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Comment by oersted | Hacker News Reader

I don't have the details, but every single time I have heard the mention of Deutsche Bahn in the last few years it has been accompanied by comments of how broken it has become, with constant delays and cancellations, to the point where for many people it is no longer a viable option for commute or for anything where you cannot risk to be up to several hours late.

I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.

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There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.

I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.

among intercity trains run by Deutsche Bahn, the on-time rate hovers around 2/3. it's technically true that "most were on time", but one third being late is really terrible, especially since you often need to make a tight connection.

even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck.

https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2023/en/combined-management-re...

Long-distance trains are worse statistically because they travel longer Router and therefore have more opportubities to gain delay. Across all trains, puncuality is like 95%.

that is true, but tons of highly frequent on-time commuter trains doesn't help anyone who wants to travel long distances.

right now if you want to go between two cities you always have to plan on missing your connection.

I wouldn't call a 7 minutes delay "terrible".

It is if you miss a connection that only runs hourly or so. (Even with a half-hourly connection it'd be annoying.)

>There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.

I feel most know about Japan's shinkansen being run well.

For those who don't, the average delay is 1.1 minutes on average.

For comparison, the DB long distance trains are considered on time if they're less than 6 minutes late, and still only 64% are considered on time.

> Japan's shinkansen

They have dedicated tracks. In Germany all train lines (freight, local trains, long-distance trains) share the same tracks and especially at different speeds this causes delays and problems.

Building new track or even adding more lanes is extremly difficult because of NIMBY's and from 1995 to 2005 switches and extra lanes for overtaking where build back to save costs.

Additionally signalling is in large parts still very labour intensive and smaller tracks are often still running with technology from the early 20th century and late 19th century.

So the problem Deutsche Bahn has to solve is quite a bit harder than shinkansen.

Long distance trains are getting more unreliable (ICE, IC) due to repair works on the tracks - regional / local trains are mostly fine (at least in my place here) and I can't remember the last time there was an delay longer than 10 minutes here. However lately I've saw that trains are cancelled due to manpower shortages and due to the nature the local trains are organized (there is a tender and a railway company wins that tender for 5 years with the same rolling stock) peaks in capacity like on the weekend are not dealt with.

It was broken long before the offer though so the reduction in driving being moderate probably reflects fewer shifts in daily commute and mostly more leisure usage.

Last time I frequented Boston Amtrak it would delay about 28% of travel.

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