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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> when you ignore critical infrastructure for three decades

To be fair, Deutsche Bahn is currently spending “€107bn between 2025 and 2029” on infrastructure upgrades [1].

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/db75e347-b13b-4753-8130-6301bb55c...

NYC is spending around $68 billion to modernize their subway. Not sure what that’s says about Deutsche Bahn vs NYC/MTA but I’m sure both are not upgrading that much.

Not sure what I was expecting quality wise in Germany when I rode the DB rail between states and the Munich subway but it wasn’t much different than the US, except it much more expansive. Nothing fancy and it was late but I’d rather not pay for fancy here or there. Just make it work.

that could have been a lot cheaper of they would have spent in the past (their spending seems to have been very low)

They need to spend at least 3x that and they need to bring redundant workforce to fix Germany. It is completely broken now.

> They need to spend at least 3x that

According to whom?

Look at how much Switzerland spends per capita vs Germany. €477 vs €115. And Swiss kept their infrastructure well unlike Germans.

source: https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/themen/infrastruktur/inve...

> Look at how much Switzerland spends per capita vs Germany. €477 vs €115

Your chart shows close to €200 spent by Deutschland per capita in 2024, before the abovementioned spending splurge (about €30/person/year). (The numbers 477 and 115 never appear in your source.)

€230 in Berlin purchases about as much as €371 of CHF in Zürich [1]. So no, I’m not seeing evidence Germany needs to further 3x capital expenditure to unfuck its system, and that’s before observing it spends more than Italy per capita, and Italy’s intercity rail is fantastic.

[1] https://www.paritydeals.com/ppp-calculator/switzerland-vs-ge...

The number €115 is in the second chart as the per capita German expenditure on rail infrastructure in 2023. I don't see €477, but it's pretty close to the €480 figure for Switzerland in 2024. My guess is they saw an old version of the page when the first chart had numbers for 2023 and have kept using it without noticing the update.

And the Swiss CFF also thinks it is under spending on maintenance. Track maintenance last year was nearly 20% from its target.

Yeah sorry I was using the wrong page and outdated numbers from the infographic I have saved. Here is the picture my numbers came from: https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/1...

Here's an article (in German) from last year where Richard Lutz, boss at the time of Deutsche Bahn, says they needed at least twice as much as what they were getting:

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/mobilitaet/trotz-sond...

And here's an article (also in German) from this year about how the money that's been promised is not being delivered, leading to the cancelation of 90 projects.

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/es-fehlt-das-geld-mehr-a...

I also remember an article about how part of the train budget was being redistributed to fix highways, but I can't find it right now.

So I agree with the parent comment: the current investment is not enough and what little they have is constantly being diverted.

Out of which €106bn are to be spent on regulations and environmental assessments.

Though I think they are not spending it sustainably. There is one train line and one lightrail line between my city and the next big city. They want to do things to the train line, blocking it for half a friggin year, and they make that announcement as if they do not give a damn about anyone, who relies on that line. Everyone will have to squeeze into the lightrail trains, which take longer. Often whole carriages are mephitic and unusable, when certain people have made them their temporary homes.

If things were done with an eye to the future, we would see things like extra lines, so that when things need to be renewed/maintained train service is not completely and utterly fucked for half a year for thousands of people, who want or need to take the train for daily commute. It is in my eyes utterly ridiculous, that we rely on a single track and are fucked, when literally anything at all needs to be done. Instant 100% train service disruption. This is Deutsche Bahn reliability.

Of course that would cost more ... It's cost accumulated by decades of neglect, and now they don't want to spend that money on the citizen, but rather pay biiiig juicy bonuses for management levels at Deutsche Bahn. Predatory capitalism at its best.

And that's not all. Their software and app sucks ass too.

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