[pp.int.general] Big Brother in NL?

[Reinier Bakels]

>    There is indeed an anonymous option in the present chipcard system. But 
> it
>    does not work for people who are entitled for reductions, like owners 
> of
>    season-tickets. For instance, I personally bought a card which gives me 
> the
>    right to travel on trains with a 40% reduction if I travel after 9.00 
> in the
>    morning(*).
>
> If the goal is to provide price reductions after 9am, there are many
> ways to do that, and some are anonymous.  Long-term passes can be
> anonymous too.
>
Yes, but the other aspect of this reduction card is that it is *personal*. 
IIRC the German "Bahncard" system (25/50/100) is valid 24/24 hours. The 
system of all time-tickets is that you pay a certain amount per year and get 
a reduction per trip. Such systems presume a certain amount of travel. The 
simplest is Bahncard 100 were you pay thousands of euro's and travel "free". 
Such a system would not work if I can lend my card to my brother or my 
neighbour.

Anyway, the present political debate in NL is on reducing traffic congestion 
mainly in the urban area in the west ("Randstad"). These problems are really 
serious, and it is a political priority to solve them. But the poblem is 
assumed to be very difficult: it exists for many years and no one was able 
to solve it. Lots of roads have been built or widened, tunnels, birdges, you 
name it. Still there is a congestion that costs billions. There is a dense 
public transportation network, but it does not provide sufficient relief. 
Part of the problem is that the country is so small that people rarely move 
if they get a job elsewhere. And people (especially with children) like to 
live in the countryside rather than in the cities where they work. All these 
people commute. Experiments with "telework" over the internet are not as 
sucessful as one would expect. For many jobs, physical presence is required. 
And in families with children, it does not work if dad works at home.

I think that public transportation eventually is essntial to solve the 
traffic jam problem. But public transportation is expensive. That is ther 
reason that various tariff schemes have been developed that mimic the cost 
structure of automobiles (e.g. a second person sometimes can travel for 
free, because the marginal cost of a second person in a car is zero). The 
purpose is to make piblic transportation more attractive from a cost 
perspective, and still get sufficient income. Without relying too much on 
subsidies by taxpayers. Incidentally, the EU plays a bad role here, 
requiring the privatisation of railway companies. But "markets" do not work 
in this fields. Policy makers believe economists, but economics is a 
"science" that constantly fails to make proper predictions (think of the 
present financial crisis). The privatised railway system in the UK is a 
disaster. The Dutch railway system was split into a state-run infrastructure 
company, and a privatised transporation company. But it is a 
near-monopolist. Strange enough all shares are still owned by the 
government, but the company is run as an indepdent company - which is as 
arrogant as one can expect from a (bad) monopolist. German railways have 
plans for real privatisation (IPO) - so they decided to cut cost, to make 
them more attractive for potential shareholders, by decreasing maintenance. 
The result is that major parts of the Berlin "S-Bahn" are out of service for 
several months: because of insufficient maintenance of the brake systems, 
the authorities decided that it was no longer safe to travel with this 
system. Perhaps the French SNCF is better - I think they basically ignored 
the EU requirements.

The PP representives in the EU parliament may have the opportunity to 
address the public transporantion problems - the link with core PP issues is 
apparently pretty strong.

reinier








oits.




reinier