Indeed that is a monopoly on cereal sales to you. Nothing to do with transport or this discussion though.


That's your belief? That there is a market of people that have decided to travel from A to B by rail only? I would suggest that is only a very, very small subset of the market that is people who want to travel from A to B. Train drivers.



Correct, train drivers can only travel with the current rail service provider. The wider market segment, people who just want to get from A to B, have many alternatives open to them other than choosing the train, hence that train service not being a monopoly.

There is only one more thing to say.

LOL

I wonder how many here complain about the private operators having a monopoly would welcome back a state run monopoly?

I can remember rail travel in the 80's and trust me it wasn't only Jimmy Saville that was dodgy...

Why would it go backwards in time though, how are the state owned operators coping in a private franchised monopoly world at the moment ?

Although to buck the trend of this thread, the state owned operators on a franchised line are actually in genuine competition on most of their routes - how are they coping ?

They are competing because they have to, remove that competition and we'll be back in the '70s within 5 years.

Is there ever incentive for a state owned enterprise to increase business though? Would a state owned railway want more passengers? Whilst a private enterprise gains from increasing revenue and efficiency in terms of profits, what does a state owned industry get? In the state days, it felt passengers were considered an inconvenience to running a railway.

So have we all agreed that when Mintball said on Page 7 'That is a monopoly' she was right

Why would increasing revenues, profit, and offering a more frequent and efficient service be limited to just a private operator though - why can't the right management run a public service company for profit - why does the word "public" always equate to non-profit making ?

How is East Coast Mainline making more profit on their franchise than their private predecessors ever did (or didn't) - its simply because a management team has been put in place with incentives to bring the business back into profit and prove to the private operators that the route is worth bidding for with an eye to re-sale within the next one to two years.

There is no reason why similar management incentives cannot be applied to a publically owned franchise without an eye on a future sale - incentivise all the employees to perform against easily described targets and they will.

Whether a business operates efficiently depends on the management structures put in place. Bad management results in an inefficient business whether it be public or private sector.

It should also be noted that there are other influences to why people take the train e.g. can't drive, can't afford insurance, can't afford fuel, can't afford car, lack of parking etc.

In addition, the government needs to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels due to their depletion (and thus increased price) and the impact of the Kyoto agreement. Rail travel instead of car travel addresses all these issues to some extent. For the population to buy into this rail travel needs to be cheap, reliable, be integrated with appropriate gaps between changes at stations and also be integrated with local tram and bus services. This is nigh on impossible at the moment as too many different companies with conflicting interests make up our public transport system at the moment.

A monopoly on rail services on a particular route, yes. A monopoly on transportation along a specific route, far from it.