As someone using the German railway for a large distance destination couple a weeks ago it was a total disaster, we got stranded in a unfamiliar German city. Deutsche bahn told us they didn’t have any of their (partner) hotel rooms left. Just arrange something yourself. That was very nice because all the hotels were full anyway. It took us another 2 hours of calling to find something. I was exhausted when I finally checked in somewhere at 1 am.
I try to avoid flying, but the German railway is giving me nightmares. I frequently travel through Germany and it is the exception if there aren’t any large issues.
The article itself is very thin when giving its reasons. I’m sure it’s oké for people without the money to spend, but I would rather pay more for increased reliability. If the German summers are similar to how the Dutch maintains their railways, I’m sure they will plan a ton of construction while the masses of people that usually take the trains for work are on holiday. So I’m inclined to see this promotional as compensation for bad summer train service.
That's really unlucky. Before the Covid thing I took a long-distance train at least once per month for two decades, and I never managed to get stranded anywhere even when I chose late connections. Normally DB knows the connections passengers have, and it seems that if the last train of the day gets delayed the other trains wait for it to make sure no one gets stranded. I would really have enjoyed staying in one of those Intercity hotels at DB's expense.
The worst thing that happened to me was that the ICE train broke down in the middle of nowhere and the DB had to send another train and evacuate everyone from the original one over a gangway (it's not allowed to let passengers deboard in the middle of nowhere). Took more than four hours of waiting in an overheated train during summer. They sent me a box of really good chocolates as a "We're sorry" gift.
Lucky you. I was taking Koblenz to Utrecht some years ago and every week there was something going wrong in Germany on the way back. Once they just dropped me off in Bonn, no further service to Koblenz at midnight „sleep on the bench, we aplogize but can’t do anything”.
DB is nightmare. I had so many cases of missing trains when they had 1 hour delay on 1.5h track, connecting trains no waiting even for 5 minutes, cancelling train in last minute, etc.
The mess of DB isn't that much different from how the oligarchs in a lot of eastern European countries came to be. Privatization without real plan. Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
The rails near Hamburg Altona are rotting, but the Bahn didn't want to foot the bill. So they came up with a horrible new station somewhere else. As a result the city chipped in to make a better one and pay of it from tax money.
I'm the last person to favour the government institutions in Germany. They're slow, lazy and full of old lazy hierarchies that must have been productive 30 years ago, but what is the point of privatizing something when the structure itself doesn't change and the privatization does nothing but siphon money out of the system and pump tax money in anyway? Half the ICE fleet is out of commission nowadays.
So, echoing what eisstrom wrote: Deutsche Bahn is fully state owned. That phrase about "privatizing the profits and socializing the losses" is a common but still mindless form of dross in this case. I do understand why it gets a particular group of uninformed people to upvote your comment out of reflex though. You use it as click-bait, sort of, while building a convoluted argument that presumably very few of those upvoters actually grok.
Deutsche Bahn AG is the national railway company of Germany. Headquartered in the Bahntower in Berlin, it is a private joint-stock company (AG), with the Federal Republic of Germany being its single shareholder.
DB is not privatized, it is 100% state-owned. As far as I know, all ICE power cars are still in use today, except for the one destroyed in the Eschede accident.
> what is the point of privatizing something when the structure itself doesn't change and the privatization does nothing but siphon money out of the system and pump tax money in anyway?
That is the point.
Gigantic projects like nuclear reactors, stadiums, high ways, bridges, airports (hallo Berlin) trains (and big software projects and wars, too) are just different ways of funneling a significant percentage of the tax payer money funding the project into the politicians' and decision makers' circle's wallet.
You book a train from Aachen to Berlin. The first leg in your connection is late, you miss the ICE in the middle of nowhere. The next one is in four hours. You get in, the DB staff looks at you like you shit in their coffee. Booked a bike place and reserved a seat? The best they can do is to offer to stand between the carriages.
I've definitely had my "I hate DB" moments in my life and experiences similar to the one you describe, but for me, most of the time, I don't experience major issues (I don't count "train is half an hour late" to be a major issue, although I agree that it's kind of laughable that this happens so often - but I got used to it). It's definitely easier if you don't have to change trains or you don't take a super late train or anything.
Then there's also things that are consistently bad, like regional trains in NRW. They're never on time.
That's an interesting viewpoint and as someone living in the south of you, I have a hard time to understand why 30min is not a major issue. I feel more like after 5min, it's way to late :D ...
Maybe worth noting that the 9-euro ticket is only for local public transport, such as buses, subways, or regional trains. Only the latter (RE) are operated by Deutsche Bahn, whereas buses and subways are mostly ran by local companies.
I do not share your experience. I used to commute weekly for 1,75 hours in one direction with ICE. I had rarely problems that lasted more than 5 minutes. There was no change of trains required which might help here.
Same here: I regularly take long-distance train rides throughout all Germany, both with ICE (the fast one) as well as RE (the regional one), and for me it works smoothly for the most part.
If you beed to be on time, national flights with Lufthansa for me are close to 100% reliable whereas Deutsche Bahn turned out to be a catastrophe in about 50% of the cases. I still don’t get it: they own the complete network, they control every train on it and arriving on time at a place is like playing roulette. Neither air travel nor traveling by car gives those headaches (especially when you listen to your dynamic GPS that routes around traffic jams).
You can reduce the bad luck a bit by planning longer stops when changing trains, still making pauses longer reduces the attractiveness of trains even more.
Personally, I love taking trains when it works. It is comfortable, fast and you arrive in city centers. Even first class tickets have acceptable prices. But as I usually don’t travel for pleasure, but for business and don’t want to waste my time, German trains have become a no-go for me.
Lufthansa rarely gets "Personenschaden" ("injury to persons", an euphemism for "suicide") on their flight paths while Deutsche Bahn has frequently to deal with that. A delayed intercity express train definitely delays departure of other trains that are considered Anschluss(züge) ("connecting trains"). It then ripples through the network.
I like the „nightjets“ where you can sleep and wakeup in another city. Used that a few times.
I have to say, that if I have to be on time somewhere I take the car. DB is too much risk to miss the connecting train and the employees just look at you „well, bad luck. Next train 2h“
When I m on vacation i would file that under „experience“ and would just sit somewhere and sip coffee.
Ive had a Bahncard 100 (yearly pass for all fast trains in the country) for six years now and while there are problems, its about once a year, working out to about 1% of my train trips.
For air travel, Id guesstimate I get delays about 10-20% of the time.
What does large/long distance mean here? Do german railways extend outside of Germany proper? I'm confused because the longest distance I can find between two major cities is Munich to Hamburg, and that's only about 400 miles!
Since the discussions here are primarily about the railway system, Deutsche Bahn and especially long distance travels, I would like to point out that most of this does not specifically apply to the 9-Euro-per-month ticket for this summer. But first, I want to agree with many of the complaints, that long distance travelling by train has its annoyances in Germany: lots of trains not on schedule, missed connections resulting from that, occasionally completely overfull trains, very bad management when something goes wrong.
However, the 9-Euro ticket is not designed for long distance travels. (You may use it as such, because some regional trains are covering quite a distance and by switching from local train to local train; just take your time.) Besides of local and regional trains, it is also valid for most of the local trams and buses as well (except some private operators, that do not participate).
The ease it provides for local transport is, what it makes really attractive for me. I do not need to think about how to get a ticket (often in advance), if I am visiting somewhere. Without any afterthought, I can use a bus downtown everywhere for just one or two stops. I can park my car somewhere outside, near a tram station and take a 10 min. ride into the centre and do not need to find out which of more than a dozent ticket options is the one I need.
All of this is mainly psychological. Even before the 9-Euro ticket, using local transport was cheaper than driving a car. And admittedly, there are still some advantages of the car, most notably that you don't have to obey a time-table. But as you might think of your car as just waiting for you to get in and go, so it is now with any bus, tram or local/regional train.
As Swiss (just southern country of Germany fyi), the push for cheaper train is always interesting. However I expect the same level of punctuality and reliability when I would be ready to use train vs my car for work or business trips.
I did regularly go to Germany for work (Stuttgart, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt) and regularly had issues with either people causing trouble and police needed to board, suicide (sad but a reality) and most often technical problems. These often lead to missing important connecting trains.
So all in all for me the first step is not to reduce price but to ensure reliable infrastructure…
If the train costs more than flying and is a lot less reliable there's basically only the environmental argument left.
That said, I'm not sure what I want to choose. Trains /should/ be cheaper than planes, but they also shouldn't be a roulette whether I will arrive on time, or at all.
Unless things changed from when I used to live there, even with Swiss salary, any sort of demi-tarif even with Swiss salaries, is requirement for using the trains regularly.
This is very interesting to hear. In 2014, my wife and I went on a vacation in Germany and I found that it was cheaper and more convenient to rent a car than it was to use trains as we've typically done countries like Italy and France for our vacations. I chalked it up to Germans being a big fan of cars.
In Cornwall, UK, the local council has started something similar but not just for summer. Now a person can buy 7 day ticket for £10 and can travel anywhere in Cornwall on any bus. The stated goal for this policy is to encourage people to use public transport as much as possible, and to nudge older citizens to use public transport instead of driving themselves.
More needs to be done by the government. I was interested to learn the other day that Great British Rail will recieve the same, if not less, in subsidies. It's purely to 'streamline' buying tickets and the ticket costs will be barely effected.
It's being fronted as preventing further taxpayer costs, but I can't but feel maybe if there weren't a million private ToC's and the RoC's bleeding the railways dry this would be a non-issue.
This is first and foremost a subsidy scheme to give public transit providers some more money - many people will buy the 9 euro ticket which before did not buy monthly tickets - and for each such ticket, the state will give the public transit provider the difference to a full month ticket, up to 200 Euros.
1. The casual public transit rider will get one of these tickets: 9 Euros is like three rides on the Berlin subway ... they ride cheaper beginning with the fourth.
2. The commuter will save some money on the monthly ticket for three month.
3. Because of the media frenzy about these 9 Euro tickets, many non-users will buy it with plans to go sightseeing, as this ticket still is cheaper than most individual routes. Not all of them will actually use it.
4. Sylt (think 'the German version of Nantucket/Martha's Vineyard') will burn to the ground.
> This is first and foremost a subsidy scheme to give public transit providers some more money - many people will buy the 9 euro ticket which before did not buy monthly tickets - and for each such ticket, the state will give the public transit provider the difference to a full month ticket, up to 200 Euros.
Do you have a source for that? Considering that the federal government considers 2.5 billion
Euro enough to cover the costs, this sounds false. As far as I'm informed the transport authorities will just get their current costs covered.
My source is from an internal (FDP) party newsletter I've read when the idea first was announced. I seem to have since deleted it...
But to put that into context: with 2.5 billion Euros, you could finance 12.5 million such 200-euro-subsidies, or a ticket for three months for about 5% of the population, which I think is not too pessimistic - I'd wager that's about twice the number of people who have a net-wide ticket for their respective ÖPNV-Verbund today.
The Länder of course consider that money too little and are trying to get more cash assigned, though.
Sylt is considered "the holiday island for the uberrich". When the idea was first considered, their mayor carelessly spoke to the media that he feared the plebs coming to their island and do lower-class stuff, in short, getting on the nerves of 'regulars'.
Which was the inspiration for Germany's youth to - very loudly - start planning the invasion of Sylt to drink cheap beer from tincans and do lower-class stuff.
Add our liberal-democratic federal finance minister to the mix, who will get married on Sylt in mid-June, and you got a perfect storm.
Something very similar happened in the 1990s, when the Bahn had a cheap ticket - back then, riot police was sent to Sylt to avoid lower-class tourists getting too annoying. This time, though, it's likely going to be a lot worse, because of things being more organized thanks to the internet.
It's an island that has been a high society hotspot for decades. Think celebrities and politicians sipping champagne in overpriced beachside restaurants.
But even though it's an island, it's reachable by train via a dam, and the locals are worried about being overrun with day trip tourists, and the clebrities are worried about being crowded by poor people.
From various comments here and also some advice from friends. Consider not taking a trip for more than 2 connections or 2 hour trips with this scheme. A journey delayed will be percolated up to your final connection.
Readit News
I try to avoid flying, but the German railway is giving me nightmares. I frequently travel through Germany and it is the exception if there aren’t any large issues.
The article itself is very thin when giving its reasons. I’m sure it’s oké for people without the money to spend, but I would rather pay more for increased reliability. If the German summers are similar to how the Dutch maintains their railways, I’m sure they will plan a ton of construction while the masses of people that usually take the trains for work are on holiday. So I’m inclined to see this promotional as compensation for bad summer train service.
The worst thing that happened to me was that the ICE train broke down in the middle of nowhere and the DB had to send another train and evacuate everyone from the original one over a gangway (it's not allowed to let passengers deboard in the middle of nowhere). Took more than four hours of waiting in an overheated train during summer. They sent me a box of really good chocolates as a "We're sorry" gift.
The rails near Hamburg Altona are rotting, but the Bahn didn't want to foot the bill. So they came up with a horrible new station somewhere else. As a result the city chipped in to make a better one and pay of it from tax money.
I'm the last person to favour the government institutions in Germany. They're slow, lazy and full of old lazy hierarchies that must have been productive 30 years ago, but what is the point of privatizing something when the structure itself doesn't change and the privatization does nothing but siphon money out of the system and pump tax money in anyway? Half the ICE fleet is out of commission nowadays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bahn
Deutsche Bahn AG is the national railway company of Germany. Headquartered in the Bahntower in Berlin, it is a private joint-stock company (AG), with the Federal Republic of Germany being its single shareholder.
That is the point.
Gigantic projects like nuclear reactors, stadiums, high ways, bridges, airports (hallo Berlin) trains (and big software projects and wars, too) are just different ways of funneling a significant percentage of the tax payer money funding the project into the politicians' and decision makers' circle's wallet.
Then there's also things that are consistently bad, like regional trains in NRW. They're never on time.
Deleted Comment
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...
I have to say, that if I have to be on time somewhere I take the car. DB is too much risk to miss the connecting train and the employees just look at you „well, bad luck. Next train 2h“
When I m on vacation i would file that under „experience“ and would just sit somewhere and sip coffee.
For air travel, Id guesstimate I get delays about 10-20% of the time.
However, the 9-Euro ticket is not designed for long distance travels. (You may use it as such, because some regional trains are covering quite a distance and by switching from local train to local train; just take your time.) Besides of local and regional trains, it is also valid for most of the local trams and buses as well (except some private operators, that do not participate).
The ease it provides for local transport is, what it makes really attractive for me. I do not need to think about how to get a ticket (often in advance), if I am visiting somewhere. Without any afterthought, I can use a bus downtown everywhere for just one or two stops. I can park my car somewhere outside, near a tram station and take a 10 min. ride into the centre and do not need to find out which of more than a dozent ticket options is the one I need.
All of this is mainly psychological. Even before the 9-Euro ticket, using local transport was cheaper than driving a car. And admittedly, there are still some advantages of the car, most notably that you don't have to obey a time-table. But as you might think of your car as just waiting for you to get in and go, so it is now with any bus, tram or local/regional train.
So all in all for me the first step is not to reduce price but to ensure reliable infrastructure…
That said, I'm not sure what I want to choose. Trains /should/ be cheaper than planes, but they also shouldn't be a roulette whether I will arrive on time, or at all.
However I really do miss their pontuallity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31445822
It's being fronted as preventing further taxpayer costs, but I can't but feel maybe if there weren't a million private ToC's and the RoC's bleeding the railways dry this would be a non-issue.
1. The casual public transit rider will get one of these tickets: 9 Euros is like three rides on the Berlin subway ... they ride cheaper beginning with the fourth.
2. The commuter will save some money on the monthly ticket for three month.
3. Because of the media frenzy about these 9 Euro tickets, many non-users will buy it with plans to go sightseeing, as this ticket still is cheaper than most individual routes. Not all of them will actually use it.
4. Sylt (think 'the German version of Nantucket/Martha's Vineyard') will burn to the ground.
Do you have a source for that? Considering that the federal government considers 2.5 billion Euro enough to cover the costs, this sounds false. As far as I'm informed the transport authorities will just get their current costs covered.
But to put that into context: with 2.5 billion Euros, you could finance 12.5 million such 200-euro-subsidies, or a ticket for three months for about 5% of the population, which I think is not too pessimistic - I'd wager that's about twice the number of people who have a net-wide ticket for their respective ÖPNV-Verbund today.
The Länder of course consider that money too little and are trying to get more cash assigned, though.
As a non-American, I'd appreciate some further elaboration.
Which was the inspiration for Germany's youth to - very loudly - start planning the invasion of Sylt to drink cheap beer from tincans and do lower-class stuff.
Add our liberal-democratic federal finance minister to the mix, who will get married on Sylt in mid-June, and you got a perfect storm.
Something very similar happened in the 1990s, when the Bahn had a cheap ticket - back then, riot police was sent to Sylt to avoid lower-class tourists getting too annoying. This time, though, it's likely going to be a lot worse, because of things being more organized thanks to the internet.
But even though it's an island, it's reachable by train via a dam, and the locals are worried about being overrun with day trip tourists, and the clebrities are worried about being crowded by poor people.