“A nation built on efficiency”. These times are looong over. We had a good run with our Wirtschaftswunder in post-WWII times and that’s about it.
Yes. But travel to other countries and hear their thoughts about Germany and you’ll discover this image is very much alive still. It’s important to spread the word outside of Germany, too.
Had some Germans visiting Norway recently. They said Germany is becoming way too individualistic. It’s a race to the bottom now. Liberalism has taken it’s hold, so efficiency will fade away.
The Wirtschaftswunder also had a lot to do with the Social Market Economy which, along with our train network, has been crippled by decades of neoliberal reforms.
Lol! Come to hungary! Here the 30 min or even more delay is usual. While branchlines are closed due to the state railways dont have enough working diesels, as most of them are 40+ years old (or just soviet quality), and no money for new, as the EU stopped sending support, due to the corruption of the stateparty-government.
I’ve only been to Budapest and never used any intercity trains but the tram/streetcars have been way better, more on time and generally more available then anything in any German city
yes, IF you’re in the inner city. Else, if you live the outer parts of the city, or if you have to go there, you’re mostly doomed to ride on 30+ years old junk (or even see tram line 2 next to the parlaiment with those 60 years old not nice trams), with many transfers and long walks. But the transport in budapest handled by the (oppositional) city, not by the stateparty. However the stateparty takes as many money as they can from the city, just because the people in the city not voted them, so it’s hard to improve the city transfport without money.
As an American who used DB for the first time, their shitty transit blows the best travel experiences here out of the water. I’d rather use German trains than fly first class in the US. Not even close TBH.
You can’t compare a first world country to a third world country.
i donno, amtrak is pretty great on the east coast. there’s absolutely nothing from the mississippi to the west coast so if you’re going that way youre going to have a bad time.
Have you ever been to Europe? The Amtrak is terrible
yah ive been to europe. some things are nicer but amtrak is way more accommodating for people with disabilities.
As a general tip: you usually have to apply for assistance beforehand. Doesn’t mean it isn’t shitty though, and if your train is delayed then and you miss a connection…
yah that is what we ended up having to do for my family. i think the bigger issue was the surrounding buildings and some of the stations not having adequate assistance. they nearly dumped my father into the water in Amsterdam.
i live in DC and commuted every day on the MARC for years and never saw anything so disasterous. the ACA is a force to be reckoned with.
If Amtrak is the best we can do we should all be embarassed.
what’s wrong with amtrak?
Frequent delays. Poor frequency. Weird routes. Slow average speeds that can barely compete with a bus. Always getting bogged down by track-sharing with freight.
The Northeast corridor is the only section of the entire system that is even remotely decent and is basically subsidizing the crappy lines that they are congressionally mandated to run so it’s not even that cost competitive with other modes.
To be fair, most of this isn’t Amtrak’s fault but just a reflection of the fact that America doesn’t care about passenger rail.
I live in the northeast and used to use it semi regularly (2-3 times per week).
Delays were insane if it was so much as sprinkling out. But the real problem was that it wasn’t much of any cheaper if you already owned and insured a car.
Also for the rest of the country, it’s hard to care about something you don’t have access to and won’t be able to experience in even the remote future.
yah the north east corridor is great.
The US needs to nationalize the railways. The US has done it twice before and many unions are calling for it now.
My cousin visited Texas from Germany and took a train from Dallas to Austin. The track sharing with freight was insane, the trip took 9 hours due to freight having right-of-way on the tracks. It’s only about a 3.5 hour drive. He was not impressed at all.
I kept reading the article trying to find the reason why DB is so crappy now, only to realize that a 10 minute delay is catastrophic by German standards. I’d love to just have any kind of public transit near me.
Connecting trains are the big problem. I had a three and a half hour direct train from Frankfurt to Brussels end up taking 8 hours. The one direct train turned into four legs with 3 cancelations. Otherwise waiting for an additional 10 minutes is not a problem, yes.
DB has a link where you can ask for refunds, which is nice. It doesn’t offer refunds for time lost though.
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Here in the US, in one of the areas with “good” train service:
– my commuter train was standing room only, every day
– longer trips, like 2+ hours, ar reservation only, so o would have had to book it well ahead of time, or not get on
That sounds kind of a you problem. No really, your service being laughable doesn’t excuse Germany’s service being bad. 10 minutes of delay is unreliable when people use it as their main way of transport, the US is car centric so these delays don’t impose the same kind of problems on the general populace.
In Spain our train performance varies wildly through regions, and in some people just don’t use trains because they don’t work, where in others 5 minute delay is unacceptable. Trains, Buses, Metro, if Google maps makes a mixed plan and it doesn’t work because of an unnanaunced delay, I will be rightfully pissed.
It is if it makes you miss a connecting train.
Also, those delays aren’t the biggest problem, there’s areas of the network which are completely messed up with hour-long delays and trains being skipped. That’s a thing that’s tolerable to commuters if it happens once a year, but not three days a week.
Not enough tracks, not enough cars, not enough reserve capacity, not enough fallbacks, and not even close to enough political will to fix the situation. Oh, yes, politicians agreed to introduce a swiss-style synchronised timetable by 2030, and that’s definitely doable… but it has been postponed to 2070, or, in other words, never.
And then you hear bullshit like “we can’t burden the coming generations with debt to build infrastructure” – motherfucker how about not burdening future generations by having them drive horse buggies over gravel roads?
Swiss synchronized timetable!?
Come to Slovakia, where 30+ minute delays are the norm. Or to Greece, where railways are still operated by humans.
Thank the christian democrats and Angela Merkel. I’ll have you know that people haven’t learned and that christian democrats are leading the polls once again.
Christian and Democrat seem opposite to me. Maybe it’s just an American thing.
Hmm… why wouldn’t christians be democrats? Is the democratic party in the US majorly atheist?
It’s more so that the republican party pushes more Christian ideals (usually the “bad” ones).
When you turn the logo of Deutsche Bahn upside down, you’ll see their customer.
How do I hide these images?
They are getting pretty annoying.
Fork of one of the Lemmy frontends and add code to specifically hide the embedded images and then deploy it to your choice of hosting providers.
Or sent a PR to the main project that adds a config option instead
The web app Voyager hides them by default, as far as I can tell. You can sign into this with whatever instance account you’re using.
You can hide comments.
“Bad Day”
Omg, I never noticed. Thanks 😂
Infrastructure delivers more economic impact with less grifting when it’s not designed and run to make a profit on its own.
Right? When did we start becoming concerned with a public service being “profitable”? I’ve heard this applied to the US Postal Service a lot recently.
When did we start becoming concerned with a public service being “profitable”?
Late 80s, early 90s, with the rise of the rise of the Chicago School of neoliberalism.
“The postal service is losing money!”
No, the postal service costs money. It’s a service. It doesn’t aim to make a profit. It costs money, and we are in turn rendered a service that is useful.
I swear people are delusional.
Conservatives want to kill the postal service because it competes with for profit services they own and invest in. See: DeJoy
Which of course is stupid, because USPS is actually great and provides a much better and more reliable service than any private competitor even in its current underfunded state.
Yet nobody ever expects the road system to turn a profit. Why should trains be any different?
You want to put pressure on these things to make them more cost effecient. You’re in a capitalist system which does that job very well. But since this is not really a replaceable company, the government has to own these companies until they go public.
I first remember it becoming an issue when a failed businessman turned president wanted to run the country like one of his failed businesses.
I remember Postal Service profitability being a political issue under the second Bush, too. Trump didn’t start that. He probably even benefited from the previous rounds because he bought a historic post office in DC when it was sold off and he turned it into a hotel. That’s the same hotel where people stayed during his presidency to curry favor with him.
Depends how you calculate profit.
Exactly it’s not accumulating debt. It’s a service being provided to citizens.
Auferstanden aus ruinen more like zurück nach ruinen
It’s all good though because SNCF is an order of magnitude worse.
Lol?
I’m German and travel regularily in France as well. Travelling in France by train is a JOY compared to Germany. Please ask around as many French living in Germany as you can find. Hear their opinions.
In my experience and that of most of my friends both French and German, that is wrong. The French rail system may have its flaws (it does), but the German one is so much worse
In my experiences the SNCF Infra, rolling stock, station experience is…pretty good! Customer service on the other hand
German efficiency is such an obnoxious myth
So what myths are your people fighting with?
Fascists like you, who mythologize conflict, the past, and suffering.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The situation has severely deteriorated in recent years,” said Detlef Neuss, chair of the passenger lobby group Pro Bahn, standing outside Cologne’s main station, in the shadow of the city’s gothic cathedral with its distinctive twin spires.
Earlier this month, after weeks of speculation over the future of Britain’s planned HS2 high-speed rail link from Birmingham to Manchester, the prime minister finally announced that the northern leg was to be scrapped.
In an excoriating special report published earlier this year, the public audit body did not mince its words as it sounded the alarm, warning that the company responsible for running the national rail network, its stations and signals, along with many long-distance and local trains, risked becoming a “bottomless pit” for taxpayer money.
Despite paying some €4,400 for an annual season ticket, in recent months Winter has had to put up with a weeks-long closure of the track between Wolfsburg and Berlin for upgrades, coupled with delays, cancelled trains and lack of staff.
The company, formed from the existing West and East German railways, was freed from previous debts with the idea that it would be able, in time, to become profitable, with the goal of boosting Germany’s GDP and floating on the stock market.
The governing agreement struck by the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals in late 2021 committed them to doubling the capacity of passenger services by 2030, while setting a target for 25% of freight to be carried by rail by that date, and electrifying more railway lines amid attempts to meet climate goals.
The original article contains 1,887 words, the summary contains 258 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The myth of Germany efficiency is slowly becoming unwound.
Slowly and with lots of unplanned breaks in between.
I’ve never understood why people think that anyways - if you’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with German bureaucracy, you would have lost that view instantly.
Oh, it‘s no better over the ocean. A German colleague of mine just settled in the US and civil servants attitude and bureaucracy is the same shit. Bureaucracy seems to be an international culture.
Germans. Come to Melbourne Australia, and as you get off at the airport realise there is no connecting train to the city. Cabs only.
Brought to you by the cab industry/lobby.
Cab industry is the scum of the world.
Cars can do one.
There is a bus, but yeah, it’s a joke.
Yeah but the bus uses the same road as cars so other than being cheaper, you’re getting stuck with traffic
Or the one from Sydney that charges you 20 dollars on top of the normal fare just because. I’m on the outskirts of Sydney and I’ve given up on the train system, they’re either delayed, cancelled or running whenever they feel like it unscheduled now
Yeah the strikes and union action hasn’t helped either. Just give them what they want so we can go back to regular ish trains lol
I’ve got a joke about DB, but I’m not sure when it’ll reach you
Sänk yoo for joking wizz Deutsche Bahn.
Perhaps the Germans could start investing in coal powered trains?
So tired of this uninformed bashing honestly.
But while we’re at it: There are some coal-powered trains still in service in Germany, though mostly as attractions. Example: https://www.hsb-wr.de/
Wind farms are literally being dismantled to make room for coal extraction.
Edit: Source: https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157364
Don’t listen to a powercrazy bitch that still travels on dirt roads and shits in an outdoor toilet ;)
100% German solution.
Edit: For everybody downvoting me, see Germany begins dismantling wind farm for coal.
