Gregory's Server@researchfairy you can privatise ownership but regulate how the service is operated, set rules for pricing etc. not saying this is necessarily a good idea, but it is a thing that is done in practice. requires a government that is willing and able to, of course.
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 @ncrav @researchfairy also speaking from experience, there are many countries, many ways to attempt this. trains run like this in Norway, for instance. is it a success? no. better than how Britain did it, but i wouldn't recommend. but the problem with it is not that a rich person is now in charge of trains, or even that they're extracting tax money and blaming regulations. mostly just that it's not a good way to run trains.  @bjoernstaerk @researchfairy in Portugal our passenger train company which is now a EPE (public but under the same law as private) and has only degraded service further. This started before the private management with profit seeking politicians. For instance most lines and stations in the interior are there, but have been closed or underserved starting since the early 1990s. Nowadays even main lines are underserved and we don't even have a high speed connection to the rest of Europe. |
@bjoernstaerk @researchfairy from experience as soneone living in a country with plenty of that (public private partnerships, supposedly regulated essential services, privately managed public services, etc): it's just a strategy so the richbois can extract more tax money and blame "regulations" every time something goes wrong (which always happens eventually).