Deutsche Bahn struggles to shake off 'travel hell' reputation
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Compare with Belgium. For many years it ranked below moldovia in the world postal reliability report. Delivery is unreliable, many packages disappear. During COVID I wanted to buy stamps. In Germany you just print the stamps. No printer? Just use a pen and write a code on the letter. In Belgium they offered to send me stamps by postal mail. After I lost many packages and one was going back already to the US (address cant be found) I wrote a real nasty email to the Belgian minister in charge of the post office. They actually rerouted my us package back and were able to deliver it :-). The postman got a nasty talk with his both for forging my signature for packages he just put in front of the door and that goes stolen. 500 dollar loss...
Nope. The reputation is well deserved.
> What is really amazing is German postal service. Contrary to some reports it is reliable.
Not for parcels which are handled by DHL. They have no shame in claiming delivery attempts that never happened and then make you stand in line for up to hours to retrieve your stuff because they can't be arsed to hire enough staff.
> And they do understand how to work digital.
There has been some improvement in that area but basic things like step by step tracking for the postal service isn't available (because they want you to buy their more expensive DHL products). It's absurd that if you order something from abroad you get frequent update while the package transits in bumfuck nowheristan a but then as soon as it gets to germany it's all silence and all you can do is hope it arrives within the next months.
Sure, China is better, cheaper. At my time without wifi, maybe this has changed. But compared to most countries DB is pretty good. I love trains.
On the way back the train enters Switzerland with enough delay to fuck up Swiss timetables and so it accrues even more delays. So much so that makes an overcrowded Flixbus an alluring alternative.
So, long story short DB is absolutely terrible IMHO. The worst railway company in Western Europe by far among those I traveled with enough times to have an opinion (SNCF, Trenitalia/Italo, Renfe, DB, OBB).
What's good about it exactly? They're not reliable, they're overpriced compared to any other form of transportation, you need to reserve a seat even if you pay for first class and the internet sucks. I find it hard to see anything good about them.
There many things DB can improve on. But I think they have a good coverage with modern and clean trains. They are often late, but I think it's also really hard to run a punctual train network with a country of this size in the middle of Europe, where you also need to consider all neighboring countries that have an effect on your planning and so on (a constraint, for example, that Japan doesn't have).
Sure, for example SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) is more punctual, but the complexity is also much lower due to the country size. Also mind that the Swiss just don't let DB trains into the country when they're late more than ~ 30 min.
Price: I think dynamic pricing is fine, but the range is crazy. If you book ahead of time, you can get from Hamburg to Zurich for like € 30 (8 hour trip). You'll pay double that to go from Hamburg to Berlin (2 hour trip) if you book like one day before departure. But I think on average the prices are not too high. Consider that you can go to every major city in the country within 8 hours for less than € 50 if you plan ahead 1-2 weeks, in a clean train with a nice board bistro.
Wifi: Yes, it sucks.
I take the ICEs often for long distance rides. My strategy: Plan with up to 60 min delay (especially important if you need to change trains) and don't schedule calls or tasks that require a good internet connection. With this two tricks and the right mindset you'll be fine!
But not a single ounce of reliability to be found among them.
> but I think it's also really hard to run a punctual train network with a country of this size in the middle of Europe
If it was just the punctuallity. However they can't even notify people of delays correctly. Just to take the most obvious example to ever exist: Last year the entire state of Bavaria got snowed in, most predictions put restoration of rail travel at around a week. For the first day the DB app reported cancellations one hour in advance, the following days it used a 12 hour window to cancel trains. At no point did they bother to put a realistic "don't bother we wont even get to your station for the next 5 days" anywhere on the app. The event may have been an outlier but them failing to anounce cancellations when they become aware of an issue is systematic, worst case you wont be aware that your train wont make it anywhere is when the conductors start handing out complaint forms the moment the train leaves the station. The entire DB is a clown show without equal.
Their self reported punctuality for long distance trains was 64% in 2023.
https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2023/en/combined-management-re...
I heard the minister is considering reducing the investment in track improvement to spend the money on autobahns, though, so maybe it'll become as bad as it currently looks.
The 15 minute delays are annoying, the trains that do not arrive at all, however are travel ending. Bonus points: the DB was encouraged to cut train travel short or skip rail stations to make up for lost time because at least until recently the official statistics did not cover trains that did not arrive at all. That on top of the dozens of punctual ghost trains I seem to miss while praying for an actuall train to arrive at a train station under cunstruction that can't handle half the advertised train traffic.
> the situation is better than it's said to be
It is better in parts of Germany, there is a CCC talk from a few years ago that ends with a "free upgrade" slide, if your train had to travel through any of the listed stations you where basically guaranteed a travel delay of at least one hour.
No way. I use DB quite often, and its bad reputation is well deserved. Traveling Cologne <-> Leipzig I don't think I've ever had a train that was less than 20 minutes late, and since the beginning of the year, I've had two trains cancelled on me (with no compensation for the reserved seats) and two missed connections. Polish trains used to be a joke in comparison, but not anymore.
Just in the past 4 years things have gone from tolerably bad to really bad. Even Ukrainian trains operate better (personal experience), and they're dealing with Russians knocking out their infrastructure each day.
I spend so much time waiting for delayed trains that I made a social media account to keep track of them. In June alone I experienced 15 days with delays - shortest I keep record of is 10 minutes, longest in June was 43 minutes. And I have a friend whose weekly delays are hours long.
If I commuted daily (and I don't) my own stats mean I have a 50/50 chance of missing a connection. For my regional trains that means I need to buffer at least half an hour for a 45 minutes trip. Factor in the lack of benches (God forbid the homeless sit on them), the dirty stations, the drug users living in them, the broken equipment...
Two trivia points: the "Deutschlandtakt" program will supposedly bring the trains back to their former 90s glory. It is scheduled to be finished in 2070. And the government is reportedly planning to redirect train repair funds to repairing highways instead [1].
The train situation is bad and they deserve every critic they get.
[1] https://archive.is/LsMab, in German
If there's a politically important but poor performer, that fact will be ignored and the deliberate attacks on their reputation will be discussed instead.
me and a friend want to travel through eastern europe by train next year - we purposefully exclude germany from our trip because we fear that we'll miss a connection[1]. this can happen in other countries, too, but we all have personal stories where german trains have f*cked us.
[1] Germany isn't eastern europe but we'll start from central europe so germany could've been a destination in our trip. now we'll go via austria...
the motivation and goals have shifted, that's what i meant with privatization. it's now a company with stocks, belonging to the state.
public transport and capitalist profit-oriented mentalities never go well together. not saying the state itself would handle DB way better. but in my opinion, it does not help that it was turned into an AG[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company
excuse the half-baked business/corpo terms, it's a bit hard for me to translate german business terms into english, and i wasn't sure where you're from.
But, yes, the initial plan to actually privatize did some damage, but that has been abandoned now for a couple of decades.
> the legal form doesn't really matter
i disagree. but let's not waste time on kleinigkeiten, i'm pretty sure our disagreement stems from our respective political viewpoints and not DB specifically.
another comment which explains what i mean - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40864811
i think quite a couple of things change when you start focusing on share-prices etc.
I am not letting the owner off the hook here.
Just now the coalition government decided to move funds intended for rail infrastructure into road infrastructure and build/extend another stupid highway. At the same time existing highway bridges are falling apart and the rail infrastructure is in desperate needs of improvements. German railway is at the same time kneecapped by its need to operate as a profit-driven business as well as being controlled by the policy-driven government.
1. Transporting people is less profitable than transporting goods, so those trains have to wait for the more important ones. They share tracks due to cost and difficulties with planning new routes.
2. Until the 90s there was a person physically using the railroad switch lever. This meant that these almost never malfunctioned, and if they did, someone was there to immediately fix it. Today they are centrally managed and electrical, and one of the biggest reasons for delays.
Now the thing is that there are many areas where the DB could both cut costs and increase reliability, but are blocked by the unions / Betriebsrat. Rails is an area ripe for automation but in my experience at every little nook a union representative will find a way to block it as it might make some employees redundant.
Which results in tracks getting blocked for traffic, as there is no-one who could monitor the system.
So the issue is not really about unions blocking automation. Now, the recent union win about the 4 day week is not going to help with that.
But generally, the problem seems to be more with infrastructure management/investment and less with the people or the unions.
As much as “they” recently really screwed me due to the strikes, which was not really their DB fault since the strike was the conductors’ union, which related to your comment about “acting private” while not really being either private or public, probably leading to the worst of both, rather than the best of each.
To give the DB entity some credit though, it appears they are in that very kind of bind of being stuck dealing with the bad conditions of both being private and public, and in a country which was set up after the war to be as self-deconstructing and self-sabotaging as possible.
How do you deal with problems you both have immense responsibility for and over, while at the same time being unable and not having the power to actually affect, and the very avenues by which you could change that condition are also sabotaged and feckless and mired in self-sabotage to improve it? … you simply abandon, throw up your hands and walk away, but considering the nature of the system, you can’t of course do that as a whole, so you become passive in areas; which is what I experienced when it wasn’t actually the DB that sabotaged me, it was the conductors’ union that really committed a breach of contract and engaged in what should and possibly is criminal activity against me, causing me damages and suffering through their stupid strike in which they didn’t even want more money, they wanted to work less.
I’ll leave it at that, and I agree that I don’t see any of these things really improving, considering the fatal actions and atrocities that have been imposed on Europe now too, but on the sinking ship that is European civilization, it is surely not the DB that is there worst among the bad simply because it is no longer exceptional in the public transportation segment. I won’t go into the mind blowing impressive nature of the freight handling and hauling and logistics efficiency of the DB rail system, but is one of those things that is not nearly as respected as it should be for what it is, once you actually realize what you’re looking at.
IMO what needs to be done is separation of DB into a fully government-run infrastructure company and a fully privatized and publicly listed train company. Subsequently, the infrastructure company must be injected with lots of cash to fix the current infrastructure problems.
Edit: Used a Frecciarossa in Italy recently and was very impressed - Business class was very comfortable (better than LNER 1st class) and ticket prices very reasonable at a small fraction of what you'd pay in the UK.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255048/punctuality-regi...
https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/03/19/the-breitspurbahn-o...
Just kidding
The reality is that most people will actually prefer being in the "public space" of an open plan train car with many random strangers over being closed in in the "private space" of a compartment with a small selection of random strangers. Even if they firmly believe the opposite.
I've ridden in various trains with 2-seat and 4-seat compartments, which were wonderful. Some of them were sold by the compartment rather than by the seat: you always pay for the whole compartment for your party, so that (for instance) a 3-person group still has the compartment to themselves.
And yes, in cases where they're sold by the seat rather than by the compartment, I will absolutely buy 1-2 extra seats for that purpose.
But even if not, I'd happily take a six-person compartment with a door, and less background noise.
The empty "hallway" space outside the compartments is also nice. It means you can go out and walk around without bothering other people, not so easy on a airline-style car.
If you are agile, in a compartment you can climb up on the luggage racks above the seats and sleep there (I've done that). You need to give some (maybe non-verbal) assurance to the other people in the compartment that you aren't crazy. Again that's easiest when it's just a few people.
If the compartment has just 1 or 2 people, it's easy to lie down on the bench seats and sleep. With 3 or 4 people, you can flatten out the seats and everyone can sleep if they don't mind a little bit of squishing. As a college student I was fine with that. Maybe most of us here are too old for that by now.
A full compartment is imho certainly not noticeably worse than open plan seating. A non-full compartment is definitely better, if you have a bit of luck and get one. So think of buying an economy airline ticket that automatically comes with a chance of a free first-class upgrade, vs. one without such a chance.
Edit: Meh, semi-dup post, the earlier one took a while to show up so I thought it had been lost.
Six seats, three on each side. That means someone needs to sit in the middle, and unless you're traveling in a group, it's 5 other strangers.
Personally, I prefer rows of 1 and 2 like normal 1st class, so nobody has to sit in the middle.
Is this economic? Can it pay for its own repairs?
Almost free public transportation helps people lead richer lives, so its also a productivity/quality of life issue.
I disagree. that's absolutely not a valid conclusion for a service (public transport, road infrastructure, healthcare, etc) that has a substantial benefit to society as a whole.
i.e. providing it at low or no cost at point of use can be a great idea.
This makes no sense whatsoever. That conclusion does not follow - that's what the above comment says.
( Not directly before, there was the 9 EUR ticket in summer '22, and then BVG offered their monthly ticket for 29 EUR for a while).
DB has long distance, local/regional, and freight business.
How much local/regional traffic companies are harmed by the 49€ ticket I have no numbers handy. But I feel DB is impacted relatively little compared to many other operators.