-Hannover S-Bahn trains are 20 years old -new rolling stock needed -they privatize the network and hand it to transdev -transdev runs 40 year old rolling stock on the network
@schratze and some fuckass railfan will say that we need competition yeah sure man, competition is when old trains get replaced by older trains but at least it’s cheaper right?
@jeder competition for rail traffic is such a funny idea to me. You're a person. You need to be in X place at Y time. Do you take the transdev train that goes to X place at Y time? Or you take a competitor's train that goes somewhere else entirely at the wrong time
@schratze@jeder it makes zero sense on a much more fundamental level, which is that the nature of a high-coverage public transport network is that profitable lines subsidize unprofitable lines, and there is fundamentally no way around that, that's how population distribution works
you literally cannot do competition in that scenario. doesn't matter how many options there could conceivably be for a given route. nobody is going to compete for more or less losses. so private operators will only compete for the profitable parts and take away the subsidy for the unprofitable parts, toppling over the whole network. the whole concept is completely absurd in a way you just can't fix no matter what you do
it has never been anything but an excuse for private extraction of public funds and everyone involved must have known this from the start because the idea doesn't pass even the most basic economic scrutiny
@joepie91@schratze@jeder yeah, and also, the profitable lines stay profitable in part because the unprofitable fringe lines are feeding passengers on the more profitable lines. that's the whole point of a transport network, every line gets more passengers as the number of interconnected lines is increased. chopping that up to several independent operators just weakens the network effect considerably.
@Stoori@joepie91@schratze this is what poland found out the hard way state railways in 1990s and 2000s decided to “optimise” the network by chopping unprofitable routes guess what happened to profitable ones 🙃
