>wrote:
>>What what will happen to this once great railway system now that it is
>>wide open to competition in the open market?
>What open market? Governemt still owns the track. Just like the
>various reports that recomended this sort of competition, based on
>incorrect assumptions.
>The real competition is road and air.
>Terry Flynn.
The Government owns the roads and in the cases of the major capitals at least
at the current time , owns the airports as well.
Who owns the infrastructure isnt important,what is important is who controls
the infrastructure.
In the case of air and road the "owner" ie the Govt isnt itself directly an
operator,ie the Govt doesnt fly Govt planes in competition to private planes
and doesnt run Govt trucks in competition to private trucking companies.
In the case of Rail however , this is not true.
The Railway authorities who "control" the railway infrastructure also run
trains over the infrastructure directly in competition to private operators
trying to do the same thing,and also provide the control, ie the train
controllers are direct employees of the Rail Authority.
This is a classic conflict of interest,and would be akin to Air Traffic
Controllers at Sydney Airport being employees of Quantas or Ansett.
For true competition to exist within the Rail systems in Australia , the
concept of ownership and control of the Rail Infrastructure has to be totally
isolated from the operation of trains,ie the Train Controllers and schedulers
cannot be employed by the same organizations who run the trains.
Sadly even the creation of Track Australia , (if it ever gets going) will not
address this issue.
The other problem that must be addressed is the issue of who has the right to
run trains and on what basis this right can be withdrawn.
A classic example of this sort of problem was the application of AN to run the
IP into Melb whilst the Broken Hill line was being repaired and the Refusal of
the PTC to let them.
Could you imagine this sort of scenerio occurring in air or road Transport, no
chance.
Sadly I cant see any short term fix to all of this , other than rail in
Australia continuing to become less and less relevant to anything and
eventually the pollies will simply forget it , ie no more funding and thats
the end.
cheers
MD
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Maurie Daly
Department of Communications Lab.
Canberra
Australia
mauried@commslab.gov.au
ph 6 2791331
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