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veltas

The infrastructure isn't privatised though, it's maintained by Network Rail.

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People literally died before it became Network Rail due to badly maintained infrastructure

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

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

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

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

Edit: To be 100% clear the badly maintained infrastructure was the responsibility of a for profit private company at the point where people died.

Southall:

> The passenger train operating company had failed to inform Railtrack and the signaller that the automatic warning system (AWS), which warns drivers of adverse signals, had been turned off in the cab of the HST.

But Ladbroke Grove was Railtrack's fault entirely (within the first few years of its creation). Meanwhile it's been 20 years since National Rail was created, when do we get to blame current governments and National Rail for bad infrastructure?

Which was private under railtrack, but after a number of high profile crashes and failures was taken into public ownership again.

Railtrack made a lot of money by selling off land, and other assets, under invested and generally underperformed

Not disagreeing, but words are important here to get at precisely what happened.

> Railtrack made a lot of money

"Made" implies creation, growth, increase.

This is the opposite of what happened.

The money wasn't made. It was /extracted/. They /extracted/ a lot of money.

Railtrack doesn't have that money. Their succeeding entity doesn't have that money. The government doesn't have that money. The taxpayer doesn't have that money. None of that money was invested such that any of these entities might benefit from it in any way. It was removed from the system into private wallets.

The private owners plundered and fled, and the remaining skeleton was socialised again so it might regrow a bit of flesh from public taxes for the next extraction cycle.

One example that Ben Elton gave in his excellent "The Great Railway Disaster" documentary was not training new train drivers!

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/ben-elton-the-great-rail...

"Privatise the profits, Nationalise the losses!"

What about losses from federally funded corporations like USPS and Amtrak that are bailed out every year? Amtrak loses over $1 billion/yr and they are still "nationalized." USPS loses multi billions per year.

USPS costs billions, public services don't need to be profitable they just need to be paid for. Taxpayers pay for it with their taxes.

When we sell our public investments for a quick buck we complain when the real cost of the service gets priced in. The trouble is, we pay the same taxes still, they just no longer go to the service we privatised, so we feel it in the pocketbook individually.

Presumably those taxes are going elsewhere now, but I was very happy with them going to core public services.

The USPS is "loosing" money because it was told to prefund it's Healthcare having to set aside $100 billion in 10 years (unlike any other company) . Moreover, it's much more a service than a business, e.g. it can not really set its own prices.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/usps-louis-dejoy-post-offic...

I don't get it. The USPS has lost billions due to government policies and can't enforce prices due to government policies. They are forced to deliver to unprofitable routes and have prices set to inflation due to government policies. Private delivery services like Amazon and Fedex are generally profitable and don't have these issues. Why is a government alternative better?

> They are forced to deliver to unprofitable routes and have prices set to inflation due to government policies. Private delivery services like Amazon and Fedex are generally profitable and don't have these issues.

I, for one, think it's a good thing that people are entitled to their mail regardless of the profitability of their mail route. That's the point of a public service.

A cynic would say Congress's actions, loading the USPS with costs while denying it control over prices, is so that people ask "Why is a government alternative better?"

None of the competitors offer a similar service to USPS.

Among other core competencies, USPS has nationwide daily coverage of the entire United States and centuries(?) of experience interoperating the the respective mail services of every country in the world and then some.

Amazon wont even take MY package one town over.

None of the competitors are allowed to offer a similar service to USPS.

That said, the service provided by the USPS nowadays is primarily delivery of paper waste into a receptacle I am obligated to empty because very occasionally they also use the same box for packages.

Is fedex forbidden from delivering to a lonely hut in Alaska for the same price as USPS?

Quite literally yes when we are talking about letters. Even if they did it for cheaper.

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

Ah yes letters, the backbone of revenue for any delivery service.

Irrelevant snipe. I am not the one who said "a similar service". In a world where USPS had to compete, other entities could deliver letters.

It's extremely relevant. Other entities could deliver letters, but would they? At prices competitive with USPS?

Is it your opinion that some people simply shouldn’t get their mail, or that people who live in rural areas should pay exponentially more to get their mail delivered? Why is either of those things desirable?

USPS is not a business, and it’s a fundamental mistake to pretend it is, solely for the sake of slandering it.

Wait until you hear how much money the US military has lost.

Welcome to the world of privatising public services. This has been a scheme of free market politicians for years; call public services too expensive, strip them of funding and hamper them in other ways, then call out how they are not delivering on their promise. Then sell the off at bargain prices, often with additional government guarantees on revenue. After privatisation services don't improve and cost never go down, but somehow the public is better off?

USPS isn't losing money. It's a public service. It costs money.

Amtrak is the least subsidies mode of Transportation. It has to compete with road transport and the subsidies given to highways, roads and parking is orders of magnitude larger then what Amtrak gets.

Amtrak gets surprisingly small amount of money.

Freight rail also has priority over Amtrak, which causes all kinds of problems with scheduling and adds insane delays.

I mean sure, we can talk for hours about issues with Amtrak.

However that doesn't change what I said so I'm not sure why you are bringing it up. Amtrak most likely wouldn't be profitable if they had priority.

I think you may have conditioned by HN to assume that any comment is a refutation. I brought it up because it’s an additional piece of the explanation for why amtrack can’t support itself on ticket prices alone.

Fair. I'm just saying that its one of many factors so I was confused why you would bring it up specifically.

Mostly because it’s the single biggest thing that keeps me from using Amtrak. The last few trips I’ve taken, we ended up sitting waiting on freight trains for many many hours.

Each big city we came to we had to stop and wait without having any idea how long it would take for “freight traffic to clear”.

I love train travel, and I’m not price sensitive at all, but the delays were completely absurd.

Public infrastructure does not need to make a profit, its there to provide a service not make money.

USPS delivers to remote addresses no one else’s will on route that will never make money.

They are not bailed out, is the highway maintenance service ‘bailedout’? They don’t build themselves you know

We need to rearrange our brains. USPS provides a valuable service to the country. It does not need to make a profit. It should be evaluated based on the value it generates for the people. Why does something like the mail system get treated differently than something like road development, which is not expected to bring in any revenue at all let along a profit?

They don't lose money, they cost money. You can't measure the losses if they even exist

There’s also water, energy, busses outside of London, Openreach (especially them), and pitty the poor people of Hull with that Kingston shitshow.

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