Germany is offering a summer of cheap trains | Hacker News Reader

Germany is offering a summer of cheap trains

bloomberg.com

134 pointspaul-graham106 comments

As someone using the German railway for a large distance destination couple a weeks ago it was a total disaster, we got stranded in a unfamiliar German city. Deutsche bahn told us they didn’t have any of their (partner) hotel rooms left. Just arrange something yourself. That was very nice because all the hotels were full anyway. It took us another 2 hours of calling to find something. I was exhausted when I finally checked in somewhere at 1 am.

I try to avoid flying, but the German railway is giving me nightmares. I frequently travel through Germany and it is the exception if there aren’t any large issues.

The article itself is very thin when giving its reasons. I’m sure it’s oké for people without the money to spend, but I would rather pay more for increased reliability. If the German summers are similar to how the Dutch maintains their railways, I’m sure they will plan a ton of construction while the masses of people that usually take the trains for work are on holiday. So I’m inclined to see this promotional as compensation for bad summer train service.

Okay, but when you compare to the US, it's still amazing.

Okay, but the US is 50x larger.

China has trains.

I like trains.

trains

Why is it downvoted? He has a point.

And China has an agenda and a government that is supporting the building of railways. It's successful.

In US the government was supporting the development of roads a century ago. It was very successful.

So is it about the size of the country or corrupt government?

I'm pretty sure Europe is bigger than US surface wise.

And we’ll over 2x the population.

Eh?? I thought they were quite similar... Mmm, yeah, EU population is only 447 million. You must be counting Russia and other countries too but those are outside of the socioeconomic system we're talking about.

The EU alone is under half the surface area of US, though, so it's like 3x the population density.

You’re right (had to look it up), though it’s only bigger by 3.5 %.

If you take a traditional definition of Continental Europe, including islands like Britain and Ireland, and going all the way into Russia as far as the Ural and Caucasus mountains, then Europe is slightly larger than the USA.

But if you're talking about just the European Union, then the EU is much smaller than the USA. Less than half the land area.

> Continental Europe, including islands like Britain and Ireland,

Continental Europe doesn't include Britain and Ireland.. That's kind of the point of the phrase.

Yeah he meant the European continent (the western half of Eurasia) rather than Continental Europe.

Okay, but with a GDP and population to (out)match, sooo not really relevant. Per capita and per square km, "German train system quality" is a bajillion times better than in the US.

The US has lower population density than Germany, so you need more km of rail to serve the same amount of people. But that only accounts for part of the difference in quality, to be sure

Sure, feel free to compare the trains in New York State vs Germany then.

The primary issue in NY is the subway service and the Amtrack trains coming in via the soon to be replaced portal bridge in NJ plus general Amtrack crappiness from other routes (not an NY problem). The commuter lines are decent. Though, with ridership destroyed it remains to be seen what impact the revenue shortfalls will have going forward.

That's only NY City though. If we consider the trains in Buffalo/Utica/Syracuse/Rochester/Albany I think you'll find it way more grim compared to equivalent German cities than what you're describing.

That's an Amtrack problem not NY specific.

I'm not sure how that's relevant though when just trying to compare travelling by rail in NY State to Germany; is the claimed problem with Amtrak that they have to cover more states than the German train system, and train system management doesn't scale directly causing rail to be worse in NY State than in Germany?

You book a train from Aachen to Berlin. The first leg in your connection is late, you miss the ICE in the middle of nowhere. The next one is in four hours. You get in, the DB staff looks at you like you shit in their coffee. Booked a bike place and reserved a seat? The best they can do is to offer to stand between the carriages.

That's really unlucky. Before the Covid thing I took a long-distance train at least once per month for two decades, and I never managed to get stranded anywhere even when I chose late connections. Normally DB knows the connections passengers have, and it seems that if the last train of the day gets delayed the other trains wait for it to make sure no one gets stranded. I would really have enjoyed staying in one of those Intercity hotels at DB's expense.

The worst thing that happened to me was that the ICE train broke down in the middle of nowhere and the DB had to send another train and evacuate everyone from the original one over a gangway (it's not allowed to let passengers deboard in the middle of nowhere). Took more than four hours of waiting in an overheated train during summer. They sent me a box of really good chocolates as a "We're sorry" gift.

DB is nightmare. I had so many cases of missing trains when they had 1 hour delay on 1.5h track, connecting trains no waiting even for 5 minutes, cancelling train in last minute, etc.

Lucky you. I was taking Koblenz to Utrecht some years ago and every week there was something going wrong in Germany on the way back. Once they just dropped me off in Bonn, no further service to Koblenz at midnight „sleep on the bench, we aplogize but can’t do anything”.

I do not share your experience. I used to commute weekly for 1,75 hours in one direction with ICE. I had rarely problems that lasted more than 5 minutes. There was no change of trains required which might help here.

Let me guess: Your commute was in East Germany? Reliability is a lot better there [1]

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...

No, it was the route from Hamburg to Munich or similar.

I worked for a company for 7 years and the only ICE (between our Munich and Würzburg office) I took that was not either: replaced with an IC, cancelled, or my reservation messed up... was the one to a company christmas party. So the table seat to be able to work on the ride happened exactly 0 times out of X where I tried. But I think they were at least on time and I wasn't stranded. Not that I should need to mention this...

Same here: I regularly take long-distance train rides throughout all Germany, both with ICE (the fast one) as well as RE (the regional one), and for me it works smoothly for the most part.

The mess of DB isn't that much different from how the oligarchs in a lot of eastern European countries came to be. Privatization without real plan. Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

The rails near Hamburg Altona are rotting, but the Bahn didn't want to foot the bill. So they came up with a horrible new station somewhere else. As a result the city chipped in to make a better one and pay of it from tax money.

I'm the last person to favour the government institutions in Germany. They're slow, lazy and full of old lazy hierarchies that must have been productive 30 years ago, but what is the point of privatizing something when the structure itself doesn't change and the privatization does nothing but siphon money out of the system and pump tax money in anyway? Half the ICE fleet is out of commission nowadays.

> what is the point of privatizing something when the structure itself doesn't change and the privatization does nothing but siphon money out of the system and pump tax money in anyway?

That is the point.

Gigantic projects like nuclear reactors, stadiums, high ways, bridges, airports (hallo Berlin) trains (and big software projects and wars, too) are just different ways of funneling a significant percentage of the tax payer money funding the project into the politicians' and decision makers' circle's wallet.

In summary: because corruption.

DB is not privatized, it is 100% state-owned. As far as I know, all ICE power cars are still in use today, except for the one destroyed in the Eschede accident.

So, echoing what eisstrom wrote: Deutsche Bahn is fully state owned. That phrase about "privatizing the profits and socializing the losses" is a common but still mindless form of dross in this case. I do understand why it gets a particular group of uninformed people to upvote your comment out of reflex though. You use it as click-bait, sort of, while building a convoluted argument that presumably very few of those upvoters actually grok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bahn

Deutsche Bahn AG is the national railway company of Germany. Headquartered in the Bahntower in Berlin, it is a private joint-stock company (AG), with the Federal Republic of Germany being its single shareholder.

It was privatized in 1994. It's actually interesting that to the outside world people believe that it wasn't privatized because of the weird holding structure that it has.

They actually brag about how the privatization in 1994 was a huge success. The history of the privatisation of the Staatsbahn is so convoluted that it's hard to tell what actually happened.

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/erfolgreiche-weichenstellung-...

EDIT: just because privatization isn't the kind of privatization you like doesn't mean it didn't happen. especially since the people here have no idea about the actual internal structure of the institution and who the leadership answers to.

That article describes Deutsche Bahn being converted from a government agency to a fully state-owned "private" (public) company.

The word "private" as used here does not mean what you think it means.

("Mit der Bahnreform entstand ein Wirtschaftsunternehmen in privatrechtlicher Form. Der Bund blieb zwar alleiniger Eigentümer der neuen Bahn AG, er sollte allerdings nur noch bei strategischen Entscheidungen mitreden dürfen.")

The problem is probably more the EU directive that caused the privatization, because it requires that all European rail services compete commercially. Which means they are all required to make a profit even if it is a net negative to society. I can't wait for an EU directive that requires our firefighters to compete commercially, following the example of Marcus Licinius Crassus this would seem quite doable.

Wait, what problem? Do you also believe that Deutsche Bahn was privatized, as in the ownership being transferred from the government to private citizens? If not, can you please clarify for the benefit of other readers of the thread?

The problem that it __acts__ like a for profit privately owned company.

Ah. I guess that involves bourgeoisie things such as attempting to balance their budget.

Yes, the rail system needs to grow up and be like the wonderful privatized road system that charges tolls on all levels of streets to make sure it is not stealing from tax coffers to encourage pollution.

It's more nuanced than looking at this 'who owns it and is it really a privatization'. Back when the people working at DB were government officials there weren't so many problems, trains were on time and money was spent on the infra. Then they sent them all into early retirement and I guess everything is now more focused on profits (are there even any?) but the outcome is that it's badly managed and dysfunctional.

Maybe worth noting that the 9-euro ticket is only for local public transport, such as buses, subways, or regional trains. Only the latter (RE) are operated by Deutsche Bahn, whereas buses and subways are mostly ran by local companies.

If you beed to be on time, national flights with Lufthansa for me are close to 100% reliable whereas Deutsche Bahn turned out to be a catastrophe in about 50% of the cases. I still don’t get it: they own the complete network, they control every train on it and arriving on time at a place is like playing roulette. Neither air travel nor traveling by car gives those headaches (especially when you listen to your dynamic GPS that routes around traffic jams). You can reduce the bad luck a bit by planning longer stops when changing trains, still making pauses longer reduces the attractiveness of trains even more. Personally, I love taking trains when it works. It is comfortable, fast and you arrive in city centers. Even first class tickets have acceptable prices. But as I usually don’t travel for pleasure, but for business and don’t want to waste my time, German trains have become a no-go for me.

Lufthansa rarely gets "Personenschaden" ("injury to persons", an euphemism for "suicide") on their flight paths while Deutsche Bahn has frequently to deal with that. A delayed intercity express train definitely delays departure of other trains that are considered Anschluss(züge) ("connecting trains"). It then ripples through the network.

Then how do other countries get to a reliable service? Japan, Switzerland, France…

Having travel a few times TGV trains across france, while connecting to Switzerland, Belgium and Germany, I wouldn't consider them much better than German ones.

I still have a good story from a TGV travel from Paris back to Geneva that took the double of the time, partial return travel back to Paris, again reversed mid-way back to Geneva, being blocked on a trainstation on the middle of nowhere waiting for restaurant wagon supplies trying to calm down everyone, and finally arriving into Geneva several hours later than expected.

I cut lots of details on that reliable train trip.

Mostly by spending more money. Especially France and Japan built special rails only to be used by high speed trains. While those exist in Germany, there are less of them and they mostly don't reach from station to station but instead near the city centers high speed trains share rails with slower trains.

I like the „nightjets“ where you can sleep and wakeup in another city. Used that a few times.

I have to say, that if I have to be on time somewhere I take the car. DB is too much risk to miss the connecting train and the employees just look at you „well, bad luck. Next train 2h“

When I m on vacation i would file that under „experience“ and would just sit somewhere and sip coffee.

What does large/long distance mean here? Do german railways extend outside of Germany proper? I'm confused because the longest distance I can find between two major cities is Munich to Hamburg, and that's only about 400 miles!

Ive had a Bahncard 100 (yearly pass for all fast trains in the country) for six years now and while there are problems, its about once a year, working out to about 1% of my train trips.

For air travel, Id guesstimate I get delays about 10-20% of the time.

I've definitely had my "I hate DB" moments in my life and experiences similar to the one you describe, but for me, most of the time, I don't experience major issues (I don't count "train is half an hour late" to be a major issue, although I agree that it's kind of laughable that this happens so often - but I got used to it). It's definitely easier if you don't have to change trains or you don't take a super late train or anything.

Then there's also things that are consistently bad, like regional trains in NRW. They're never on time.

That's an interesting viewpoint and as someone living in the south of you, I have a hard time to understand why 30min is not a major issue. I feel more like after 5min, it's way to late :D ...

Most times I take the train is visiting my parents and it's a 9–10 hour journey. Considering that total time, half an hour certainly isn't that big of a deal. And by car the same distance would take nearly the same time, if not more, as the motorway isn't clear of other cars whenever you travel.

Admittedly, the most probable leg of the journey to get late or be disruped in any way is the very first one. Living in a town that has no long-distance rail connection you're forced to use local trains to the next major city anyway.

Well, it depends. For a half or one hour trip, of course that would be a huge delay (but that also doesn't happen so often except for some areas like NRW...), but I'm talking more about >4h trips without changing trains, and I really don't care that much about half an hour more or less in that case.

Of course, I'd prefer that trains were as punctual as in Switzerland but what can I do?

Since the discussions here are primarily about the railway system, Deutsche Bahn and especially long distance travels, I would like to point out that most of this does not specifically apply to the 9-Euro-per-month ticket for this summer. But first, I want to agree with many of the complaints, that long distance travelling by train has its annoyances in Germany: lots of trains not on schedule, missed connections resulting from that, occasionally completely overfull trains, very bad management when something goes wrong.

However, the 9-Euro ticket is not designed for long distance travels. (You may use it as such, because some regional trains are covering quite a distance and by switching from local train to local train; just take your time.) Besides of local and regional trains, it is also valid for most of the local trams and buses as well (except some private operators, that do not participate).

The ease it provides for local transport is, what it makes really attractive for me. I do not need to think about how to get a ticket (often in advance), if I am visiting somewhere. Without any afterthought, I can use a bus downtown everywhere for just one or two stops. I can park my car somewhere outside, near a tram station and take a 10 min. ride into the centre and do not need to find out which of more than a dozent ticket options is the one I need.

All of this is mainly psychological. Even before the 9-Euro ticket, using local transport was cheaper than driving a car. And admittedly, there are still some advantages of the car, most notably that you don't have to obey a time-table. But as you might think of your car as just waiting for you to get in and go, so it is now with any bus, tram or local/regional train.

As Swiss (just southern country of Germany fyi), the push for cheaper train is always interesting. However I expect the same level of punctuality and reliability when I would be ready to use train vs my car for work or business trips. I did regularly go to Germany for work (Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt) and regularly had issues with either people causing trouble and police needed to board, suicide (sad but a reality) and most often technical problems. These often lead to missing important connecting trains.

So all in all for me the first step is not to reduce price but to ensure reliable infrastructure…

Unless things changed from when I used to live there, even with Swiss salary, any sort of demi-tarif even with Swiss salaries, is requirement for using the trains regularly.

However I really do miss their pontuallity.

Public transportation is always a waste of time in the end. If you can afford a car, I wouldn't use a train.

If the train costs more than flying and is a lot less reliable there's basically only the environmental argument left.

That said, I'm not sure what I want to choose. Trains /should/ be cheaper than planes, but they also shouldn't be a roulette whether I will arrive on time, or at all.

This is very interesting to hear. In 2014, my wife and I went on a vacation in Germany and I found that it was cheaper and more convenient to rent a car than it was to use trains as we've typically done countries like Italy and France for our vacations. I chalked it up to Germans being a big fan of cars.

Already well-covered on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31445822

In Cornwall, UK, the local council has started something similar but not just for summer. Now a person can buy 7 day ticket for £10 and can travel anywhere in Cornwall on any bus. The stated goal for this policy is to encourage people to use public transport as much as possible, and to nudge older citizens to use public transport instead of driving themselves.

More needs to be done by the government. I was interested to learn the other day that Great British Rail will recieve the same, if not less, in subsidies. It's purely to 'streamline' buying tickets and the ticket costs will be barely effected.

It's being fronted as preventing further taxpayer costs, but I can't but feel maybe if there weren't a million private ToC's and the RoC's bleeding the railways dry this would be a non-issue.

This is first and foremost a subsidy scheme to give public transit providers some more money - many people will buy the 9 euro ticket which before did not buy monthly tickets - and for each such ticket, the state will give the public transit provider the difference to a full month ticket, up to 200 Euros.

1. The casual public transit rider will get one of these tickets: 9 Euros is like three rides on the Berlin subway ... they ride cheaper beginning with the fourth.

2. The commuter will save some money on the monthly ticket for three month.

3. Because of the media frenzy about these 9 Euro tickets, many non-users will buy it with plans to go sightseeing, as this ticket still is cheaper than most individual routes. Not all of them will actually use it.

4. Sylt (think 'the German version of Nantucket/Martha's Vineyard') will burn to the ground.

regarding number 4: for more information or to team up with other people, see the 'official' subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/sylt51/

Sylt ist fällich!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKmSLO6QNwg&ab_channel=Wobin...

> This is first and foremost a subsidy scheme to give public transit providers some more money - many people will buy the 9 euro ticket which before did not buy monthly tickets - and for each such ticket, the state will give the public transit provider the difference to a full month ticket, up to 200 Euros.

Do you have a source for that? Considering that the federal government considers 2.5 billion Euro enough to cover the costs, this sounds false. As far as I'm informed the transport authorities will just get their current costs covered.

My source is from an internal (FDP) party newsletter I've read when the idea first was announced. I seem to have since deleted it...

But to put that into context: with 2.5 billion Euros, you could finance 12.5 million such 200-euro-subsidies, or a ticket for three months for about 5% of the population, which I think is not too pessimistic - I'd wager that's about twice the number of people who have a net-wide ticket for their respective ÖPNV-Verbund today.

The Länder of course consider that money too little and are trying to get more cash assigned, though.

> 4. Sylt (think 'the German version of Nantucket/Martha's Vineyard') will burn to the ground.

As a non-American, I'd appreciate some further elaboration.

The suggestion is that it will get overrun with more tourists than it can handle.

Sylt is considered "the holiday island for the uberrich". When the idea was first considered, their mayor carelessly spoke to the media that he feared the plebs coming to their island and do lower-class stuff, in short, getting on the nerves of 'regulars'.

Which was the inspiration for Germany's youth to - very loudly - start planning the invasion of Sylt to drink cheap beer from tincans and do lower-class stuff.

Add our liberal-democratic federal finance minister to the mix, who will get married on Sylt in mid-June, and you got a perfect storm.

Something very similar happened in the 1990s, when the Bahn had a cheap ticket - back then, riot police was sent to Sylt to avoid lower-class tourists getting too annoying. This time, though, it's likely going to be a lot worse, because of things being more organized thanks to the internet.

It's an island that has been a high society hotspot for decades. Think celebrities and politicians sipping champagne in overpriced beachside restaurants.

But even though it's an island, it's reachable by train via a dam, and the locals are worried about being overrun with day trip tourists, and the clebrities are worried about being crowded by poor people.

Sylt is windy and cold also in summer, for a family holyday I woudn't recommend. Let's see how this turns out. The typical summer tourists go south...

From various comments here and also some advice from friends. Consider not taking a trip for more than 2 connections or 2 hour trips with this scheme. A journey delayed will be percolated up to your final connection.

https://archive.ph/GxXWn

I must confess that I've used the train system in Berlin many, many times and never paid because I didn't realize (at first) and later forgot.. Have things changed so that you need to go through a turnstile or similar ticket entry system, or is this just for the RE trains?

Can’t speak to Berlin within the past 3 years, but I’ve never seen any sort of gate/turnstile entry to German train or subway. There are little punch machines in the stations most places, or just use that city’s transit app - Nuremberg’s is well-integrated with Apple Pay.

Enforcement is anywhere from routine and uniformed (IC/ICE), semi-routine (RE/RB/S-Bahns), to random and plainclothes (most subway systems).

There's no gate or turnstile to any kind of rail transport, local or long distance. I wonder how long you managed to travel without a ticket in Berlin though as ticket inspectors are very common.

From my experience, maybe one in ten or twenty trips gets checked, but it does depend on the time of day and which line you take.

Discussed recently.

"9-Euro-Ticket (bahn.com)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31445822

Consensus is that is not really that interesting as it might sound.

Especially if your interest is long-distance travel and you haven’t discovered the difference between ICE (Munich to Nuremberg in 1:10, perhaps a stop in Ingolstadt - Airbus + Audi) and RB (Munich to Nuremberg in 2:30…ish, stop in all the little towns)

Is there actually the capacity to offer this? I understand it excludes IC/ICE trains but surely going to induce a hell of a lot of demand on regional trains?

Yes, there is a lot of concern about that; it might even drive away existing customers. Some extra trains are being added, but the ability to do that is obviously limited.

Lots of negativity here about the fact that German trains aren’t as great as you would hope. On one hand I understand - I live in Switzerland and the German trains are not as reliable as the Swiss ones. However, I’m an American and as such I am very impressed that Germany is pushing this. This is great news for anyone who cares about climate change or stopping Putin, because it indicates political will to get more people using public transit.

The idea is great, the implementation is horrible. There have already been announcements that regular prices will probably increase after that because the transport companies/conglomerates are not happy with the state deciding this ticket but not providing enough money to subsidize it.

This should be a standard scheme all across Europe. Given the high population density and relatively short distances - such a scheme would greatly reduce congestion and provide a cheaper way of transport (apart from reducing dependency). This scheme should be made permanent.

The lack of access to high speed ICE trains is a hinderance. There should be a way a 9Euro ticket allows access to ICE trains twice a week with advanced booking.

> The lack of access to high speed ICE trains is a hinderance.

The ICEs are already quite overcrowded without the 9 Euro ticket though, at least during "prime time" (weekdays in the mornings and early evenings, and at the start and end of weekends). Adding more trains may also be problematic because (1) those trains probably don't exist yet, and (2) the trains are mostly already on 1hr interval which is probaly hard to increase.

As someone who just made the switch from planes to trains (I regularly travel on an inner-german route where planes do make sense): If the hordes would invade ICEs, I would go back to the airport. Long-distance rail is over-encumbered as it stands, and more people means less reliability.

Even regional trains are often crowded at regular prices, which is particularly problematic given there's still a pandemic and noncompliance with the mask rules on trains is high. I don't imagine wanting to take advantage of the almost-free travel except at odd times of day when demand is low.

I appreciate the submission but can you please pick a different username? Celebrity names are a variant of trollish usernames [1], and we don't allow those on HN [2] because they subtly troll every thread they post to. Inevitably this leads to low-value off-topic stuff.

We've learned from experience to just deal with the problem early, so I've temporarily banned this account. If you'd like to pick a neutral, non-trollish username, we can change it for you and unban it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

What if someone has same name as some "celebrity"?

HN implodes and disappears in a puff of logic. So don't tell such people about HN.

We'll figure it out.

"We are sorry to inform you, but a big multi billion dollar company has selected a snipped of your video/music/name and registered it within our copyright/trademark system. Therefor we will automatically delete all of your content and sue you for one hundred million dollars in damages on their behalf!"

Dang sounds like a copyright/trademark troll to me! Really disappointed that they allow something like that here.

Edit: I only know graham crackers?! But I guess that's not it?

> There should be a way a 9Euro ticket allows access to ICE trains twice a week with advanced booking.

We'll finance expensive high-speed train infrastructure with 9-Euro-Tickets. Very funny.

> "such a scheme would greatly reduce congestion"

It might reduce congestion on roads, but would greatly increase congestion on trains. And many are full already!

> When the German parliament approved a new measure this month slashing public transit fares nationwide for three months this summer, the move reflected the severity of the nation’s energy crisis. To reduce its heavy reliance on Russian gas and oil after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany is desperate to find ways to reduce its fuel consumption and push more drivers to take trains and buses.

The entire premise that Germany is "mortally reliant" on Russian gas is plainly wrong.

Double digit of gas Germany imports ends up as its electricity exports. Only 20% of the gas actually goes to the industry.

If passenger rail increases, then goods rail must decrease and go onto trucks. Or, one could let goods rail go at night, but Germany is noise -sensitive, so that's unlikely to happen. In the long run building more tracks are probably the only real solution.

Uh... Goods rail is running at night in Germany, and lots of it. So much in fact, that some connections are utilized at full capacity pretty much 24/7 and causing huge problems when they're blocked.

When we were house-hunting several years ago, my husband bought a 70 EUR noise meter and would take measurements around a candidate house during the day… and between 2-3am.

We rejected at least two that seemed peaceful enough during the day with commuter train noise that was acceptable for the convenience, but with multiple loud freight trains overnight.

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