If you privatize public transport, be like JR

Every few years Bangkok rediscovers privatization. The State Railway is late and broke; the buses are a political object; someone has been to London or Singapore and returned with a slide deck. I am not against selling the railway. I am against selling it badly. If you are going to do it, be like JR.

Two privatizations that are not the same thing

In 1987 Japan broke up Japanese National Railways. The move that mattered was not “private” versus “public.” It was horizontal split, vertical keep.

Six regional passenger companies (and a freight company) replaced one nationwide bureaucracy. Each passenger JR still owned the track, the trains, the stations, and — this is the part reformers skip — a lot of the land around the stations. Management stopped answering to the Diet on every rural siding and started answering to a timetable and a balance sheet. Old JNR debt was parked in a settlement corporation so the new firms were not born already drowned. Thin rural lines were offered to local governments or replaced. The three Honshu companies (JR East, JR Central, JR West) eventually listed. Service got better. Fares did not have to jump to close the hole.

That is not the British story. Britain unbundled: a track owner over here, franchised operators over there, rolling-stock companies somewhere else. The theory was competition on the rails. The practice was a coordination problem with a fatality rate. Railtrack went bankrupt. The state crept back in as Network Rail. You can call that privatization if you want. I call it taking a system that only works as one machine and selling it as spare parts.

Europe’s “vertical separation” — government keeps the infrastructure, private firms run the trains — is closer to Britain than to Japan. Japan looked at that and did the opposite on purpose.

What JR actually sold

Three things, not a logo.

1. Someone who owns the corridor end to end. If the track is crumbling, the same firm that sells tickets pays for the rail. No endless argument about whose budget the sleeper replacement is on. In a monsoon country that is not a detail. I have spent enough time on floodplain tracks and buckling CWR to know that “the operator will just run around the failure” is a sentence written by people who do not run trains.

2. Stations as a business, not a waiting room. JR companies make money from the building, the department store, the hotel, the offices over the ticket gates. That is why they care whether you can walk from the platform into the city. A concession that only skims farebox will never rebuild the catchment. Bangkok already knows the half-version of this: BTS and MRT stations that open into malls work; stations that open into a motorcycle taxi scrum do not.

3. A region, not a franchise map. JR East is eastern Honshu, not “whichever lines won the last tender.” You can plan a network, a rolling-stock family, a suburb. Franchise boundaries teach operators to game the edge.

What JR did not do is pretend that Hokkaido is Tokyo. The island companies still struggle. Density along the Tokaido and through the capital region is doing a lot of the work. Anyone who copies JR onto a sparse network and expects JR East’s dividend is not copying JR. They are copying a press release.

Thailand is closer to JNR than it wants to admit

SRT is a production-driven national railway with political projects, deferred maintenance, and a balance sheet that cannot fund the next flood season. That is JNR in 1986, with worse drainage. BMTA is a different mess — urban buses as employment policy — but the same temptation: announce a private operator and leave the depot, the labour, and the road space untouched.

We already privatized pieces. BTS and MRT are concessions. They work best where the city is dense and the station is a real estate event. They do not magically fix the national railway, and they do not prove that the next step is to franchise SRT operations onto track SRT still cannot maintain.

If a Thai government wants the JR outcome, the checklist is unfashionable:

• Split SRT into regional passenger companies that own their infrastructure, plus freight with clear track-access rules. Do not separate “ops” from “track” and call it reform.
• Park the legacy debt outside those companies. A privatized SRT that inherits the whole hole will only raise fares and skip maintenance.
• Give them station land they can develop, with rules that keep housing in the mix so this does not become another exclusive TOD.
• Let thin lines go to provinces or to buses. JR did that. Pretending every branch is a Shinkansen is how JNR died.
• Accept that Isaan is not the Chao Phraya corridor. The Honshu companies listed; the islands needed other tools. A serious plan names which Thai corridors can be JR East and which need a public service contract.

Vertical integration is not a slogan about “synergy.” It is how you make the person who underinvests in drainage lose money when the line floods.

The objection I take seriously

JR worked because Tokyo-Yokohama-Nagoya-Osaka is a ridership machine, the state spent a decade preparing the split, and Japanese private railways had already shown that you can live on fares and property. Bangkok’s rail spines have some of that density. Most of SRT does not. Copying JR onto the whole map would strand rural Thailand.

Fine. Then do not copy it onto the whole map. Copy it onto the corridors that can carry it, and be honest about the rest. That is still more JR than selling a 20-year operate-and-maintain contract on a track you will not upgrade.

I also take the labour objection seriously. JNR’s headcount fell hard; the settlement corporation existed partly to place people. A Thai plan that has no sentence about workers is not a plan. It is a procurement.

Privatization is a means

I do not care whether the logo on the train is a ministry or a listed company. I care whether the entity can invest, whether it is punished for a flooded cutting, and whether the station is a place you would send someone you like. JR East is that kind of entity. A farebox franchise on rotting rail is not.

So: if you want to keep SRT as a state railway, fund it like one and stop using it as a jobs program. If you want to privatize, be like JR — regional, vertically integrated, stations that earn, debt left behind, rural lines told the truth. Anything in between is how you get Britain’s diagram with Thailand’s monsoon.

The numbers behind that claim — what 1987 actually moved, who listed, who is still on the public books — are in the next post: JR: past, present, and future.