{"id":27441,"date":"2014-08-20T08:13:52","date_gmt":"2014-08-20T12:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27441"},"modified":"2019-08-23T18:09:37","modified_gmt":"2019-08-23T22:09:37","slug":"britains-railway-system-under-private-and-public-ownership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/20\/britains-railway-system-under-private-and-public-ownership\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain&#8217;s railway system under private and public ownership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the <em>Adam Smith Institute<\/em> blog, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adamsmith.org\/blog\/regulation-industry\/what-would-we-consider-a-successful-railway-system\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ben Southwood<\/a> asks the question &#8220;What would we consider a successful railway system?&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Under many measures, the railways have performed remarkably since privatisation. It is not surprising that the British public would nevertheless like to renationalise them, given how ignorant we know they are, but it\u2019s at least slightly surprising that large sections of the intelligentsia seem to agree.<\/p>\n<p>Last year I wrote a very short piece on the issue, pointing out the basic facts: the UK has had two eras of private railways, both extremely successful, and a long period of extremely unsuccessful state control. Franchising probably isn\u2019t the ideal way of running the rail system privately, but it seems like even a relatively bad private system outperforms the state.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/British-railway-passengers-1830-2010.gif\" alt=\"British railway passengers 1830-2010\" width=\"853\" height=\"523\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-27442\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Short history: approximately free market in rail until 1913, built mainly with private capital. Government control\/direction during the war. Government decides the railways aren\u2019t making <em>enough<\/em> profit in 1923 and reorganises them into bigger regional monopolies. These aren\u2019t very successful (in a very difficult macro environment) so it nationalises them \u2014 along with everything else \u2014 in the late 1940s.<\/p>\n<p>By the 1960s the government runs railways into the ground to the point it essentially needs to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beeching_cuts\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">destroy or mothball half the network<\/a>. Government re-privatises the railways in 1995 \u2014 at this point passenger journeys have reached half the level they were at in 1913. Within 15 years they\u2019ve made back the ground lost in the previous eighty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the Adam Smith Institute blog, Ben Southwood asks the question &#8220;What would we consider a successful railway system?&#8221; Under many measures, the railways have performed remarkably since privatisation. It is not surprising that the British public would nevertheless like to renationalise them, given how ignorant we know they are, but it\u2019s at least slightly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25,237],"tags":[1303,469,394],"class_list":["post-27441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-railways","tag-britishrailways","tag-monopolies","tag-privatization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-78B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27441"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50527,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27441\/revisions\/50527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}