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Comment by harddrivereque | Hacker News Reader

Deutsche Bahn has gone from not perfect to straight up disastrous and antisocial in the past years. They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie. It's rightfully headed for insolvency despite billions of wasteful and wrongful state funding. I hope that company goes under as soon as possible. Any other solution to the railway system management is better than DB. DB is not going to make it

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Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive, now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms. Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary, now we have no backups when one fails.

Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.

Underfunded and wasteful are not opposites. When there is not enough money to do things properly there is often a lot of duct tapping going on which waste available resources without fixing anything. There is scarcely anything more expensive in government than saving money.

> They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie.

Would you mind sharing some examples? My only complaints with DB are cancellations and delays. Well, the ticketing might be a bit confusing the first time you realize "ticket" and "seat reservation" are two completely independent entities. Similarly, rules for which train you're allowed to take might be a bit confusing. But I wouldn't call it scamming.

After privatization, the Deutsche Bahn became private enterprise and is now 100% owned by the German state. As such, insolvency isn't going to happen. Though it would be funny.

If a company fails this hard, the solution isn't to feed it more government money to prop it up. It's to let it fail and rebuild from scratch.

Blacklist everyone who was involved above a certain rank. Put together an entirely new structure. The only real way to get rid of this kind of rot is to make the consequences of dysfunction hit.

The DB is and always was fully owned by the government, this is not the usual case of "dumbass executives mess things up".

Unfortunately, the DB first got hit by Thatcherite neoliberalism in the early 90s that led to "unprofitable" things like switches, railyards or lesser-used routes to be torn down and the real estate sold off (to prepare for a privatization that THANK GOD never happened), and then we got 16 years of Conservative traffic/infrastructure ministers whose job priority was to funnel money to Bavarian highways [1], not towards railways.

Unfortunately, while the left wing loves to prune its ranks in purity tests (partially because its voters demand accountability), the Conservatives have a solid "better dead than red" voter base.

[1] https://www.merkur.de/politik/csu-parteitag-bayern-markus-so...

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