经济学人下载:英国铁路(2)

The Williams report was commissioned after a catastrophically botched timetable change last summer led to nearly half the trains in northern England being delayed or cancelled. The incident exemplified how the railways, which made much progress after being privatised in the early 1990s, have gone off-track. Last year delays and cancellations reached their worst level in nearly a decade. At the same time passenger numbers fell by 1.4%, the first dip since privatisation. Amid all this, passengers are paying more. Ticket prices have risen twice as fast as wages since 2010.
威廉姆斯的这份报告是在去年夏天的一次灾难性的列车时刻表变动后发布的，那次变动导致英格兰北部近一半的列车延误或取消。这一事件说明，在上世纪90年代初私有化后取得巨大进展的铁路，是如何偏离轨道的。去年，列车延误和取消达到近十年来的最严重水平。与此同时，乘客人数下降了1.4%，这是自私有化以来的首次下降。在这一系列变化中，乘客们花费越来越高。自2010年以来，票价上涨速度是工资上涨速度的两倍。

When Britain broke up and sold British Rail, the state-run monopoly, it hoped to spur competition and cut costs. With this aim it embarked on a radical experiment, tried before only in Sweden, of separating the management of the tracks from that of the trains. Politicians feared that chaos could ensue, and some politically sensitive lines could close, if the system went from rigid state monopoly to free-market free for-all overnight. So they introduced a system of franchises, in which companies could bid for the right to operate specified services, to ensure continuity and allow for the subsidising of loss-making services.
当英国拆分并出售国有垄断企业英国铁路公司时，旨在刺激竞争并降低成本。为了实现这一目标，英国开始了一项激进的实验，将铁轨的管理与火车的管理分离开来，这项实验之前只在瑞典进行过。政客们担心，如果金融体系一夜之间从僵化的国家垄断变成全民自由市场，那么混乱可能随之而来，一些政治敏感路线也可能会随之关闭。因此，政客们引入了特许经营体系，在这个体系中，企业可以竞标特定服务的运营权，以确保连续性，并允许对亏损服务进行补贴。

The opposition Labour Party, which came to back privatisation in the 1990s, wants to renationalise the network. Andy McDonald, the shadow transport secretary, argues that privatisation has left “a fragmented and inefficient network that drives up costs”, and says the answer is for a single state-owned firm to run both trains and track. Most voters seem to agree. A poll last year by BMG Research found that 64% support nationalisation. (The same is not necessarily true of rail-users, notes Anthony Smith of Transport Focus, a watchdog. It finds that passengers care more about having a reliable service than who runs it.)
上世纪90年代开始支持私有化的反对党工党希望将铁路网重新国有化。影子内阁交通部长安迪•麦克唐纳认为，私有化留下了“一个支离破碎且效率低下的铁路网，让成本更高”。他表示，解决办法是让一家国有企业同时运营火车和轨道。大多数选民似乎同意这一观点。BMG研究公司去年的一项调查发现，64%的人支持国有化。(监管机构“交通焦点”的安东尼•史密斯指出，铁路用户的情况未必如此。调查发现，乘客更关心的是提供可靠的服务，而不是由谁来运营。