this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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This happens in most European countries as well, I believe?
It works fine as long as the private companies are held accountable for their shit and the high-level planning is done by public offices.
It breaks down when there are no consequences for budget or deadline overruns, or the actual deliverable failing to meet requirements, because obviously private companies are gonna fleece the tax payer.
Well since the privatisation of germanies public transport systems everything went downhill.
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.
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.
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
Exactly.
Public money spent = public owns the end result
Should be exactly this simple.