It's incredible that about 80% of people in this thread seem to be commenting without having looked at the website.
In defense of Deutsche Bahn, countries with comparable infrastructure but more reliable transport have put in about twice as much money per capita for the last 30 years at least.
Also, it went through a pseudo-privatisation back then, which hasn't helped (just private enough to focus on quarterly profits by letting bridges decay so that they have to be rebuilt or repaired in a few years, just public enough that they have to serve a lot of non-lucrative areas by law).
I have to admit I'm rather biased as I work there, but I would say most employees do the best they can with the hand they're dealt. It's just that politicians dealt them a really bad hand. And if Germany were to properly invest in infrastructure from now on, there's so much stuff that has to be repaired that reliability would go down even more in the next decade or so (seriously, this is not something you could fix in a year or two, even with hundreds of billions).
> In defense of Deutsche Bahn, countries with comparable infrastructure but more reliable transport have put in about twice as much money per capita for the last 30 years at least.
Why is that "in defense?"
When you let your infrastructure rot away since the 90s of the last century for something as complex as a train network by brutally underinvesting.
Then you seriously fucked up. There's nothing to defend here.
I think the defense is that it's the fault of the politicians (CDU/CSU, actually), as they are the ones allocating funds towards train infrastructure. The Deutsche Bahn is state-owned in all but name (which was one of the major fuckups of the last red-green government).
"We elected right-wing parties who are against sane wages and unions and often use/exploit immigrants to depress wages while funneling billions into companies and away from infrastructure projects. So we decided to elect an even more right-wing party to blame immigrants while doing even more funneling away. It will definitely solve all the infrastructure problems that those penniless brown people and weird speaking ones caused."
Because DB does not decide its own budget. And we're literally living in times where their employees are getting attacked and verbally abused by the passengers for the state of the train system
Yes everyone does their best but in typical german fashion nobody does the right thing because it would mean to break some rules or habit. Its a general problem but it shows hard at DB.
> It's incredible that about 80% of people in this thread seem to be commenting without having looked at the website.
In defence of the 80%, there is no indication in any section other than the About page that it is not real money (with the possible exception of the suspiciously high sums of money), and most commercial services have fairly useless About pages. The HN headline presents it as if it's real.
A far cry from GP's implication that "inadvertently click[ing] on the website" is sufficient to see this.
As someone who is in a group who regularly trashes DB at will, no one blames the line employees, but definitely blame people in upper levels of management
> I have to admit I'm rather biased as I work there, but I would say most employees do the best they can with the hand they're dealt.
I think most people don't blame the normal employees. The blame is on the management layers, the "Wasserkopf", that gives themselves boni, even if things are done poorly and are going badly. A disconnect from the reality on the tracks.
I don't see improvements. I rather see worse and worse reliability, even though Deutsche Bahn asks for more and more money from the government. That money is disappearing somewhere, at least partially, instead of arriving in projects for improving the situation. In many places, if not most, there isn't even a single turnout track, so that any construction work halts the whole line. Disastrous. You cannot ask people to buy train tickets for 100 to 200 EUR, and then be hours late. I mean, you can, but then you are delusional. They are not surviving because of their great product or service, they are only surviving, because people don't have good alternatives. Basically, it is extortion. In other countries I pay 1/10 of the ticket price and I arrive on friggin' time, on a much longer ride.
> I don't see improvements. I rather see worse and worse reliability, even though Deutsche Bahn asks for more and more money from the government.
Maybe you should leave your home then and go take a look. Most of the Stations,tracks and signalling around me were renewed and modernized in the last 5 years. During the traffic light coalition, a huge chunk of the main lines also got modernized
> That money is disappearing somewhere
Yes, it's "disappearing" in construction projects and new trains. You're onto something big.
> You cannot ask people to buy train tickets for 100 to 200 EUR, and then be hours late
The average train ticket price is well below 100-200€. Also have you heard of the Bahncard?
> In other countries I pay 1/10 of the ticket price and I arrive on friggin' time, on a much longer ride
What other countries are these supposed to be? I've travelled extensively around Europe, and there is hardly a country where you get the same level of comfort for the price.
Even Flixtrain is rarely cheaper than DB with Bahncard50, and they run decades old junk trains without AC, and sometimes even without heating in the winter
In many places, if not most, there isn't even a single turnout track, so that any construction work halts the whole line. Disastrous.
That's true, but that was the result of our moron politicians dreaming of privatising the network in the early 2000s.
We should abolish the stupid structure of a publicly owned company organised like a private one, that was the result of that process back then
I find your comment disrespectful and bordering breaking HN rules.
Please stop taking parts of sentences out of context when quoting, and please refrain from trying to dismiss other people's personal experiences as less valid than your subjective experience.
> What other countries are these supposed to be? I've travelled extensively around Europe, and there is hardly a country where you get the same level of comfort for the price.
Well, there you have it. You only consider European countries. That is quite a limited perspective. In China I can pay around 12 EUR and take a reliable high speed train, that takes me further than Germany is in size. The interior of those trains looks a bit older than ICEs in Germany, but actually offer more space for each individual passenger and allow for a more comfortable ride. The trains actually go fast (200-300km/h), not like in Germany, where it can happen, that you take an ICE train and for part of the way crawl at 30km/h. I am aware, that the comparison is not a 1 to 1 comparison, but ultimately the high speed train system there just works. Whether that is due to massive government investment or cheaper workforce, I don't debate. The result is good, reliable and cheap train service, that pays off in being way more climate-friendly, than the bad train service in Germany, that pushes people to take the car instead.
But another example of how prices in Germany are insane is actually another city in Europe: Madrid. The metro system there even rivals or surpasses modern Chinese cities, because it is even simpler to use. You pay for "1 ride", only a little more than 1 EUR (I paid 11.60EUR for 10 rides), and that ride lasts until you exit the station somewhere. You can change as many times as you want, stay in the metro for hours riding back and forth, if you so desire. The moment you leave a station, you will need to scan your card and only then 1 ride is deducted from your card. It is so simple, it is a dream. Meanwhile in Germany, you pay 3-4x the price for a 1h ticket or so-and-so many stops ticket. Ridiculous.
Germany did a good thing: The Germany ticket. But slowly the cost for that is creeping up. From originally 49 EUR, it is now at over 60 EUR. If this goes on, it will soon no longer be a viable choice for people, who don't take the train every day, but maybe 2-3 times a week.
You've made some unfounded rumors and claims, calling it your "personal" experience whilst calling the fact that there was more investment and maintenance of infrastructure done "subjective".
Was your claim that the better funding doesn't get invested but is disappearing "somewhere" also a "personal experience" ?
Your comment now is way more balanced and objective than the stuff you wrote previously, and I would probably agree with you
Privitisation is a huge curse, and a tremendous scam perpetuated by capitalist financiers. Where has it ever produced better results? No private entity can provide a service at cost like the government can.
Telekom is a profitable enterprise. Yet, telecom infrastructure in Germany is on a remarkably bad level and relatively expensive. Cell coverage is also still bad, especially when travelling via rail or car.
With the exception if the Japanese Rail, all the other examples are different in one crucial detail: they are not natural monopolies.
I don’t think you’re aware of how bad the national railway has been managed in japan, they even went broke in the 80s with trillions in debt and had to split up sell off all their infrastructure and vehicles. That’s the reason why there’s often many non-interconnected competing stations at the same site today.
Yeah, I have absolutely no clue about japanese rail whatsoever, so I chose to not comment about it.
For Germany though, the rail „privatization“ has been an absolute failure no matter how you try to spin it, unfortunately. But hey, at least we have nice rolling stock!
I would not call telecommunications privatization in Germany a success story.
Yes, we can use more devices now. Prices have stayed more or less the same (or have risen, corrected by inflation. Service quality has collapsed, though.
In defense of Deutsche Bahn, countries with comparable infrastructure but more reliable transport have put in about twice as much money per capita for the last 30 years at least.
Also, it went through a pseudo-privatisation back then, which hasn't helped (just private enough to focus on quarterly profits by letting bridges decay so that they have to be rebuilt or repaired in a few years, just public enough that they have to serve a lot of non-lucrative areas by law).
I have to admit I'm rather biased as I work there, but I would say most employees do the best they can with the hand they're dealt. It's just that politicians dealt them a really bad hand. And if Germany were to properly invest in infrastructure from now on, there's so much stuff that has to be repaired that reliability would go down even more in the next decade or so (seriously, this is not something you could fix in a year or two, even with hundreds of billions).