We have less lines and lots of late trains. Funny thing is that the private company "Deutsche Bahn" was doing so bad it is now 100%owned by the state but still a "profit orientated" private company that does weird shit in order to fake the numbers.

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not a fan of privatisation of existing systems either. Nor a fan of private companies providing public transport, but in Estonia that works because they have to adhere to strict terms.

What I meant was specifically in the context of private companies building infrastructure that's specced out by the government and will be owned by the government - that it works in Europe.

In the US a large problem is that the private companies can own the infrastructure they build and then deny other companies usage

There is also an example of this happening here in Estonia too - Telia (which acquired Elion) owns way too much of the fiber optic networks, particularly the last mile connections and now you have relatively little competition - if you want an Internet connection at home, depending on where you live, you may only be able to get broadband from Telia.

But at the same time - we also have private companies build our roads and that works fine for us, because the roads still belong to the country and everyone can use them all the same. Our rail network is owned by the government and while there's only one (state-owned) company running people transport on it, many companies can use it for transportation of goods.

[–] Johanno@feddit.org 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

As long as the product is owned by the government it works. You can pay a contractor to build it, maybe even manage it, but you can't give the infrastructure to the private company that then has a monopoly

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 5 points 3 months ago

Exactly.

Public money spent = public owns the end result

Should be exactly this simple.