Comment by orwin
14 hours ago
People can say it's 'years of neglect' and might even believe it, but to me it's clear train liberalisation directly caused 2 train incident in Spain this year. Yes trains are slightly cheaper (for now, look at GB to estimate how long the low prices will last), but I'm not so sure the redundancy you pay for in a public monopoly is worthless, especially in areas where an incident can cause this many deaths.
"Directly" is way too strong. Yes, it may have been a factor here that the train that remained standing still was from another operator, but there are many more important factors at play, the main one being apparent lack of safety mindset of the controller. In other European countries with even more operators, the safety record is not commensurably worse.
It is though. It's like the electricity market. We try to liberalize it, we see it doesn't work, so we add regulations and regulators (here the "controller"), and each time there is a failure, we blame regulation or regulators, or both. Sometime when it's too egregious we blame the particular company that was caught fucking up, because blaming the system that allows such fuck ups would cost to much: ideologues in power agreeing to the idea that maybe, market do not work everywhere.
Nice job, i won't get fooled again though.
Train controllers (dispatchers, signallers) existed way before liberalization.
There is merit to your arguments, but I still don't think it's the main issue in this case.
Also the train network was neglected a lot since the 70s-80s so the car and oil companies could earn huge profits.