(07 Jan 2020, 4:01 pm)Andreos1 wrote I know you've said in the past that you like a good troll now and again, but really? 

Care to share any examples of competition benefiting the consumer - whether this is related to public transport or not.

We could look at the bus wars seen on and off since 86.
We could look at the continual bail-out of private firms on the ECML and lack of competition on key sections of the route.
We could look at the aggressive buy-out of smaller bus ops and associated agreements stopping the firms re-appearing under another guise for x number of years.

I could go on, but would love to know if you really are trolling or not.

I do love a good troll, but in this case I am not trolling.

The issues that you mentioned regarding the bus wars and the buy outs aren't issues with competition, they are issues with anti-competitive practices by larger companies.
And as I've said in the past, the issues with the ECML aren't necessarily issues with the private firms, but the way the franchise system works. Operators are essentially required to lie about what benefits they will bring if they operate the line, because they know if they don't lie, one of the other operators will and get the franchise instead. This is why we've seen the likes of Virgin not able to meet the targets they said they could, not because they weren't doing well, but because they had to exaggerate so much it would be impossible for any operator to meet them!

As for with competition benefiting the consumer, I am also a fan of technology, so I can give an example with that, although I don't know if this is necessarily the place for it. (Also, I'm heavily simplifying things otherwise I could literally write pages!)
Anywho, there are two main CPU manufacturers, AMD and Intel. For the past decade or so, AMD haven't been able to produce any CPUs that are competitive with Intel's offerings, so instead of launching new products, they've essentially been releasing the same product over and over again (albeit with minor alterations). So we've been stuck on CPUs with 4 cores, Intel said that it was impossible for them to add more into the same size product, they essentially had no competition. Then recently AMD came along and launched their Ryzen CPUs with double the cores that Intel could offer, at a much lower price.
Pretty soon after, Intel released a product they previously said was impossible, a 6 core CPU. Skip forward another year, and Intel released an 8 core CPU, once again something they said was impossible. 
For workstation CPUs, Intel released an 18 core around the same time AMD released a 16 core, but for double the price. The next year, Intel re-released the same CPU again with a different name, but AMD released a 32 core for less than the price of Intel's 18 core. This year, Intel re-released essentially the same CPU again but for half the price in order to compete with AMD's much better, and lower price offerings. Meanwhile, the same day AMD released another 16 core CPU, this time on their consumer platform (the one that previously had 8 cores) which outperforms Intel's 18 core offering.
I think it's fair to say, in this situation, if Intel didn't have the competition from AMD, we would still be stuck on 4 core CPUs like we had been for the past 8 years. In 2016 Intel had around 80% marketshare, now they're down to 65% marketshare.