Comment on Public transit in Chengdu, China versus Toronto, Canada
ALiteralCabbage@feddit.uk 4 days agoI think people forget that many of the highways in The West™ were created as part of glorified jobs programs too.
These projects run like utter shit now in places where work is tendered out to corporations now of course, because they’re being driven by private bodies whose sole motivation is profit, not the creation of useful infrastructure. In my own country HS2 is a beautiful example of this.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 4 days ago
Do you have any clues why privatization was so much more destructive in the UK than Japan? The JNR breakup increased ticket prices, decreased service, and made the system overall much more inefficient (Nagoya has subway, rail, elevated rail, bus, elevated bus, ferry, gondola, run by 16 different companies), but regulation and infinite loans stemmed the bleeding.
ALiteralCabbage@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Honestly I don’t know enough about the way that it’s run to give a correct answer!
I mean even pre-privatisation the rail service was being reduced (Beeching’s cuts etc.) so there’s clearly a cultural element at a government level, but the actual running of the rail firms is pretty opaque; there’s a lot of subcontracting, and the profitability is high, with reinvestment in the railway services not being proportional to that. I suspect that the culture around rinsing public services for private gain isn’t quite so dominant in Japan, but again, I couldn’t comment on that really.
We also have relatively old infrastructure, comparably narrow gauge railways that we would struggle to update because the country was built up around it, but this might be a bit of an old-fashioned take. I’m sure some transport historians could set me right!