Mastodawn

@jon I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. :)

My experience of big corporates is that there is an awful lot they don’t seem to know. Diseconomies of scale are real. Many group dysfunctions are to be found that work against their objectives.

@dubiousblur Perhaps. But they would still need to know what they don't know. (Now I am sounding like Donald Rumsfeld, not Groucho Marx)

@jon what they don’t know hasn’t obviously hurt them yet :)

Unless and until the Minister makes it their problem, they won’t have to care.

Per that Erasmus study, the sheer size of the social value returned versus subsidies & losses for NS ought to give some people inside NS, pragmatic but visionary, room to say, we can do better if we try.

Moreover: the study of Chinese high speed rail profits (when fully accounted) should be embarrassing to _everyone_. Maybe that’ll help, too.

@dubiousblur Doubt it. That assumes the political accountability loops work in railways, and I am not at all sure they do.

@jon privatisation seems to have given the worst of all possible combinations: neither real democratic oversight for goals, nor market forces. (Gareth Dennis in particular very annoyed that GBR will not have passenger modal shift as its statutory goal. Perhaps that will change during the Rail Bill’s passage, but at the moment GBR will only have to really care about freight.)

@dubiousblur Precisely. And - weirdly - some of the semi marketised state railways (like Trenitalia, or ČD) do a better job at upping passenger numbers than some of the less opened ones, like SNCF.

Putting it another way: to get a good outcome out of a state owned railway, you need enlightened political leadership that you're highly unlikely to get.

@jon I am following Marine Tondelier closely :)

@dubiousblur I am yet to encounter anyone in Les Verts in France who has any deeper diagnosis about what to do with French rail. WHAT they want is clear-ish. HOW to get it, they have not even begun.

(Not that I can help, as trains are so bad around here I cannot even get to political meetings in Dijon or Paris and back home)