London has arguably one of the largest and best connected public transport systems in the world and yet if you talk to any person who is a regular user of buses, tubes, trams, or trains about this, they will not shut up about how awful the system as a whole is.

 

From regularly waiting 10 minutes longer than the posted arrival times to never arriving at all seems to be a common experience of all people who take public transport. Nationwide, our trains also seem to be insufficient and inter-city trains are often criticised for their high price. However if we look across to our European neighbours we do not see the same issues.

 

A train ticket from Bologna Centrale to Napoli costs at the cheapest around 45 pounds for a distance covered of about 500 km as the crow flies. To travel the same distance by train in the uk costs around 80 pounds, going from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley. In Luxembourg, whilst travelling 500km in the country alone is impossible due to its tiny size, all public transport is free for those with citizenship. The question is: how is this possible? As you might expect the free public transport of Luxembourg is paid for by taxpayers and the large majority of European train lines are publicly owned and have never been privatised as happened in the UK under Maggie Thatcher. The primary objective therefore of these government owned companies is therefore to break even or not lose too much money whilst also providing the best service to customers. By contrast, a privately-owned company's primary objective is to make profit margins as large as possible by increasing how much the consumer pays and reducing costs by making the trains worse, paying the drivers less ( leading to delays and strikes ) and not caring about anything about complaints because they're still making money. The primary duty of a CEO of a company is not to one’s customers or coworkers but rather to shareholders. Injecting such greed for money into what is arguably an essential service is almost always bad such as healthcare in the US, in which those who are in most dire need of healthcare due to their financial inability to go to the doctor or have insurance are either burdened by hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt or simply turned away.