Should the public transport system be brought back under public control?

No absolutely not. I'm old enough to remember BT, British Gas, the Railways and even some airlines before they were privatised and they were awful.

Look at what Richard Branson is trying to do with the railways. This is surely one of the largest, most intractable problems in the country.

How to get a regular, clean, efficient and cheap rail service. It is worth thinking for just a few moments about the sheer scale of this problem.

Next time you're tempted to complain about a late or dirty train, spare a thought for the immensity of this problem, which, I humbly submit, is way, way beyond your (and mine) capacity to solve.

I'll give you just one tiny example. In the morning, everyone wants to travel to London. So you need five hundred trains, ready and waiting at various locations around the country, stacked ten deep for people to get
into the capital.

In simple terms, come ten o'clock in the morning after the rush hour, all 500 trains are stacked fifty deep in sidings at Paddington and Waterloo.

What do you do with them? Leave them sitting there all day ready for the return rush? That's not a very good use of a fifty million pound train.

Using it only twice a day will guarantee bankruptcy! You want to keep the thing running all day and night, if possible.

But how?

Well... If you could come up with a creative solution, you would make a fortune. That one's been worked out already, of course. I'm just giving it as an example.

How do you absolutely guarantee to have a driver ready, on time, for each one of the fifty thousand departures each day, without overstaffing? Think of the consequences of not solving this problem! A train full of passengers just sitting at the platform.

How do you reconcile passenger safety with the realities of high-speed travel on outdated track? How do you combat an epidemic of ticket fraud without using Gestapo-like tactics?

How do you ensure your drivers are fit to drive without seeming overly paternalistic and administering breath tests and drug tests? How do you manage the media, who are always out to get you? What do you say when a rail disaster occurs due to (say) a driver high on drugs when you had a test available, but elected not to use it?

It goes on and on and on. The problems are huge, but the rewards are vast. Hundreds of millions of pounds - even billions are on the table for anyone who can come up with some creative solutions to problems like this.

Branson is willing to take on problems which others shudder at. He is willing to find solutions and clean up to the tune of tens of millions at a time. That's why he's so rich (and deserves to be).

And handing them back to the government is most certainly NOT the answer.

100% yes. Beeching shafted British Railways and it never recovered. Things don't have to be lavish. Check out the Moscow metro (not the stations, the trains) things there are unbelievably better than the tube, more passengers, better service, random stopping.

The replacement of foolishly removed branch lines and light rail services in most towns could massively reduce pollution and congestion on the roads. I accept that it may not be cheap and that it will have to be subsidised but other countries offer cheap urban rail and it's time we woke up to that. Trains don't have to be flash or excessively fast, just regular and reliable. I think the emphasis should be on cheap prices with volume use.

Also, having engineering, infrastructure and operations all as one company can only be a good thing.

BTW it helps if you see ticket inspectors on trains to reduce ticket fraud.

The only time London Underground made any sense was when it was in the hands of,(I advise the frail, infirm, those of a nervous dispostion and Leftie Bashers in general to look away NOW), Ken Livingstone!

Remember Fare's Fair? I'm sorry for being Londoncentric here but it was the only time the Underground and London Transport have every worked properly since the war.

The hiving off of LT to vampires like Stagecoach was an absolute disaster as was the removal of the GLC simply because they wouldn't do what Mrs Thatch said.

The only man who has managed to make some sense of the mess once again, whatever you think of him, is Ken!

Well, truth be told, the railway is already kind of back in the public sector, and we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.

Railtrack PLC was replaced by Network Rail, a not-for-profit company owned by the government. Subsequently an enormous maze of private sector contractors have been brought back into Network Rail.

Whilst train operators are still private sector. But DfT Rail now specifies the franchises (services, prices, train types etc) to such a high degree that there is little scope for the innovation that the private sector can and does bring into virtually every other industrial sector. So they just run the service as specified by the DfT, and whichever company can do it cheapest gets the franchise from DfT.

So what we've got is a system that has all the costs built into it that are required by having a multitude of companies involved in everything (all the contractural relationships etc)- always the big negative of the private sector model, but with all the commercial incentive stripped away, which is the problem with pure public sector models.

I agree with TSG, people forget just how terrible the railways were when they were State owned. The quesion refers to how the service is worse now and the cost more but the cost was probably much higher before except the passengers didn't pay, all the rest of us tax payers paid to prop up the industry.

Why should the majority pay to maintain a service only used by a relative few?

Having said that, the railways in France are superb. The trains are fast, modern and a pleasure to travel on. THe French would normally chose the train for long journeys over the car. Sometime even putting their car onto the train for the journey. So it can be done.

It's interesting that in England the trains are private and the roads are public and they are both terrible ... in France the (long distance) roads are private and the railway is State owned and they are both fantastic. We just get it completely wrong either way ... it's just us

This is a hard one to answer in a couple of ways.
The trains have improved over the last few years, they are now mostly (but not all) more modern and cleaner. Arrival times are now quite good. The problem I find is for my work I have to travel from almost one end of the country to the other, using three different service providers. In the old days of British and Scottish rail there was a certain amount of co-operation between the operators in regard to holding an out going train for a few minutes to allow connection for a slightly late in coming service. A prime example of this is I often arrive in Edinburgh just as my connection is doors closing and starting to pull out. In the old days this outbound service would be held for a few minutes and make the time up by the next stop. Now First Scott Rail will not help G.N.E.R. who will not help Central etc etc. My train journey takes 10 hours approx if all connections are made but 3 or 4 hours can be added to this if connections are not made. If I lived closer to Heathrow or Luton I could fly to Aberdeen for far less than the cost of a train ticket but unfortunatly my nearest airport is Norwich which happens to be the most expensive airport in the country for internal flights. I feel I am now about to start ranting about the way B.M.I. and Eastern Airways work with each other to keep the prices high. Come on Easy Jet or Ryan Air please start flying Norwich to Aberdeen.

The story of the privately run buses in our town is amazing

First have increased fares three times in six months, they have risen 100% in two years
Up to 50 routes in South Yorkshire have been axed or cut.

Since de-regulation (privatisation) of the buses in 1987, South Yorkshire bus journeys have fallen from 350 million a year to 112 million last year.

Before privatisation, the return on capital employed (profit) was only 3%. Now First's profit target is 15%. First Bus Group made £107 million profit last year.

The private rail operators get more public subsidy than British Rail did when it was publicly owned. Supertram, built with £250 million of taxpayers money, was sold to Stagecoach for just £2 million.

The really naughty bit is the greenhouse effect. Increased use of public transport is hailed as a way to combat global warming, but private companies are creaming off so much money the fares are prohibitive. These companies are being greedy, causing environmental damage, and clogging our cities with cars.

As far as re-nationalisation goes, it would cost the taxpayer a fortune, the money's already been given away. We could have much more stringent contols on companies providing public services though, This could be caps on profits, fares and shareholder dividends. Then the money might be more likely to stay with the public, which is where it came from in the first place

YES, the rail, busses, like all the other services that were put out to private contract seem to have gone tits up.

now i'm no great brain but when run by the government a service was provided and as long as it broke even profit was not an issue but now these services are in private ownership that is all the service providers think of hence non profitable routes or services are axed driveing more and more people into car use which i thought is what the government wish to avoid.

i don't use busses or trains because there is never one going where i want to go ,when i want to go there.

in short the government couldn't run them without makeing a loss and so sold them off to private ownership.
you expect these guys to make a profit without cutting services?, private industry won't do it for fun.
they're only interested in money , if its running at a loss they will axe it, any thing else is bad buisness.