> On [public ownership of] our railway, the East Coast line was run in public ownership from 2009 to 2014. It had 91% customer satisfaction and returned £1 billion to the Treasury. (Today, half of our rail services are run by foreign state owned companies.)

https://weownit.org.uk/why-public-ownership/successful-examp...

In 2015–2018, the three year period of VTEC, customer satisfaction was generally unchanged from East Coast (though went down at the very end) and £800m was returned to the Treasury. Per year, that's 30% higher than the nationalised East Coast returned (and okay, ~£160m of the £800m ultimately came from Stagecoach paying more money than VTEC had operating profit, but from a taxpayer point-of-view that's irrelevant).

(See https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmtr...)

What is different now compared to before? Fares have increased faster than inflation, trains are overcrowded, the seats are a lot more cramped, just as worn and dirty, no faster than before and the sandwiches are still as bad as the ones you get in petrol stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G...

Make of this trend what you will.

Increased car ownership causes congestion which makes travelling by car impractical for long journeys and increased house prices force people to commute from further out?

> Fares have increased faster than inflation

Fare increases have vastly slowed (versus inflation) since British Rail. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vAlCWxoV1NYC&lpg=PA277&p... shows average annual fare increase and RPI for the last 14 years of British Rail.

Over the last ten years of BR, fares increased 102% versus RPI of 62% (thus increasing 25% in real terms based on RPI; CPI didn't exist till the final five years of BR).

Over the past ten years, fares have increased 40% versus RPI of 31% (thus increasing 7% in real terms based on RPI, or 16% based on CPI).

Most of the increases were during the tenure of a government that wanted to privatise the railways and believed they should be self funded and obviously would not want these price rises to occur once the railways were privatised.

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