Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.

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ffsm8 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're actually misrepresenting it with that imo.

DB is state owned, yes ... but it's run like a private company. It's basically the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" - done as a yearly routine.

Not even remotely exaggerating, it's incredibly corrupt.

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pell 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DB‘s quality decline started when this move to privatization happened. They didn’t put money into maintenance, closed lot of tracks and ignored all warnings by experts who predicted this exact scenario more than a decade ago. Most of the time now DB issues seem to be connected to a lack of available tracks. A super fast ICE has to wait for some slow train to clear the path. There’s an issue on one track and thus the entire traffic is backed up till that’s resolved.

I do think they’re working on improving these conditions. But I wish they did more to communicate that. Where is the big marketing campaign explaining how they got there, apologizing, and explaining how they will do better?

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snowpid 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When the owner of DB is owned by the German federal government, they all rule the whole company, who gets the profit? The German federal government? (It's a sign of stupidity to claim DB is privat. It is not. It is not.)

	▲	ffsm8 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's why I said it's incredibly corrupt. It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . (Or pay out to their shareholders? Lol, nope). losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes. That's why it's privatize profits, socialize losses. But there has just been a leadership change, maybe things will improve..

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burnt-resistor 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Welcome to public-private "partnerships", featuring socialism for corporations with extractive profiteering of users.

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jonp888 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.

No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.

Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.

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nephihaha 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not completely. Transport for Wales is state owned, or at least Welsh government, and control most of the local trains in Wales and out to some bits of England. Some of the UK infrastructure is state owned or funded. The state provides the licences as well, so they are not off the hook in that sense.

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hexbin010 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> UK rail is privatized

50% of operators are now state owned

Not that it's a guarantee for things to get better...