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Comment by gknoy | Hacker News Reader

> Your trains are bad. America's trains are bad. They don't have to be.

And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle. The odds of the US or Britain improving their rail systems in order for them to be more efficient/usable are vanishingly slim, to the point that we should likely bake their crappy nature into our assumptions of requirements.

We can't even figure out how (here in the US) to build subway tunnels as cheaply as ones in Europe, if I recall right. I am very skeptical that we will ever manage to approach the ideal here, for a variety of reasons (suburban / car-centric lifecycle being so deeply embedded here, etc) which I don't think can be addressed by science. It seems like an economic problem, where paying to rebuild everything is so expensive that no one will do it in the short term, even if the long term gains could be great.

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> The odds of the US or Britain improving their rail systems in order for them to be more efficient/usable are vanishingly slim, to the point that we should likely bake their crappy nature into our assumptions of requirements.

It's a matter of time: the political polar-opposite states of Texas and California are both working on high-speed rail projects, though they are rather unambitious in scope.

I'm curious if the dysfunction of British Rail is also related to the patchwork privatization like it is in the US. Is that still a thing? last I read, parts of the network - and/or trains - were owned or operated by a Virgin subsidiary.

> I'm curious if the dysfunction of British Rail is also related to the patchwork privatization like it is in the US. Is that still a thing? last I read, parts of the network - and/or trains - were owned or operated by a Virgin subsidiary.

Patchwork privatization hasn't helped matters and allows some companies to extract a bit of monopoly profit from a subsidised industry (the infrastructure remains nationalised, franchises are awarded to private companies for running rolling stock in certain regions routes for fixed terms, some companies were really struggling and had their franchises taken over the government and there are other quirks of the franchising system like franchises being required to lease rather than own trains and some services being mandatory to run, and prices are regulated).

But the root cause is that running rail networks is a hard problem: demand fluctuates from hour to hour and decade to decade more than the infrastructure can, optimisations for network efficiency aren't necessarily going to align with individual passengers' demands, when stuff breaks down a well-used part of the network gets cascading problems, governments have lots of other things crying out for more subsidies (and a purely for-profit network would be smaller and thinner). The UK also has older than average infrastructure and very expensive and occupied land right where new lines are most needed, although other countries are cursed with geography which is more challenging in many other ways

> the infrastructure remains nationalised,

Slight correction. Renationalised, rather than remains nationalised.

The infrastructure was renationalised, because Railtrack preferred handing out dividends over maintaining tracks, eventually leading to a derailment that killed 4 people and injured 70, and led to trains being restricted to 20MPH across the country for months afterwards, because they had no idea how fucked any of the rest of the rails were.

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