If my train costs more than it would to drive, park, and pay congestion charges, there is something very wrong with the system.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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This is the outcome of Capitalism . Even the new Open Access Operators are no guarantee of sustainable salvation. As Capitalism in a free market will always seek to acquire and merge. Or out compete and destroy competition.
This isn't capitalism, it's more cronyism where the government takes on all the risk but outsources any profit to private companies
If it were capitalism, the full system would've collapsed over covid where there weren't enough passengers. If it were socialism, it'd probably be largely the same given the number of lines that do lose money, but at least the profitable ones like the London-Birmingham/Manchester routes would be adding money to the government instead of private companies
I would argue that cronyism is a symptom of capitalism. Regulatory capture and buying off politicians is a damn fine return on investment.
This is not to say communism didn't also have it's problem with corruption and bribes.
Without proper oversight, any human run thing is subject to this universal law: humans are lazy and greedy.
Cronyism is a symptom of any (not even the) class system, not capitalism. Those with power (ie those charged with administration/lawmaking under communism, those in power/with sufficient capital under capitalism) abuse their power to give more power to their friends and those like them. The only cure is openness and transparency in book-keeping and policy-making, but that's not an economic ideology but a political one.
Nationalise the lot, dump in the billions we need to get it back to scratch again.
Infrastructure always makes its money back in growth several times over, before anyone thinks of replying we should spend the money elsewhere
And the amount of effort required to get a refund is ridiculous. Back and forth emails resulting in a cheque in the post 2 months later
………that sounds like an outrageously high number dude
I read it and was like “140 isn’t too bad”. Then I noticed it said per day, wtf?!
~~Every 10th train basically.~~
~~(For people who have a hard time with %...)~~
Edit: should have read the article. It is up 9%, my bad.