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Comment by 4ggr0 | Hacker News Reader

well, it's hard to find people who like how DB is doing. Shame that they were privatized a couple of decades ago.

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...

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They are private in name only. The government owns all the shares of Deutsche Bahn AG.

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

They are private in how they act - improving profit by cutting costs while raising prices. Well, raising prices is now effectively capped by the Deutschland Ticket (for slower trains at least) so the focus is even more on cutting costs.

I’m no fan myself, while keeping in mind that it is their previous exceptional precision and performance that people measure against rather than comparison to the rather abysmal peers, not only in Europe, but the European world in general. Try talking Amtrak somewhere and then get back to me. Make sure to plan several days longer than you think it will take you to travel using Amtrak though.

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.

Cost cutting is one of the issues for constantly being late. To give two examples:

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.

As I understood it the issue with the infrastructure is not so much that electrified switched fail, but that there is not enough personal to man the monitoring and control stations for those switches.

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.

There are a lot of problems with the current arrangement. Privatization is not one of them for reasons that others have already explained. As far as I can tell, the real problems are: a) Ownership of tracks and stations are not separated from the running of train services, leading to discrimination against alternative train journey providers, and b) Insufficient investment. The last one is not insignificant. Germany spends relatively little on its train infrastructure, which is good for the government budget, of course, but definitely bad for train passengers.

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.

State owned - the planned privatization was abandoned.

In 1994 it was transformed from a state-owned thing into a profit-oriented, private Corp with state-ownership. Half of the employees were fired, "non-profitable" lines were canceled, ever since the focus is oriented towards profit instead of public interest.

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.

State owned and controlled - the legal form doesn't really matter (the owner could also change the form if so desired. Might need a supermajority in both houses if going beyond art. 87e GG). Hence it is all about what the owner does/want/etc. - so I don't see the state "off the hook" here on its ownership and control.

But, yes, the initial plan to actually privatize did some damage, but that has been abandoned now for a couple of decades.

i'm a big fan of 'Die Anstalt', here's 45 minutes of them satirically talking about DB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVxaxKEpIj8

> 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.

There is no market in those shares hence no observable price and the Bund is controlling DB (including changes to its legal form - subject to art 87e GG or a need to change that one, but even that isn't impossible). I don't see a political angle here. It is a state-owned and controlled entity - wanting to turn a profit or not is ultimately a decision by the owners, not by someone else.

I am not letting the owner off the hook here.

It's semi-privatized in effect. It's run as a profit-oriented business while at the same time being publicly controlled and funded. It's the worst of both worlds in that sense. In fact, in addition to DB there's DB Regio as well as its various subsidiaries including DB RegioNetz with its own various subsidiaries. Other direct subsidiaries of DB are DB Fernverkehr for long distance trains, DB Cargo and DB InfraGO which was created as a merger of DB Netz (not to be confused with DB RegioNetz) and DB Station&Service. Most of these subsidiaries are intended to operate in such a way as to be independently profitable. There's also DB Energie because of course a corporation of this size needs vertical integration.

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.

It is not privatized - it is the owners (the state) giving it certain objectives. The state has control as well as ownership and is making choices. If the owners wanted to do something different, they could do so (as you pointed out with the redirection of funds). The choices that were put into art 87e GG, for example, are still choices.

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