I moved to Germany 10 years ago and while regional and suburban train service has been great, the long distance service has been terrible, with high prices, almost no high speed service and no competition. I'm Italian and therefore I had very low expectations, but at least high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany (at least until recently, when lack of regular maintenance work ultimately made its dent into the service quality).
But for many software engineer this is not a big surprise: everyone knows that accumulating tech debt and neglecting maintence will eventually bite back sooner or later.
> high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany
Not to excuse the German performance, but part of the reason is that the Italian high-speed railway network is significantly simpler than the German one, also in terms of interconnections with neighbouring countries:
Germany is much flatter than Italy - while the the line between Bologna and Florence, Florence and Rome, Rome and Naples, must go through a lot of mountains or steep hills. Also, Italy is a territory with a lot of seismic activity every year, and that's something you can't ignore when you send trains at 300 km/h.
The problem in Germany is that due to the structure of the railway network, there are much more interdependencies between connections, so one disruption tends to be harder to contain. It spreads out and affects many more connections.
which translates as, germany has no land left for rights of way and things like train switching yards.....real estate is bonkers expensive... and switching tracks for high speed trains are going to be HUGE....next step would be to have elevated(double deck) bypass tracks....but that would cause.....further disruptions
There are so many Germans on YouTube mocking both the lack of time precisiin as well as the pricing schedule where to get reasonably priced tickets is you have to book them three months in advance
No the trick is to get one of the first x% of tickets sold to exactly that train.
Well, mostly; being early also has some influence but the amount of unsold seats is far more important.
The problem in Munich is that everything must go through a single two-track part underneath the city center, which is at absolute capacity. If anything breaks down there (and it does, often, very often), even a small delay in a single train, all trains get delayed or skip stops.
In my experience, you have to take at least one train early if you do not want to come late regularly. Even e.g. the main airport train line, used by tourists, often turns around before the actual airport due to delays.
If you live in the city itself, it's fine, you also have other options. If you live further away, it's barely acceptable to very bad, IMO.
It is reliable-ish, but more "Amtrak Capital Corridor"-reliable than "JR Yamanote Line"-reliable.
I live in Berlin and while there are sometimes disruptions, it's hard to complain when the interval between trains is 4-5 minutes. Just get on the next one. Actually, if the train is 2-3 minutes late, it makes sense to wait another 3-2 minutes after that because it's guaranteed the late train will be crowded, and the next one will be undercrowded, because most people don't follow this principle.
Sibling comment says all traffic in Munich is funneled through the same central section; that's also true for several Berlin lines, but I've never heard of it becoming a problem. Maybe one time. Berlin's network[1] is complex enough that you have plenty of alternate routes available if something like that happens.
Note to future urban planners: a ring railway is a great idea as it provides redundancy of any possible route through the city center. (Very large cities might even need two. The Soviets actually built a second ring to avoid West Berlin, but it doesn't run as a continuous service. You can see various regional services running around the very outside of the network map.)
I've also traveled fairly long distances by regional train (yay Deutschlandticket) and by ICE (absolutely worth it if you're not penny-pinching). It's always disrupted; trains are always late. But I always get to my destination, so I don't mind that much. If you're on a nice and relaxed schedule, like traveling the day before, you'll be fine. It seems an acceptable, despite not ideal, way to run a railway network.
I think that unlike plane travel, where you normally get there exactly on time but there's a small chance you might be seriously delayed, with German train travel you're quite often a few hours delayed (for a cross-country trip) but it's never worse than that. You never have to stay the night in a hotel, you never have to pay extra money to get rebooked, and you never have to sue them afterwards. IIRC, if you're estimated to arrive more than 20 minutes late, you're allowed to just hop on any train towards your destination - the DB app will tell you this - and you don't need a new ticket, though it's recommended to get a note from a customer service desk to prove it occurred.
Note that the German network runs a lot of trains on a lot of tracks - unlike, say, the French TGV network, which has dedicated tracks for TGVs. The German approach allows for more services with less reliability and the French approach provides the opposite. AFAIK, there are a lot more ICE routes than TGV routes because the routes can be pieced together from existing local track segments and incrementally upgraded.
Side note: I've been on a regional train that was delayed 10 minutes, then sat on a siding for another hour to let more important traffic such as ICEs run on schedule past it. There is a tradeoff between resource utilization, and slack which allows for quick return to equilibrium. The more timeslots are occupied, the longer it takes before a delayed train can find a normally empty timeslot to fit into. This also applies to computers.
And people have been complaining about train delays since long before I got here.
As a German, I always loved the long distance trains I. Italy. I remember a trip in 2008 crossing From south to North Italy which cost a fraction of what it would have in Germany. It had A/C and it was on time. So comfy. Meanwhile in Germany, they charged a shitton of money and it had no A/C.
Still last year I found it much better than in Germany, overall. The only thing that PISSES me off is that the stupid Trenitalia does not show me which platform the train is departing/arriving from. It blows my mind that this CRUCIAL information is not shown anywhere and you literally have to be standing in the station to hopefully find it.
>The only thing that PISSES me off is that the stupid Trenitalia does not show me which platform the train is departing/arriving from. It blows my mind that this CRUCIAL information is not shown anywhere and you literally have to be standing in the station to hopefully find it.
The Trenitalia app shows arrival and departure platform and time info per station, as well as for trips you are currently taking.
There is also this gem of a website, no TLS and with 2007 iPhone 1.0 design language, but it works:
When I toured Germany in the 1980s with a train pass, there were clocks all over the train stations. If the train was scheduled to start at 11:07, when the big hand clicked to 7, the train started to move.
It was wonderful.
BTW, the D community is all over the world. We schedule a zoom meeting each month. When we began the meetings, and the meeting started at, say, 8, the meeting organizer would say "we need to wait a bit for the rest to join us". I put my foot down and said when the meeting is scheduled for 8, it starts at exactly 8.
And everyone shows up on time! It's amazing how that works.
Fun fact, all train clocks in Germany synchronize ever minute. That's why the second hand freezes every minute: its actually set to be a bit too fast, and then gets held at the top until the radio signal comes to let it continue.
When I worked at Boeing, we'd have a meeting now and then in a meeting room. The engineers showed up on time. The lead engineers showed up 10m late. The supervisor showed up 30m late. Anyone higher up, even later.
This was never discussed, but the pattern was the same every meeting.
That is why I do not like the American traffic signaling system. When the light turns red cross traffic has a two to three second delay. My feeling is that if people knew the cross traffic would go immediately when the light turned red they would certainly stop. But right now they know there's a buffer so they just run the red light.
Wouldn't you need the delay even if everyone drove perfectly? Isn't the point of it to give time for cars that have already entered the intersection to exit it, since the light turning red just means you're no longer allowed to enter?
Around here the power goes out to the lights now and then. Interestingly, the traffic flows smoother and faster without the lights! Even the arterials! It's amazing! Drivers simply politely cooperate with each other.
(The same thing happens when a traffic cop handles the intersection.)
I'm always assured that the city traffic light engineers know what they're doing and design the lights for maximum flow. They do no such thing. They are either incompetent or deliberately set things up to impede the flow of traffic.
Most of the lights now have cameras on them. Would it be so hard to connect them up to AI with the goal of "maximize throughput"? Imagine how much gas would be saved. It would be tremendous!
At 4-way stops I find myself incredibly frustrated at the lack of roundabouts in the US since the traffic moves so much more slowly. But for high traffic intersections traffic lights are just more efficient since they let more cars through on average.
I think much of the issue is that by solving it at one intersection you simply move the problem to the next intersection. I'm pretty sure putting a roundabout at the 280/Page Mill Road intersection would improve throughput but nobody would get to work any quicker since the choke point is the next intersection along.
Moving to the US, the traffic light system was a big culture shock for me. No major/minor dendritic road system laid out like a tree like I was used to — more like right angles everywhere and so many delays. Traffic lights on every single intersection. So inefficient.
And when you mention it, a surprising number of people say “that would never work here. People don’t know how to drive”. So little faith!
That's because traffic lines exist for safety not efficiency. They guarantee a time during which you can drive through the crossing without looking, while introducing idle time.
This was the biggest culture shock for me coming from military aviation to software. In the former, a brief starts exactly on time, down to the second. "5-4-3-2-1-hack. Time is 0800."
I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my company.
> I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my company.
The problem with it is the boss. Too many bosses show their dominance by how much they can force underlings to wait for them. The boss is quite capable of starting the meetings on time, and the rest will work out.
I do the same thing with chronically late people. I simply don't wait for them. The problem resolves itself.
I've also done this. Back when I used to teach, all I had to do to get students to be on time was to start on time myself, and close the classroom door. (I think they locked automatically, so students had to knock to be let in, but that wasn't the point. I never gave them any grief, just let them in with as small an interruption as I could manage.)
I have never had a more punctual group of people that large. It works.
I was going to write a very snarky reply, but you seem much more experienced than me, so I thought about it a little bit. My point remains, but the snark goes away. And I'm in Germany and people wait 5 minutes before starting. In all regular seminars, people start at 5 past. It's because it is assumed that people have another meeting or seminar till the hour before. Same with meetings. Only in conferences do people start at the dot.
I think it is when systems fail, people stop responding to systems, and this is what is happening in Germany right now.
The punctuality of the trains has been more of a joke for quite a bit, I don't think it's a big part of German identity.
The part that is really terrible are the long-distance trains. Not that the regional trains are always punctual, their reliability varies a lot per route. But they're not as bad as the long-distance trains.
One big recent improvement is the Germany ticket, for 58 EUR per month you can take any regional train or bus.
I got the impression they have a different cultural definition of "late" -- they'd get as mad about a 15 minute delay as folks in the states would get about an hour plus delay.
Maybe twenty years ago, but these days it's pretty common to have hour-long delays, or to have trains be cancelled at short notice, or rearranged such that you won't get a connection. When traveling East/West, I'd pretty much always recommend planning a buffer of at least an hour, more if your journey involves connections.
Trains here are bad and the ones to/from Frankfurt are almost always delayed IME but surely you have other options to fall back on for getting there (or to whatever airport) that take less than "several hours".
Good luck with those fallback plans when your train stops in the middle of nowhere for an extended period of time. Or getting a full refund for that taxi you had to take to reach your intended destination.
For starters, you don't have to worry about getting stuck in traffic, getting in an accident or the car breaking down. You also don't have to worry about parking the car at the airport.
I guess one's viewpoint on the matter depends on the public infrastructure in one's region.
> “The reliability of the railway must be significantly improved,” Patrick Schnieder, Germany’s new transportation minister said .. calling the punctuality numbers “unsatisfactory.” Passengers often make the same point — but using expletives.
Is this an old article? They haven't consistently run on time for around a decade. The service is no better than supposedly worse trains in say the UK and is nowhere near say Korea's train system.
The data is misleading at best, probably manipulated. Let’s not forget the data is from DB itself.
As an example, in 2018, the then boss of infra at DB, Ronald Pofalla introduced the “Pofalla Wende”, whereby a commuting train between two cities will simply turn around and not serve the rest of the line if it has a certain delay. In itself, one could argue it can make sense under certain circumstances. But all remaining stations on the line are not counted as delays, even if there is not replacement train.
Same with cancellations, these don’t show up as delays.
The situation is significantly more dire than what this data shows.
Maybe the DB staff went soft during the lockdowns. Maybe some employees left and institutional knowledge suffered. The same thing happened with the truck driver shortage.
COVID harmed most industries that rely on manual labor. Suggested reasons vary, one is that people discovered they could do mental-work, and preferred it (and apparently it never occurred to them before). Another reason is many retirements and a gap in knowledge transfer to the next generation. Another is a huge increase in demand for non-physical work during COVID that never went away, leaving other industries short handed (and it's not a pay thing, there's not enough people for all demand in all industries, someone must run short).
The way neoliberalism dealt with the public sector including rail service and infrastructure and then come up with "COVID killed Deutsche Bahn" is like saying that poor old sucker who was pushed down the staircase succumbed to his running nose. The problems run much deeper and were already visible in the 70s and 80s, but because it's only the public sector and rail traffic, not about more highways and more cars and then even more cars it never got fixed. Because who needs rails and trains, right.
The old data chart shows that they never did run on time, so it was always just a myth. Well, don't build your identity on lies and you won't have a crisis :)
The diagram is confusing because DB has started “massaging” the data.
As an example, if a train which travels back and forth between two cities has a certain amount of delay, it will just turn around and not serve the remaining stations on the line. And that’s as many stations not counted as delays. This trick is named the “pofalla turnaround”, after the DB infrastructure boss Ronald Pofalla who introduced it in 2018.
And I think that’s just one trick, meaning the downfall starts earlier and is more significant I suspect.
I remember last decade seeing an ad on a Deutsche Bahn "ticket envelope" (remember those things?) promoting their new mobile app, proudly telling everyone "now with delays notification!"...
The last time I caught a train in Germany I remember having to wait on a freezing platform for ~ 3 hours until they gave up on the train and got us a coach and drove us to Hamburg...that was ~ 9 years ago.
I don't remember having the same issue in Netherlands though.
On the other hand I've been in Japan for a long time, I honestly don't remember a single train being late in all that time.
Or there is a sane explanation - People drive cars -> People push their politicians to improve road infrastructure -> less money for other infrastructure -> trains are underfunded -> trains and tracks are having maintenance issues a reliability starts to fall apart -> people drive cars even more.
While I agree that fundamentally the issue is that Germans spend more on cars than any other European population (but nowhere near as much as Americans), there is also the detail that a large share of VWAG is owned by a German state.
Sadly true, always plan your trip with at least half an hour exchange, with as minimal train exchanges as possible.
Also pick train stations for the exchange where there are more options for follow up connection trains, in case that half an hour is not enough.
Additionally good luck with luggage, the new trains hardly have any space for luggage, I don't understand how they are supposed to be an alternative to cars, if the only luggage I can fit on the upper compartment is a slim backpack, under the seat, or if I am lucky fighting for a slot on the single luggage compartment in the middle of the wagon.
dude, Germany's identy crisis is that Germans still don't get the potential they have. They are still, after decades of American ( I love America but I think they had it waaaaaay too easy in the past decades ) easy mode, not realizing they are playing the game of others.
Two bad examples: there's a PhD level genius just a few villages away and he still didn't even try to get the funding to build a proper mechatronics Hogwarts in our area ( it's 2025 ... ) and a nuclear Physics PhD, who's now a banker ( crying laughing joker emoji, a fucking banker, like one of those modern Kazakhs, crying laughing Joker emoji ) just a little further away .... who's daddy is also a Physics PhD and has been in IT for 30 years or so ...
Iean, sure, money, but is that all "agency" or just the result of priming/nudging towards the lower levels?
Good little Germans, just do as I do, keep your lips ( and minds ) sealed .... walk away
it's 4 to 8 hours of work per day anyway and you got the brains for it, ma dudes and dudettes, what the fuuuuuuuck
It was the first thing that came to my mind, even though that referenced Mussolini. But I think about WWII probably too often. Maybe the editor wasn't thinking that at all.
It would be an odd reference to make since it's usually applied to Mussolini, falsely (it's propaganda, he did not actually make the trains run on time[0].) I suspect in this case it just generally refers to some archetype of efficient modern German infrastructure and engineering.
No longer? They were bitching and moaning when I visited fifteen years ago in my hostel. They got horrified when I told them they're coddled to be annoyed about 15 minute delays and spoke on how things are in the states... anyways this is troubling I guess... but it's not new.
Edit: also, I found the English UI to be the best in the EU (yes, better than UK's) and traveled the continent on DB, so while I sympathize with wanting things better... as an American it was a pretty good system.
Why is this always the American answer when anything good about EU gets brought up that maybe turned worse?
Vacation, workdays, sickdays, parental leave, free schooling and healthcare? and public transport as here.
It is a question of money, investment and what society you want. You chose the Ford F-150.
For me in Sweden, we also have worse rail now, also due to the same issue. Maintenance is never "sexy" weather its fibre or rail. Parking, roads and cars nets points here too sadly.
American here, very tired of the response you note. It's self defeating and depressing. Feels like any expectations for a good experience, for things to work, to be treated like a person, is mocked as childish naivete.
https://archive.ph/9kInY
I moved to Germany 10 years ago and while regional and suburban train service has been great, the long distance service has been terrible, with high prices, almost no high speed service and no competition. I'm Italian and therefore I had very low expectations, but at least high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany (at least until recently, when lack of regular maintenance work ultimately made its dent into the service quality).
But for many software engineer this is not a big surprise: everyone knows that accumulating tech debt and neglecting maintence will eventually bite back sooner or later.
> high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany
Not to excuse the German performance, but part of the reason is that the Italian high-speed railway network is significantly simpler than the German one, also in terms of interconnections with neighbouring countries:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Italy_TAV.png#/media...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ICE_Network.png#/med...
Germany is much flatter than Italy - while the the line between Bologna and Florence, Florence and Rome, Rome and Naples, must go through a lot of mountains or steep hills. Also, Italy is a territory with a lot of seismic activity every year, and that's something you can't ignore when you send trains at 300 km/h.
The problem in Germany is that due to the structure of the railway network, there are much more interdependencies between connections, so one disruption tends to be harder to contain. It spreads out and affects many more connections.
What does this even mean?
One train has to get off for a different one to get on a track. Delays compound.
How is it different from every other rail network in the world?
France’s high speed trains have a dedicated network of tracks. They don’t have to share those tracks with regional and cargo trains.
which translates as, germany has no land left for rights of way and things like train switching yards.....real estate is bonkers expensive... and switching tracks for high speed trains are going to be HUGE....next step would be to have elevated(double deck) bypass tracks....but that would cause.....further disruptions
There are so many Germans on YouTube mocking both the lack of time precisiin as well as the pricing schedule where to get reasonably priced tickets is you have to book them three months in advance
No the trick is to get one of the first x% of tickets sold to exactly that train. Well, mostly; being early also has some influence but the amount of unsold seats is far more important.
> regional and suburban train service has been great
In which city?
Berlin. Until few years ago it was great.
I don't know what others think, but Munich seemed reliable to me.
YMMV
The problem in Munich is that everything must go through a single two-track part underneath the city center, which is at absolute capacity. If anything breaks down there (and it does, often, very often), even a small delay in a single train, all trains get delayed or skip stops.
In my experience, you have to take at least one train early if you do not want to come late regularly. Even e.g. the main airport train line, used by tourists, often turns around before the actual airport due to delays.
If you live in the city itself, it's fine, you also have other options. If you live further away, it's barely acceptable to very bad, IMO.
It is reliable-ish, but more "Amtrak Capital Corridor"-reliable than "JR Yamanote Line"-reliable.
Very nice comment, thanks.
One remark only: TGV does not have to use the high speed rails only. It will just have to go slower on the other rails.
I live in Berlin and while there are sometimes disruptions, it's hard to complain when the interval between trains is 4-5 minutes. Just get on the next one. Actually, if the train is 2-3 minutes late, it makes sense to wait another 3-2 minutes after that because it's guaranteed the late train will be crowded, and the next one will be undercrowded, because most people don't follow this principle.
Sibling comment says all traffic in Munich is funneled through the same central section; that's also true for several Berlin lines, but I've never heard of it becoming a problem. Maybe one time. Berlin's network[1] is complex enough that you have plenty of alternate routes available if something like that happens.
Note to future urban planners: a ring railway is a great idea as it provides redundancy of any possible route through the city center. (Very large cities might even need two. The Soviets actually built a second ring to avoid West Berlin, but it doesn't run as a continuous service. You can see various regional services running around the very outside of the network map.)
I've also traveled fairly long distances by regional train (yay Deutschlandticket) and by ICE (absolutely worth it if you're not penny-pinching). It's always disrupted; trains are always late. But I always get to my destination, so I don't mind that much. If you're on a nice and relaxed schedule, like traveling the day before, you'll be fine. It seems an acceptable, despite not ideal, way to run a railway network.
I think that unlike plane travel, where you normally get there exactly on time but there's a small chance you might be seriously delayed, with German train travel you're quite often a few hours delayed (for a cross-country trip) but it's never worse than that. You never have to stay the night in a hotel, you never have to pay extra money to get rebooked, and you never have to sue them afterwards. IIRC, if you're estimated to arrive more than 20 minutes late, you're allowed to just hop on any train towards your destination - the DB app will tell you this - and you don't need a new ticket, though it's recommended to get a note from a customer service desk to prove it occurred.
Note that the German network runs a lot of trains on a lot of tracks - unlike, say, the French TGV network, which has dedicated tracks for TGVs. The German approach allows for more services with less reliability and the French approach provides the opposite. AFAIK, there are a lot more ICE routes than TGV routes because the routes can be pieced together from existing local track segments and incrementally upgraded.
Side note: I've been on a regional train that was delayed 10 minutes, then sat on a siding for another hour to let more important traffic such as ICEs run on schedule past it. There is a tradeoff between resource utilization, and slack which allows for quick return to equilibrium. The more timeslots are occupied, the longer it takes before a delayed train can find a normally empty timeslot to fit into. This also applies to computers.
And people have been complaining about train delays since long before I got here.
[1] https://sbahn.berlin/liniennetz/
As a German, I always loved the long distance trains I. Italy. I remember a trip in 2008 crossing From south to North Italy which cost a fraction of what it would have in Germany. It had A/C and it was on time. So comfy. Meanwhile in Germany, they charged a shitton of money and it had no A/C.
Still last year I found it much better than in Germany, overall. The only thing that PISSES me off is that the stupid Trenitalia does not show me which platform the train is departing/arriving from. It blows my mind that this CRUCIAL information is not shown anywhere and you literally have to be standing in the station to hopefully find it.
>The only thing that PISSES me off is that the stupid Trenitalia does not show me which platform the train is departing/arriving from. It blows my mind that this CRUCIAL information is not shown anywhere and you literally have to be standing in the station to hopefully find it.
The Trenitalia app shows arrival and departure platform and time info per station, as well as for trips you are currently taking.
There is also this gem of a website, no TLS and with 2007 iPhone 1.0 design language, but it works:
http://www.viaggiatreno.it/infomobilitamobile/pages/cercaTre...
When I toured Germany in the 1980s with a train pass, there were clocks all over the train stations. If the train was scheduled to start at 11:07, when the big hand clicked to 7, the train started to move.
It was wonderful.
BTW, the D community is all over the world. We schedule a zoom meeting each month. When we began the meetings, and the meeting started at, say, 8, the meeting organizer would say "we need to wait a bit for the rest to join us". I put my foot down and said when the meeting is scheduled for 8, it starts at exactly 8.
And everyone shows up on time! It's amazing how that works.
Fun fact, all train clocks in Germany synchronize ever minute. That's why the second hand freezes every minute: its actually set to be a bit too fast, and then gets held at the top until the radio signal comes to let it continue.
https://youtu.be/Er5VIgJqvtg
German engineering!
When I worked at Boeing, we'd have a meeting now and then in a meeting room. The engineers showed up on time. The lead engineers showed up 10m late. The supervisor showed up 30m late. Anyone higher up, even later.
This was never discussed, but the pattern was the same every meeting.
I seriously disliked that nonsense.
That is why I do not like the American traffic signaling system. When the light turns red cross traffic has a two to three second delay. My feeling is that if people knew the cross traffic would go immediately when the light turned red they would certainly stop. But right now they know there's a buffer so they just run the red light.
Wouldn't you need the delay even if everyone drove perfectly? Isn't the point of it to give time for cars that have already entered the intersection to exit it, since the light turning red just means you're no longer allowed to enter?
Generally, cross drivers pay attention to other cars in the intersection and don't just drive into them.
And cars already in the intersection have a momentum, you’d need quite a powerful car to hit them (and you would have to do it on purpose)
Around here the power goes out to the lights now and then. Interestingly, the traffic flows smoother and faster without the lights! Even the arterials! It's amazing! Drivers simply politely cooperate with each other.
(The same thing happens when a traffic cop handles the intersection.)
I'm always assured that the city traffic light engineers know what they're doing and design the lights for maximum flow. They do no such thing. They are either incompetent or deliberately set things up to impede the flow of traffic.
Most of the lights now have cameras on them. Would it be so hard to connect them up to AI with the goal of "maximize throughput"? Imagine how much gas would be saved. It would be tremendous!
At 4-way stops I find myself incredibly frustrated at the lack of roundabouts in the US since the traffic moves so much more slowly. But for high traffic intersections traffic lights are just more efficient since they let more cars through on average.
I think much of the issue is that by solving it at one intersection you simply move the problem to the next intersection. I'm pretty sure putting a roundabout at the 280/Page Mill Road intersection would improve throughput but nobody would get to work any quicker since the choke point is the next intersection along.
> Interestingly, the traffic flows smoother and faster without the lights!
I agree with that at off-peak times, but when lights malfunction at peak times, that seems to make traffic a lot worse.
Moving to the US, the traffic light system was a big culture shock for me. No major/minor dendritic road system laid out like a tree like I was used to — more like right angles everywhere and so many delays. Traffic lights on every single intersection. So inefficient.
And when you mention it, a surprising number of people say “that would never work here. People don’t know how to drive”. So little faith!
That's because traffic lines exist for safety not efficiency. They guarantee a time during which you can drive through the crossing without looking, while introducing idle time.
That's how the traffic in India actually works. No sudden moves, no surprises, no AI, everybody cooperates.
This has been found over and over, the more traffic control devices the worse the driving.
The Netherlands has it.
This was the biggest culture shock for me coming from military aviation to software. In the former, a brief starts exactly on time, down to the second. "5-4-3-2-1-hack. Time is 0800."
I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my company.
> I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my company.
The problem with it is the boss. Too many bosses show their dominance by how much they can force underlings to wait for them. The boss is quite capable of starting the meetings on time, and the rest will work out.
I do the same thing with chronically late people. I simply don't wait for them. The problem resolves itself.
I've also done this. Back when I used to teach, all I had to do to get students to be on time was to start on time myself, and close the classroom door. (I think they locked automatically, so students had to knock to be let in, but that wasn't the point. I never gave them any grief, just let them in with as small an interruption as I could manage.)
I have never had a more punctual group of people that large. It works.
One thing about human nature that I rarely see mentioned is people tend to behave as you expect them to.
If you expect them to be honest, they'll be honest.
If you expect them to be thieves, they'll be thieves.
If you expect them to be on time, they'll be on time.
And so on.
(Of course there are exceptions.)
This is being "fashionably" late, you assert social status by being late.
If I'm going to be late for a social occasion, I'll text the host.
I was going to write a very snarky reply, but you seem much more experienced than me, so I thought about it a little bit. My point remains, but the snark goes away. And I'm in Germany and people wait 5 minutes before starting. In all regular seminars, people start at 5 past. It's because it is assumed that people have another meeting or seminar till the hour before. Same with meetings. Only in conferences do people start at the dot.
I think it is when systems fail, people stop responding to systems, and this is what is happening in Germany right now.
Took me a while to realize but D here refers to the D language I assume
The punctuality of the trains has been more of a joke for quite a bit, I don't think it's a big part of German identity.
The part that is really terrible are the long-distance trains. Not that the regional trains are always punctual, their reliability varies a lot per route. But they're not as bad as the long-distance trains.
One big recent improvement is the Germany ticket, for 58 EUR per month you can take any regional train or bus.
I got the impression they have a different cultural definition of "late" -- they'd get as mad about a 15 minute delay as folks in the states would get about an hour plus delay.
Maybe twenty years ago, but these days it's pretty common to have hour-long delays, or to have trains be cancelled at short notice, or rearranged such that you won't get a connection. When traveling East/West, I'd pretty much always recommend planning a buffer of at least an hour, more if your journey involves connections.
6 minutes is late for DB. But trains are often much later (or cancelled).
It's a meme, even Duolingo's German lessons bring up "the train is late" phrases pretty early :)
> But they're not as bad as the long-distance trains.
In my recent experience the most punctual trains I’ve taken have been long-distance ones, namely IC (as opposed to ICE). Not sure why, though.
I found this article a couple of hours ago, it's fun to see it here as a thread.
I live in Germany and I sent the article to my former manager. His response, verbatim, was this:
"This pisses me off so deeply".
I went on to muse about the "academic quarter hour" and that now "six minutes is now German standard lateness".
All in good faith, and hell of a lot of fun.
Last year 38C3: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wann-klappt-der-anschluss-wann-n...
In the last few weeks I’ve had friends lose/almost lose their flights in Germany because their trains were several hours late.
Trains here are bad and the ones to/from Frankfurt are almost always delayed IME but surely you have other options to fall back on for getting there (or to whatever airport) that take less than "several hours".
Good luck with those fallback plans when your train stops in the middle of nowhere for an extended period of time. Or getting a full refund for that taxi you had to take to reach your intended destination.
I don’t understand why someone would take the train instead of his car unless he wanted to take the risk of losing the flight.
For starters, you don't have to worry about getting stuck in traffic, getting in an accident or the car breaking down. You also don't have to worry about parking the car at the airport.
I guess one's viewpoint on the matter depends on the public infrastructure in one's region.
> “The reliability of the railway must be significantly improved,” Patrick Schnieder, Germany’s new transportation minister said .. calling the punctuality numbers “unsatisfactory.” Passengers often make the same point — but using expletives.
Thanks for the chuckle!
Is this an old article? They haven't consistently run on time for around a decade. The service is no better than supposedly worse trains in say the UK and is nowhere near say Korea's train system.
No it's from August 5th. It includes some nice graphs, apparently the punctuality really plummeted around 2020.
I wish the author would dive into that even a little bit. It looks like COVID killed the performance. Why? And what about post COVID?
The data is misleading at best, probably manipulated. Let’s not forget the data is from DB itself.
As an example, in 2018, the then boss of infra at DB, Ronald Pofalla introduced the “Pofalla Wende”, whereby a commuting train between two cities will simply turn around and not serve the rest of the line if it has a certain delay. In itself, one could argue it can make sense under certain circumstances. But all remaining stations on the line are not counted as delays, even if there is not replacement train.
Same with cancellations, these don’t show up as delays.
The situation is significantly more dire than what this data shows.
Maybe train personnel out sick?
The odd thing is it never recovered; it's stayed low since 2020.
Maybe the DB staff went soft during the lockdowns. Maybe some employees left and institutional knowledge suffered. The same thing happened with the truck driver shortage.
COVID harmed most industries that rely on manual labor. Suggested reasons vary, one is that people discovered they could do mental-work, and preferred it (and apparently it never occurred to them before). Another reason is many retirements and a gap in knowledge transfer to the next generation. Another is a huge increase in demand for non-physical work during COVID that never went away, leaving other industries short handed (and it's not a pay thing, there's not enough people for all demand in all industries, someone must run short).
The way neoliberalism dealt with the public sector including rail service and infrastructure and then come up with "COVID killed Deutsche Bahn" is like saying that poor old sucker who was pushed down the staircase succumbed to his running nose. The problems run much deeper and were already visible in the 70s and 80s, but because it's only the public sector and rail traffic, not about more highways and more cars and then even more cars it never got fixed. Because who needs rails and trains, right.
Ironically, DB owned many lines in the UK up until recently (via their ownership of Arriva)
The old data chart shows that they never did run on time, so it was always just a myth. Well, don't build your identity on lies and you won't have a crisis :)
The diagram is confusing because DB has started “massaging” the data. As an example, if a train which travels back and forth between two cities has a certain amount of delay, it will just turn around and not serve the remaining stations on the line. And that’s as many stations not counted as delays. This trick is named the “pofalla turnaround”, after the DB infrastructure boss Ronald Pofalla who introduced it in 2018.
And I think that’s just one trick, meaning the downfall starts earlier and is more significant I suspect.
I remember last decade seeing an ad on a Deutsche Bahn "ticket envelope" (remember those things?) promoting their new mobile app, proudly telling everyone "now with delays notification!"...
I always thought Swiss trains were the ones with the reputation for being on time.
When have they ran on time sorry ?
The last time I caught a train in Germany I remember having to wait on a freezing platform for ~ 3 hours until they gave up on the train and got us a coach and drove us to Hamburg...that was ~ 9 years ago.
I don't remember having the same issue in Netherlands though.
On the other hand I've been in Japan for a long time, I honestly don't remember a single train being late in all that time.
It's compared to before the train reform. 9 years is only 2016.
Germany, like America, is operated by and for the benefit of car companies. Their infrastructure difficulties share root causes with America's.
Or there is a sane explanation - People drive cars -> People push their politicians to improve road infrastructure -> less money for other infrastructure -> trains are underfunded -> trains and tracks are having maintenance issues a reliability starts to fall apart -> people drive cars even more.
While I agree that fundamentally the issue is that Germans spend more on cars than any other European population (but nowhere near as much as Americans), there is also the detail that a large share of VWAG is owned by a German state.
if you judge driving cars as 'sane', sure; I don't
I am just opposed to "big auto" idea being responsible for lack of investments in train network.
it's exactly this
Sadly true, always plan your trip with at least half an hour exchange, with as minimal train exchanges as possible.
Also pick train stations for the exchange where there are more options for follow up connection trains, in case that half an hour is not enough.
Additionally good luck with luggage, the new trains hardly have any space for luggage, I don't understand how they are supposed to be an alternative to cars, if the only luggage I can fit on the upper compartment is a slim backpack, under the seat, or if I am lucky fighting for a slot on the single luggage compartment in the middle of the wagon.
Why would a de-industrialized third world country amalgamation have trains running on time?
Germany took some choices about where it's going as a nation and now complaining about how the destination terrain is shaping up.
I'd hope they discover causality one day but I'm afraid that ship already sailed.
dude, Germany's identy crisis is that Germans still don't get the potential they have. They are still, after decades of American ( I love America but I think they had it waaaaaay too easy in the past decades ) easy mode, not realizing they are playing the game of others.
Two bad examples: there's a PhD level genius just a few villages away and he still didn't even try to get the funding to build a proper mechatronics Hogwarts in our area ( it's 2025 ... ) and a nuclear Physics PhD, who's now a banker ( crying laughing joker emoji, a fucking banker, like one of those modern Kazakhs, crying laughing Joker emoji ) just a little further away .... who's daddy is also a Physics PhD and has been in IT for 30 years or so ... Iean, sure, money, but is that all "agency" or just the result of priming/nudging towards the lower levels?
Good little Germans, just do as I do, keep your lips ( and minds ) sealed .... walk away
it's 4 to 8 hours of work per day anyway and you got the brains for it, ma dudes and dudettes, what the fuuuuuuuck
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Are you implying it's a WW2 reference? Did not occur to me before I saw your comment.
It was the first thing that came to my mind, even though that referenced Mussolini. But I think about WWII probably too often. Maybe the editor wasn't thinking that at all.
It would be an odd reference to make since it's usually applied to Mussolini, falsely (it's propaganda, he did not actually make the trains run on time[0].) I suspect in this case it just generally refers to some archetype of efficient modern German infrastructure and engineering.
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-sayi...
> Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this...
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These problems predate the immigration waves
Jeff Bezos might be interested in that market.
No longer? They were bitching and moaning when I visited fifteen years ago in my hostel. They got horrified when I told them they're coddled to be annoyed about 15 minute delays and spoke on how things are in the states... anyways this is troubling I guess... but it's not new.
Edit: also, I found the English UI to be the best in the EU (yes, better than UK's) and traveled the continent on DB, so while I sympathize with wanting things better... as an American it was a pretty good system.
>they're coddled
>bitching and moaning
Why is this always the American answer when anything good about EU gets brought up that maybe turned worse?
Vacation, workdays, sickdays, parental leave, free schooling and healthcare? and public transport as here.
It is a question of money, investment and what society you want. You chose the Ford F-150.
For me in Sweden, we also have worse rail now, also due to the same issue. Maintenance is never "sexy" weather its fibre or rail. Parking, roads and cars nets points here too sadly.
American here, very tired of the response you note. It's self defeating and depressing. Feels like any expectations for a good experience, for things to work, to be treated like a person, is mocked as childish naivete.
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