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@straphanger@urbanists.social#Germany used to have a reputation for precision and punctuality.
Last year, only 62.5% of long-distance trains arrived without delays of six minutes or more. Deutsche Bahn recorded a €2.7B loss. And high-speed trains are struggling on 19th-century infrastructure.
#Italy now easily outperforms German trains on most metrics. Wie geht's, #Deutschland ?
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-deutsche-bahns-ambitious-plans/a-72062916
@straphanger
Are we really going to dwell on "...but they made the trains run on time"?
@straphanger The car lobby is too strong here. The (promised) money for the train infrastructure will probably be reinvested in freeways
@straphanger In fairness to DB, they are in progress of massive track and station upgrade projects all over Germany. So in prt unsifficient investments in past yield lesser reliability, and the current works projects yield many delays, and detours around closed sections being rebuilt.
@straphanger
Many things in Germany's image are more facade than reality.
DB is state-owned, but managed like a big corporation, that knows it's a monopoly with very incompetent managers which earn much money for a meager performance.
Too much of the infrastructure is too old, in a bad shape, to little capacity for the big demand, overloaded tracks.
The government is setting the wrong priority. Too much Lobbyism for Autobahn & Cars. Too less for rail & mobility.
@straphanger My first thought was "Only 62.5% on time? Try using a British train!"
Then I looked up the figures¹, and trains in the UK are actually slightly better.
Then I dug down into the numbers, and, surprise surprise, the best performing areas were in London and the South-East, with outliers in Scotland and Merseyside.
All other networks are significantly worse.
I know, comparing DB as a whole with individual networks in the UK results in all sorts of botched data, but comparing networks within the UK reveals that, as usual, living anywhere outside the "Home Counties" (which name suggests that anywhere else in the UK is a foreign country) renders us 2nd class citizens.
¹https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/zvwf0eux/performance_stats_release_2024-25_q2.pdf
@straphanger My father-in-law, an Ossi who would happily go back to the DDR, says DB 'subletting' to private firms is to blame.