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Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

Infrastructure in Leipzig is awesome because it was newly created after joining Western Germany for the money from westerners. Infrastructure in Western Germany is crap! My wife uses subway in Munich and there is no week without complaining about delayed or canceled trains. Buildings of universities in Western Germany is a bad joke. University in Regensburg was literally collapsing while one in Dresden got many new buildings. It’s not fair comparison.

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At least there are trains... and Munich in particular is slightly weird in that the subway (U-Bahn) is run by a municipal company and works very reliably given the amount of people they're moving, while the suburban trains (S-Bahn) are run by Deutsche Bahn and are often a mess at rush hour. In part that's due to the design flaw of having a massive central bottleneck.

Similarly for universities, the quality differs. Go to Munich's technical university and you'll see buildings in the top percentiles. Go to other universities and the substance is easily going to be much older - but then again, Germany sets its priorities to a good quality education without student debt, and the buildings themselves don't matter much for the education.

Generally, I feel like all these complaints need to be measured against what the alternative is. Which cities have a busy subway system where commuters aren't complaining?

> Generally, I feel like all these complaints need to be measured against what the alternative is. Which cities have a busy subway system where commuters aren't complaining?

Literally any city in Asia (or at least Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, whose subway company has now branched out to run subways in many parts of the world like Stockholm). In one year of living in Nagoya the subway was late once.

That said it has a way more sensible layout than Munich where one failure in a central point does not cascade to paralyze the entire rest of the network. It is not the worst of course, since it is pretty extensive, but routing nearly every single line through Hbf or Sendlinger Tor couldn't ever have been a good idea.

Germany sets its priorities to a good quality education without student debt, and the buildings themselves don't matter much for the education

That is true to some extent. However, the noise of the rainwater dripping into many buckets at the central library of the University of Regensburg made it hard to concentrate on anything.

That was around 2010. Not sure if the leaky roof has been fixed since. Wouldn't be surprised if the answer is no.

> My wife uses subway in Munich and there is no week without complaining about delayed or canceled trains.

At least there is public transportation at all, unlike in the US.

Exactly. People in Germany think that if your train is late it is the end of the world. Their trains and subways tend to be very clean and punctual, yet very affordable. In the US this is not true. BART in SF nowhere near to the quality of service in Munich.

You could say that not having public transportation is better than having crappy public transportation. And I'm not talking about some occasional hiccup but the fact is that Deutsche Bahn operated trains are an enormous shit show. They are constantly late or even cancelled. You buy a ticket for a train and few mins before the train is supposed to arrive the board will say "zug fellt aus" (train cancelled). Have fun waiting 20-40 mins for the next one. If you have to be somewhere on time then you're going to have look for an alternative way of transport and you have practically no recourse for recouping the cost of your wasted ticket money.

Now if the public transportation didn't exist you'd just shrug and go by your car saving yourself a whole bunch of stress and fist clenching and cursing.

Our subway is good. I'm using it every day and just because one train is canceled doesn't mean anything because 10 minutes later the next one comes

Agreed, I lived in Munich for 5 years and its public transport is excellent and very extensive, some of the best I've seen.

10 minutes? Good for you - I get pissed off if I have to wait more than 5 minutes between trains in London.

A delay of 10m is different than a delay of 1h or a lack of public transport. The Munich Transport Corporation (MVG) guarantees a return of fare, equivalent to a full day's ticket, if they delay is more than 20m [0].

[0] https://www.mvg.de/dam/mvg/ueber/unternehmensprofil/mvg-imag...

Have you been to the US?

I used to hate public transport in munich, but compared to US (e.g. SF or NYC) it seems incredibly good.

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