[mlindner]

> What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to inherently be more expensive?

A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs, or a the very least, following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs. (It's hard to reduce costs when how you operate is decided by politicians.) The same problem that plagues government run systems all over the world.

A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263

[TheDong]

> A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs

This argument doesn't seem to me as if it's fundamental.

Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected.

On the flip side, companies are only incentivized to reduce the cost charged to consumers (or in this case, companies shipping freight) in the face of competition, and long-haul freight has a massive up-front investment cost of building out rails, so there won't ever really be that many choices. This is akin to the highway robbery ISPs can still charge, even though they are private companies and the moat of laying fiber isn't nearly as extreme as that of laying rail

> following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs

Won't it be equally true that private and public corporations will have to follow laws? That seems identical.

> A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263

I'm trying to ask if there's a fundamental reason here, not a bag of anecdotes, and we were also talking about freight, not commuter trains, so that comment isn't particularly relevant to the comment tree you started about freight specifically.

[mlindner]

> Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected.

Politicians are incentivized to give lip service to reducing cost, not actually reduce costs. They only need to look like they're more likely to reduce costs than their opponent, assuming the voter actually cares enough in the first place. Further, it assumes that politicians even know how to reduce costs when they have no experience what-so-ever in running a train company.