Why public transport keeps failing
The lost art of Dutch infrastructure
Heritage Standard is a paid publication for men who inherited a civilisation but not the instruction manual. Every week: a free essay naming what was lost, and a paid essay showing what to do about it.
You know the feeling…
Standing on the platform at your local train station, watching the departure board flicker from 5 minutes delayed to 10 minutes to ‘no information available.’ The crowd thickens. People check their phones, calculating if they will make their connection, or if they will be late to work.
Then: ‘The 7:32 service has been cancelled. Next train departs at 8:02.’
While annoyed, nobody is surprised, this has become normal. NS (Dutch Railways) will send an automated apology in their app. And their executives (ex-politicians) will still get their bonuses for operational improvements.
Meanwhile, in 1632, boats departed Amsterdam for Haarlem on the hour, every hour, arriving when the timetable promised. It was Europe’s first scheduled public transport system, pulled by horses, yet more reliable than anything you will use today.
If you boarded at 10:00, you arrived before 11:00. You could not check your phone, nor get an automated notification.
And contrary to nowadays, this system ran profitably for 200 years without any subsidies.
What changed was who runs the system and what they optimise for.
This essay is about what Dutch engineering once was, how it actually worked, and why modern infrastructure is worse despite appearing more advanced.
A system that worked
By 1665, the trekvaart network spanned 415 kilometres of engineered canals connecting every major city of Holland. A boat towed by one horse at a consistent speed.
The men who built this understood they were building a system, not managing a business.
The canal depth was standardised across the entire network. The locks were positioned at calculated intervals. The towpaths were maintained to exact specifications. The horses bred specifically for 8-hour towing shifts. And the boats built to identical dimensions.
Change one variable and you had to recalculate the entire network.
The engineers who designed this had spent decades working on canals, not KPIs. They understood water flow from digging drainage ditches. Understood boat construction from building them. Knew horse capabilities from breeding and training them. And how weather affected operations because the Trekvaart operated in all weather conditions.
Their knowledge was embodied, since they had done the work.
The system worked for 200 years because it was made by people who understood how the pieces actually functioned together, not how they looked in theory.
What runs public transport now
Modern public transport has computer-controlled switches, real-time tracking, and electronic scheduling optimised to the minute. Centuries of additional technology, and billions in infrastructure investment.
Still: trains and buses are ALWAYS late.
Which is not a technology problem, but a management choice.
The Dutch Railways are run by Wouter Koolmees, who became CEO in November 2022.
His career before that…
Minister of Social Affairs and Employment from 2017 to 2022
Member of the House of Representatives from 2010 to 2017, serving as D66’s financial spokesman.
Worked at the Ministry of Finance as head of budget policy.
An entire career spent in government offices, parliament, and ministries. Optimising budgets, negotiating coalition agreements, reforming pension systems, and managing policy portfolios.
He has never operated a train. Nor maintained rail infrastructure, nor worked a single day in its operations. He may have taken the train, but that is all.
He does have a degree in economics from Utrecht University, and is in a network of neoliberal circlejerkers, who gave him this job.
This is what managerialism produces: circlejerks selected for their ability to manage abstract systems, not for their understanding of what the average employee actually does.
But Koolmees is not an outlier, rather the model of pseudo-government companies like NS / Dutch Railways.
His predecessor as CEO was Marjan Rintel, who left in 2022 to become CEO of KLM (also terribly managed) Before NS, she worked at Achmea insurance, PostNL, and ABN AMRO.
A career moving between executive positions in completely unrelated industries. Insurance, postal service, banking, railways, airlines. The actual operations do not seem to matter, since management is management (what they think).
Before Rintel was Roger van Boxtel, CEO from 2014 to 2020. Before NS, he was CEO of Menzis health insurance. Before that, Minister of Urban Policy and Integration. Before that, State Secretary for Education. A politician who became an insurance executive who became a railway CEO.
None of these people built the expertise to run a railway by working in railways. They built the expertise to manage organisations by moving between executive positions in unrelated fields.
They are professional LinkedIN NPC’s: talking about work is more important than how the actual work.
Who destroyed this
Let us go back to the root cause: the guild system being destroyed by force.
Napoleon forced the abolition of Dutch guilds between 1795 and 1818. The revolutionary governments declared them ‘medieval monopolies’ that ‘restricted free trade.’
Their explicit goal: eliminate craft organisations to liberate labor.
The apprenticeships ended, and standards disappeared. The knowledge of how soil feels at 15 metres, which timber comes from which forest, how to identify foundation failure none of this was in books because it could not be. It lived in the hands of masters who corrected apprentices through years of practice.
A type of knowledge that died with the last guild masters. Knowledge we only retroactively ‘discover’ now.
Instead of guilds we have engineering schools teaching abstract principles. Soil mechanics as equations. Load calculations as formulas.
A modern civil engineer can calculate theoretical load capacity. But cannot feel when a pole hits sand. He cannot identify weak timber by grain pattern. He was never taught these things, because he will likely never talk to the men constructing his ideas.
The real collapse came later. James Burnham spoke a lot on this.
In the 1950s, and beyond, a political class of neoliberal technocrats convinced that markets could optimise everything, and dismantled what remained of our institutional competence. (This revolution already happened earlier in the USA.)
They privatised infrastructure, and introduced ‘competitive tendering’. People with skills were replaced with consultants, experience with Excel sheets, and standards with KPIs.
Dutch Railways / NS today is run by Wouter Koolmees, a D66 career politician. He has never built, maintained or operated anything.
This is what runs modern infrastructure now: people who believe systems can be managed like balance sheets, who think reliability is a metric to optimise, and assume expertise is whatever came out of their university textbooks.
The men who built the trekvaart would have been master canal engineers with decades of practical experience. The men who drove foundation poles were guild craftsmen who had apprenticed for seven years. The men who built windmills were millwrights who inherited knowledge spanning generations.
The men running public transport operations are technocrats who think punctuality is like Russian Roulette: it either happens, or it does not.
What we lost
We cannot rebuild the trekvaart, because the ethos that led men to design integrated transport systems like these is gone.
Modern systems pretend to be better… Not objectively, but optimised for a quarterly return, or a bonus for board members, not generational durability.
Public transport is doomed to have subsidies, because for some magic reason we cannot have profitable and reliable transport like Japan has. So the managerial midwest optimise vanity metrics instead of whether the system works. Thought out by people who have never built anything, nor ever will.
Your train might arrive eventually, overcrowded and late. And you pay €10,- for a service that would have been shameful in 1732. The CEO receives bonuses for ‘operational efficiency’ and awards for his service.
We have accepted this incompetence to be normal.
Because the people who knew how to build things that actually work are either dead, underpaid, or left the industry a long time ago.
The people who actively kill knowledge are now in charge.
—Robbert
An enjoyable article, here. It’s clear the author is a man who understands quality when he sees (and feels) it.
I’m put in mind of the great fanfares often made in the UK when a new franchisee is chosen to run a railway, or ‘Train Operating Company’ as some are compelled to call them. Let’s take Dutch railways as an example. They were granted the right to operate Scotrail, an enterprise which has existed since the first years of railways, notwithstanding legal name changes, etc..
To be expected, NS, operating under their fiscal cordon sanitaire of “Abellio”, messed it up and were told to bugger off, just as the majority of franchisees had also been. But who were they really? Nothing more than beancounters and pocketers thereof. A management elite of random executives with CVs littered with wildly differing industries, but executives nonetheless, that was all that seemed to matter.
I had the pleasure this afternoon of reading through the internal vacancy list for such a railway. Their engineering section was jam-packed with highly detailed job specifications, the intention being to recruit into a role someone who knows what a railway is and for and does. They clearly demanded and expected a middle-manager to have been on the railway since they were in nappies. And why not, say I.