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Comment by robertkrahn01 | Hacker News Reader

Can they fix schedules and reliability first please?! https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article244075801/Bah...

Being a victim (some say: customer) of the Deutsche Bahn (with bahn.comfort black status): I sincerely believe they can not. After 40 years of ignoring maintenance, never setting up the East-German rail system for success, I honestly believe the system is broken beyond repair. What is indicative of that is that they believe they can make the Deutschlandtakt work by (no typo!) 2070.

We get what we have, and that's it.

There was a time when there was no railway and a time were we had a good railway. That is not out-of-reach, but it is mostly a political problem, not a technical one.

No, public money is going into road infrastructure.

Rail is a lost cause in Germany.

I know Germans like to complain, but the ICE network is still one of the best in Europe, especially given its size.

That does not mean that we shouldn't invest more money into improving it. But I would not count it as a lost cause.

Hopefully, when the current government is replaced by a more progressive one at some point (let a man dream), we see more political will.

There's no incentive for them to do so, so they won't.

Unfortunately, they realistically cannot. Basically every major infrastructure project gets loads of local opposition which would require substantial political will. However, the currently elected government is the government that let the rail infrastructure get that bad in the first place

AFAIK to fix reliability no new major infrastructure projects would be required (at least for most of the reliability offenses). They would just need to maintain/modernize existing infrastructure and rolling stock, so all things that aren't really opposable.

To achieve the Deutschlandtakt as noted in the article, yes new infrastructure projects are required, but I think most people would be happy with all the existing service running as well as it has ~15-20 years ago.

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