„Es ist das gleiche tägliche Elend“: Deutschlands schreckliche Züge sind kein Witz für ein auf Effizienz ausgerichtetes Land

by BitterFuture

13 comments

  2. You’re a fine one to talk. England’s public transit is privately owned and it basically shuts down on holidays, weekends, or whenever a route isn’t profitable.

  3. Hmm so it really started to go down from 2016 onwards, right as trains became more important due to climate change getting more attention by the public. Who was responsible during that time? Someone perhaps who managed to present a new record budget surplus each year? Wonder how she managed that…

  4. German trains are basically good to very good. The old-slow ones (RB) tend to have fewer passengers, more space. The fast new ones (ICE) tend to be crowded expensive and faaaaaaast. Both are basically always on time or at worst 5-10 minutes late.

    Compare: British rail is slow, expensive, timeliness questionable.

    USA – Boston to Washington corridor has at most a half dozen trains per day (3 in each direction morning noon and night!) which is ridiculous, but at least the corridor is usually on time. Usually. Outside the corridor, the further west you go, the likelier you are to run into hours or even DAYS of delay, especially in Winter.
    Amtrak is expensive, or at least not cheap. However the cars are clean, roomy, and there is a dining car which is good since you might be on your trip a few hours OR DAYS longer than planned…

  5. “German efficiency” is a myth. Their governance is steeped in byzantine bureaucratic processes and almost nothing is digitised. Everything requires visiting various government offices with heaps of physical paperwork or sending stuff through the mail.

    Germany should learn from their neighbour Denmark, where most government work is digitised and fairly efficient.

  6. Considering you can travel by train through the entire country as often as you want for 49€ per month, the system is fantastic. While you may only use the non-highspeed-trains, you can travel through the entire country in 10-12 hours still. e.g. Kempten (Allgäu) -> Hamburg is ~12h.

    REs and RBs are usually on time too – it’s ICEs which are notoriously late.

    I really don’t get the complaining, I’ve been travelling almost exclusively by train and other public transport for 20 years and it’s fine. I only experienced a single ‘catastrophically late’-incident, and that was when some guy threw himself in front of our train in before reaching Augsburg-Oberhausen. Even then, DB paid for my ~300€ taxi ticket home.

  7. Shame that they got rid of their older system of government where the trains ran on time.

  8. Could have gone to shit but I thought the rail system was pretty awesome around 1990 . Could go about anywhere and was very efficient at the time.

  9. Germany has a hard time with trains in recent history. They are now set to be 15(!) years behind schedule on the Basel-Karlsruhe upgrade that would unlock the full potential of the swiss NEAT project to facilitate trans-alpine transport. Switzerland managed to build a 57km tunnel one year ahead of schedule and Germany now says they need until 2040 to lay some tracks on flat land.

  10. It boils down to:

    1. Privatisation of Deutsche Bahn in the 90s and the following massive cuts to infrastructure maintenance
    2. Lack of Digitization of routine processes and again infrastructure
    3. Car centric country with a huge lobby on the automotive industry that has for years stifled more investments in alternative locomotion, such as rail

    and last but not least

    4. the federal model

    its often a case of federal and local governments passing the buck between eachother on large projects and funding til the end of the legislative period and then nothing ends up happening and we got stagnation

    the rahmedetal bridge is a great example of how this process is failing:[https://svtransporte.de/en/2023/02/14/the-dilapidated-rahmedetal-bridge-on-the-a45-has-been-closed-for-more-than-a-year/](https://svtransporte.de/en/2023/02/14/the-dilapidated-rahmedetal-bridge-on-the-a45-has-been-closed-for-more-than-a-year/)

  11. believe me, they are a national joke. have been for couple of decades now.

  12. Routes that influential politicians use are better staffed and serviced so as to give the illusion of good operation.

    The circus never sleeps!

  13. Pshaw, [this](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/veterans-affairs-backlog-files-were-stacked-so-high-they-posed-a-safety-risk-to-va-staff-1) is how America does government efficiency:

    While researching our story on the Veterans Affairs benefits backlog, we saw this Veterans Affairs Administration Inspector General’s report that points out that at one VA center, a regional office in Winston-Salem, N.C., had so much paper that it “created an unsafe workspace for (VA) employees and appeared to have the potential to compromise the integrity of the building.”

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