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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

During Oktoberfest... 2012, we stayed during the week in Munich and then planned on leaving for Berlin before the weekend.

I recall the cost of 2 train tickets being comparable to gas and 1 day 1-way rental for an entry level Mercedes (E class perhaps?).

Autobahn or train... it wasn’t a hard choice.

Edit: As Canadians, we took the car rental. We couldn't turn down an experience of no-speed limits, even if driving is work.

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Yes. Regular ticket prices for trains are horrible expensive in Germany. You can pay a yearly fee (called Bahncard) to get 25% (62€) or 50% (255€) off. There is also a flatrate for everything called Bahncard 100 (4.270€)

You can also book early. Often you get a ticket for 20-60€ but these are limited. At least they made an UI for this: https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_start.post?dbka...

If you don't use ICE/IC you can get a daily flatrate for 44€ for whole Germany or for 20-25€ for one (or multiple) federal states.

Now we often have empty trains and busses are on the Autobahn...

Why are the prices so high?

It's difficult. They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company. They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. They need to invest a lot of money in the coming years because their infrastructure is crumbling and running on attrition.

Here are the prices vs. inflation: https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533...

However the price for a certain track depends on a lot of things and this new high-speed track has lot's of buisness customers that avoid a flight this way - so it's priced higher.

It's a complicated system with lot's of subsidies, subcontractors and so on. There is a price to pay for using the track to a different company that runs the train...

Another problem is that freight train traffic is even more expensive and they simply forgot to invest in the system for 30 years - now the Autobahn is clogged with trucks...

>"They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company"

Can you say how it is "public owned" if it is not a publicly traded stock? It sound like their bid to list it on the stock exchange failed?

I'm sorry not a native speaker - I mean the GmbH is owned by the state of Germany.

It's an AG (a stock company), not a GmbH (a limited company). But yeah, all the stocks are still owned by the federal government, and therefore all profits get credited into the federal budget.

This is interesting. I am curious what is the upside to a stock company if all the shares are owned by the same entity(the government)? Are there some classes of the DB stack that are allowed to be publicly traded then?

The original plan was to somehow make the whole thing profitable and publicy trade a large partion of shares - so they bought a lot of companies and hoped that they can refinance the train operations. Turn's out it's not so easy...it was just typical management failure, neoliberal politics and pipedreams - so they stopped it in 2005 - Hartmut Mehdorn the CEO at the time is now infamous for basically destroying everything he touches.

It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.

Very interesting, thanks for the detailed information. I will need to read up more on this. It sounds like a good case study. Cheers.

> They probably want to make some profit where it's possible.

Deutsche Bahn is infamous for extracting as much profit as possible, especially when they had no competition (long-distance buses were mostly outlawed until 2012 because of a Nazi-era law). A particularly well-known instance were the local express trains ("S-Bahn") in Berlin where they outright closed many depots and ignored mandated maintenance schedules until:

> On May 1, 2009 an S-Bahn train of the class 481 in Kaulsdorf derailed due to a broken wheel. According to S-Bahners, the scheduled general inspection of that train had been postponed for two years. This accident led to the S-Bahn chaos of 2009, since the Federal Railway office mandated shortened test intervals and therefore at times only 165 out of 552 required quarter trains were available. Eventually, all axes had to be replaced because they were generally considered to be inadequate.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn (lightly edited because the original article reads like it came out of Google Translate)

Mostly because prices are fixed so it’s hard to raise then higher like airlines can do with their tickets.

Train infrastructure is a lot more expensive than you'd think. This line cost about 10 billion Euros. If you want to recoup that money over twenty years at 4 million passengers a year that's 125 Euro per passenger. This doesn't include maintenance or the cost of the trains.

The infrastructure will last a lot longer than 20 years. Perhaps hundreds of years, with proper maintenance.

Unfortunately maintenance and upgrades to the trackside equipment aren't free either.

Rome roads are lasted for more than thousand years, but Rome isn't.

The German government is extracting usually around 1 billion € yearly out of the German railway company.

German rail subsidies in 2014 were 17b a year, so not sure where this "extracting" comes from.

as silly as it sounds it's true. Deutsche Bahn AG needs to get 850 million € a year back to the state. The rail tracks and local lines are heavy subsidized but there are different companies.

They really made a mess with this attempt at privatization. It went so far that Deutsche Bahn AG destroyed their own (payed with public money in the 80ies) working and good rolling stock in an attempt to keep the market prices up? https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880

Funnily enough Germany is held as a paragon of virtue by the nationalisationists in the UK (who now number about 65% of the country)

Well all things considered it's way nicer to take the train in Germany than England.

Getting tickets for 20 – 60 € is not so uncommon, even international ones. I also highly recommend this website to find cheap connections instead: https://bahn.guru/

There's also the Eurail and Germanrail (for non-eu residents) and Interrail (for eu residents) passes that give you several days of travel within a month. I paid 230 Eur for 5 full days of travel within a month, and there's twin tickets that are a bit cheaper per person.

Also there's the summer special, where you can get 4 trips for 96 euros.

it wasn’t a hard choice

Funny how two people can face exactly the same problem, both quickly conclude that the obvious choice is so obvious you don't even have to mention it and then both make the exact opposite choice.

If renting a car and taking the train was the same price I'd take the train without even blinking.

Yeah, in the US, for me driving to NYC is probably both the cheapest and the fastest option--even given expensive parking. But I essentially always take the train as I hate driving into Manhattan.

I actually assumed he picked up the train and just realized he decided to drive instead by reading your comment.

As an American expat living in Munich, I honestly don't know which choice you made. For me the easy choice would have been the train... Large, comfortable seats, room to get up and walk around, no traffic, and no need to focus on driving. You're right, it's not a hard choice.

Well, yeah. You live in Germany so the novelty of a no speed limit highway has worn off, if there was one. Most tourists visiting Germany probably haven't experienced a road way with no speed limit so to them it is novel.

Also, we hadn’t experienced a highway where drivers stay in the right lane unless passing.

that IS definitely the most painful thing about driving in the US. People drive in any random lanes, not related at all to the speed they go at. It makes it so much more dangerous and inefficient for everyone.

Last time I drove (well I was a passenger) on the 'no speed limit' Autobahn I think we averaged ~70 km/h for the whole trip, and spendt the last 90 minutes of our trip never getting above 30. I'll take the train every time.

Honestly driving on a long straight crowded highway is just as dull no matter what the speed limit.

Most actually have a limit and even on those that don't you should not exceed 130km/h unless you know the road: the next speed limit will come and just afterwards a speed trap....

Well aware. I’ll also point out that Mercedes’ GPS was awful at the time. It would send us through these “shortcuts” that it thought were 80km/h, but was actually posted at 30.

We gave up on it when it said this 1-lane railway underpass, for 2 way traffic, was an 80km/h road...

So given the choice of a comfortable, safe, environmentally responsible mode of transportation, you chose to go for the option where you get to burn lots of fossil fuel and move at a speed in a metal box at which you cannot control it any more if anything happens and which you had no experience in, putting your own and other lives at risk.

As a German, I wish we would impose strict speed limits on the Autobahn to avoid tourists, or anyone for that matter, do such wasteful dangerous joyrides.

Note: have been in a car accident so appreciate I am very very biased against how offhand and casually people go about such behaviour, how lives are destroyed for no reason.

I’m a believer in the cost of something being a representation of the resources used up in providing that product/service.

Even if the train itself produces less CO2 than a car, somewhere along the line those extra EURs are being used to buy things that produced CO2. And Germany’s gas taxes keep that in mind.

Or maybe the car company just needed to relocate cars out of Munich (no surprise during Oktoberfest) and there weren’t many train tickets left.

> Even if the train itself produces less CO2 than a car

Deutsche Bahn advertises their long-distance trains as running on 100% renewable energy.

Which is just that, marketing.

Almost half of German electricity is from coal.

It’s all the same grid. If DB earmarks some renewable electricity for itself, then the non-renewable mix is increased for another customer.

Deutsche Bahn operates their own grid and gets about two thirds of their energy from power plants directly connected to that on long-term contracts (the rest is fed in from the public grid with some inverters).

Things have changed a lot the last years, because of companies like Flixbus and now Flixtrain, which finally offer a real _price_ competition to the train. Now you can get from Stuttgart to Berlin for 10 Euros on Flixtrain, if you book early. I expect the same for Munich to Berlin, when Flixtrain starts to service this route next year: https://www.flixtrain.com/

Meanwhile, the price I pay because I don't want to plan my trips weeks and months in advance keeps rising and rising.

There does seem to be a general trend with hotels--which are often my biggest expense--to offer material discounts for advanced purchase/no cancelations.

Off-topic, but Mercedes E class is not "entry level", it's mid of range for Mercedes.

I just checked my reservation and it was a C-class.

I’m not that familiar with the models, but I know that Mercedes and BMW have lower-level models in N. America because they don’t want to “dilute their brand”. So entry/mid class definitions will differ between Germany and Canada.

I thought it's the other way round - e.g. Mercedes A class and BMW 1 series are not even for sale in the US?

Yes, that’s what I meant, and it’s too late to edit :(

The US does have the 1 series (finally), but just the coupe, and it’s still marketed as something sporty.

I liked the 118d hatch, but no dice in N. America (except Mexico).

Ah right.

As probably most people have heard, we in Europe think that Americans are a bit silly to want such large vehicles. Driving an A class or 118 would be both more fun and use much less fuel than an SUV that you really only use on highways and streets.

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