Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

This is a great example of why underground railways are so expensive to run. I don't believe the London Underground has ever been profitable.

Not only is it expensive to install equipment, you then have to maintain it and replace it and in this example, not even "like for like" are going to fit in the same space.

When I used to go round various equipment rooms, there was electrical equipment that was the best part of 100 years old. Who would ever remove it in case it is wired into the signalling system or whatever? For that reason, they have to wait and then do a massive re-signalling etc. so they can safely remove everything and put nice expensive new stuff in!

View on HN

That's not right, I'm afraid - the Underground is usually profitable and subsidises loss-making forms of transport (particularly buses). Here's some high-level, pre-pandemic figures: https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2018/03/average-yield-and...

(based on TfL's draft budget for 2018-19)

There is so much pent up demand for transport in the UK that it completely distorts things. You can have a system that is overcrowded, profit making, expensive for users, and underfunded all at the same time. The economic pulls that could fix this are outweighed by things like housing costs.

The govt bailed them out last year.

Right, cause covid. You know, when no one was using the service but they had to keep operating for front line workers... hard to make money when there are no users.

So they were profitable...discounting all the times they lost money.

The comment you are replying to said "usually" and that was in response to the GP that said "I don't believe the London Underground has ever been profitable."

The government did not bail out the London Underground in particular last year but TfL, though I would be surprised if the underground was profitable last year.

Anyway, unsure what your comment was adding.

I don't get why so many people and politicians speak about profitability as if it was an optional system for a modern city to have.

Yes, the income via transportation fees are usually similar to operating expenses, but like it's the case with roads, no one should expect for it to cover the full cost of building the infraestructure, much like roads.

The tube is not a part of a closed system and delivers thousands of other societal and economic benefits that are not reflected in the fees paid by their direct users.

Also, this infraestructure can last for more than one century, as I understand is the case of London's tube.

I don't think it is as much about profitability but more like who should pay for it. In one world view, the people who use it should pay for it, whatever that costs, in the ticket price. This gives direct pressure to keep costs down.

Another view is that it mostly benefits people in London so it should come out of London's Council tax (which I think part of it does).

The other view is that it is a general benefit to society and can and should be bankrolled by government. Then the problem is that the pressure to keep costs down is perhaps political and it is hard to know how much subsidy is fair.

TfL is funded from fares, the congestion charge, business rates and grants from the Greater London Authority — which itself is funded by the national government and some council tax.

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-ar...

(Note TfL are also paying for buses, trams and many larger roads in London.)

It mostly transports people who live in the 'home counties' (the smaller towns and countryside surrounding London) to and from the major rail stations, so maybe they should pay for it. e.g. 750,000 people pass through King Cross station in the morning rush hour.

At the same time there are benefits to nontransit users having a chunk of the population use transit. The roads are clearer, for one. Less smog, for two. Higher national GDP due to less resources overall required to move labor from housing to the means of production, for three. I'm sure there are more reasons, too.

On the railways in general there is a strong inclination towards keeping what works as the potential downsides of getting it wrong can be literally catastrophic. Things like solid-state interlocks, are reliable and trusted; it's taken a lot of work to develop the same kind of trust in software based systems.

I worked in railway safety back in the early 2000s and moving block signalling was like nuclear fusion, the great hope for increasing capacity and always just around the corner. While it's in use on some underground lines, it still isn't in widespread use on surface lines, it's just proved really hard to get right. We are getting there, it will form part of future systems in Europe, but it's taken decades to get to the level of maturity where people will trust it to carry thousands of people at intercity speeds through complex rail networks.

You have to maintain and replace all infrastructure eventually. Maintenance should be part of the project calculation and how items are maintained should also be part of that. Additionally how things are maintained needs to be updated to go with new technologies and methods.

I see this with for example the public transport in Zürich, Switzerland. Some of the light rail is very old but they are maintenance revisions done on them and things are continuously improved or replaced. Same goes for the tracks which have to be pulled out of the streets every few years and replaced. How this is done has improved tremendously over the years and materials of the track have also changed.

Another example are the electric busses that used to have a gasoline backup generator. These have now all been replaced with batteries as they became small and efficient enough to replace the generator.

Letting the bus run until it's dead will end up costing more than keeping it in good working condition.

Great in theory but if you are managing a system now, you would rather spend money on things you need now, you aren't going to keep it in the bank for some future day when the escalator needs replacing.

I suspect that equipment is depreciated in TfL accounts but the people 50 years ago wouldn't know how much this replacement would have cost so who knows.

The trains will run for 100+ years. This is possible because almost all parts can be made in house and those that can't are eventually replaced.

I'm fact the Zürich rail company (ZVV) in their purchase deal of the bombadier light rail included all plans for all parts. Bombadier was not happy but the ZVV has to make sure they can service the trains even if the manufacturer goes away.

This is also the reason LED lighting it a very delayed roll out in the city because the city can not use a light that is vendor locked which most commercial LED setups are. The old Natrium lighting can be purchased anywhere from. many different vendors. The fitting is standardized.

> I don't believe the London Underground has ever been profitable.

The subsurface lines were profitable for at least their first 50 years. Oddly, their profitability started to tumble at about the same time as the rise of the automobile, reinforced by the foreign-based urban renewal blitz that occurred a couple of decades later in which many homes and places of employment were forced to relocate.

> profitable

Infrastructure like roads is rarely directly profitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com