Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

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Well, Stuttgart 21 is not exactly a project you want to dig up when you want to advertise train travel. The reason of course is that most people at least in Germany associate it with the highly controversial rebuilding of Stuttgart main station [0], although the rest of the project is pretty reasonable.

What is also missing from your list is the fact that the main feeder line for the Gotthard base tunnel, and one of the most important railway lines in Europe, the Rhine valley railway [1], is extremely overloaded with over 300 trains per day, and the ongoing extension, which was planned in the 70ies and 80ies and for which construction work started in 1987 will not be finished before 2041 (!) [2]. It was originally planned to be finished in 2002. In 2016, the line was capped for days because the rail company (DB) chopped down some trees which were specifically planted in the 19th century to stabilize the ground (which DB was unaware of), resulting in a massive landslide [3]. In 2017, it was capped again for 2 months because of a collapse of a tunnel under construction by DB and crossing the existing line underground [4, 5]. In 2020, it was capped again because a bridge which DB planned to replace with a longer one crashed onto the rails and into a train, killing the driver [6] and nearly missing a high speed ICE train.

If the embarrasing engineering failures continue at this rate, I doubt they will finish the extension in the 21rst century.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_Hauptbahnhof

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannheim%E2%80%93Karlsruhe%E2%...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausbau-_und_Neubaustrecke_Karl...

[3] https://ais.badische-zeitung.de/piece/07/36/42/b1/120996529-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastatt_Tunnel#August_2017_col...

[5] https://bilder3.n-tv.de/img/incoming/origs19996186/831279596...

[6] https://www.schwaebische.de/cms_media/module_img/12646/63233...

I briefly browsed the Stuttgart 21 article but didn't quite get why people are opposing it. Would you mind to elaborate?

Here is one angle: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/08/31/stuttgart-21s-...

In short, it's very expensive and it will quickly reach peak capacity and need expansion.

Living in the area at the height of the protests, so I can fill in.

Some of the reasons: many people (including experts) argued that the project could have been done for half the price with almost the same effect by upgrading the existing station above ground instead of building an entirely new underground station, for example. Costs kept increasing – nothing new for big public infra projects, of course. But when a multi-billion euro project slowly triples its budget, people start asking questions.

That way it also took away funding from other smaller necessary projects. One should consider here that DB (railway operator) has been shutting down smaller, rural lines for decades making it harder and harder to rely on them, when you don't live on the main intercity network.

There were ecological concerns about the planned changes to Stuttgart's inner city layout and how it affects the already bad micro climate.

Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns. They acted completely tone-deaf to the protests and in one instance used excessive police force to crush a peaceful assembly. Just altogether bad topics, which did not make the project more popular.

> Plus there was a general sense of the project being pushed through by stubborn DB officials and state government as a kind of vanity project despite the aforementioned concerns.

A public referendum was held in 2011. 58.9% voted for the project to be continued.

A state-wide referendum was held on the entire project, including the hundreds of kilometers of new tracks, tunnels, and bridges, a long-distance station for the Stuttgart airport, and a new station on the Swabian alb. There was never a referendum only on the new main station.

I would add that the train station part freed up a lot of prime real estate in Stuttgart's city center by moving the railways, and the station, underground. I always had the impression that played a big role for everyone involved (DB, the city, politicians,...) in the decision to not budge on the train station part. The rest of Stuttgart 21, all the new tunnels and bridges and railway lines, are quite reasonable IMHO.

Germany has a history of poorly managed public projects. From the big projects in the last decade, there is not just Stuttgart 21, but also the new Airport in Berlin and the Elbphilharmonie-concert hall in Hamburg which are infamous for taking too long building-time, wasting too much money and offering a poor job for what they are supposed to do.

In similar vein there are many smaller projects which are just waste of money for no benefit. There is even a whole tv-series of such obscure failed projects, as also regularly reports of the fails of Germanys Government in handling Money. So Germans have very low trust in public projects, especially when they are expensive.

I guess such views do exist in most countries to some degree, but this is something that specially triggers German mentally, which usually more composed and on the peaceful side. Similar behavior surfaced in the last year with the different pandemia-rulings, and now with the vaccinations.

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