Competition is good, but railroads are a natural monopoly - there are very few points in the world that can justify more than one set of tracks between them. Airplanes can share an airport because if someone else blocks a runway everyone else can take a different one and thus there can be competition. However if train operator B blocks a track (possibly by running a slow train) everyone else can’t get through.
I’m all for competition, but you have to own your own tracks.
In the Netherlands the actual railways are owned by a separate company that was split from NS after privatisation, ProRail.
Railway competition is bullshit anyway. Neoliberal ideology pretends people constantly make informed decisions about what products they wish to buy. This is bullshit anyway, but with the railways especially. If you want to take the train to a specific place and arrive at a specific time, you will pretty much always have one option anyway. There is no choice. All the so-called ‘competition’ will do, is split up a currently contiguous network, which will probably introduce needless transfers to different train companies, where you currently have one.
So-called ‘competition’ is a disaster for what should be a public service like the railways.
Railways and the energy market are the two areas where liberalization most spectacularly shat the bed. It increased prices, decreased reliability, didn’t deliver on anything it was supposed to, and still the neoliberals are saying “one more market incentive bro, just one more incentive and we’ll build productive competition into this natural monopoly”.
Competition is good, but railroads are a natural monopoly - there are very few points in the world that can justify more than one set of tracks between them. Airplanes can share an airport because if someone else blocks a runway everyone else can take a different one and thus there can be competition. However if train operator B blocks a track (possibly by running a slow train) everyone else can’t get through.
I’m all for competition, but you have to own your own tracks.
In the Netherlands the actual railways are owned by a separate company that was split from NS after privatisation, ProRail.
Railway competition is bullshit anyway. Neoliberal ideology pretends people constantly make informed decisions about what products they wish to buy. This is bullshit anyway, but with the railways especially. If you want to take the train to a specific place and arrive at a specific time, you will pretty much always have one option anyway. There is no choice. All the so-called ‘competition’ will do, is split up a currently contiguous network, which will probably introduce needless transfers to different train companies, where you currently have one.
So-called ‘competition’ is a disaster for what should be a public service like the railways.
Railways and the energy market are the two areas where liberalization most spectacularly shat the bed. It increased prices, decreased reliability, didn’t deliver on anything it was supposed to, and still the neoliberals are saying “one more market incentive bro, just one more incentive and we’ll build productive competition into this natural monopoly”.