Also, some textbook examples of bad incentives. For example, repairing bridges is paid by DB. If a bridge is beyond repair, then the tax payer pays. Predictable result: doing hardly any maintenance until the bridge fails. (That example is by now fixed, but shows the clear lack of planning)
Finally, the system is just over capacity. Many more trains but same infrastructure as decades ago. If you got rid of half the schedule and used a swiss-like system of stopping several minutes at every station, the trains could be on time. But the trains already are overcrowded, so then what do you do with all the passengers?
Just to give you an example of the latter: a Vietnamese-German woman (a German citizen who speaks German natively) was recently in the news because the local authorities have refused to issue her baby a birth certificate for over 6 months.[0] When she went to get a birth certificate, the authorities told her that her last name, Le Nguyen - which already appears on all of her German documents - does not meet their standards. They refuse to issue a birth certificate for her baby until she changes her last name to something the German regulations allow.
To make the situation even more absurd, the problem is that the German regulations state that double family names do not exist in Vietnamese (surprise: they do).[1] If the mother had a French double name, it would be no problem.
The problem is not even the baby's last name - it has the father's last name. The problem is that the birth certificate has to list the mother and father, and the authorities refuse to write the mother's name.
Instead of just giving the mother a bit of leeway and issuing a birth certificate, the authorities insist on inflexibly following some completely incomprehensible interpretation of the regulations. Suddenly, after thirty-something years of living in Germany, this lady has to suddenly change her last name, and until she does that, her baby - a German citizen - has no official documentation and cannot receive any government benefits.
Repeat this daily across many aspects of daily life, and you can see how it would become a problem.
0. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/berlin/rbb-keine-g...
1. https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/10/interview-berl...
Or in other words: classical underfunded, overused legacy system showing its age.
As strongly encouraged by their regulators (the Bundesnetzagentur and the Eisenbahnbundesamt), though, too, because for a long time the main political mandate regarding the railways was mainly to save money.
Yeah, that reason is propaganda and myth, it might have been true in the 1800s and early 1900s but now it's the same shit as everywhere else
Even Spanish trains are faster and more punctual on average than German ones, and Spaniards are world world-famous for siestas