> Another figure illustrates why the practice is necessary from a Swiss perspective: in 2023, 92.5 percent of all trains in Switzerland reached their destination on time, compared to only 64 percent for long-distance trains in Germany.
To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the threshold at 15 minutes ("Reisendenpünktlichkeit") [2].
To put this a bit into perspective: long-distance trains in Germany typically travel for at least half a day. "Long-distance" trains in Switzerland can be compared to regional lines in Germany (the country simply isn't that large, and the majority of rail travel in Switzerland happens between Zurich/Olten/Berne/Basel, which are all within 100 km of each other). The likelihood of anything going wrong during a 1:30h train journey from Zurich to Basel is simply much lower than during a 10 hour train journey from Kiel to Freiburg. 3 minutes delay on a 1:30h train journey is a delay of 3.3%, 15 mins delay on a 10 hour train journey is a delay of 2.5%.
The reason regional trains are also delayed is that regional lines, local lines, long distance lines and freight trains are typically using the same tracks in Germany, and delayed long distance trains always get higher priority. A typical situation is that your regional train is perfectly on time, but suddenly stops, and waits for 5-10 minutes for a delayed long-distance train to overtake it. Switzerland has a similar mixed system, but as noted above, does not really have long-distance rail lines, apart from the trains that enter from Italy, Austria, France and Germany, which is the main reason why these trains are not allowed to enter if delayed. This is in contrast to the system in France, where TGV lines typically have dedicated high-speed tracks, where all trains on it travel more or less at the same speed.
Shouldn't you then add redundancy to the system by having time buffers at large stops every 2-3 hours? Or even let replacement trains start at intermediate stops as soon as the delay of the regular train is greater than X to avoid propagation of the delay into to rest of the network? Absolutely, but most stations and rail lines in Germany are either at their operational limit, or above. Having a train wait for 15 minutes in a large station just in case it is delayed would block that track for 15 minutes in the majority of cases, when the train is punctual. Also, DB simply has not enough rolling material to start replacement trains, and the rail infrastructure to even park such trains has largely been dismantled in the years after the privatization (they are doing it sometimes, but not very often).
As someone who used to travel regularly between Zurich and Frankfurt (Zurich - Hamburg line ICE) I can 100% tell you that distance is *NOT* the root cause of DB's reliability problems. Infrastructure decline is. From lack of electrification, badly maintained rolling stock, insufficient tracks you find everything. Swiss railways deal with problems like lack of capacity and geography. Deutsche Bahn deals with a lack of maintenance and investment.
Maybe you are not aware, but swiss trains dont go back to sleep after they arrive at a destination. They stop for 3-5 minutes, and then continue to their next destination. All day long, from morning till evening. Geneve to St. Gallen with like a dozen stops is pretty long way. Especially when you drive it 6 times a day.
Also generally the length of the tracks dont magically change. It is possible to create a timetable: which train should be where when, and then stick to it.
Note that before the DB, SBB were anoyed with some models of french or italien trains, which broke down regularly, putting too much pressure on the integrated timetable.
Fyi, it's actually easier for trains to be on time the longer the journey is - that's because sane travel times aren't calculated at max speeds. So if there is any delay, you can go at a higher speed than what was used in the calculation to catch up. On shorter journeys there are simply fewer opportunities to catch up.
Now, I wouldn't be exactly shocked if DB using too high speed assumptions in their stated travel times was part of their problem with delays.
is this specific to DB only? I feel like Germany needs a lot of workforce at German quality but no way they can fill that with any type of foreign immigration. They lowered a lot of immigration requirements to entry because of this. But still it will be not enough. It's a cultural thing and low wages in Germany can't fix it.
The language is a big problem. They can get quality immigrants, but convincing those quality immigrants to learn German is a big task. A lot of people would rather go to US with all it's uncertainty than stay in Germany due to these issues.
The language isn't the biggest problem. Once you learn the language your problems don't stop. The big problem is most companies in Germany still prefer to exclusively hire locals who went through the German education system and have degrees from established local educational institutions, instead of recognizing foreigners' digress from abroad at similar levels to that of locals.
It's a white collar form of discrimination. Unless you come from a country as 'white' and wealthy as Germany, your degrees and experience is seen as much less valuable despite your language knowledge and your CV will be rejected even if it's technically a fit. Then comes the discrimination you'll face when looking for a place to rent but that's in other countries as well like the Netherlands.
Well, we just got one million of Ukrainian refugees, half of which is not going to return home according to dome polls, but you are right, the demographics cannot be fixed by immigration alone. I myself currently work on a corporate healthcare project with the goal to reduce sick leaves and reduce health-related early retirements. The parental benefits in Germany are quite generous, but it all breaks into the growing cost of living wall. Everyone understands what’s going on and the urgency, but real solutions are yet to be found.
>They are non-solutions if they cannot pass voter approval.
Then why don't voters just vote themselves higher salaries and better pension plans and higher retirement ages? D'uh! Who cares about economics when you have votes? Worked well for Greece.
>But what are you talking about exactly?
Reducing public welfare according to realistic economic capacity and sustainability of the national budget, and encourage citizens to rely more on private systems and personal responsibility. See Switzerland.
So, non-solutions, as I said. You refer to a state that is 10 times smaller, has the same demographic problems and over 40% of population with immigration background as a model for Germany, why? Do you seriously believe it can scale to German size? What has it to do with the budget?
I proposed the Swiss system as the solution and welfare reductions according to the budget and you're calling it non-solutions. Why are you being dismissive in Bad faith without any arguments?
The German welfare state will slowly collapse by itself on the long term anyway at this rate since the expenses are growing faster than the income and the only way to save it is to reduce it. Why isn't that a solution? Are you saying math is wrong and can be altered by votes?
> Why isn't that a solution? Are you saying aritmetic is wrong?
I’m saying that you just proposed random idea that has nothing to do with solving the workforce crisis. Reducing welfare state will not increase birth rate, if anything it will decrease it. Lower taxes will not lead to bigger families, with scarce housing the additional income will be simply redistributed to landlords thus increasing inequality. You propose to treat symptoms, but this treatment will only accelerate death.
1) The Swiss way is not random WTF are you on about. It's based on people receiving welfare based on individual contributions, not based on social need, out of bottomless money pit which is anything but bottomless. You can't grow your economy if you use a third of the national budget on welfare instead of stuff like R&D to boost the economy.
2) There's no workforce crisis, it's just a shit pay and too high CoL crisis. Skilled workforce will always come if you pay for it enough to make it worth their effort. See Switzerland and the USA. Germany doesn't want to. They want workers to work for peanuts, pay high taxes and to tolerate crazy housing. Skilled people with options aren't into that.
3) Why are you so focused on birthrates? Uneducated people having more kids randomly as economic cannon fodder will not boost the economy since they might cost more in welfare than they produces as adults. You need to get skilled people any way you can not just throwing random bodies at the problem hoping that fixes the economy.
4) If you insist on being focused on birthrates, then see how countries with the lowest or no welfare have the higher birthrates, and countries with the best welfare have the fewest. Food for thought.
> The Swiss way is not random WTF are you on about.
You failed to explain how it will help DB to hire more people. Yes, this is random until you connect the dots.
> Skilled workforce will always come if you pay for it enough to make it worth their effort.
To Germany? No, they will not. I would not, if the money were my primary incentive (yes, I’m THE skilled workforce you are talking about). You are talking about half of current German GDP to make it an incentive. And the whole country must start speaking English as a primary language. And of course there’s global demographic problem: you see, population of our planet will peak soon enough, poor countries will get richer and there will be less and less incentive for educated people to move. For small countries like Switzerland it may be enough for a while. For most of the Europe merit-based systems won’t work - we will have to offer support and education to refugees and unskilled economic migrants. Neocolonial model with immigration-supported economy is simply not sustainable.
> Why are you so focused on birthrates?
See above.
> Uneducated people having more kids
Who said “uneducated”? In Germany education rates are very high. The problem is not education itself, but deferred or abandoned family plans because of simpler life opportunities elsewhere.
> Food for thought.
I don’t think you are in position to tell this to anyone regarding this topic. You clearly have not educated yourself enough on this matter.
Yes with no real retirement in the future :) All social benefits and retirements will collapse and %100 not sustainable not only for Germany but for so many nations. Many reason exist already and it just takes longer.
German welfare state is worth paying it, it just needs to become more efficient. I don’t miss lower taxes I enjoyed in other countries, because I see the difference. And, anyway, high taxes hit upper middle class the most, for majority of population it’s not the biggest concern — rent is.
And now because of German needs eastern and south-easthern EU countries are in even worse position because Germany has hoovered up a decent chunk of skilled younger workforce.
We have started to import unskilled/low skilled laborers from SE Asia en masse to keep the country barely running. But the quality is going downhill yet prices of goods and real estate are soaring.
>and south-easthern EU countries are in even worse position
The economy of Easter Europe has been growing steadily in the last years and skilled immigration tom Germany ahs slowed since the salary/CoL ratio has reduced lately.
And its doubtful any statistics from the German side can be trusted. In more than one occasion, I've personally experienced delayed and cancelled trains that were shown as running on time in every information system. DB either doesn't know where their trains are, or is continuously fudging the numbers.
They are intentionally preventing transparency. The operational side of DB knows where the trains are, and the infrastructure to communicate it transparently to consumer side is intentionally hampered. And so information I'd either delayed or not available.
Having read through the links you provided:
You are comparing two different things. DB’s Reisendenpünktlichkeit takes in delays caused by missed connections etc. SBB’s 3 minute delay are just the individual train delays. For that DB has a similar measure which defines punctual as below 6 minutes of delay.
So the difference is big (3 vs 6 minutes) but not that big (3 vs 15 minutes).
DB has the worst company culture that I'm aware of. Everything has to go by plan, and when it doesn't, someone has to be responsible. So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.
This has removed the potential for improvisation in dispatching (no one wants to be responsible for delaying that other train), making the train network unable to give any trains room to make up their delays.
There is a reason every other dispatcher has problems with alcoholism.
I’ve read an interesting analysis of that situation, or rather the ass-covering culture in government adjacent power structures in Germany: The authors concluded that government agencies and offices are often led by lawyers, and therefore fostered a lawyer-inspired culture—which pretty much follows Conway‘s law. Over time, this has led to a management style overwhelmingly concerned with a fear of liability, and ass-covering instead of innovation.
>So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks.
Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
And nobody wants to go around the processes or change them, even if they know they're broken because then they would be the ones liable for the outcomes, so the entire society revolves around preserving the status quo even if the ship is heading towards the iceberg.
Change to processes is usually exclusively top-down where a boomer detached from the work in the trenches but with connections, a laundry list of a academic credentials and a pompous CV of management positions at large consultancies/companies, makes the decisions and those below execute without question while mumbling at the canteen lunch how stupid and out of touch the decisions are.
That's just my opinion as an outsider, it's not a fact I can provide citations for in case anyone asks, so it can be incorrect as all opinions go, feel free to disagree or correct me.
>Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
I've heard it said that the idea that Germans are efficient is a myth. (The new Berlin airport is one example.)
How about we merge the two definitions: efficient rule followers. Which is great when the rules are okayish (see older German cars, highways, handicraft...) and abysmal when they're random (bureaucracy, forced optimizations solely for the yearly bonus...).
There are whole regions of the world where nobody follows any law,besides the absolute minimum for society to exist.no institutions, no state, no laws, no companys..it all merges into "family" which is a little bit of everything. Not ideal, not very german.
not arguing but .. in systems theory, "good" and "bad" are too simple to be useful. Systems with many parts, have balance, efficiency, productivity .. and also the opposite of those.. in large amounts across many interactions.. from a physics point of view "stability" is also very real. Changes in system characteristics come from the actions and interactions of many individual parts, each one can change, or each class can change.
All of this is important in describing and understanding complex systems. The "rule following" is not simply "good" or "bad" using this analysis framework.
I worked technical support at a mid sized company that sold some equipment that had very expensive support contracts. These support contracts made up a large % of the company income and our customers were happy to pay them.
When I joined the team first thing the director told me was "everyone fucks up, you will to, just tell the truth and you'll be good". I learned quickly that there was no finger pointing allowed in that team. If something went wrong we'd figure it out later and in the meantime do the right thing to help the customer.
It was a great culture in that group. There was surprisingly little bureaucracy in the tech support team. You could do what you needed to to get things done / got the help you needed. Almost every call that came in was immediately answered, and our customers loved us.
Later (after a series of other acquisitions and etc) we picked up a company that had more than 4x the number of support techs and they solved less than half the number of tickets. Even the tickets weren't "solved" as much as they went through the motions and they hit their metrics.
That group was all about finger pointing, they didn't seem to know how to do anything else. They weren't even good at finger pointing. One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.
Unfortunately, due to the bad acts / crappy culture from the new team we ended up with a slowly evolving / massive bureaucracy too all designed as CYA type setups where everyone "did what they should have done" but really never solved any problems.
I feel like that's often the source of bureaucracy.
> One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.
People tend to accuse others of things they would do if they were in that position.
> It seems to me the underlying issue is that mistakes are punished and taking initiative to solve problems is not rewarded
This.
Context: born and grew up in Germany. Worked abroad for many years. Now living in Berlin, would still never work for an established German company for that reason.
Startups are usually better; until they're not startups any more.
Asking first "wer ist schuld?" ("whose fault was this?") is deeply rooted in German culture somehow though and sooner or later takes hold again.
It's the best way to ensure processes do not get improved but the paper trail attached to them grows steadily.
>Now living in Berlin, would still never work for an established German company for that reason.
What's wrong with traditional German companies besides burocracy? I see many have happy lives there with very good WLB and great job safety, contrary to start-ups.
>Startups are usually better; until they're not startups any more.
True, but also start-ups are better when you're part of the early founding crew who know each other, and get some sizeable equity for the effort. Otherwise, if you're one of the later joiners outside of the founder inner circle, you get nothing in rewards but get all the pressure and stress of working at a start-up. I'd much rather be at a traditional German company than a start-up like that, especially now that I'm past my prime youth years.
Well for one US corporations are not a monolith (or at least not yet) but yes some US corporations are like the same is this example, some German ones too, also Chinese, British, etc., and in all of these case this type of work culture is terrible and unproductive. But in this case we are very specifically discussing the German train company Deutsche Bahn so what other corporations are or aren't doing is complete irrelevant to the conversation, if you would like to discuss what other corporations with this same business culture I would suggest starting a new discussion thread. I hope this helps clear up any confusion you may have.
My company goes as far as awarding teams that have epic failures.
Corporate goals often include more risk taking, and leaders communicate that.
One thing that helps is I am an industry where failure is common and where project failure often has a clear root cause outside the control of the team.
Its not a transport company after all. Main buisness is speculation and building on inherited areas in inner cities and tax evasion on revenue gained from that. Incentives are aligned wrong.
I visit Germany more or less regularly. The deterioration in the overall experience with DB is very noticeable. Last time I was unfortunate enough to take an ICE, they started an informal poll with the passengers to decide whether to cancel a stop in Frankfurt. I was astonished. They eventually decided not to cancel it, seemingly after a lot of time deliberating or waiting for something, but most of us lost our connections thanks to the resulting delay. It was 4am +/-.
I wonder what's going on over there. I understand that there are complex organizational issues involved, but, besides this long-term rotting, there seems to be some more recent, abrupt diseases affecting them too.
By the way they decided to fire 30k employees to save costs just a couple days ago.
Enjoy it while it lasts... it is going to be much worse very soon. Some renovation plans are completely bonkers, they will close important railways for years without any replacement.
Well their finances were broken by a series of changes:
1. Lockdowns wrecking everything. Ticket revenue plummeted etc.
2. Soon after, the government there decided to make train travel nearly free. 9 EUR a month to travel as much as you want anywhere in Germany. Justification: climate change. This doubled short-distance usage of the network immediately. Huge increase in usage + hardly any new ticket revenue = network damage. There were subsidies but you can't place that kind of load on a system without everything being stripped to the bone to try and handle it.
3. When that scheme expired they decided to replace it with a new similar ticket at 49 EUR per month, but the rail companies complained they couldn't afford this and the financial risk was huge. https://www.railjournal.com/policy/germany-introduces-e49-ti...
DB losses have exploded and debt grows as a consequence:
DB had a net loss for 2023 of some EUR 2.4 billion (compared with a net loss of EUR 227 million in the previous year). One of the negative factors here was the significant increase in interest paid, which was driven in part by higher borrowing for capital expenditures. The DB Group's results were also affected by the additional burdens of inflation-related cost increases, a sharp rise in personnel expenses and multiple strikes.
So basically you have a socialist government that is giving sops to its base by trying to pump rail usage for climate reasons, but without making people pay for that increased usage, at a time of high inflation. The system creaks and groans under the weight.
Those are reasonable arguments, which I've heard previously indeed. But, truth be told, although the pandemic had an impact, all this mess started to become visible at least a couple of years before it — maybe even earlier.
This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
> so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
New York’s Metro-North and LIRR have 95%+ on-time rates [1]. (EDIT: On time is defined as less than 6 minutes late [2].)
> I bet, however, it's not uniformly distributed and some lines are late more than others
Sure. But "with a nearly perfect on-time performance of 99.3% on Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines," there isn't much room to hide problems. (LIRR is 96.3%.)
The point is we have systems that have been well built and well maintained. They just don't get coverage because they just work. (The LIRR is far from perfect, mind you. But it's apparently outperforming the DB. You have to get to some of the worst routes during peak conditions to get in the neighbourhood of DB's systemic numbers.)
As JumpCrisscross asked the definition of on-time is important. Most Euro countries define "on time" as "within 5 minutes" with something like 90%+ of their train being on time.
SBB CFF FFS has similar numbers, except it defines "on time" as "within 3 minutes"[1] which is of course harder to achieve.
BART's on-time definition is "within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival at final station". I recall in NYC's Metro that trains would frequently "go express" and start skipping stops at arbitrary moments. Do these systems do this as well and have that definition? I think I now understand why they do this stuff: they're trying to juice metrics because skipping stations speeds up the train a lot.
In practice it does feel like basically every single Amtrak is delayed after just a few stops, so I would be shocked if the situation is worse in Germany. However to put some numbers on it, here are Amtrak's own stats: https://www.bts.gov/content/amtrak-time-performance-trends-a.... In the flagship northeast corridor (that's Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - DC) the "on-time" percentage is around 80%, where on-time is within 20 minutes.
In the rest of the country Amtrak blames freight companies for most delays (https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance), and frankly I am inclined to agree with them. Amtrak does not own those lines and does not have priority on them, and the freight companies don't give a shit about anyone. See for example https://www.propublica.org/article/trains-crossing-blocked-k... and the rest of ProPublica's excellent series on the industry.
Agreed, I just think it's worth mentioning because a lot of the discussion in this thread is about how much Deutsche Bahn sucks, and while Amtrak also sucks, it doesn't suck quite as much as experience would lead you to believe. Much of the blame is on America as a whole, not specifically Amtrak.
Or to put it another way, it sounds like DB has a lot of problems that it could fix, but Amtrak has a lot of problems that are out of its control.
The Swiss rail lines are used close to capacity. If a train is too much late, it has follow-on effects on other trains, and the whole railway system can start to run into problems. So for the whole system to work, there can't be any overly late trains. This applies to all trains, not just German trains.
So this doesn't really have anything to do with that single train not being on time, or with differences in culture or something like that, it's about keeping the system running. If you have a system that isn't used at capacity, then it doesn't matter much if individual trains run late, the system itself will still keep on running.
It's absolutely crazy to me! I can see my uber driver on my phone stopping to pick up a pretzel from the convenience store, but I can't see where the bus is or get any kind of estimate of when it's going to arrive at the busstop.
On vacation this summer in europe, all tram stops had estimated arrival times. Ridiculous, 5-10 minutes out at worst, they wouldn't even need the electronic signs, just a placard that says "just skim your phone for a bit, it'll come".
You are describing a well-off high density city in Western Europe.
I unfortunately live in "we used to have trams, most of them were scrapped in favour of bus lines, then the bus lines were scrapped because they were not profitable enough, go buy a car" Europe.
Portland Oregon as well. There are a variety of apps that use the API to get arrival info from Tri Met, and all train stops, and many bus stops, have displays.
I've taken transit in a few US and Canadian cities. Most of the time there was some app that reported the live location of the busses and trains in transit.
Often I could get the data through Transit, but sometimes they have their own app.
Trams and buses tend to be more unreliable because they use the same streets as cars (sometimes they get extra lanes, but not always). Metros tend to be more reliable in my experience, I can usually trust what it says on the electronic sign (one big exception is Cologne where the metro isn't a real metro and runs on the street half of the time).
However in Cologne, to my big surprise, trams, despite running in the streets and in a real maze of crossings underground, manage to always be on time when I use them. S-Bahns on the other hand, seldom are...
Stadtbahns use the "U" sign for U-Bahn when only part of their network is underground; I guess this is to avoid confusing riders.
You might have been lucky. The "metro" in Cologne is notoriously unreliable, to the point that there's even a word "KVB minutes" to explain why sometimes the train will be arriving in 2 minutes for about 10 minutes.
This was belgian coast (long story), trams have dedicated right of way and don't share the street with the cars. Peak tourist season too, which may explain the subway-like frequency.
North American trains have a huge amount of level crossings, which, predictably, cause tons of accidents when oblivious drivers get hit by trains. Although most of the world considers high speed trains to be incompatible with level crossings, the recently built Brightline in Florida has several level crossings and has already hit many cars. [0][1]
Caltrain routinely has delays due to accidents involving grade crossings. Despite spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, they still haven't managed to fully grade separate the line. [2]
Fun fact, Canada's Turbotrain was one of the earliest examples of high speed rail in the world in the 1960s and was even faster than the Shinkansen at the time. However, it hit a truck only one hour into its debut run. This is often cited as the main reason why there's no high speed rail in Canada despite the density and proximity of Toronto and Montreal being ideal for such a line. [3]
Not sure why you'd want to lump all of America in to one category of failure when it's demonstrably untrue. Quick example - BART in the Bay Area has a 92-93% on-time rate.
There must be some definitional trick here (like canceled trains not counting, or something) because my memory of BART (as a daily multi-commuter: home to work, work to sports, sports to home) was frequent moments of "10 CAR SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT / MILLBRAE TRAIN IN FOR-TEE MINUTES" and shit like that. Enough of that in the year 2019 led to me switching to e-bike/car and frequently this is a much faster trip than the train.
Swiss trains define on-time as within 3 minutes of schedule, and this includes all mechanical issues, suicides, etc.
And this includes multi-hour intercity train lines, double-decker trains, trains that stop inside of airports, local trains, everything. If you have just a couple lines in a single city, under a single jurisdiction, with no interdependencies and no freight on the same lines, then of course it gets a lot easier.
The issue is that trains need tracks. Tracks are very expensive and a limited resource. The stricter you are about time the more trains you can pack into a given amount of trackage.
A bus uses a road and doesn't have a problem like that because there is far more road than the buses need.
The Dallas Area Raipd Transit on-time rate is about the same as this Swiss train system at 93%. The Trinity Railway Express is 97%, so higher on-time rate than the Swiss system.
The Trinity Railway defines on time performance for trains as arrival within 5 minutes of schedule[1]. It's not materially different from the Swiss standard.
Does the US not have an extensive network of Greyhound busses, similar to our FlixBus system? Or is that just something I saw in the movies? (I'm not American)
Here in bc Canada we had profitable intercity rail (bc rail), a previous conservative government were elected with the promise they wouldn’t sell it, they instead leased it for 99 years cheaply and that was the end of passenger rail for most the province. Greyhound took up the slack but 10ish years ago they pulled out leavings nearly no way to get between cities without a car. There are now some private bus companies but as I understand it they are really expensive with terrible schedules.
It’s honestly sad how public transport was left to rot/fail/or sold off in North America.
And how people now go “it won’t work here! Europe is more dense! Things are too far apart” Ignoring it did and was (at least in bc) a few short decades ago
I'm happy with European rail. For instance, it is 36 hours by FlixBus from Amsterdam to Porto, but if you use high-speed rail (Eurostar, TGV, Iryo) it is only 23 hours, faster than going by car.
Traveling 2,000km in the US would take me like 5 hours including an hour in the airport each way. Even if you made it two hours on departure that's six hours of total travel time. Compared to a 23 hour train trip.
Distances like that, trains just don't make sense IMO.
Sure they do when you have proper high speed rain. That journey could be 10 relaxing hours at 300kph. No security, no awful plane noise and seats. Quiet comfy and relaxing (or overnight and you can sleep)
It’s also far better for the environment, and should be cheaper if you take plane subsidies and apply them to trains.
Also your math is wrong 5 hours with 1 hour each side (generous) is 7 hours. With 2 hours each side that’s 9 hours.
Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
(The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too)
> Also your math is wrong 5 hours with 1 hour each side (generous) is 7 hours. With 2 hours each side that’s 9 hours.
Its a three-hour flight not a five hour flight. Five hours is including the one hour on each side. And you wouldn't have two hours on the arrival side, you're not having to wait through security. Chances are on the arrival side its less than an hour. Sure, maybe customs slows you down, but I've never had customs take as long as security and the consequences of being a little slow are much less. But there are no customs flying domestically, and I'm not sure what customs are like flying within the eurozone anyways.
> Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
It's not 10 hours on the train, its 23 hours on the train. And it's not 5 hours on a plane, its three hours. The person said they were taking HSR. Its a 23 hour ride taking HSR.
> The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too
Sure, but generally speaking you don't have to when flying You often don't even need to change planes once. That's the whole point. Rail is great for certain distances, but past that there grows a lot of complexities. You're not going to take a single shot HSR trip 2,000km practically anywhere. You're going to have times where the train stops. You're probably going to have to change trains, potentially even change to a non-HSR for a leg of the trip. Meanwhile planes don't need to change 7 times to go 2,000km.
> should be cheaper
Sure, if you value two days of your vacation at nearly $0. Or two days of seeing your family while gone on a business trip at $0. Personally, two days of travel would have to be radically cheaper for me to think it worth it.
Sure, but people lament the lack of trans-national US trains. If even taking high speed rail in a region of the world known for good trains (Europe), a normal-ish kind of travel pattern would take 23 hours versus 5 hours, why would people choose the train?
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro-train. I'm super excited for the prospects of the Texas bullet train. Trains can make a lot of sense to a certain distance. But why would you pick it for a 2,000km trip?
There is a network but in my experience it's not the most reliable and with no accountability. I tried to use it twice so far but experience was not too good.
First time bus was just cancelled with no explanation (my guess is not enough passengers) so I had to take pretty expensive last-minute 1h flight. They refunded the ticket but kept credit card processing fee.
Second time it bus was late for 1h and it didn't even stop where it was supposed to. I had to pay for an Uber and since bus company refused to refund my ticket I had to charge back.
Maybe I was just unlucky but I don't plan to try them again.
Fairly recently (maybe in the last five years or so), Greyhound in some cities has been selling their city-center land and moving their stations to much less convenient places. Near me it's a side-of-the-highway industrial area with occasional local buses downtown.
There are even FlixBusses in the US. I see them pretty often.
There are a number of nation-wide and regional inter-city bus systems. They're just not extremely popular since car ownership is typically pretty high, fuel costs are generally low-ish, and chances are when you get to your destination you'll need a car anyways.
It's dwindling. If the movie you saw was It Happened One Night, the fact that the bus breaks down is indicative of the state of Greyhound today. FlixBus recently bought Greyhound. We'll see if they have have a positive effect.
We do have a pretty extensive greyhound network in the US (it was recently bought by flixbus, but I think they're keeping the greyhound branding). But it is a totally different experience than long-distance buses in Europe.
I've taken a number of flixbuses in Europe and they were decent. Most cities had some sort of bus terminal where you could sit and grab food before the trip, the bus was clean, the advertised power outlets worked, seat assignments were respected, and they'd make stops at places with clean restrooms.
I've also taken a few flixbuses in the US west and wouldn't recommend people do that. The cleanliness is poor, the on board amenities like power outlets/wifi are frequently broken (or don't exist), paid seat assignments have never been enforced, bathroom stops are disgusting, and there is a lack of order/safety on board. And the bus terminals simply don't exist - in Los Angeles you stand in an uncovered parking lot outside the central jail and there is no notification of which bus goes where. Everyone just runs (literally) up to each bus as it arrives, preventing passengers from disembarking, and asks the bus driver where it's going, and then tries to cram on immediately because that's the only way to avoid getting an undesirable seat.
Safety is a huge issue on these buses. I conduct most of my life on foot and by public transit in southern California and there's some sense of safety from knowing you could avoid/move away from people acting dangerously. But on the bus you're stuck, and I often arrive with my nerves frayed by the behavior of other passengers. They don't publish stats on this but my friends who have taken these buses also reported they also feel extremely unsafe, with one telling me they were on a trip where a stabbing occurred.
I regularly take the Amtrak from San Diego to LA to see friends and family, and during the track closure last year I tried flixbus a few times. After 4 tries, I simply stopped discretionary travel to LA for the better part of a year because it was such a bad experience.
Videos I've watched of people's experiences. Things like having a driver be at their max hours, maybe due to unforceen traffic and delays, and Greyhound having no replacement driver ready, causing them to be late. Not hit pieces, just travel vlogs. Everyone has to get off the bus, sit in a sometimes crappy terminal at 2 am, often with no amenities while it's sorted out.
I'm a bus advocate, you can see it from another post this week. But Greyhound is not reliable if time is sensitive.
Are watching videos of people's negative experiences really an unbiased way to understand the actual statistics on how often busses are on-time? People probably post videos when things go wrong, do you think a similar rate of videos get uploaded when nothing notable happens?
I see videos of fights breaking out on airplanes, hear about horror stories of being stuck on a plane and not allowed getting off. I take it that's what happens in the majority of flights then?
I mostly only see videos of car accidents. I guess most people get into car accidents every day. Or maybe people don't bother uploading the hundreds of hours of non-interesting dashcam clips.
I think you're misunderstanding. GP isn't saying "drawing randomly from all videos of unsafe situations, a large fraction of them occur on long-distance buses". They're saying "drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations".
There are a number of travel vloggers who do a trip exactly once and report on what happened. The same vlogger will make videos about taking ships, trains, airplanes, and long- and short-distance buses, in a variety of countries, on a variety of budgets. Among these vloggers, it is generally agreed that long-distance buses in the USA are the worst form of transit in the developed world. Their videos on other forms of travel rarely (if ever) show the kinds of unsafe experiences they have on long-distance buses in the US.
I'm also a numbers person and I've looked around to try and find stats for how dismal the safety and on-time performance of US long distance buses are for you, but none are published. I can just report that the cancellation rate is well over 10%, the on-time performance is maybe around 50%, and personally speaking the experience is frequently unsafe and miserable.
I don't mean to make this personal, but if you're in the US, consider driving to the local greyhound station/pick up and just waiting there for particular bus. It's really one of the worst experiences you can have in a city.
Read my other comment. I have ridden inter-city busses in the US on many occasions and picked up people at the stations. They've generally been on-time. My personal experiences have been pretty alright. A few times the WiFi didn't work but that was about it when it comes to my own negative experiences. The bus stations haven't exactly been in the nicest parts of town, but I've never experienced anything like violence there. Outside of chartered trips I haven't done a multi-day bus trip, most have been straight city pairs. Houston <-> Dallas. Dallas <-> Austin. Austin <-> San Antonio. Etc. But I'm not then saying that's always typical, to actually judge the performance I'd look at the larger statistics.
> the on-time performance is maybe around 50%
I posted Greyhound's on-time statistics which was 90%.
> who do a trip exactly once
What a way to collect statistics. I just stepped outside. It wasn't raining. I guess it'll never rain.
> drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations
Well yeah, once again, are there really going to be a lot of popular videos of "I took a five day bus ride, nothing happened, here's an hour-long video of the travel!" And are those really random videos or ones the algorithm have bubbled up to the surface? Think a video with crazy stuff happening would bubble up in the algorithm rather than an hour long video where nothing of note happens? Maybe analyzing statistics by one-off example YouTube videos made for clicks isn't the best way.
You watch travel vlogs where fights break out on planes? I'd love to see those channels!
I suspect not. I suspect you don't watch actual vlogs, rather you see 1 minute long clips we all see.
Sometimes we want to watch the whole unedited experience to get a sense of what it's like, rather than for 1 minute entertainment bits. I've watched Tesla Self Drive from SF to LA over several days to see what it's like for example (it's jerky on streets I'll tell you that).
There's bias in every single thing. But the alternative is to be blind to all media, which no one is doing. I've given you the context, and you've drawn up a red herring--1 minute news clips, which I'm not talking about.
I could tell you about a 14-hour flight I took between Dallas and Charleston (lots of storms, lots of reroutes, crew timed out, etc.). I could have made that a 14-hour long video for you to watch. Is it indicative of the typical trip between these two cities or just a single example and potentially a massive outlier? Should you assume it normally takes 14 hours to fly that distance in the US and that's a typical experience of a flier?
Personally every time I've taken an inter-city bus its been a smooth trip and pretty much on-time, I can't think of a time I was over 15 minutes late. Every time I've been on a chartered bus it was on-time. Every time I've picked someone up at the bus terminal they were within 5 minutes. That's a little over dozen experiences over the years in total. Admittedly, a bit luckier than average looking at the actual statistics. How many vlogs have you watched? How many times have you actually taken a Greyhound or similar?
Thanks for sharing these numbers. I'm actually baffled to see the on-time performance so high and the passenger injury rate so low. I wonder how these numbers would look if they broke it down into greyhound vs. other operations, and whether cancellations are factored into their on-time performance. I've seen verbal aggression on so many of these buses and stations that I can't square it such a low injury rate. Maybe I've just been a major outlier in my travels.
They are quite shit and you still need to get dropped off and picked up from them.
Anybody who mentions it online is only trying to win an argument and literally never uses it because it’s shit. You only use it if you don't have a car.
That's like Italian trains, but it's more like "nobody knows what platform it's gonna be at; keep a look out and run when you see it; also, screw you".
Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.
Deutsche Bahn is wholly owned by the federal government (https://www.deutschebahn.com/en/group/ataglance/aufsichtsrat...). This is exactly the same relationship as SBB has to the Swiss government. I don't think the corporatisation (not privatisation) is the problem in this case.
> now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.
That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)
Honestly it's a very low bar and Germans should aspire for better and not for a meager "we are not the worst there is".
I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.
Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.
Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.
Italy's geography is not universally worse. The mostly linear shape limits the number of required connections between stations: you only need a couple 1000km long distance lines to connect everything on the north-south axis, whereas in Germany they must go 500km+ in every direction for full coverage.
Yes and no. If you need to go from cities east to cities on the west you need to tunnel a lot and those choke points also make maintenance more tricky because you can't really re-route trains elsewhere without adding hours to the trip. Germany, as you said, it's mostly open ground and so you can go in any direction. Rerouting trains in this setting using viable alternatives for effective maintenance should be easier.
And those longer trips wouldn't even count as delays since they were hopefully announced weeks ahead of schedule and so passengers know it will take longer to get to their destination.
Depends on the conditions. It is 6 hours by car, but with a BMW or Mercedes you can easily make that 5 hours (averaging just 117km/h). Meanwhile it is 4,5 hours by train, but will likely be over 5 hours due to delays.
In France, Paris to Lyon is 2 hours by train and there is simply no way going by car is faster (legally).
These are just examples, my point is that a high-speed line should be a lot faster than going by car. Not slightly faster, and sometimes even slower.
And we're talking about high speed rail here (ICE trains). The UK has exactly one line that qualifies - from the channel tunnel to London St Pancras, and I don't think the US has any.
How does it work? In my country (at least non-regional trains) the ticket price is calculated as ax+b where b is a constant price and x is the distance in kilometers. So splitting the ticket is always more expensive than buying two separate ones (but there are other reasons to do it, for example it's a trick to use when there's not enough seats to ride a->c directly - but that's an edge case)
Ticketing on the UK train network is completely inscrutable.
Perhaps the A->C ticket entitles you to travel on either an air-conditioned nonstop high speed train, or a slower train that stops a lot along the way, and buying A->B and B->C tickets you can only travel on the slow train and that's cheaper.
Perhaps all the discount advanced-booking tickets leaving A have sold, mostly to people only doing A->B, and when you look up B->C there are discount advanced booking tickets still available.
Perhaps you depart A during peak hours and so pay a peak fare, but as the B->C portion of the journey starts later, it doesn't fall into peak travel hours.
The UK is also relatively unique in extending full passenger rights even to split tickets as long as you adhere to the usual minimum connection times. (Apparently not out of the goodness of the train operating companies, though, but rather some interpretation of UK contract and customer protection laws which seem to demand equal treatment even for separately bought tickets.)
Privatization has brought some truly crazy incentives into the spotlight. Like how bridge maintenance is paid by the company, but when a worn out bridge needs replacing it's suddenly a government investment.
I consider it safe to assume that the reason for this is that it had been just the same when it was still a government org, but a government org will see its responsibilities very different from a company eagerly cosplaying shareholder-value while the sole shareholder happens to be the government they can freely rip off because of an ongoing legacy approach to the principal-agent problem.
As for delays, I think one reason, besides lack of maintenance and the massive interdependence in that large network that allows neither a star nor a main axis simplification is the high speed Autobahn: if they weren't overambitious in terms of travel times they would perhaps put bigger time buffers in their schedule and that would certainly help a lot.
The Japanese economy is significantly more consolidated than Germany's.
Vertical and Horizontal Integration (like what the 3 groups above do) is heavily regulated and litigated against in the EU [0][1], especially under Vestager.
Japan on the other hand doesn't actually regulate against either forms of market dominance. All three of those groups (called zaibatsu/keiretsu) have had market dominance in Japan since the 16th century.
That's why I recommended reading that book above - Antitrust in the Western sense doesn't actually exist in Asian countries, all of whom modeled their economies on Japan and with Japanese advice (METI) and aid (eg. ADB).
"Privatizing" is not the correct word for it - DB was reformed and is now a company instead of a government agency, but it's still 100% owned by the state. Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, favoring short term savings over long term sustainability, which led to the sorry state in which German rail infrastructure is today. IMHO the major issue with the reform is that the trains and the infrastructure were left in the same company (with other train operators forced to use the tracks provided by the "incumbent"), which leads to all kinds of conflicts of interest.
" Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, " Except it does not make any profit. It is tightly controlled by the government. They could change any management behaviour. But they don't.
I think it's worth adding the fact, that not only the Deutsche Bahn has been privatized, but also the Deutsche Bundespost (mail service/telecommunication) has been privatized and split into Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom coming from the same policy.
As far as I know this all boils down to the fact, that the European Union (or better it's predecessor) wanted to get rid of state monopolies. It did work out for the "Deutsche Post" (more or less) and very good for "Deutsche Telekom".
But "Deutsche Bahn" was a failure coming from that policy.
It didn't work very well for Telekom's competitors, though.
I've switched apartments about once every two years in average and every.single.time I've had to wait more than a month without internet (after already waiting a month for the scheduled appointment) because Telekom is the owner of the DSL lines and they connect their competitors' customers only when they feel like it.
Isn't Deutche Telekom one of the main reasons why Germany's broadband and internet coverage is abysmal in comparison to even significantly poorer countries in Europe these days?
That's a general article about privatizing state-owned railways all over the world. If you look at the part referring to Germany, it links to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnreform_(Deutschland), and "Bahnreform" is the term that's more commonly used to refer to what happened in Germany.
Besides the point that Deutsche Bahn is goverment owned, it is worth pointing out that Western and Eastern German had " to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. " + much much debts.
Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.
Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that.
The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.
In German private means privately owned. It is rare that people out of Germany care about the legal status of Deutsche Bahn thus I used the German meanings and many posters as well.
" o make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows. " I refer to the time before 30 years. It was a very problematic time in West and East Germany though were a Goverment Agency by legal.
Can’t comment on the 90s, but it only seems to have become truly unreliable in the last 5 years maybe? I take a train through Germany 2-3 times a year, and delays and faults are pretty much inevitable on every journey.
I’ve been to Germany twice to visit family. All of my trains had delays (one was because a suicide though), and every time Ive heard from family, they are also having train delays. It’s very unreliable.
My experiences in France were quite the opposite. So much for stereotypes.
I can't say what it was like 5 years ago, but I take a DB train 2-3 times a week and I can never be sure that I'll get to my destination on time, or that I'll even get there on the train.
If you privatize with the right rule structure and policing from the government, with payment as a function of being on time or not. You can have a good system.
(The land is not enough to fix trains and the land next to it was reserved but somehow sold to build a sports arena because the train land section became a company that had to post good numbers)
Alos, one important thing that happened in Sweden was that the part that was not privatised was also ran like a for profit company.
The railway infrastructure "CEO" basically stopped a lot of repair work and long term projects and was able to show some very good numbers to the goverment, which they very much liked. 10-15 years later things started falling apart, by which time she was long gone.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and follows all the Wall Street bad practices... So much for obstinately calling it "not-privatized", when by all practical matters it is.
It's actually a different system - Japan's network was privatised and split into competing companies with all shares publicly traded (bar some exceptions), the Deutsche Bahn was privatised into a single, state-owned company. As such it is beholden to slow, non-deciding German governments, including investments into the network.
How is that privatized, then? If it’s state-owned, the only thing that changed was the legal framework that applies to the entity, none of the incentives of privatization actually applying to it.
It worked OK for the UK. Passenger numbers, which had been steadily falling, started to increase. On the other hand, there are complaints about high fares.
This has been true for Germany too. Passenger numbers are at an all-time high, but that's part of the problem - the infrastructure is at it's limit, but building new infrastructure is met with strong resistance by locals. e.g. the planned relief for the notoriously overcrowded Hamburg - Hannover track got effectively canceled, and this is only about the get worse with increased traffic from the new tunnel to Denmark that is set to open by the end of the decade.
I think very few Brits would agree that rail privatisation has "worked". Poor and old carriages, overcrowded, slow, late trains, and generally a lack of investment. Oh, and ridiculously high fares (often well over air fares!), which seem to increase above inflation every.single.year.
Some of us remember pre-privatisation as being a lot worse: carriages were older, trains were slower and there were less of them, staff were ruder and didn't care about their customers, announcements were inaudible. Fares were probably lower though.
Yes, it's true that things were pretty grim. I remember being embarrassed when a colleague from Norway travelled with me in a filthy, worn train carriage stinking of piss :(
But IMO that doesn't excuse the lack of poor management since then. Things could be much, much better.
I think the question is, will nationalization make things better? Historically, the UK has not done very well with nationalized industries. Maybe this time will be different.
Passenger numbers were generally CLIMBING in the 80s, Intercity was massively popular and successful, which was the reason for sectorization - let the bits that should be funding the system as a whole succeed, and let the bits that need subsidies fail.
Sectorization was, of course, the prelude to privatization.
This is only a Wikimedia page, so if you have better evidence that contradicts it, feel free to present it. But note that it cites trustworthy sources.
Japan did it differently than the EU counterparts:
>The most basic, fundamental difference between the British and Japanese railways is how they were privatised. In Britain, the tracks were split from the trains.
from a ft article I apparently can't link
The split of infrastructure and the invisible hand of the train operator market seems to be a correlation.
For context German trains over the last few years have become increasingly delayed. To the point that it is now the norm.
Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders).
It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the central cause is starving the system of funds. This presents a strong warning for countries that are trying to encourage the use of public transport in order to meet their climate goals.
The problem with the legislature about funding is that regular maintainance of the railroad network would has to be paid by Deutsche Bahn itself, whereas creation of new infrastructure or complete rebuilding of completely degraded railway infrastructure is to be paid out of the federal budget. Taking preventative/regular maintainance also is at the discretion of the Deutsche Bahn as a corporation. Of course this incentives the executives of the Bahn to let the railroads rot.
I have a hard time imagining that the perverse incentives in the system have not been obvious to those in power at its inception.
I didn't do a deep dive into the issues as there are many - but a contributor to the tardiness is the decommissioning of track switches/overtaking lanes. While this allowed for a short term economy, it harmed the reliability of the network and causes flow-on traffic.
I include this detail as the source of the largest problems are not necessarily about creation of new infrastructure (although that of course would be the solution), but the deletion of existing infrastructure.
"The network is simply overloaded," said Böttger. In contrast to Luxembourg and Switzerland, which invested around €575 (about $625) per capita and €450 per capita in rail infrastructure respectively, the figure in Germany is just €114.
"The network is simply overloaded," said Böttger. In contrast to Luxembourg and Switzerland, which invested around €575 (about $625) per capita and €450 per capita in rail infrastructure respectively, the figure in Germany is just €114.
Last fall I almost missed my ferry because my train up to Hamburg was so delayed that it missed my connection to Kiel, and my backup connection pulled out just as my arriving train was stopping.
I knew things were getting bad in Germany so I had planned for enough time for a secondary backup. It left on time, but kept getting slower and slower. Then they announced that due to rail works, there was a bus from Neumünster to Kiel.
At Neumünster, I instead got a taxi, which (thanks to all the taxes going to the Autobahn instead of rails, I presume), got me to the ferry with a peak speed of 150kph, and 10 minutes before loading ended - some four hours after I had planned to be there.
Ideology and science do not mix well. The "UN Sustainable Development Goals", the current Biden/Harris-led DOT and the WRI are ideologically driven and use "Science" - in quotes because the term does not denote use of the scientific method but rather the institutional credibility, whether the scientific method was followed or not - to justify their targets and actions. Keep that in mind when you refer to these (and similarly ideologically driven) institutions as 'reputable, scientifically backed, sources'.
Do I need to add that the opponents of these organisations and institutions can also be ideologically driven? I hope not, that should be clear. Check your sources for ideological bias - no matter whether you happen to agree with that bias or not - and take that into account when you use them to defend or oppose a viewpoint.
If you question something like public transportation being climate friendly as being scietific sound, maybe you should bring up some evidence or data to back this up.
Also some anecdote about how buses where used at some major event does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about public transportation in general.
Also "there is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy" is a rather general polemic statement, which could also some clarification.
These commenters exist (usually as bots) simply to sow a false narrative for political reasons - the views they extoll are not based on measurement or research. When active as bots, they present a idea of discord and doubt - this is a common tactic to give the appearance of the matter not being long-settled. It's also not uncommon for them to cite an unsourced anecdote which other than being irrelevant, most likely never even existed.
Rather telling is that the same user had also commented twice nearly simultaneously. These types of replies are typical for comments that mention climate or government spending.
Just compare the colored rings (green = on time, orange = delayed more than 3 minutes, red = delayed more than 9 minutes) between the trains in Germany, Switzerland, and France here to get a general feeling of how bad things have become with Deutsche Bahn:
My favorite anecdote from riding a German train in Switzerland was a journey from Interlaken (Switzerland) to Frankfurt in Germany. Now if you're not used to train schedules: Stops are quick, and trains are punctual. It's fairly common for stops to just be 2-3 minutes. Connections between trains are often around 5 minutes, sometimes shorter.
So, this Intercity Express departed Interlaken perfectly on schedule, made a bunch of scheduled stops in Spiez, Thun, Bern, and continued on to the border city of Basel. Everything running perfectly on schedule, the train arrived at the Swiss station in Basel, continued (on time) to the German train station that's still in the same city, just a few minutes farther. Having had 3-5 minute stops all the way from early morning to lunchtime, the train then sat in the German station for about 15 minutes, departed with only a minor delay, and just a few yards after exiting the station proceeded to stop, sit on the tracks for half an hour ("to catch up with the prevalent delay conditions on the German rail network"), before starting to move again.
Waiting in a comfy seat on a train with working AC isn't the worst of fates, and we made the final destination within half an hour of the scheduled time, so it all went well -- just funny to observe how different parts of this interconnected network had very different ideas of scheduling.
Swiss railways optimise for punctuality, sacrificing line capacity (compensated for with double-decker cars).
Meanwhile every other European rail transport authority seems to be bent on squeezing out the most of the lines it has.
I grew up in a city that had two parallel rail lines in the east-west axis - one for long-distance connections, cargo and everything else, the other a refurbished old main line with trains only once per hour.
The latter was punctual almost to the minute(even if comparatively slow at an average 30km/h including stops), while the former was a mess and you were often better off driving instead.
My friend living in the suburbs close to that refurbished line always boasted how it took him a grand total of 18 minutes to get to the city centre and he could rely on the train to always arrive. That was quicker than I could get there by any means, despite a similar distance.
What you said goes against what the other commenter have said, that is Swiss trains cannot inject late trains into the system because the tracks are used at capacity, I.e. there is no buffer for trains to “queue”. Every train is always at the expected place, at the expected time. Hence the system is always at maximum throughput and on-time.
> SBB grants Eurocity trains on the Munich-Zurich route a buffer of ten minutes before reallocating their train path, and even 15 minutes for ICE trains between Freiburg and Basel.
Emphasis mine. This whole system works because they account for delays by having a time buffer in each route that can be consumed by going slower.
During my commutes along Lake Zurich I noticed that the trains would rarely arrive earlier than 30s before schedule - even if it meant going below the maximum allowed speed, as evidenced by instances where the train used the same section to restore the buffer by going faster.
What to do with late trains is a very interesting problem from a network stability perspective.
It’s somewhat akin to the packet dropping question, though packets don’t complain as loudly as passengers.
In a rail network with one train a day it’s not a big issue, but with regular service you can’t let a late train get out of control or it blows the entire network out of sync until you have some dead time - which is one reason some systems have an “hour of the dead” where no trains run - it lets it reset and get back to something sane.
Trying to build a system that has 15 minute heads and can handle a train going late or dying on the rails is really, really hard without ridiculously complexity like quad tracks everywhere and spare train sets at every station.
I agree that it's a hard and interesting problem. Yet other countries seem to be managing it better, or there is something structurally different.
I read somewhere that one of the key issues in Germany is that freight and passenger trains share the same network. While a delay of 15 minutes can be wildly problematic for a passenger train (missing connections, stranding at some godforsaken train station etc.), it is virtually irrelevant for freight. Then again, that should make it easy enough to always prioritize passengers over freight, but either that isn't being done or it's still insufficient.
The USA has the freight problem because trains can't pass each other unless there is a siding long enough for the train that is being passed; and the freight trains are too long.
Where there's double-track (or more) it's not as big an issue because the train can pass on the other side of the track (tracks are often handled as if they were a road with one lane going in one direction and the other going the other way, but you can swap around with signaling).
The other major solution (bandaid) is to add dwell time at stations so that there's room to make up - the timetable says when the train will leave not when it will arrive, and if it normally arrives five minutes early, it just waits; if it lost time and arrives one minute before departure, it will just be there a minute and the lost time is made up.
But while that may reduce the "worst case" scenario, it does make the average travel time longer.
Reading this on a German train that is expected to arrive in Zurich 25 minutes late, hoping that the connection will not be cancelled at the boarder as per usual.
Note that trains to Zurich and Basel SBB then end in Basel Bad (or sometimes they let it go to Basel SBB). It’s a separate train station in Basel which is run by Deutsche Bahn so it’s not literally “turning back at the border”.
IIRC Swiss passengers waiting in Basel SBB get a replacement train travelling at the original time.
When I was living in Germany circa 1999 I was riding the train from the former East Berlin to Dresden and remember watching the engineer look at his watch and at the clock on the platform, making a point to push the driving lever forward at the exact moment the seconds hand hit zero.
Seems fair. You can't make it right for everyone, and at one point they need to draw a boundary, to care for your citizens and keep up the standards.
Otherwise everything would fall to the lowest common denominator.
I don't think it's fair for the article to say that a "temporary measure" has now become a permanent one, it likely is temporary until the problem is solved.
Sometimes I ask myself why the schedule of those always-late trains isn't changed. If it would be planned that it always arrives "15min later", people and other transportation could work with that timing so much better.
There's an old anecdote about this, almost certainly false, but worth sharing, goes something like this:
The Swiss trains arrive on time, more often than any other country. Second place is the Germans. What's the difference?
The Germans set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. Then the famed German engineering kicks in, and they move Heaven and Earth to identify and fix any problems which are keeping the trains off schedule.
The Swiss set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. They use these measurements to identify when trains aren't arriving on schedule and... adjust the timetable.
The German train system isn't awful, when talking about long distance trains. It's not good, but it's not awful.
Look at the regional feeder lines, though. Unmaintained tracks, ancient trains, diesel instead of electric. Many towns have no connection at all - where I used to work, there was an old train station, but the tracks had been ripped up years earlier.
I used to (have to) rely on the German train system. Thankfully, I am now in Switzerland. It is a huge difference.
That probably strongly depends on where exactly you're living, though. I can't complain about my local trains, which are nothing like what you describe.
The long-distance network in Germany has routes that take more than 8 hours. Delays of 15 minutes are because of network complexity not uncommon.
SBB - Swiss rail - doesn't want its schedule to be affected by the long-distance DB - German - services. So it doesn't allow the DB service to enter the country after a given cut-off delay.
This means that travellers need to transfer to an SBB service for the final 1-2 hours of their trip. This transfer typically takes 15-30 minutes.
You can travel across Japan, similar or even larger distances, with practically no delays.
As a passenger it's not always about the bare number of minutes, the problem is that I might get stranded somewhere, and train stations in Germany are generally very dirty and somewhat unsafe at odd hours.
> Delays of 15 minutes are because of network complexity not uncommon.
If the delay is that likely, due to the long distance of the route, isn't the obvious step to take then to adjust the schedule? So that at some stations along the route trains have a buffer.
I don’t buy the idea that it’s mainly because of network complexity and line length. Local lines, even ones that don’t share tracks with any other trains, are routinely cancelled or delayed, as well. Other large countries manage to run trains on time (Japan, Spain…).
DB is uniquely bad and I don’t think we should be making excuses for them.
The delays in Germany can also be felt here in Linz/Austria.
For years the train from Linz to Vienna was always punctual.
However, recently (Last ~9 Months or so) all trains are super later. The reason is, all of them go through Germany (Innsbruck (via German) -> Salzburg -> Linz ->Vienna), and given everything is delayed in Germany it also delays Austrian trains.
Not that I can blame the Swiss for wanting to make the trains run on time, but I laughed at this part:
> SBB introduced the regulation back in July 2022 in consultation with Deutsche Bahn. Introduced as a "temporary measure" at the time, it is now permanent.
Just a reminder to folks that there is nothing so permanent as a “temporary” government program.
I wouldn't mind the delays that much if we had more direct connections between cities. But the reality is that you book a connection to another city, and that connection was never possible in the first place because of some construction work or bad rails or something else. They know they can't make that connection but they never update their schedule to reflect that. And then you are on the first leg of the journey and everything goes to hell. You have to find a replacement train, your reservations are void, you have to wait hours.
And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.
> And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.
Unfortunately, it's not as if airlines were any better. Less than 3h of delay and you get nothing.
At least, with DB you can get the money for your reservation back if they cancelled your original connection. Still sucks to be in an overcrowded train without a reservation, though.
Direct connections are definitely better, as you say.
As a foreigner, I am currently travelling for work in Europe and had a DB train from Munich all the way to Ljubljana (Slovenia) through multiple connections. Interestingly, the trains were on time until we were in Germany but when I reached the last connection in Villach (Austria), suddenly they cancelled the train from Villach->Ljubljuana without any notice at last minute. As a foreigner without any understanding, I had to scramble through and find a Flixbus which thankfully I was able to buy tickets online.
Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.
> Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.
I wouldn't recommend that, at least not for longer rides. Apart from the fact that I don't trust their overworked drivers (there was a big accident this year that may have been caused by a conflict between the drivers, according to some witness reports), its cheapness also tends to attract rather unsavoury individuals. I have all sorts of horror stories, from the guy (probably on some drugs) who started shouting multiple times in the middle of the night, to some dude who fell asleep with his orange juice bottle still open, which then spilled all over me, to the guy who thought it was a good idea to take drugs across the Swiss border (which caused a massive delay as, of course, his baggage was then extensively searched), etc. I've met weird people on trains too, but Flixbus is a whole other level.
Villach to Ljubljana is a joined ÖBB and SŽ line, not Deutsch Bahn. Your ticket was with DB, but the train getting cancelled had absolutely nothing to do with them.
If you had asked at the Reisezentrum at Villach station you would have been presented with options to continue your journey, or get a refund.
Understood but from my perspective, the cause doesn't matter. I booked through DB and it was not a good experience. Was my very first Time and I had a few minutes to decide what to do as I had people waiting in Ljubljuana. Didnt even have time for a refund for that portion of the journey.
I have decided to not take the train next time for sure if I can. Will try bus first.
Regardless, your experience has nothing to do with this topic or DB. And you could have gotten a partial refund quite easily, even after taking alternative transport. Refunds for delays is something DB has worked out pretty reliably. Filling out the online form is trivial, and if you use the DB app most fields are prefilled.
I disagree. I booked a train ticket online at one single place. It was a single ticket with a QR Code. It had connections. I don't care who the underlying providers are. I paid to one entity. It was their job, not mine to track.
This is one of the worst parts of European train travel these days - while airlines are forced to find you replacement connection, give you hotel and even pay you a fee if they're late, there's nothing like that for trains.
So you can end up with a blame game of "well, you bought a ticket from DB, but OBB fscked up, good luck being stuck in the middle of nowhere!" situation that makes you wish you took a plane.
I always avoided German trains when riding in Switzerland: they were often late or canceled, dirty, and full. Especially given that I could take a cleaner, punctual SBB train with the same ticket and for the same price.
The situation with trains in Germany is appalling. Our kids need to go to school by train. Even though it is the only line using that route, there are constant delays and cancellations. DB (Deutsche Bahn) often does not even care to inform the passengers of such events over the loudspeakers or displays. I routinely take at least one train earlier to increase the probability of reaching my destination in time. Working from home has saved me a good amount of stress over the years.
This is not motivating anyone to switch from cars to trains.
Just to add one more voice to the choir of outraged DB customers: in Russia, for a long-distance train to get cancelled, it takes something like a new World War to begin, I don't remember a single case. And as you may imagine, Russian Railways are not hiring the brightest talent awailable.
In Germany they don't even express regret when they do it.
That‘s what we got for privatization and many years of „conservative“ ministers of transport and public infrastructure.
Just wait for the first bridge to fail with a train or a car on it and the calls for public-private partnerships…
(Writing this on a moderately ICE-train)
This pretty much is the case in the US. People complain all the time about amtrak being delayed by freight, but the law has been that amtrak gets priority for decades.
It's just that they only get priority if they're actually on time (the initial booking of the rail essentially). Since they're constantly late they always miss this time and therefore have to wait.
Interesting culture if that's seen as a punishment. In my school half of the kids would try to be a minute late (so they can't enter the school and 'have to' slack off the whole day).
Why?! How does this help? That sounds insane and pointless to the education process. Unless the point was to educate your kids to be obedient slaves with childhood trauma for their corporate overlords.
We used to have something similar during communist rule in my European country, to teach kids who's boss and to respect authority.
> the point was to educate your kids to be obedient slaves with childhood trauma for their corporate overlords.
You haven’t heard of Samsung or the life of the average South Korean student. They invest the first 20 something years of their lives to get a corporate job as soon as possible, to not be left behind. Samsungs owns like half the country.
There is no saving the Deutsche Bahn. Everyone who knows someone working there knows this. Just ban everyone currently working there from ever working there again and reshuffle the cards.
They're already severely understaffed, I doubt kicking out the current people working there would help.
On a top management level, maybe, but I don't think train conductors can do much about a train schedule that is impossibly failure-prone, based on ageing and inadequate infrastructure and trains in disrepair.
"...in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
But it reminds me of the famous quote from Bertrand Russell
> My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
(Bertrand Russell / 1872-1970 / Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? / 1930)
I think the food and climate of England were a huge driver of British Imperial expansion. The elite were desperate to get out and so the British always had a large supply of soldiers and administrators for their colonies (until they were decimated in WWI).
James May bettered Gordon Ramsay in a practical cooking competition. The gearhead from TopGear baked the better fish pie. And on Ramsay's own cooking show no less.
The best part of British food is that we're incredibly good at adopting all of the worlds cuisines' as our own. I remember being at the Belgian GP and literally you could have chips with various shaped sausage and one pizza place hiding at the back. At the British GP you could eat some variant (admittedly, probably not the best variant) of pretty much every cuisine you could imagine.
Even in our supermarkets if you want to make a Paella or Peri Peri chicken you'll find all of the ingredients you need. If you go to a Spain it's really hard to find Peri Peri and if you go to France you'll struggle to find ingredients for a Paella.
I have many times visited friends in England, and I find their traditional home cooking to be quite nice. Maybe it's a teensy bit underspiced at times, but I am not averse to actually be able to taste the natural aromas of the bulk ingredients. I admit that it may not be on the level of some of the traditional Italian home cooking I have tasted, but that would be a very tall order indeed.
Yeah I can agree with you that perhaps many countries have cuisine we consider bad because countries just do their best and they can't all be Italy or the Szechuan Province.
I don't agree that because of the British Empire their food is good. They had the British Empire long enough to prove or disprove that claim.
I've visited England 5-ish times. I love it. But I've personally encountered some true Curry monstrosities over there. And Abominable fish and chips. I have fond memories of eating marzipan.
MOREOVER, Gordon Ramsay making dog-food egg mush and calling it scrambled has criminally misled a whole generation of youtube-addicted hipsters. I can't tell you how many times I've heard some random Millenial describe his exact, twisted method and inevitably I learn they've watched this exact video. Okay, twice.
After an excursion to London many years ago (from USA), I reported to my coworkers that the food was great.
I received the strangest looks from the British-ex pats. I still think the food was quite good, though thinking back I don’t think I sampled the “native” British cuisine.
Anyone complaining about British food has never eaten Dutch "cuisine". After having lived in both countries I'll always defend the Brits when it comes to food.
Apart from the root issue here someone need to remind that Switzerland is the parasite of EU. Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations. EU should tax them heavily so that they contribute to solve e.g. EU transportation issues.
Why in Heaven's name should Switzerland be (heavily!?) taxed to solve EU transportation issues? Should Switzerland then tax the EU as well to pay for its own transportation?
Until today I believed that the world had solved these problems by charging transportation fees but you seem to have very different ideas.
> Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations.
Switzerland certainly doesn't have all EU rights. For instance, they are not applicable for any EU subsidies. They do not have any voting rights. They are exluded from certain scientific cooperation programs (e.g. the ESFRI). And the list goes on.
I do consider Switzerland doings as hostile to EU.
1) Switzerland gain on using EU transportation and free market but does not contribute fair fee to maintain and build it.
You can tax EU - we will see who will survive.
2) Switzerland does unfair tax competition
3) Switzerland helped hide EU citizens untaxed money (maybe still does)
4) Switzerland helps Russian oligarchs maintain their wealth and many other criminals all around the world.
5) Last but not least:
If Switzerland does not care about Ukraine dying because it is ‘neutral’ and yet still wants safe borders, then I don’t fucking care about Switzerland well being.
2) unfair in what way? Swiss taxes are lower than most EU countries, that's true. But not all: Income tax in e.g. Bulgaria is lower, company taxes are lower in Ireland. But even if it were the lowest, why is that unfair? Can't voters decide by themselves how much taxes they want to pay?
3) 15 years ago, yes. But then Switzerland had to give up banking secrecy, at least for EU and USA citizens.
4) This is your only point that is true
5) Switzerland, by its constitution, is neutral and can also not give military support to countries that are at war. The last part was not always like that, during WO2 neutral CH was still selling lots of weapons to Germany and making a fortune with that. After the war allied forces made CH pay recovery payments for that, so CH decided to amend their law to forbid selling weapons to countries at war. They stick to that law but do care about Ukraine, so they found a workaround: they sell weapons to e.g. Germany, who then can replace their own weapons and send them to Ukraine.
1) EU can workaround you - you can't workaround EU. Size is not proportional.
2) It's obvious - fin-tech have virtual companies to lower taxes in Switzerland, lot of individuals try to get Swiss tax residence to lower taxes. Switzerland knows that and allows that.
5) My point is - if Switzerland want to be secure inside EU it should pay fee to secure external EU borders. That would be a fair deal.
What are you talking about, my marginal tax rate in Switzerland is 50%. When I last went to Prague, I changed trains at a station that prominently said it was financed by “friendship funds” from Switzerland. My taxes already are paying for Germany’s transport infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Swiss students couldn’t go on Erasmus for a year, because someone in Brussels threw a hissy fit.
I’m a fan of the EU, but let’s not pretend it’s not throwing its weight around, just like any other huge federal government.
These aren't EU transportation issues, these are GER transportation issues. The most powerful "parasitism" argument against CH is probably the tax arbitrage you can get from Zug/Lucerne, but a lot of that already happens inside EU itself with Luxembourg/Ireland/etc.
But yes, a fight over bigger contributions/more harmonization is inevitable within the next 10 years.
To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the threshold at 15 minutes ("Reisendenpünktlichkeit") [2].
[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...
[2] https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...