The problematic British Rail and privatization

Since I have lived in Britain for over eight years, I think British railways are very problematic and privatization does not work well to improve the public transport capacity. Trains are expensive and slow and cannot meet the need of the public. For example, travelling from London to Edinburgh by train could cost over 100 pounds for a single adult; however, people can choose to travel by plane, which is sometimes cheaper and much faster. This is a relatively long travel distance, so how about shorter ones? Nowadays people have cars available to them for daily uses, even if they do not own a car, they can still rent cars. If you can drive a car, the time taken when driving a car is actually shorter than the time taken when travelling by a train, and has similar costs. Therefore, when people choose to travel by train, there are several main reasons: they cannot drive a car, they dislike driving for long distance, the airlines are not available, they are tourists who want to watch the views. The railway service companies complain that because the small number of passengers, the average cost is too high, so they have to set up high prices. I think that the real problem of British railways is it needs to update its hardware. It does not have modern locomotives to drive trains fast enough to catch up with people's pace in the modern era. This requires huge investment in the early stage, which is not something that private companies can afford or even are willing to do. Therefore, privatization does not solve the problem in the railway industry. It may improve the management efficiency but ignore the fundamental problems in the industry. The government should intervene in such something which is deserved by the society but no one is willing or able to pay for.

To conclude, the state management may have some efficient issues; however, when it comes to some investment decisions which have very high risk and requires significantly large amount of financial support, the intervention of the government becomes crucially important, as the government may be the only party in the society which is able to take such high risk. I think that the importance of the government spending strategy is to take the risk that no one else is able to take in order to correct the market failure.