Deutsche Bahn’s once-admired service has descended into chaos. Whether decades of poor investment or the company’s unusual structure is to blame, it’s a huge headache for a coalition trying to meet climate goals
The sleek high-speed train is 10 minutes behind schedule when it slides into Cologne’s main station before continuing its journey north to Dortmund. The delay is now such a common occurrence that the train manager does not even both to mention it to disembarking passengers.
In late afternoon on an unremarkable weekday in this western German city, holidaymakers are hauling suitcases through the station, workers are commuting home, and the late arrival of Deutsche Bahn’s IC 118 from Innsbruck is no surprise.
It does cause annoyance, though: a glance at the departures and arrivals board prompts one middle-aged man carrying a backpack to swear loudly as he enters the station.
I somewhat harshly disagree with this sentiment, sure most of the problems you mention are real, although I always feel like criminal danger in central/western Europe is just not really something anyone should let impact their live decisions, as it’s generally so rare –
Punctuality is very much a mixed bag regional and S trains are usually pretty good here in Köln, there are delays of course but half of them seem to be idiots walking on the tracks which I don’t really attribute to DB.
Long distance is a bit worse than that, you could definitely say delays are common and sometimes very long delays occur as well.
And communication is usually pretty atrocious. Although this usually can be sidestepped somewhat by just reading the app carefully and at least occasionally reading the upcoming construction notices.
But and this is the actually important thing that makes it all worth it, they run a ton of service, to a just insane number of stations. You can legitimately use it for all your travel if you just impose a time buffer about as long as the initial trip. From everywhere to everywhere in this country, usually for under 50€ if you just plan the slightest bit, or with the Deutschlandticket travel regio.
The amount of stations we have in towns of under 50k people might be among the highest in the world. The amount of people within x km of a station with regular (usually at worst hourly) service is enormous. The amount of track per person both in the country as well as company is staggering.
It’s nice and easy to call DB a joke but I think it’s far from it, public transit especially in urban areas, where as we all know most people live, is nearly world class in terms of coverage. You don’t need a car anywhere in Germany if you don’t want to and that’s a great thing, sure if you are impatient or get stressed when things outside of your control have impact on you, you might want a car but it’s very much not a requirement. Unless you almost pretty specifically have your home or work as far away from civilization as you can get.
DB has much more potential and probably should be much better than it is but it’s far from bad even. Some of the arguments brought against it also in your comment will just read like old anti transit propaganda for the car companies, wether rehashed out of habit or ignorance. Please at least get your mostly valid criticism and don’t aim it at DB but the car lobby, and 20+ years of neolib transit policy that’s responsible for this situation.
I knew 14 year old girls who would use the trains in the middle of the night and I have used them for all my transport that’s not on a bike for the last 6 years. And I like the system. Your comment reads like pure anti transit propaganda to me. Even though some of it I’d say myself as a jokey complaint.
To end on a lighthearted note, at some point in time I borded a train (45mins delayed although for me it was essentially 15 mins early in a hourly schedule)heading for Aachen from Köln Deutz. After heading successfully through Hbf and Ehrenfeld we found ourselves on the track heading onto the südbrücke back to the eastern side of the rhine, with our train conductor being about as confused that we were now rolling through the same station i borded the train at, as everyone else on the train. All in all we ended up almost another hour behind.
Everything I mentioned in my comment is either something I experienced myself (multiple times), or I directly know someone who experienced it. If it reads like propaganda to you, I don’t know what to say. It is what it is.
Köln is what I’d say is a big (enough) city where you probably don’t need a car, because public transport inside the city is at least decent.
Sure, most cities have a station. But there are a lot of small towns or villages which have 1-2 bus stops at best. Where I live (~4,000 people), there’s a bus coming about every hour, starting from 6:30am and ending at 8pm (!). Good luck going out in the evening when you have to be back before 8pm. I guess you could walk from the next bigger town, but that takes around an hour and after a busy day, you might not fancy walking for that long. In this bigger town there’s a train station, and no it’s not safe. It’s a place where illegal activities are happening on a regular basis once it’s dark outside.
It’s not about comparing DB to the rest of the world. You need to compare public transit to cars/car infrastructure and then provide something that’s at least as good if you want more people to use it. And where I live, it’s not even close. Having to plan an entire trip multiple weeks ahead of time to get acceptable pricing is ridiculous and doesn’t always work. Get sick? Unlucky, either no refunds at all or they’re very expensive. And “Flex” pricing is ridiculously expensive, you can pay 150,-€ (and more) for a 2nd class ticket across the country. Sure, you can get a BahnCard 50 or whatever, but then it’s still 75,-€ plus the cost of the BahnCard. Even when you’re driving the car alone, fuel + wear and tear is usually cheaper than one “Flex” ticket. Traveling with 2-4 persons and you need to get 2-4 tickets, I found a route across the country (~470 km) where one ticket is 120,-€, so 240-480,-€ with 2-4 persons. 470 km in a car would cost 94,-€ in fuel assuming the car consumes 10 l/100 km (which it shouldn’t) and 1 l costs 2,-€, and then you have 26,-€ left to 120,-€ for car maintenance caused by these 470 km. Travel with 2-4 persons and it’s way worse. Sure, you don’t have to drive yourself and that’s a big thing, but the price gap is huge once you’re 2 or more people, and you’d easily arrive two hours earlier by car, and that’s assuming nothing goes wrong on the trip by train.
Another simple example would be the dentist for me. With a car, I drive 15 minutes (on a Sunday drive) to my dentist, checkup takes say 15 minutes as well, and back I go in another 15 minutes. 45 minutes is all it takes, I can basically do that during my lunch break. With public transport, I’d have to take the bus which takes 40 minutes (!) to the target location, add 5 minutes of walking time (so 45 minutes), and assuming the dentist takes longer than 8 minutes I’d have to wait about 40 minutes for the next bus to arrive, then take the bus back which takes another 45 minutes including walking back home. So 130 minutes, and that’s assuming that the appointment perfectly aligns with the bus schedule. That’s a huge difference of 45 vs 130+ minutes. I kind of value my time, you know? When traveling by car, I also have the option of quickly grabbing takeaway lunch on my way back to work.
Trust me, if it wouldn’t limit me so much and cost so much time to go public transport only where I live, I’d be the first person to do it. I don’t enjoy driving my car, I see it more as a necessity. I use trains for longer distances (when going on vacation or whatever), and if it all works out, it’s an okay experience. Sure, it takes two hours longer and it’s a bit more expensive even when traveling alone (I’m rather spontaneous most of the time), but I personally don’t mind that as long as it at least works as advertised. But often, it doesn’t.
I did a city trip with a few friends of mine this year where we travelled to a new city almost every day for about 10 days. We planned it in a way so that cities were no more than 2,5 hours apart. In theory…in practice, while that worked sometimes, we had two occasions where it took over 6 hours instead to arrive. Kind of sucks when you only have this same day to spend in the city, and it already starts to get dark when you arrive. On the trips that were in time, many trains were still completely overloaded and had non-working air conditioning, sometimes with 30 degrees C outside (you can imagine how hot it was inside the train). With a rather tight schedule and after days and days of travel, you’d sure enjoy getting a seat in a train, and working air conditioning.
Anyways, enough about my experiences. Great if it works for you, but as I said, if you/they want people to switch up the way they do things, there needs to be an alternative that’s at least as good, but preferably better.
Your experience might be true, but to frame it as representative or real in any general way like you insinuate with;
is just disingenuous, you admit you live in a place with 4000 people, yet still you complain about transit. It fundamentally doesn’t matter because you are in the last couple of percent in terms of transit viability.
That’s why it reads like propaganda because while the examples you give are likely true, the overall picture you paint is significantly worse than the lived experience of most people that use the system, because you consciously or accidentally collect examples that make it seem dysfunctional. It’s mismanaged and it could be much better but it isn’t dysfunctional.
You brought up towns <50k having train stations, and I was basically saying that simply because there is a train station (in the town next to mine, which has >20k population) doesn’t mean it’s great relying on it. I then also went ahead and gave you examples of bad experiences I had completely independent of where I live.
What you say about “the picture I paint” is something I could’ve said about you the other way around. If I’m in the minority, how come there’s so much negativity towards public transit, and yes, also from people living in big cities? This leads to nowhere.
The part you quoted is literally how people work, they pick what they think is best for them based on their own experiences.
Anyways, I won’t elaborate further. I simply wanted to share my experience without having to justify how it’s not “disingenuous” or “propaganda”.