It technically is in many places around Germany: The national railway infrastructure is owned by a government-owned entity, as is the main railway company. Many municipal public transport systems are also owned directly by the municipalities themselves, although there are also some semi-privatized systems and the national railway company also owns shares of municipal public transport systems in many major cities.
Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid.
In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.
My inclination to agree that public transit should mostly be a nationalized utility. But some experience in rural areas leads me to a counterargument that I don't have a good answer for:
Should people that live in urban spaces massively subsidize people that choose to live in rural areas for no economically useful reason? Like, some tech bros decide they don't want neighbors and want to live 20 km from everything. Should the city folk subsidize their preferences? Maybe it should be recouped in local taxes? Should that be covered by agricultural tax breaks?
Mostly I think public transit should be a public service. But I don't think it's a given that rich people's preferences should be subsidized just because they want to live in remote or suburban areas.
I think this is a good question, but I'm assuming that this is happening anyways: Few constitutions have provisions forcing tech bros to live in the city. If they move to the burbs without public transit, they are being subsidized via roads and car traffic, which is arguably worse.
I think you're also right. The framing for this is I spend some time in a village that has a part that's now been inaccessible because of a landslide. About 10 people live on the road that's now impassable. Digging a safe tunnel through the mountain would cost millions. Should the state shoulder the cost for the mostly wealthy retirees that live on the other side? I don't have a good answer.
I also have a version of this from a doctor friend that lives on a "farm" that doesn't grow anything. Who should pay for the roads / public transit to their place? Everyone else? Again, I don't have a good answer. But I'm open to the idea that people that simply want to live in rural areas as a personal luxury should shoulder some of the costs to making those places accessible.
I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
>It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
That's blatantly false. It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
What worker productivity do you think society is loosing out on here? We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs.
The labor they provide and experience they earn in the social system is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables in a restaurant or flipping burgers at McDs instead.
> The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
Interesting take. Is there any supporting official position on this or just personal opinion?
If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social services systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribute. How do these systems handle the rest of the 9 months every year when the teenagers are unavailable on account of being in school. Why would a healthy society operate at the very limit of crashing down because the natality dropped or parents/teenagers start refusing to provide this service?
Now I've dealt with a lot of trainees in my life. All university graduates, including with PhDs. They all take weeks to months full time on the job until they're ready to do anything productive in the simplest of jobs. I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year (with 9 month breaks) to support a country's healthcare system from collapsing. And that's not even touching on the topic that you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
> Is there any supporting official position on this or just personal opinion?
The government figures and claims are supporting this opinion. In fact, it's been the government's opinion, not mine. I'm just quoting it.
>If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social service systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribut
9 months not 3, and yes, that's socialized care for you and an aging population when you have too many people in need of care, and too little contributions into the system since the economy has stagnated post 2008 and taxes are already high enough and no more money can be obtained this way. And it's not just healthcare work, but all social services like kindergartens, retirement homes, refugees homes, etc. that make use of 9 months of teenage labor.
> I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year
You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR. At least not here. Teenagers are quite smart and quick learners if you treat them well.
>you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
The military service is forced nation-wide (a system kept through democratic vote), while doing social public civil work is the alternative choice if you feel the military is not for you.
And the children get paid for it, and for many it's the camaraderie and opportunity to meet other young people from other parts of the country/city and make life long friends or meet future spouses while learning useful social and
life skills and feeling a sense of self worth for contributing to society, especially in the context of the west having a loneliness and depression epidemic among teens. It's also an opportunity for silver spoon kids of privilege families to get to interact with the lower classes of society and soo how others live, through this kind of work.
You're making it sounds like they're prisoners for life, but they're still free to go binge drinking and care free sex in the south of Spain after.
Let those teenagers join the workforce, use the revenue from the increased societal productivity to hire more professional workers in the health care system.
> It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
In case anyone is curious, this appears to refer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst_in_Austria which is an alternative to conscription in the Austrian Armed Forces. Conscription applies to men (but not women), and this alternative civil service option is chosen by ~40% of these young men.
> We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs.
But these people are starting university one year later, which means they graduate a year later, which means these badly needed, highly qualified workers become available to the job market a year later, because they have to spend their time doing some menial job that most of them have no interest in doing. We used to have this nonsense in Germany. Most of the people I know were just goofing off, were drunk or high on the job, or were deliberately destroying equipment, because nobody wanted to be there.
Most of the students do not leave university as high qualified, badly needed workers, but as useless parasites, like lawyers, economists, psychologists, sociologists, ..............
Sure, but if you cut everyone loose now, than the whole system becomes understaffed instantly and collapses. You can't wait 10+ years until all those you cut loose have great paying jobs and their taxes pay for the necessary workers.
I have done social service instead of military in Switzerland where we have the same system. In fact we have to do 1.5 years of before we are 30. I worked in at least 5 (old people homes and hospitals) different positions. In not a single one of them is it true to say the system couldn't function if not for the civil service workers.
Simply paying normal people to do that work would be perfectly reasonable.
> is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables
Yeah but most people don't actually work minimum wage jobs. Me as a Software Developer spend 6 month cleaning windows. While this was reasonable fun and low stress not sure my window cleaning experience has this great benefit for society.
> not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs
You start your job one year later and therefore spend 1 year less doing it before retirement, not sure how this is difficult to figure out.
It seems like you do not realize that the 30 year olds who don’t flip burgers and make more than minimum age were once those 19 year olds whose career you’ve delayed by 1 year.
You can search for different keywords to find open positions. For me personally I worked in:
- Hospital as a Programmer (they made position for me)
- In another hospital as Technician (hanging up stuff, changing light-bulls, assessing damage, configuring doors and so on)
- Old people home, I worked for in technical service, including garden work.
- Old people home, I also worked as a cleaner, mostly windows, floors and so on.
In the hospital you can also work as a bed mover for example. You can work directly in old people care and things.
In general there are 100s of position, some position are even going with international aid organization to other countries. A friend of mine did his in archeology departments digging up old stuff. Another friends simply did farm work with a mountain farmer, that's the easiest to get (he in fact simply was to lazy to get a job so they assigned him to a farmer).
> And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that.
To people who argue like this, I often argued in the past that if I were to contribute on an open source project for one year instead, this would do a lot more good for the public welfare.
It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case.
The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.
> It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case.
Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis.
The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits.
The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.
Japanese railway don't easily beat everything in Switzerland. If you look at rural service Swiss service is often just as good or better and more punctual.
Japanese punctuality numbers are inflated because their high punctuality of their high speed trains that run on dedicated separated infrastructure. In fact, large reason that punctuality in Switzerland suffers is because international trains that mess up the schedule (looking at you Germany).
And unlike Japan Switzerland is also world leading in using railway cargo transport, that also has to share the same infrastructure.
But in general, its not just about public and private, that a simplified vision. Its something for politicians to talk about rather then talking about the actual details of the system.
While Japan is privately operated, its certainty still under public control.
In fact in Switzerland there are quite a few railway companies for both cargo and people using the same infrastructure. Some of them are semi-private or owned by local governments or a mix of other organizations. The Semi-Private Post office runs its own trains for example.
It's hard to overemphasize just how fucked up public transport ticketing in Germany is. As a simple example, you're a tourist in Cologne for a few days, what's the best ticket if you're planning to travel around the city and take a day trip to the nearby city of Wuppertal (but across the Verkehrsbund boundary, alas) to ride the famous monorail?
It should have no issue at all to align German wide but they never did it.
The Munich MVG for example is doing an experiment were you can pay by an app from some us company were you just start and stop your journey with a button and the app gives you the best price.
They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
It's ridiculousl that modern problems are often not technical problems:-(
The issue is not the lack of technical expertise. The structure of the German public transport system is very localized, due to its historical growth. local networks are often owned by the municipalities that they are serving, the actual busses are sometimes provided by private companies on contract, the national railway carrier has contracts with state governments and certain local entities for specific services, national, state and local governments are subsidizing various services, etc.
I completely agree that it is a mess, but it is not really easy to solve with so many stakeholders and so many (sometimes conflicting but valid) different priorities at stake.
> They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
But that already works with the »DB Navigator« app by Deutsche Bahn.
You can buy tickets for many local public transport companies. No need to download a custom app.
> One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused.
> The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, ...
Errm, you do see the contradiction here, no?
The 49 Euro ticket is actually heavily subsidized which means more tax payer money is wasted that could be invested into the infrastructure of public transport.
In Europe, ownership of public transport is a pretty wild mix, and corporations that are publicly owned (or indirectly so) do not seem to work substantially better than private corporations that won public contracts.
Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous.
Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.
> Even more: Public transport is a public good which should be funded by fossil fuel taxes and provided to users without cost.
A lot of public transport runs on fossil fuels. Especially, since Germany was so »smart« to shutdown all nuclear reactors so that coal has become the most important source of electricity again.
that is not incompatible with the concept?
It's not as though the resaon for public transport is soley to reduce emissions/use less of a limited resource, and even if it were & all public transport used it, its still vastly more efficient to move 50 people with 1.5x the motor that would otherwise be moving 2 people
They’re about to double the amount of carbon taxes levied on large trucks. That tax used to be used for building new roads but it’s now all being given over to new rail infrastructure.
Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.
Public parks you don't sit in are still public goods; public litter bins are still public goods even if you never have anything to put into them; public roads are still a public good even if you don't own a vehicle.
Likewise, if you want them to be, so is public transport.
Though, here's a question: I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport — is that just my observations being weird, or is that a true distinction? And if genuine, why?
People usually distinguish between local and long-distance travel, nobody is arguing that bullet trains should be free and planes fall into the same category.
The fact that long-distance highways tend to be free speaks more to politics than logic, and there are a few notable exceptions (eg Japan) where all expressways are tolled.
Highways are also tolled in Italy and I think France, its not that exceptional.
And in Switzerland for example you just pay a really high gas tax that funds the highway, plus you have to pay a one time fee and get a sticker, otherwise you are not allowed to drive on the highway.
>public parks, public litter bins, public roads
These examples are permanent things, that only need to be maintained, and it's easier to just let the government handle them instead of letting the individual pay or having a subscription model or something alike.
Also: all the public goods you mentioned cannot be managed by any single individual, that's why they are in the public hand, but it only goes so far as your activity is in "public range".
You can't pave your own roads, you can't carry a trash can with you wherever you go and you can't play football in your house. That's why the government gives you roads, parks and trash cans. But: it is not allowed to put your house trash into a public bin. Or have a barbecue in the public park, or block the roads for a protest.
I think using the train is more like using the car. I can agree that the tracks are a public good, but actually using the train is clearly different from that.
Just like the government provides me roads, but not with rides.
> I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport
I guess my framework fits that, because while you may need to maintain the air and the airport, the individual flights only help the individual person.
> I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport
In remote parts of the world, planes absolutely should be classified as public transport. Remote towns in Alaska, for example, are essentially inaccessible without bush planes.
However, planes are expensive to operate on a per-passenger basis, and in most places there are cheaper ways to facilitate helping people move around, especially since most trips from most people are short-distance.
Most public goods don't benefit everyone equally; that's never the case, and that's fine.
My house has never been on fire (knock on wood), but I'm perfectly happy that my taxes pay for a fire department. I don't often use the park up the street that's currently undergoing a massive renovation/rebuild, but I'm happy that my taxes are paying for the renovation. I don't drive on every single road in the city, but I'm glad my tax dollars make it possible for people to get around even in places where I don't need to go. I don't have kids (and don't plan to), but I'm happy that the taxes I pay go toward educating the kids who live here.
Many public transit agencies are run at a loss; I'm absolutely fine with my tax dollars making up the difference. From there it's just a matter of degree: is it fully funded by taxes, or still partially funded by fare revenue? I'd be fine with the former, too.
It may be the case that I cause a lot less externalities, but I don't think that affects the definition of a public good. If I visited my friend by using a motorcycle, I'd cause less externalities too, but I don't think motorcycles are public goods. Same with scooters, e-bikes and normal bikes.
> but I don't think that affects the definition of a public good
You happen to be misconstruing the two definitions of "public good":
> a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization.
> the benefit or well-being of the public.
As such, something can be a "public good" without being "a benefit".
I don't think I'm misconstruing these two definitions, because I didn't talk about the definitions you just brought up. I also think it is quite clear that I'm talking about what the government should or shouldn't provide, not what some specific government currently is providing.
Because reality requires these things of us but we should minimize the impact.
You’re just stringing words together to look smart; physical reality calls the shots. Your attempt to conjure some immutable truth in Anglo gibberish is banal
> If I drink water from a public water fountain why is that in the public's interest?
If there were no fountain, then many people would get water bottles and that's too big of a hassle.
Defining a public good is quite hard, and any definition will most likely other controversial terms like "reasonably" or "foreseeable" in them. However, I think a public good is something that can be shared by many people in reasonable amounts, and that cannot reasonably be attained by the average individual. It is usually characterized by its scale.
So for example, you can't build your own park, but you can use the public park without blasting your music on max volume.
> If there were no fountain, then many people would get water bottles and that's too big of a hassle.
Right, and if there was no public transit, then many more people would need to buy and drive cars, and that's not great for the public's interest either.
But a fountain is something that naturally occurs. It is used in that way because it gives more water than anyone can use, but enough water for everyone in reasonable amounts. It's not just some kind of lesser evil.
Trains and railroads must first be built and maintained, they are on the same level as roads and busses.
I think there is a difference between providing the opportunity and giving things out for free.
Only if you assume a road network of infinite size which goods and various services can traverse without any interference from private car owners. Which a short look at any given city during peak hours should disprove and those roads are not free either.
I'm neither an individualist nor an American. I'm actually from Germany and experienced how the 3 months of Deutschlandticket affected the people around me.
If you're a business it will help you if you can select employees or receive customers from a large geographical region. As the economy and all public services depend on businesses, that's the public interest.
Not controversial in the handful of countries where public transportation is efficient and ubiquitous. Americans are fed constant propaganda about how publicly owned anything isn’t possible, sold to them by the very people whose profits rely on this being true.
Doesn't really cover a lot of things you'd want to know like price, satisfaction, reliability, etc. - all of which, I believe, are strongly negative compared with 30 years ago. Also doesn't tell you if it's long distance or commuter or both - which is an important distinction since many more people commute these days.
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
Prices were so heavily subsidized they were ruining the government's finances, so that's not a valid metric to compare on because it wasn't sustainable. Even when being bailed out by massive amounts of tax (a regressive tax!), ridership was falling because the services sucked so hard that they couldn't compete with cars/trucks, despite the latter being a source of tax revenue, not a sink.
Dunno about satisfaction but clearly, when people were truly dissatisfied they stayed away and now the primary causes of satisfaction and reliability problems are simply that the network is so in demand it's at capacity all the time, especially London commuter routers. Some of that is driven by the huge increases in population via immigration in the last 20 years but some of it is just that privatized services are better, so people use them more.
If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes.
But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)
It's certainly possible this was caused by who owned what; but I'd just add the decline on the graph begins around the UK's pyrrhic victory in WW1 which IMO marked (in tandem with Irish independence) the beginning of the decline of the British Empire; while the rise at the end is roughly congruent with the increasing wealth from exploitation of the North Sea gas deposits and (depending how much you accept the possibility of noise in the data making it hard to tell exactly which year it changed direction) joining the precursor to the EU.
North Sea came on-stream at the start of the 80s. The rise in rail traffic clearly starts around the time of privatization in ~95 and the huge plunge followed by decline starts around the time of nationalization.
Certainly there were other problems: the nationalization was downstream of the socialization of the British economy between the end of ww2 and Thatcher, and as can be seen rail traffic (a general proxy for economic health) is in steady decline from then until it rebounds slightly in the 80s before taking off again once put in (mostly) private hands in the 90s.
The reason the graph seems to run a few years ahead of the changes is that actually privatizing and nationalizing something on the scale of a national railway takes a few years to implement between politicians floating the idea and the final handover of power, but the effect on people's motivations and incentives begins almost immediately.
The infrastructure (railways and stations) is still publicly owned under Network Rail. Only the trains themselves are privately owned (often by foreign state-owned enterprises, funnily enough)
There is a big problem with this graph. Its highly misleading.
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
Nobody should be drawing any conclusions from a graph like that, since it provides no useful information allowing anyone to draw any conclusion about anything.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
That's one of those grand standing issues that many people like to focus on. The reality is the is a wild mix of private, public and everything in between out there in the world. And some system that are increasingly good have combinations of everything.
Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point.
To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all.
Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.
Ownership is no more than a collection of rights on what to do with the owned asset that is recognized by society. Regulate more and there won’t be much difference between private and public property, so ownership is less relevant than financial and incentive framework around public transportation system.
It's very plausible to have public transit systems be publicly owned by a mix of local, regional, and national bodies. Each of which might have their own local goals to incentivize with no regard for what a system on the other side of the country wants.
Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.
People love making this remark still in the UK despite the Government having much more direct control of more rail services than compared to pre-COVID, and the rail network being in an absolutely dire state. Public != good, public != bad, private != good, private != bad
Sure, but completely unrestricted free markets would also reintroduce slavery etc. to the modern world.
Free markets are great at reducing inefficiencies in a world in which no participant decides to coordinate with other participants for profit. which obviously doesn't work, just like communism doesnt work at societal scales.
Well, the problem is, especially in Germany. If someone is a "Beamter" which can't be fired, has low income, there's no motivation to make a good job.
It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" .
In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free.
A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too.
Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.
By this point, there can't be too many "Beamte" left in Germany's railway and public transit systems. After all, nobody there has received that status since the 90s.
I won't dispute that there is corruption and that there are still Nazis and right wing forces around - especially if you look in certain german states.
But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye".
Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for?
When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement.
And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
> Why can I not do that online with my ID?
> Why is she even typing it at all
Social function of work. If you do it yourself, what will she do?
If you come up with a solution freeing hundreds of people doing some monkey jobs some in Germany will consider this evil, since people are losing their means of earning salary. This is more difficult with the officials, since they have guaranteed employment.
German speaking here. Keeping people busy with bullsh*t jobs just for the sake of keeping them busy is not a good investment, not financially nor for the sanity of the people themselves.
In fact, in Germany you can see that it leads to government paralysis everywhere. In contrast, they should free "Staatsbeamte" from those stupid jobs and encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands. No jobs lost, but talent attracted. This eventually leads to operational excellence. The current state of affairs is overly defensive and reactionary.
I live and work in Germany for almost two years now.
I witnessed at least two panic attacks caused by the implementation of your suggestion to "encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands".
You automatically get signed up for it if your parents were in the church and paid tax. You have to pay a fee to get out of it and keep your paper document forever in case the government forgets you don’t owe that tax for 20 years past
Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid.
In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.