Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> 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Yeah sorry I was using the wrong page and outdated numbers from the infographic I have saved.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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com