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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons, which of course makes them slow.

This is absolutely insane to hear. Feels like the whole "German efficiency" trope is mostly a meme or it doesn't apply to government/national services and is in line with all the other negative things I heard about the infamous archaic German bureocracy in general.

I know even Ukrainian refugees were shocked at how archaic German paper based bureocracy was compared to their home country which moved to digital, as they expected Europe's richest country to have much more efficient bureocracy than Europe's poorest country. Boy were they in for a surprise.

And let's not talk about Germany's infamously abysmal infrastructure and service coverage for fiber and mobile internet that's well behind Eastern Europe.

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It's not insane at all. Every additional stop takes about 20 minutes - but there are a lot of people who actually use the stations between, say, Berlin and Cologne.

Germany is much less centralised than France. 20% of the population is in Paris. Only 2% of Germans live in Berlin. It would be insanity to mindlessly copy the French model when the circumstances are so different.

You can play with combinatorics where there are ten trains per day, of which 2 are direct with no stops, 2 only stop in Cologne, remaining 6 stop in Cologne and some other destination as well.

There are sprinter trains with only one or two stops early in the morning and in the evening.

>Only 2% of Germans live in Berlin.

Over 6 million people live in Berlin metro, in an 80 million country this is closer to 8%.

And the metro area of Berlin is twice as large as the one of Paris, with not even half of the population.

Not 2% to 20% though.

(Edit: this comment was based on apparently incorrect information from GP that there is some rule that high-speed trains need to stop in any state they cross. A counter-example is given below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548720)

> there are a lot of people who actually use the stations between, say, Berlin and Cologne

Sure, and a stop in the middle would make sense on that length of route, or alternating at which intermediate place(s) it stops. But with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state you pass means that you have to build rails around to avoid hitting a corner where nobody lives anyway because you'd have to stop for absolutely no reason.

Let the trains make stops and rails be laid based on, like you say, demand. Not on arbitrary border lines.

"with a stupid rule like having to stop in whatever state"

There is no such rule in Germany.

That's literally what was said above? Did I misunderstand this sentence or was this person wrong?

> high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross

yeah, that's wrong.

For example the ICE from Hamburg to Berlin tomorrow at 14:35 goes directly, not stopping in Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern or Brandenburg.

Might have been worth mentioning in your existing reply above to the person who said that. I'm kind of wondering who to believe now: one the one hand there's the silliness of the rule that makes me inclined to think you must be right; on the other hand there is my experience living in germany and their love for rules and bureaucracy (whoever spawned the phrase 'german efficiency' must have been sarcastic).

Edit: ah I see you added an example. That settles it then, thanks!

Another one: I used to take the ICE Sprinter from Hamburg to Düsseldorf. It didn't stop in Bremen and Lower Saxony. Went directly from Hamburg to NRW.

I should have made that clear: there is no such formal rule, although there are quibbles like that where regional politicians demand additional stops.

That's the system working as intended, though. People like to laugh about small cities like Montabaur or Limburg getting ICE access but it turned out that the regions benefitted a lot from that access and after two slow years the demand for high speed train access in the region exploded.

But that doesn’t mean there can’t be express trains that bypass the minor stops, no?

There is no such fixed rule. Many high-speed trains Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig don't stop in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen-Anhalt, or Brandenburg through which almost all of the route is going through. As far as I am aware there isn't even a single service on that route stopping in Brandenburg at all.

This was a reasonable reading of the sentence, let me indulge into a digression about German grammar.

> A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons

English is more topic-loaded: We might say "for political reasons, every high speed train in Germany..." and so on. In fact if it made any sense for the reason trains cross states to be a political one, the "for political reasons" clause would attach to "cross", not "have", where I believe this is unambiguous in German.

"for political reasons" could have been regulation, also. It happens that it isn't. For that matter "need to" carries more of a sense of obligation than I feel is truly warranted.

That all said, it's valid English and I read it to mean as the author intended.

> Feels like the whole "German efficiency" trope is mostly a meme

Yeah it's really false, Germany is painfully bureaucratic, ceremonial and slow and dysfunctional, compared to other leading western nations.

German engineering, and german manufacturing, are really what deserves to have good reputation.

If one compares Germany with the France, Poland, Italy or UK, then Germany is a haven of stability. There must be something good to this 'slowness'.

Sure, but then the reputation should be "German stability" and not efficiency.

Yeah, but stability is important. Take the recent federal elections. Germany moved without any pain from a CDU/CSU/SPD to a three party government (SPD/Greens/FDP). No complaints about the election system, besides a too large Bundestag. Compare that to the US elections Biden/Trump: massive problems with the voting system: real and made up.

The Germans voted on paper. -> There was an undisputed result.

Does not feel like stability but instead maintaining status quo.

There is a fine line dividing stability and stagnation.

For example, the Poles are much better at building apartments and transport infrastructure fast than anyone else on your list, including Germany.

> For example, the Poles are much better at building apartments and transport infrastructure fast than anyone else on your list, including Germany.

Is it that they are 'much better' or the economy is in different stages? The housing market in Germany is much more expensive. It's much cheaper to build in Poland.

Germany already has a larger transport infrastructure. Example: Autobahn 13000 km in Germany vs. roughly 2000km in Poland.

So let us look at a more comparable pair.

Czech and Polish economies are fairly comparable, but Czech ability to build anything is in tatters. We are a NIMBY paradise, every modest block of flats takes a decade to approve. Our northern neighbours aren't, they build fast.

Poland was a post-Communist rust bucket a short time ago. It's easier to grow and leapfrog when you're starting low. Britain, France and Germany have a lot of inertia.

> This is absolutely insane to hear.

Its also not true. Local politians are pushing hard to get high speed rail stops, and there is political horse trading going on when building lines to get more local stops, but it doesn't necessarily translate into "one stop in each state" rule.

The problem with hsr is geographical (non centralized coubtry means u need a big network), bureaucratic (it takes decades to build big infra projects), pilticical (germany underinvests in hsr, conservatives want cars, many local greens despise big infra that destroys local meadows), inertia (germans lack vision and follow through, they mostly fiddle and optimize).

Germans can be efficient when they need to. It's just governments generally aren't so efficient. But they still get shit done.

I'd say it's actually much worse in the US in terms of the government's ability to get anything done related to infrastructure. Bad roads, rolling blackouts are a regular thing, etc. And of course there is the complete lack of any form of high speed rail connections anywhere in the US. Apparently it's impossible to get anything done on that front for decades now.

> I know even Ukrainian refugees were shocked at how archaic German paper based bureocracy was compared to their home country which moved to digital, as they expected Europe's richest country to have much more efficient bureocracy than Europe's poorest country

Ukraine isn't the poorest European country, Moldova is. (Well without counting the war, and i don't think we can accurately estimate it's economic damage).

As for the bureaucracy, it's actually quite easy to understand once you think about it. It's the same reason why Estonia was a frontrunner in eGovernement and eIDs - when regime change happens ( communism is replaced by a democracy-ish), lots of existing things (laws, institutions) are "tainted" with the aura of the old bad regime. So there's lots of impetus, desire and excuse to change all sorts of things. On the other hand, in a country Germany, even with the absorption of East Germany, things have worked, there's momentum, so there's not that much desire to just change everything.

Germany has plenty of laws and rules leftover from before the big tainted regime change at the end of wwii.

Depends on what those stops are, for bigger cities it makes sense if route isn't hugely longer. As you can serve also those not just the end points.

Berlin to Hamburg (~1:50) is a nice route. There's almost nothing in terms of population between these two cities.

However, every 2 hours there is a train that stops at Wittenberge (population 8k) and Ludwiglust (population 12k). I assume this is one of those mandated/political routes, rather than economic routes.

It adds an extra 20-30min to the trip, which isn't so bad. But whenever I've taken this route, maybe 2-5 people get on or off.

Would it be better served by more normal IC (200kph) or RE (160kph) train rather than an ICE? I don't know.

That train on the Hamburg Berlin line doing extra stops is an IC, which is a loco hauled 200 km/h train, compared to all other trains which are high speed rail sets running 230km/h. The slower trains aren’t publicly organised, they are for-profit services operated by the German railways inc. like virtually all other IC and ICE services. The German railways are owned by the federal government, meaning there is political influence into the system, but it’s pretty indirect for local politicians.

One thing to consider is that these services may be historic as well. Removing them will burn a lot of good will, which may be expensive in the long run for an operator that is dependent on ongoing public support - even if day-to-day decisions are made independently with economic interests in mind. Compare he marginal cost of providing those stops. Also consider that while Hamburg-Berlin may have a lot of competition from other modes, the small towns may not. Also, most ppl in those small cities will be close to the rail station. Add to that that ppl from surrounding regions will use the stops to get … basically anywhere by train, and you have a bunch of factors that my result in higher ridership than u would expect just by looking at the population of the cities themselves.

> every 2 hours there is a train that stops at Wittenberge (population 8k) and Ludwiglust (population 12k)

That's a Milchmädchenrechnung if I've ever seen one. When a long-distance train coming from Berlin stops in Ludwigslust, there is nearly always a guaranteed connection to a local train continuing towards Schwerin and Wismar (combined population 137k). I'm regularly using this route to visit my parents in Mecklenburg, and it's never just me who's changing trains in Ludwigslust. There's always at least two dozen people. On the weekends, sometimes a lot more.

In a similar vein, Wittenberge may not have all that much people living directly there, but it is an important train hub for northern Sachsen-Anhalt and Brandenburg with several RE lines all meeting there.

Germany is mostly a State-less country, their infra suffer from that: Germans rails and roads tend to be far worst than some poor eastern neighbors, still many rails on diesel, roads in obscene conditions etc except few main arteries.

French side having a certain State-planning infra are much, much more spread and in shape.

Too much federalization hurts. The country as a whole ends un bogged down by political squabbles of the different regions who want it "their way".

This isn't an issues specific to Germany though but many EU countries have the same issues.

The end result is too much talking politics and too little improvement, which only benefits the bureocrats cashing their paychecks either way, and hurts the taxpayers who need the services now.

>Germans rails and roads tend to be far worst than some poor eastern neighbors

Example? I know Poland is doing something, but still is far from speed of ICEs. The country is a bit smaller though, and largest destination - Warsaw - is relatively in the centre so it helps.

Germany still have many non-electrified rails, sometimes even cross-borders ones. Polemics about dangerous bridges and roads etc are regular and so on.

For instance https://elib.dlr.de/121661/1/Railways%202018_E3.01_Pagenkopf... page 3 you have a map of rails with the fraction electrified or https://www.tellerreport.com/business/2021-07-21-infrastruct... and https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/low-german-infr...

Broadband coverage is in a similar sorry state respect of similarly big countries in EU, and it's very expensive, electricity is probably the most expensive in the EU etc

Long-story short: Germany lack of a state-wide infrastructure development, being too concentrate in private profit of some big industries, that's works well for such industries but not work at all for the country at a whole.

I do not know how old is this issue, I do not know if was planted on purpose after WWII to lock their development capability, it might be: I know for Italy was done, with the complicity of vast local corruption "allied" have managed to break up the too quickly too powerful industrial complex born after WWII in most sectors successfully stop many nascent champions. But anyway that's what I've seen in Germany and the little I read about, perhaps someone else here know more and can contribute :-)

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