this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Hopefully some competition will improve things. If this gets off the ground it can only be good for prices and service. https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/10/12/evolyn-the-high-speed-rail-startup-with-mystery-investors-coming-for-eurostars-crown
"Competition will improve things" yeah sure.
Mass rail transportation as a public utility at an affordable price for everyone is never going to be a profitable operation. Competition in such a setting won't improve anything.
They'll just invest to run things at a loss while maintaining the same quality for a few years, get their share of the market and run the historical company in the ground, then increase prices and lower quality.
If the is one thing that the last couple of decades of privatised trains in the UK have shown, is that there is no possibility for real competition in trains, which should've been obvious from the start as you can't just have tons of companies lay train track at will to compete with uncompetitive established train operators.
The competition to trains are buses, cars and to a lesser extent planes, and some of those are only competitive against trains because their Negative Externalities (i.e. Polution) aren't reflected in the ticket price.
It works on high speed lines in Spain, where you’ve got Renfe, SNCF and Trenitalia all competing for business between Madrid and Barcelona. Also in Italy where Italo and Trenitalia compete head to head on a bunch of route. London/Paris isn’t that much different.
Three decades of having private operation in Britain for the whole train network only yielded higher prices and shittier service than the old public service.
Also every single one of the companies you listed there are public companies and that entire business model is only working because the State paid for the high speed infrastructure.
If you want to see what happens some years after the State stops pouring money into infrastructure, look at Britain again - the infrastructure is slowly decaying and trains are getting slower, with the exception of the whole Eurotunnel which is brand new, State paid, infrastructure.
Last and not least, 2 or 3 companies only caring about a handfull of high value routes is in no way form or shape sufficient competition to add up to a healthy competitive market (just look at how many airlines serve high value routes for reference of how real competition looks like and even there, there are barriers to entry - in the form of airport slots - that limit competition so it's far from perfect in terms of competition), not to mention tgat what you see in the main most profitable routes is most definitelly not something that you see in an entire network.
It works on the few profitable liaison. Without the secondary network that is still publically operated, I suspect those route would not be profitable.
This would be great, but won't happen as quickly as they say, and even if a competitor does get going, the lack of capacity at St Pancras is a major blocker to reducing the ticket price.