More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland
bluewin.ch
bluewin.ch
To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the threshold at 15 minutes ("Reisendenpünktlichkeit") [2].
[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...
[2] https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
The reason regional trains are also delayed is that regional lines, local lines, long distance lines and freight trains are typically using the same tracks in Germany, and delayed long distance trains always get higher priority. A typical situation is that your regional train is perfectly on time, but suddenly stops, and waits for 5-10 minutes for a delayed long-distance train to overtake it. Switzerland has a similar mixed system, but as noted above, does not really have long-distance rail lines, apart from the trains that enter from Italy, Austria, France and Germany, which is the main reason why these trains are not allowed to enter if delayed. This is in contrast to the system in France, where TGV lines typically have dedicated high-speed tracks, where all trains on it travel more or less at the same speed.
Shouldn't you then add redundancy to the system by having time buffers at large stops every 2-3 hours? Or even let replacement trains start at intermediate stops as soon as the delay of the regular train is greater than X to avoid propagation of the delay into to rest of the network? Absolutely, but most stations and rail lines in Germany are either at their operational limit, or above. Having a train wait for 15 minutes in a large station just in case it is delayed would block that track for 15 minutes in the majority of cases, when the train is punctual. Also, DB simply has not enough rolling material to start replacement trains, and the rail infrastructure to even park such trains has largely been dismantled in the years after the privatization (they are doing it sometimes, but not very often).
We have started to import unskilled/low skilled laborers from SE Asia en masse to keep the country barely running. But the quality is going downhill yet prices of goods and real estate are soaring.
The economy of Easter Europe has been growing steadily in the last years and skilled immigration tom Germany ahs slowed since the salary/CoL ratio has reduced lately.
It's a white collar form of discrimination. Unless you come from a country as 'white' and wealthy as Germany, your degrees and experience is seen as much less valuable despite your language knowledge and your CV will be rejected even if it's technically a fit. Then comes the discrimination you'll face when looking for a place to rent but that's in other countries as well like the Netherlands.
We do value actual experience (as opposed to certification).
I once interviewed a nanny who had been a practicing lawyer in Central America.
I chose to hire someone with no education, but an extra year of nannying.
"Real solutions" exist, but voters won't want to hear them, so we kick the can down the road until the system collapses by itself naturally.
Then why don't voters just vote themselves higher salaries and better pension plans and higher retirement ages? D'uh! Who cares about economics when you have votes? Worked well for Greece.
>But what are you talking about exactly?
Reducing public welfare according to realistic economic capacity and sustainability of the national budget, and encourage citizens to rely more on private systems and personal responsibility. See Switzerland.
The German welfare state will slowly collapse by itself on the long term anyway at this rate since the expenses are growing faster than the income and the only way to save it is to reduce it. Why isn't that a solution? Are you saying math is wrong and can be altered by votes?
I’m saying that you just proposed random idea that has nothing to do with solving the workforce crisis. Reducing welfare state will not increase birth rate, if anything it will decrease it. Lower taxes will not lead to bigger families, with scarce housing the additional income will be simply redistributed to landlords thus increasing inequality. You propose to treat symptoms, but this treatment will only accelerate death.
2) There's no workforce crisis, it's just a shit pay and too high CoL crisis. Skilled workforce will always come if you pay for it enough to make it worth their effort. See Switzerland and the USA. Germany doesn't want to. They want workers to work for peanuts, pay high taxes and to tolerate crazy housing. Skilled people with options aren't into that.
3) Why are you so focused on birthrates? Uneducated people having more kids randomly as economic cannon fodder will not boost the economy since they might cost more in welfare than they produces as adults. You need to get skilled people any way you can not just throwing random bodies at the problem hoping that fixes the economy.
4) If you insist on being focused on birthrates, then see how countries with the lowest or no welfare have the higher birthrates, and countries with the best welfare have the fewest. Food for thought.
You failed to explain how it will help DB to hire more people. Yes, this is random until you connect the dots.
> Skilled workforce will always come if you pay for it enough to make it worth their effort.
To Germany? No, they will not. I would not, if the money were my primary incentive (yes, I’m THE skilled workforce you are talking about). You are talking about half of current German GDP to make it an incentive. And the whole country must start speaking English as a primary language. And of course there’s global demographic problem: you see, population of our planet will peak soon enough, poor countries will get richer and there will be less and less incentive for educated people to move. For small countries like Switzerland it may be enough for a while. For most of the Europe merit-based systems won’t work - we will have to offer support and education to refugees and unskilled economic migrants. Neocolonial model with immigration-supported economy is simply not sustainable.
> Why are you so focused on birthrates? See above.
> Uneducated people having more kids
Who said “uneducated”? In Germany education rates are very high. The problem is not education itself, but deferred or abandoned family plans because of simpler life opportunities elsewhere.
> Food for thought.
I don’t think you are in position to tell this to anyone regarding this topic. You clearly have not educated yourself enough on this matter.
Don't forget the absurdly high social expenditures and taxes. You only keep like 40% of your money and it's on track to get even worse.
Because your entire point is that most passengers in Switzerland travels on those short distances. How are the riders distributed in Germany?
DB reported some 94.1 percent of services arrived within five minutes of their scheduled time in 2017.[0]
Also generally the length of the tracks dont magically change. It is possible to create a timetable: which train should be where when, and then stick to it.
Note that before the DB, SBB were anoyed with some models of french or italien trains, which broke down regularly, putting too much pressure on the integrated timetable.
Now, I wouldn't be exactly shocked if DB using too high speed assumptions in their stated travel times was part of their problem with delays.
So often trains are cut short and do not reach their final destination, which is arguably even more inconvenient for the customers.
This has removed the potential for improvisation in dispatching (no one wants to be responsible for delaying that other train), making the train network unable to give any trains room to make up their delays.
There is a reason every other dispatcher has problems with alcoholism.
Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it.
And nobody wants to go around the processes or change them, even if they know they're broken because then they would be the ones liable for the outcomes, so the entire society revolves around preserving the status quo even if the ship is heading towards the iceberg.
Change to processes is usually exclusively top-down where a boomer detached from the work in the trenches but with connections, a laundry list of a academic credentials and a pompous CV of management positions at large consultancies/companies, makes the decisions and those below execute without question while mumbling at the canteen lunch how stupid and out of touch the decisions are.
That's just my opinion as an outsider, it's not a fact I can provide citations for in case anyone asks, so it can be incorrect as all opinions go, feel free to disagree or correct me.
I've heard it said that the idea that Germans are efficient is a myth. (The new Berlin airport is one example.)
Germans are, rather, *rule followers*.
Which is very good when the rules are sane and up to date, and very bad when otherwise.
All of this is important in describing and understanding complex systems. The "rule following" is not simply "good" or "bad" using this analysis framework.
This.
Context: born and grew up in Germany. Worked abroad for many years. Now living in Berlin, would still never work for an established German company for that reason.
Startups are usually better; until they're not startups any more.
Asking first "wer ist schuld?" ("whose fault was this?") is deeply rooted in German culture somehow though and sooner or later takes hold again.
It's the best way to ensure processes do not get improved but the paper trail attached to them grows steadily.
What's wrong with traditional German companies besides burocracy? I see many have happy lives there with very good WLB and great job safety, contrary to start-ups.
>Startups are usually better; until they're not startups any more.
True, but also start-ups are better when you're part of the early founding crew who know each other, and get some sizeable equity for the effort. Otherwise, if you're one of the later joiners outside of the founder inner circle, you get nothing in rewards but get all the pressure and stress of working at a start-up. I'd much rather be at a traditional German company than a start-up like that, especially now that I'm past my prime youth years.
One thing that helps is I am an industry where failure is common and where project failure often has a clear root cause outside the control of the team.
When I joined the team first thing the director told me was "everyone fucks up, you will to, just tell the truth and you'll be good". I learned quickly that there was no finger pointing allowed in that team. If something went wrong we'd figure it out later and in the meantime do the right thing to help the customer.
It was a great culture in that group. There was surprisingly little bureaucracy in the tech support team. You could do what you needed to to get things done / got the help you needed. Almost every call that came in was immediately answered, and our customers loved us.
Later (after a series of other acquisitions and etc) we picked up a company that had more than 4x the number of support techs and they solved less than half the number of tickets. Even the tickets weren't "solved" as much as they went through the motions and they hit their metrics.
That group was all about finger pointing, they didn't seem to know how to do anything else. They weren't even good at finger pointing. One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.
Unfortunately, due to the bad acts / crappy culture from the new team we ended up with a slowly evolving / massive bureaucracy too all designed as CYA type setups where everyone "did what they should have done" but really never solved any problems.
I feel like that's often the source of bureaucracy.
People tend to accuse others of things they would do if they were in that position.
That rings very true with me as a German.
I wonder what's going on over there. I understand that there are complex organizational issues involved, but, besides this long-term rotting, there seems to be some more recent, abrupt diseases affecting them too.
Enjoy it while it lasts... it is going to be much worse very soon. Some renovation plans are completely bonkers, they will close important railways for years without any replacement.
1. Lockdowns wrecking everything. Ticket revenue plummeted etc.
2. Soon after, the government there decided to make train travel nearly free. 9 EUR a month to travel as much as you want anywhere in Germany. Justification: climate change. This doubled short-distance usage of the network immediately. Huge increase in usage + hardly any new ticket revenue = network damage. There were subsidies but you can't place that kind of load on a system without everything being stripped to the bone to try and handle it.
3. When that scheme expired they decided to replace it with a new similar ticket at 49 EUR per month, but the rail companies complained they couldn't afford this and the financial risk was huge. https://www.railjournal.com/policy/germany-introduces-e49-ti...
DB losses have exploded and debt grows as a consequence:
DB had a net loss for 2023 of some EUR 2.4 billion (compared with a net loss of EUR 227 million in the previous year). One of the negative factors here was the significant increase in interest paid, which was driven in part by higher borrowing for capital expenditures. The DB Group's results were also affected by the additional burdens of inflation-related cost increases, a sharp rise in personnel expenses and multiple strikes.
https://www.dbschenker.com/tw-en/insights/news-and-stories/p...
So basically you have a socialist government that is giving sops to its base by trying to pump rail usage for climate reasons, but without making people pay for that increased usage, at a time of high inflation. The system creaks and groans under the weight.
New York’s Metro-North and LIRR have 95%+ on-time rates [1]. (EDIT: On time is defined as less than 6 minutes late [2].)
[1] https://www.metro-magazine.com/10217862/metro-north-lirr-exp...
[2] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf
I bet, however, it's not uniformly distributed and some lines are late more than others.
Hopefully that 95% is them being honest about the current state, while they push higher.
SBB CFF FFS has similar numbers, except it defines "on time" as "within 3 minutes"[1] which is of course harder to achieve.
[1] https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/responsibility-society...
I deal with late trains around two-thirds of my trips. Sometimes up to two hours of delay.
Sure. But "with a nearly perfect on-time performance of 99.3% on Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines," there isn't much room to hide problems. (LIRR is 96.3%.)
The point is we have systems that have been well built and well maintained. They just don't get coverage because they just work. (The LIRR is far from perfect, mind you. But it's apparently outperforming the DB. You have to get to some of the worst routes during peak conditions to get in the neighbourhood of DB's systemic numbers.)
CURRENT TIME: 9:45
NEXT TRAIN: 9:42
STATUS: ON TIME
In the rest of the country Amtrak blames freight companies for most delays (https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance), and frankly I am inclined to agree with them. Amtrak does not own those lines and does not have priority on them, and the freight companies don't give a shit about anyone. See for example https://www.propublica.org/article/trains-crossing-blocked-k... and the rest of ProPublica's excellent series on the industry.
Or to put it another way, it sounds like DB has a lot of problems that it could fix, but Amtrak has a lot of problems that are out of its control.
And this includes multi-hour intercity train lines, double-decker trains, trains that stop inside of airports, local trains, everything. If you have just a couple lines in a single city, under a single jurisdiction, with no interdependencies and no freight on the same lines, then of course it gets a lot easier.
I'm a bus advocate, you can see it from another post this week. But Greyhound is not reliable if time is sensitive.
I see videos of fights breaking out on airplanes, hear about horror stories of being stuck on a plane and not allowed getting off. I take it that's what happens in the majority of flights then?
I mostly only see videos of car accidents. I guess most people get into car accidents every day. Or maybe people don't bother uploading the hundreds of hours of non-interesting dashcam clips.
I suspect not. I suspect you don't watch actual vlogs, rather you see 1 minute long clips we all see.
Sometimes we want to watch the whole unedited experience to get a sense of what it's like, rather than for 1 minute entertainment bits. I've watched Tesla Self Drive from SF to LA over several days to see what it's like for example (it's jerky on streets I'll tell you that).
There's bias in every single thing. But the alternative is to be blind to all media, which no one is doing. I've given you the context, and you've drawn up a red herring--1 minute news clips, which I'm not talking about.
I suspect your travel vlogs don't accurately reflect everyone's experiences and shouldn't be used to judge overall reliability or on-time statistics.
https://www.firstgroupplc.com/~/media/Files/F/Firstgroup-Plc...
I could tell you about a 14-hour flight I took between Dallas and Charleston (lots of storms, lots of reroutes, crew timed out, etc.). I could have made that a 14-hour long video for you to watch. Is it indicative of the typical trip between these two cities or just a single example and potentially a massive outlier? Should you assume it normally takes 14 hours to fly that distance in the US and that's a typical experience of a flier?
Personally every time I've taken an inter-city bus its been a smooth trip and pretty much on-time, I can't think of a time I was over 15 minutes late. Every time I've been on a chartered bus it was on-time. Every time I've picked someone up at the bus terminal they were within 5 minutes. That's a little over dozen experiences over the years in total. Admittedly, a bit luckier than average looking at the actual statistics. How many vlogs have you watched? How many times have you actually taken a Greyhound or similar?
> a low injury rate
Maybe because verbal aggression isn't recorded as an injury?
There are a number of travel vloggers who do a trip exactly once and report on what happened. The same vlogger will make videos about taking ships, trains, airplanes, and long- and short-distance buses, in a variety of countries, on a variety of budgets. Among these vloggers, it is generally agreed that long-distance buses in the USA are the worst form of transit in the developed world. Their videos on other forms of travel rarely (if ever) show the kinds of unsafe experiences they have on long-distance buses in the US.
I'm also a numbers person and I've looked around to try and find stats for how dismal the safety and on-time performance of US long distance buses are for you, but none are published. I can just report that the cancellation rate is well over 10%, the on-time performance is maybe around 50%, and personally speaking the experience is frequently unsafe and miserable.
I don't mean to make this personal, but if you're in the US, consider driving to the local greyhound station/pick up and just waiting there for particular bus. It's really one of the worst experiences you can have in a city.
Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uPDQvqoN4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QGTaGwxxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTpt4tMnDT0
> the on-time performance is maybe around 50%
I posted Greyhound's on-time statistics which was 90%.
> who do a trip exactly once
What a way to collect statistics. I just stepped outside. It wasn't raining. I guess it'll never rain.
> drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations
Well yeah, once again, are there really going to be a lot of popular videos of "I took a five day bus ride, nothing happened, here's an hour-long video of the travel!" And are those really random videos or ones the algorithm have bubbled up to the surface? Think a video with crazy stuff happening would bubble up in the algorithm rather than an hour long video where nothing of note happens? Maybe analyzing statistics by one-off example YouTube videos made for clicks isn't the best way.
There are a number of nation-wide and regional inter-city bus systems. They're just not extremely popular since car ownership is typically pretty high, fuel costs are generally low-ish, and chances are when you get to your destination you'll need a car anyways.
See companies like:
It’s honestly sad how public transport was left to rot/fail/or sold off in North America.
And how people now go “it won’t work here! Europe is more dense! Things are too far apart” Ignoring it did and was (at least in bc) a few short decades ago
I'm happy with European rail. For instance, it is 36 hours by FlixBus from Amsterdam to Porto, but if you use high-speed rail (Eurostar, TGV, Iryo) it is only 23 hours, faster than going by car.
Distances like that, trains just don't make sense IMO.
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro-train. I'm super excited for the prospects of the Texas bullet train. Trains can make a lot of sense to a certain distance. But why would you pick it for a 2,000km trip?
It’s also far better for the environment, and should be cheaper if you take plane subsidies and apply them to trains.
Also your math is wrong 5 hours with 1 hour each side (generous) is 7 hours. With 2 hours each side that’s 9 hours.
Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
(The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too)
Its a three-hour flight not a five hour flight. Five hours is including the one hour on each side. And you wouldn't have two hours on the arrival side, you're not having to wait through security. Chances are on the arrival side its less than an hour. Sure, maybe customs slows you down, but I've never had customs take as long as security and the consequences of being a little slow are much less. But there are no customs flying domestically, and I'm not sure what customs are like flying within the eurozone anyways.
> Either way I would much rather take a comfortable train for 10 hours then suffer in a plane for 5.
It's not 10 hours on the train, its 23 hours on the train. And it's not 5 hours on a plane, its three hours. The person said they were taking HSR. Its a 23 hour ride taking HSR.
> The reason 2000km takes so long for op is its 7+ train changes, if you made 7+ plane changes it would be very long too
Sure, but generally speaking you don't have to when flying You often don't even need to change planes once. That's the whole point. Rail is great for certain distances, but past that there grows a lot of complexities. You're not going to take a single shot HSR trip 2,000km practically anywhere. You're going to have times where the train stops. You're probably going to have to change trains, potentially even change to a non-HSR for a leg of the trip. Meanwhile planes don't need to change 7 times to go 2,000km.
> should be cheaper
Sure, if you value two days of your vacation at nearly $0. Or two days of seeing your family while gone on a business trip at $0. Personally, two days of travel would have to be radically cheaper for me to think it worth it.
Anybody who mentions it online is only trying to win an argument and literally never uses it because it’s shit. You only use it if you don't have a car.
I've taken a number of flixbuses in Europe and they were decent. Most cities had some sort of bus terminal where you could sit and grab food before the trip, the bus was clean, the advertised power outlets worked, seat assignments were respected, and they'd make stops at places with clean restrooms.
I've also taken a few flixbuses in the US west and wouldn't recommend people do that. The cleanliness is poor, the on board amenities like power outlets/wifi are frequently broken (or don't exist), paid seat assignments have never been enforced, bathroom stops are disgusting, and there is a lack of order/safety on board. And the bus terminals simply don't exist - in Los Angeles you stand in an uncovered parking lot outside the central jail and there is no notification of which bus goes where. Everyone just runs (literally) up to each bus as it arrives, preventing passengers from disembarking, and asks the bus driver where it's going, and then tries to cram on immediately because that's the only way to avoid getting an undesirable seat.
Safety is a huge issue on these buses. I conduct most of my life on foot and by public transit in southern California and there's some sense of safety from knowing you could avoid/move away from people acting dangerously. But on the bus you're stuck, and I often arrive with my nerves frayed by the behavior of other passengers. They don't publish stats on this but my friends who have taken these buses also reported they also feel extremely unsafe, with one telling me they were on a trip where a stabbing occurred.
I regularly take the Amtrak from San Diego to LA to see friends and family, and during the track closure last year I tried flixbus a few times. After 4 tries, I simply stopped discretionary travel to LA for the better part of a year because it was such a bad experience.
Sounds more like an "America problem" than a Flixbus problem.
Maybe I was just unlucky but I don't plan to try them again.
On vacation this summer in europe, all tram stops had estimated arrival times. Ridiculous, 5-10 minutes out at worst, they wouldn't even need the electronic signs, just a placard that says "just skim your phone for a bit, it'll come".
I unfortunately live in "we used to have trams, most of them were scrapped in favour of bus lines, then the bus lines were scrapped because they were not profitable enough, go buy a car" Europe.
Yeah..
Grass is greener I admit.
Not true in New York City. See all the busses and all the stops. Estimated number of passengers and arrival times.
Often I could get the data through Transit, but sometimes they have their own app.
Stadtbahns use the "U" sign for U-Bahn when only part of their network is underground; I guess this is to avoid confusing riders.
1: https://ridetrinitymetro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Serv...
So this doesn't really have anything to do with that single train not being on time, or with differences in culture or something like that, it's about keeping the system running. If you have a system that isn't used at capacity, then it doesn't matter much if individual trains run late, the system itself will still keep on running.
A bus uses a road and doesn't have a problem like that because there is far more road than the buses need.
Caltrain routinely has delays due to accidents involving grade crossings. Despite spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, they still haven't managed to fully grade separate the line. [2]
Fun fact, Canada's Turbotrain was one of the earliest examples of high speed rail in the world in the 1960s and was even faster than the Shinkansen at the time. However, it hit a truck only one hour into its debut run. This is often cited as the main reason why there's no high speed rail in Canada despite the density and proximity of Toronto and Montreal being ideal for such a line. [3]
[0] https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/delray-...
[1] https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/brightline-train-hits-ca...
Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.
It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.
Source: I live in Sweden there was a DN article recently about it. Here it is
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240721074607/https://www.dn.se...
(Its all too segmented, the trains, the track all different companies now nobody sees the full picture)
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240726054426/https://www.dn.se...
(The land is not enough to fix trains and the land next to it was reserved but somehow sold to build a sports arena because the train land section became a company that had to post good numbers)
I hear UK is not too happy about their rail too. https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k?si=yNWcAUZ69nN1B29O
Seems like it just does not work to separate rail and traffic like that.
Alos, one important thing that happened in Sweden was that the part that was not privatised was also ran like a for profit company.
The railway infrastructure "CEO" basically stopped a lot of repair work and long term projects and was able to show some very good numbers to the goverment, which they very much liked. 10-15 years later things started falling apart, by which time she was long gone.
Separating maintenance from operations is a terrible idea and has never worked well on any railway that I'm aware of.
I still remember "traingate", the smear campaign that followed Jeremy Corbyn (1) and how leaked CCTV video proved him right much later (2).
(1) https://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-walked-past-em...
(2) https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/virgin-release-traing...
Yes, it's true that things were pretty grim. I remember being embarrassed when a colleague from Norway travelled with me in a filthy, worn train carriage stinking of piss :(
But IMO that doesn't excuse the lack of poor management since then. Things could be much, much better.
Sectorization was, of course, the prelude to privatization.
This is only a Wikimedia page, so if you have better evidence that contradicts it, feel free to present it. But note that it cites trustworthy sources.
>The most basic, fundamental difference between the British and Japanese railways is how they were privatised. In Britain, the tracks were split from the trains.
from a ft article I apparently can't link
The split of infrastructure and the invisible hand of the train operator market seems to be a correlation.
My experiences in France were quite the opposite. So much for stereotypes.
Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.
That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)
Perhaps the A->C ticket entitles you to travel on either an air-conditioned nonstop high speed train, or a slower train that stops a lot along the way, and buying A->B and B->C tickets you can only travel on the slow train and that's cheaper.
Perhaps all the discount advanced-booking tickets leaving A have sold, mostly to people only doing A->B, and when you look up B->C there are discount advanced booking tickets still available.
Perhaps you depart A during peak hours and so pay a peak fare, but as the B->C portion of the journey starts later, it doesn't fall into peak travel hours.
I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.
Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.
Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.
Berlin-Munich
In France, Paris to Lyon is 2 hours by train and there is simply no way going by car is faster (legally).
These are just examples, my point is that a high-speed line should be a lot faster than going by car. Not slightly faster, and sometimes even slower.
And those longer trips wouldn't even count as delays since they were hopefully announced weeks ahead of schedule and so passengers know it will take longer to get to their destination.
So its just a goverment agency.
As far as I know this all boils down to the fact, that the European Union (or better it's predecessor) wanted to get rid of state monopolies. It did work out for the "Deutsche Post" (more or less) and very good for "Deutsche Telekom". But "Deutsche Bahn" was a failure coming from that policy.
It didn't work very well for Telekom's competitors, though.
I've switched apartments about once every two years in average and every.single.time I've had to wait more than a month without internet (after already waiting a month for the scheduled appointment) because Telekom is the owner of the DSL lines and they connect their competitors' customers only when they feel like it.
Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.
See Wikipedia article here. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung
Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that. The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.
In German private means privately owned. It is rare that people out of Germany care about the legal status of Deutsche Bahn thus I used the German meanings and many posters as well.
I consider it safe to assume that the reason for this is that it had been just the same when it was still a government org, but a government org will see its responsibilities very different from a company eagerly cosplaying shareholder-value while the sole shareholder happens to be the government they can freely rip off because of an ongoing legacy approach to the principal-agent problem.
As for delays, I think one reason, besides lack of maintenance and the massive interdependence in that large network that allows neither a star nor a main axis simplification is the high speed Autobahn: if they weren't overambitious in terms of travel times they would perhaps put bigger time buffers in their schedule and that would certainly help a lot.
And they don't cheat either with an x minute grace period. On time means the minute on the timetable.
So it's certainly possible.
The largest shareholders for all the privatized rails in Japan are a mixture of Mitsubishi Group, Mitsui Group and Mizuhou Group.
Western anti-trust doesn't allow that level of consolidation - everything is basically owned by a handful of Keiretsu.
I highly recommend reading "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap to learn about this [0].
[0] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
Vertical and Horizontal Integration (like what the 3 groups above do) is heavily regulated and litigated against in the EU [0][1], especially under Vestager.
Japan on the other hand doesn't actually regulate against either forms of market dominance. All three of those groups (called zaibatsu/keiretsu) have had market dominance in Japan since the 16th century.
That's why I recommended reading that book above - Antitrust in the Western sense doesn't actually exist in Asian countries, all of whom modeled their economies on Japan and with Japanese advice (METI) and aid (eg. ADB).
[0] - https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust-and-cartel...
[1] - https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/br...
Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders).
It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the central cause is starving the system of funds. This presents a strong warning for countries that are trying to encourage the use of public transport in order to meet their climate goals.
Some detail is available here: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-whats-wrong-with-the-deutsche-...
What happens if you throw tons of money on something as dysfunctional and lacking a business model? You get Die Bahn.
Calling for “more money” as a central cause is part of the problem.
Source:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-whats-wrong-with-the-deutsche-...
"The network is simply overloaded," said Böttger. In contrast to Luxembourg and Switzerland, which invested around €575 (about $625) per capita and €450 per capita in rail infrastructure respectively, the figure in Germany is just €114.
For example, the gear for the participating teams at the latest EM in Germany was transported in parallel by the empty buses the teams usually use.
The whole VIP travel caused a lot of additional cars on the street.
Don’t confuse means for an end. There is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy.
United Nations:
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2021/10/trans...
US Department of Transport:
https://www.transit.dot.gov/climate-challenge
WRI:
https://www.wri.org/insights/current-state-of-public-transpo...
Do I need to add that the opponents of these organisations and institutions can also be ideologically driven? I hope not, that should be clear. Check your sources for ideological bias - no matter whether you happen to agree with that bias or not - and take that into account when you use them to defend or oppose a viewpoint.
Also some anecdote about how buses where used at some major event does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about public transportation in general.
Also "there is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy" is a rather general polemic statement, which could also some clarification.
Rather telling is that the same user had also commented twice nearly simultaneously. These types of replies are typical for comments that mention climate or government spending.
I have a hard time imagining that the perverse incentives in the system have not been obvious to those in power at its inception.
I include this detail as the source of the largest problems are not necessarily about creation of new infrastructure (although that of course would be the solution), but the deletion of existing infrastructure.
I knew things were getting bad in Germany so I had planned for enough time for a secondary backup. It left on time, but kept getting slower and slower. Then they announced that due to rail works, there was a bus from Neumünster to Kiel.
At Neumünster, I instead got a taxi, which (thanks to all the taxes going to the Autobahn instead of rails, I presume), got me to the ferry with a peak speed of 150kph, and 10 minutes before loading ended - some four hours after I had planned to be there.
https://travic.app/?z=9&x=890440.8&y=6126327.9&l=osm_standar...
And today is a good day in southwestern Germany, just look at the current general redness in the Ruhr area and Cologne.
My favorite anecdote from riding a German train in Switzerland was a journey from Interlaken (Switzerland) to Frankfurt in Germany. Now if you're not used to train schedules: Stops are quick, and trains are punctual. It's fairly common for stops to just be 2-3 minutes. Connections between trains are often around 5 minutes, sometimes shorter.
So, this Intercity Express departed Interlaken perfectly on schedule, made a bunch of scheduled stops in Spiez, Thun, Bern, and continued on to the border city of Basel. Everything running perfectly on schedule, the train arrived at the Swiss station in Basel, continued (on time) to the German train station that's still in the same city, just a few minutes farther. Having had 3-5 minute stops all the way from early morning to lunchtime, the train then sat in the German station for about 15 minutes, departed with only a minor delay, and just a few yards after exiting the station proceeded to stop, sit on the tracks for half an hour ("to catch up with the prevalent delay conditions on the German rail network"), before starting to move again.
Waiting in a comfy seat on a train with working AC isn't the worst of fates, and we made the final destination within half an hour of the scheduled time, so it all went well -- just funny to observe how different parts of this interconnected network had very different ideas of scheduling.
Swiss railways optimise for punctuality, sacrificing line capacity (compensated for with double-decker cars).
Meanwhile every other European rail transport authority seems to be bent on squeezing out the most of the lines it has.
I grew up in a city that had two parallel rail lines in the east-west axis - one for long-distance connections, cargo and everything else, the other a refurbished old main line with trains only once per hour.
The latter was punctual almost to the minute(even if comparatively slow at an average 30km/h including stops), while the former was a mess and you were often better off driving instead.
My friend living in the suburbs close to that refurbished line always boasted how it took him a grand total of 18 minutes to get to the city centre and he could rely on the train to always arrive. That was quicker than I could get there by any means, despite a similar distance.
Emphasis mine. This whole system works because they account for delays by having a time buffer in each route that can be consumed by going slower.
During my commutes along Lake Zurich I noticed that the trains would rarely arrive earlier than 30s before schedule - even if it meant going below the maximum allowed speed, as evidenced by instances where the train used the same section to restore the buffer by going faster.
It’s somewhat akin to the packet dropping question, though packets don’t complain as loudly as passengers.
In a rail network with one train a day it’s not a big issue, but with regular service you can’t let a late train get out of control or it blows the entire network out of sync until you have some dead time - which is one reason some systems have an “hour of the dead” where no trains run - it lets it reset and get back to something sane.
Trying to build a system that has 15 minute heads and can handle a train going late or dying on the rails is really, really hard without ridiculously complexity like quad tracks everywhere and spare train sets at every station.
I read somewhere that one of the key issues in Germany is that freight and passenger trains share the same network. While a delay of 15 minutes can be wildly problematic for a passenger train (missing connections, stranding at some godforsaken train station etc.), it is virtually irrelevant for freight. Then again, that should make it easy enough to always prioritize passengers over freight, but either that isn't being done or it's still insufficient.
Where there's double-track (or more) it's not as big an issue because the train can pass on the other side of the track (tracks are often handled as if they were a road with one lane going in one direction and the other going the other way, but you can swap around with signaling).
The other major solution (bandaid) is to add dwell time at stations so that there's room to make up - the timetable says when the train will leave not when it will arrive, and if it normally arrives five minutes early, it just waits; if it lost time and arrives one minute before departure, it will just be there a minute and the lost time is made up.
But while that may reduce the "worst case" scenario, it does make the average travel time longer.
IIRC Swiss passengers waiting in Basel SBB get a replacement train travelling at the original time.
I don't think it's fair for the article to say that a "temporary measure" has now become a permanent one, it likely is temporary until the problem is solved.
Sometimes I ask myself why the schedule of those always-late trains isn't changed. If it would be planned that it always arrives "15min later", people and other transportation could work with that timing so much better.
The Swiss trains arrive on time, more often than any other country. Second place is the Germans. What's the difference?
The Germans set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. Then the famed German engineering kicks in, and they move Heaven and Earth to identify and fix any problems which are keeping the trains off schedule.
The Swiss set the timetable, and carefully measure arrivals. They use these measurements to identify when trains aren't arriving on schedule and... adjust the timetable.
Look at the regional feeder lines, though. Unmaintained tracks, ancient trains, diesel instead of electric. Many towns have no connection at all - where I used to work, there was an old train station, but the tracks had been ripped up years earlier.
I used to (have to) rely on the German train system. Thankfully, I am now in Switzerland. It is a huge difference.
SBB - Swiss rail - doesn't want its schedule to be affected by the long-distance DB - German - services. So it doesn't allow the DB service to enter the country after a given cut-off delay.
This means that travellers need to transfer to an SBB service for the final 1-2 hours of their trip. This transfer typically takes 15-30 minutes.
If the delay is that likely, due to the long distance of the route, isn't the obvious step to take then to adjust the schedule? So that at some stations along the route trains have a buffer.
As a passenger it's not always about the bare number of minutes, the problem is that I might get stranded somewhere, and train stations in Germany are generally very dirty and somewhat unsafe at odd hours.
DB is uniquely bad and I don’t think we should be making excuses for them.
For years the train from Linz to Vienna was always punctual.
However, recently (Last ~9 Months or so) all trains are super later. The reason is, all of them go through Germany (Innsbruck (via German) -> Salzburg -> Linz ->Vienna), and given everything is delayed in Germany it also delays Austrian trains.
> SBB introduced the regulation back in July 2022 in consultation with Deutsche Bahn. Introduced as a "temporary measure" at the time, it is now permanent.
Just a reminder to folks that there is nothing so permanent as a “temporary” government program.
And the worst is that you have no recourse. You get 25% of your ticket after ONE HOUR! It makes me so angry.
Unfortunately, it's not as if airlines were any better. Less than 3h of delay and you get nothing.
At least, with DB you can get the money for your reservation back if they cancelled your original connection. Still sucks to be in an overcrowded train without a reservation, though.
Direct connections are definitely better, as you say.
Look for using Bus like Flixbus as an alternative if possible. They are not perfect but more reliable than the DB train for sure.
If you had asked at the Reisezentrum at Villach station you would have been presented with options to continue your journey, or get a refund.
I have decided to not take the train next time for sure if I can. Will try bus first.
I actually use flixbusses a lot. Great for pleasant journeys at a good price to see other places.
I wouldn't recommend that, at least not for longer rides. Apart from the fact that I don't trust their overworked drivers (there was a big accident this year that may have been caused by a conflict between the drivers, according to some witness reports), its cheapness also tends to attract rather unsavoury individuals. I have all sorts of horror stories, from the guy (probably on some drugs) who started shouting multiple times in the middle of the night, to some dude who fell asleep with his orange juice bottle still open, which then spilled all over me, to the guy who thought it was a good idea to take drugs across the Swiss border (which caused a massive delay as, of course, his baggage was then extensively searched), etc. I've met weird people on trains too, but Flixbus is a whole other level.
So you can end up with a blame game of "well, you bought a ticket from DB, but OBB fscked up, good luck being stuck in the middle of nowhere!" situation that makes you wish you took a plane.
This is not motivating anyone to switch from cars to trains.
would have been more accurate, less clickbait.
In Germany they don't even express regret when they do it.
DB Data Mining which showed hacks used to gamble metric
This is not as dramatic as it sounds, since Basel is at the border. There's probably many trains into town.
It's just that they only get priority if they're actually on time (the initial booking of the rail essentially). Since they're constantly late they always miss this time and therefore have to wait.
The grain of salt is that it's a small country that's basically the size of the Bay Area, and it was never car dependent.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/thetruesize.com/mockup.html#?border...
We used to have something similar during communist rule in my European country, to teach kids who's boss and to respect authority.
You haven’t heard of Samsung or the life of the average South Korean student. They invest the first 20 something years of their lives to get a corporate job as soon as possible, to not be left behind. Samsungs owns like half the country.
On a top management level, maybe, but I don't think train conductors can do much about a train schedule that is impossibly failure-prone, based on ageing and inadequate infrastructure and trains in disrepair.
ಠ_ಠ why not "aren't punctual"..
(In hell the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the police are German, and it's all organized by the Italians.)
Could be worse.
Even in our supermarkets if you want to make a Paella or Peri Peri chicken you'll find all of the ingredients you need. If you go to a Spain it's really hard to find Peri Peri and if you go to France you'll struggle to find ingredients for a Paella.
I received the strangest looks from the British-ex pats. I still think the food was quite good, though thinking back I don’t think I sampled the “native” British cuisine.
I don't agree that because of the British Empire their food is good. They had the British Empire long enough to prove or disprove that claim.
I've visited England 5-ish times. I love it. But I've personally encountered some true Curry monstrosities over there. And Abominable fish and chips. I have fond memories of eating marzipan.
MOREOVER, Gordon Ramsay making dog-food egg mush and calling it scrambled has criminally misled a whole generation of youtube-addicted hipsters. I can't tell you how many times I've heard some random Millenial describe his exact, twisted method and inevitably I learn they've watched this exact video. Okay, twice.
But I don't blame the English, I blame the internet, which confuses our senses. > https://youtu.be/UXtrScuC30E?feature=shared&t=202
Now these are some eggs > https://youtu.be/a-GFimGcYJw?feature=shared&t=97
No one's saying that. We have decent pizza and Chinese food (sometimes), but that's nothing to do with the British Empire.
"...in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo_clock
But it reminds me of the famous quote from Bertrand Russell
> My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
(Bertrand Russell / 1872-1970 / Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? / 1930)
But yes, a fight over bigger contributions/more harmonization is inevitable within the next 10 years.
Meanwhile, Swiss students couldn’t go on Erasmus for a year, because someone in Brussels threw a hissy fit.
I’m a fan of the EU, but let’s not pretend it’s not throwing its weight around, just like any other huge federal government.
Until today I believed that the world had solved these problems by charging transportation fees but you seem to have very different ideas.
> Basically they have all EU rights and no obligations.
Switzerland certainly doesn't have all EU rights. For instance, they are not applicable for any EU subsidies. They do not have any voting rights. They are exluded from certain scientific cooperation programs (e.g. the ESFRI). And the list goes on.
1) Switzerland gain on using EU transportation and free market but does not contribute fair fee to maintain and build it.
You can tax EU - we will see who will survive.
2) Switzerland does unfair tax competition
3) Switzerland helped hide EU citizens untaxed money (maybe still does)
4) Switzerland helps Russian oligarchs maintain their wealth and many other criminals all around the world.
5) Last but not least: If Switzerland does not care about Ukraine dying because it is ‘neutral’ and yet still wants safe borders, then I don’t fucking care about Switzerland well being.
2) unfair in what way? Swiss taxes are lower than most EU countries, that's true. But not all: Income tax in e.g. Bulgaria is lower, company taxes are lower in Ireland. But even if it were the lowest, why is that unfair? Can't voters decide by themselves how much taxes they want to pay?
3) 15 years ago, yes. But then Switzerland had to give up banking secrecy, at least for EU and USA citizens.
4) This is your only point that is true
5) Switzerland, by its constitution, is neutral and can also not give military support to countries that are at war. The last part was not always like that, during WO2 neutral CH was still selling lots of weapons to Germany and making a fortune with that. After the war allied forces made CH pay recovery payments for that, so CH decided to amend their law to forbid selling weapons to countries at war. They stick to that law but do care about Ukraine, so they found a workaround: they sell weapons to e.g. Germany, who then can replace their own weapons and send them to Ukraine.
2) It's obvious - fin-tech have virtual companies to lower taxes in Switzerland, lot of individuals try to get Swiss tax residence to lower taxes. Switzerland knows that and allows that.
5) My point is - if Switzerland want to be secure inside EU it should pay fee to secure external EU borders. That would be a fair deal.