Comment by codethief
10 days ago
> In 1982, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone started to privatize the railways. Unlike other countries, Japan simply returned to the traditional private railway model of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: tracks, trains, stations, and yards were owned by vertically integrated regional conglomerates. There are substantial advantages to vertical integration. Railways are a closed system that has to be planned as a single unit. […]
This is a very interesting point, especially in light of another article discussed here a couple days ago[0] about why Switzerland has 25 Gbit/s internet and why the US and Germany don't. One of the main points of the article was that the fiber optics infrastructure is (or should be treated as) a natural monopoly:
> The rational solution is to build the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and let different companies compete to provide the service over that infrastructure. That’s how water works. That’s how electricity works in most places. And in Switzerland, that’s how fiber optic internet works.
A problem with privatising the railways is that unprofitable routes, ie rural villages, are deprioritised or simply shut down.
My village gets 1 train every 1.5 hours, and none between 3pm and 7pm. For several years now, there has been discussion of shutting down the upper half of the route.
So every household has 2 or more cars.
That's the same in most of Japan. Most people who over-idealize rail transit in Japan only visited or stayed short term within the Yamanote Line.
It's a great country, but using Central Tokyo as a frame of reference as most people on HN do is the equivalent of using Manhattan or Central London as your frame of reference for the US or UK.
Major urban areas like Osaka, Nagoya, and even most of Greater Tokyo are extremely car dependent with plentiful parking as well - let alone smaller towns.
> The rational solution is to build the infrastructure once, as a shared, neutral asset, and let different companies compete to provide the service over that infrastructure. That’s how water works. That’s how electricity works in most places. And in Switzerland, that’s how fiber optic internet works.
This isn't a magic bullet. It normally works for electricity because it's relatively cheap to transport electricity so consumer have a choice and can provide strong selective pressure. Fibre internet is similar to that (at least in the UK).
It doesn't make as much sense for water or rail because consumers have no choice. The "competition" is companies making impossible bids to the government and then getting bailed out. It definitely hasn't worked in the UK.
There is currently a major scandal about underinvestment by water companies leading them to releasing raw sewage into waterways, and trains are notoriously expensive and unreliable here (though I would still say apart from the price the UK train experience is pretty good compared to most countries).
Another crucial difference is that energy supply (as in selling energy to end users – physically providing electric energy to the grid on the other hand does require sufficient physical transport capacity in some ways) and internet access are much more virtual things – the mere existence of an additional company offering those services doesn't directly congest the infrastructure as such.
Trains on the other hand are decidedly physical things that take up a significant amount of space on the infrastructure, and they do so as soon you start offering the service, no matter whether people actually use it or not. This means that railway networks can only support a very limited amount of competing companies before you start running out of capacity to run additional trains, and it's especially easy to run out of capacity when you're talking about mixed-traffic railways where fast long-distance services intermingle with slower regional and/or freight services.
And as soon as you run out of capacity, train operating companies have to start battling each other for train paths instead of passengers, a situation that can have completely different incentives which aren't necessarily best aligned with passengers' actual interests.
Another difference is that competing trains obviously cannot run at exactly the same time, which again makes competition less efficient because trains running at differing times cannot be perfect substitutes for each other, which becomes relevant once you add passengers' external schedule-constraints (having to arrive in time for work or whatever appointment they might have and maybe cannot really influence) into the mix. (Long-distance leisure travel is probably less affected by that, because people are regularly willing to flex their schedules for that, but other kinds of traffic aren't as flexible.)
This effect then only gets magnified further once connections come into play, because with different trains along the same route always having to be separated by at least a few minutes, it's impossible to offer equally attractive connections between e.g. a branch line (which might run only hourly or half-hourly at best) and all the various hypothetical competing services on the main line.