Well... the incentives really aren't different for the government.
Incentives on the other is electability (or ideology, perhaps rare), which at least has the possibility of meaning doing a good job.
Well, if I'm a company using rail for freight or a worker depending on the rail to get to work, it already is a massive improvement if I can at least rely on the train being where it should be at the announced time. Improving the schedule for faster travel or shorter intervals is another thing, but predictability alone makes my life easier.
In the Swiss case on time is critical because they want people to depend on their next train being there when they get there. They assume most people will get off one train and get on another (or a bus) so they all meet in the same place at the same time. Early does nothing for anyone unless the bus/train they are meeting is early and leaves early. This is one good way to run a system. The other is run so many trains/buses that whenever you arrive there is another waiting for you that will leave as soon as you can get on. This second way to run a system is much faster and better for everyone - but the costs are significantly higher though and so nobody can afford to run a large system that way. (large cities often can run this way and should where they can). Note that system is the key word here. If you only have one train the considerations are different.
Thankfully I don't have to take the train very often - especially these days lol
A few people in one town having to wait an extra 20 minutes ensures hundreds of thousands have a predictably on-time system.
In general though, I'm so used to the trains being on time, I start tutting if it's even a minute late
Meanwhile, I've arrived in NYC fourteen hours late on Amtrak.
On the polish site which tracks punctuality of trains, you can often see train delayed for some time, which decreases delay by every stop, eventually ending with smaller delay or on time.
Perhaps also because it's still working.
The tender approach for time limited monopoly was just terrible though and had no good incentives at all, and so I'm not really sure a government monopoly will be much worse.
The only system that doesn't have voting negatives to me is one with a population of less than 10 where I'm sole dictator. Any population more than that and someone will get mad at me and kill me. Republics with some form of voting are the best option I know of for large populations of people who aren't "mind numbed robots" with no ideas of their own, and there is room to tweak the voting system. However they are still terrible for getting good results.
And if you're just hoping to replace party A entirely with party C, FPTP is one of the better systems as long as you're not in a country where election laws are set up to ensure that the Democrats and the Republicans are going to win almost every election. But that's a question of candidacy laws and incumbent rights; changing the voting system in the US won't suddenly cause other parties to get elected.
Anyway, the fact that party A fucked it up and party B is fucking it up doesn't mean party A lacks incentives to improve it tomorrow. Perhaps they fucked it up because their leader was incompetent, and now that there's been a change in leadership they will be motivated to improve.
Finland has generally had 3 major parties ducking it out usually around 15-25% for each. 1995 was last time single party got over 30% of seats. Depends a bit on time which exact ones they were.
English wikipedia doesn't have the historic list, but Finnish does https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduskunta#Kansanedustajat_puol... Divide by 2 to get the % (there are 200 members)
Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Efficiency leads to profits and thus dividends. The government cares more about politics than efficiency. Look the the problems southern have had because the government insisted on getting rid of guards - they effectively nationalised southern (GTR) years ago because they refused to let the private sector run it how they wanted.
Compare with chiltern who converted the Chiltern line from a service about to shut down under the government in the 80s to a leading toc massively increasing service and options
Back in the day, Chiltern had express peak-time services to Birmingham which were only marginally slower than Virgin's high speed trains. But Chiltern was much cheaper and would serve you a cooked breakfast and proper espresso coffee at your seat - in standard class!
The free market certainly provides benefits, but there needs to be some meaningful recourse to removing your custom while the provider depends on it. Otherwise, it's simply not a free market at all, no matter the circumstances that surrounded the bidding process.
This looks like an attempt to present a kind of Potemkin nationalisation to mollify the anger of people with £1k+ season tickets and cement their hold on voters drawn away from Starmer in the last election (who meekly dumped rail nationalisation as a policy).
This measure might be too little to really matter but the fact is that when you don't have an market(and for passenger rail you kind of don't) outsourcing operations to for-profit organisations provide nothing but a venue to funnel cash out of the system to private shareholders.
When there is an functioning market that is not tied to an government backed/guaranteed service it does make sense to subcontract work to private enterprise, but unless the government contracts represent a relatively minor portion of the subcontractors revenue and the subcontractor don't have more then say 20% market share, there is no functioning market, so all you end up with is an mercantilist structure of public risk and private profits if you still insist on pushing the task to private enterprise.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess you've never used the for-profit rail services of the UK then.
(I know this is quite snarky, but to elaborate, there is no incentive for the TOCs, because a operating a stretch of railway line doesn't have any competition. You don't need to be efficient or give good service because customers do not have an alternative choice of train they can use.)
It all moves in cycles, I could well imagine the same situation happening again in 20 years.
Shareholders aren't stupid enough to invest in something long term unless their investment will have a return. Companies invest when there is a long term profit from the investment that makes it worth it. With governments all over the world having a history of nationalizing railroads, there is no rail investment that can be made with a time-frame beyond 7 years - and rail is up front expensive enough you need a lot more than a 7 year time frame on most investments.
Most of the railroads in the US were funded by 150 year bonds. (your history class talked about the government giving railroads 10 miles of land on each side of the track - but that was only a few routes in the west that got that, most rail in the east the railroads had to buy the land at market price). I assume most of the rest of the world was similar.