Boltar wrote:
Dave Arquati wrote:
Why should they run it themselves? Doing so would be unlikely to bring
many benefits. The concession approach is similar to the running of the

Apart from the fact that they wouldn't require having to make a profit
out of the service , unlike any company that does run it. Unless they
have all been struck by the christmas spirit and will do it all for no
comeback.

The whole point of a penalty/incentive regime is that the need to make a
profit forces the concessionaire to deliver high performance - because
if they don't, they will lose money and eventually have to give way to a
more efficient company.

The difficulty running the service publicly is precisely the one you
just pointed out for a private company. Will the public sector employees
deliver a high performance service just because they have a warm, fuzzy
feeling about working for the public? Some of them may, but certainly
not all. On the other hand, the concessionaire will have to run a
high-performance service because if they don't, they will be penalised.

DLR, which has a phenomenal track record, and it allows a performance
incentive and penalty regime to be installed so that the concessionnaire
is continually motivated in the right direction. You'd be unlikely to

I suspect its rather easy to run a completely isolated computer
controller light railway which pretty much runs itself. Quite another
to run a semi-metro system that will run on network rail lines and be
subject to all the usual cockups and delays.

Accepted, but DLR services do operate seamlessly across infrastructure
owned by three different organisations (one public and two private), and
maintained by three different private organisations. Overground services
will operate on infrastructure owned and maintained by a single
(semi-public) company.

If, in the 1980s, someone had asked for £1.5bn to build a 40km light
railway network throughout the derelict docklands of East London, they
would have been laughed out of the Treasury - but by 2012, that will be
the investment in and scale of the DLR.

I think that says it all really. If they'd built more originally it
would have probably cost somewhat less in real terms. And don't forget
the DLR could probably no longer cope with the daily traffic to canary
wharf. If the JLE hadn't been built it would probably be falling to
bits under the strain right now. The DLR was only ever a half hearted
cut price token gesture from the Thatcher government who wanted to be
seen to be doing something but pay bugger all for it. If they had been
really serious about regenerating Docklands as opposed to just hoping
for the best they'd have built a tube line there from the start.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Given the situation in the area in the
early 80s, it would have been irresponsible to gamble many hundreds of
millions of pounds of public money at once on a new Tube line and hope
that it brought development.

As it was, the much smaller (£77m) initial investment in the DLR *did*
bring Canary Wharf - a smaller risk for a big reward.

The JLE got built because the DLR brought the traffic for it. In fact,
the JLE did *not* have a favourable cost-benefit ratio when it was given
the green light - it was something like 0.92. That's with Canary Wharf
already well-progressed. Imagine what the situation would have looked
like in 1985.

--
Dave Arquati
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London