Yes, but who would buy Kiwirail? Fifteen years of private ownership have demonstrated pretty thoroughly that:

(a) you cannot run a freight railway in New Zealand on straight commercial terms;
(b) as a result, if you want to have 14m tonnes of loaded freight per year on rail, you have to be prepared to pay some pretty big subsidies; but because,
(c) government will not pay subsidies to a privately-owned ‘monopoly’, as was made clear to both Tranz Rail and Toll;

then, a business as subsidy-dependant as this needs to remain in the public sector, whereas an infrastructural monopoly like Auckland Airport can be and was happily privatised. Certainly, there is no point in putting the passenger side of the rail business back in private ownership.

How many others are abandoning the Western Line? How many of us will NEVER return?

What’s the point of all the investment in upgrades if you disaffect your customer base in the process?

I’ll be keeping an eye on the train patronage statistics over the next year or so. As we’ve seen in the past, a downward trend in PT use is a very difficult thing to stop and reverse.

On what basis do you say that? I know that National would very much like to privatise it again. They have said they wouldn’t do it in this term of government, but I have not heard them giving any such promises for post 2011.

This is one of the problems with the way public transport is funded. With most goods and services we pay the full price directly to the seller. Successful sellers are generally those that provide goods and services that are ones people want to buy and which they deliver to a standard that satisfies buyers.

On the other hand, public transport operators have two customers to satisfy: the traveling public and government, local or central or both. The operator might be able to turn a profit based on subsidy income by keeping government happy, even if their passengers aren’t.

For example, I used to regularly take a long distance train in the UK and then transferred to a local connector service. There was really no point in operating the connector without the long distance service to provide it with passengers. The timetables for each coincided. But, if the long distance service was late, the connector would depart with almost no one on board, rather than waiting. Why? Because if they didn’t, then their departure statistics would look bad and the government would punish them by withholding subsidy. The subsidy was more important than the passengers.

Subsidies are a reality that can’t be avoided. But it will inevitably confuse the link between transport operator and passenger and the incentive to provide the service that the passenger wants.

So if we apply this to the 92 Western Line services that are sheduled to run on an normal weekday, only 30 trains will be more or less on time, 53 will be more than five minutes late and 9 won’t make it at all!