German trains are less punctual than Britain’s ‘broken’ railways
Olaf Scholz mocked UK trains. FT analysis of 1.9bn data points shows they are more reliable than Germany’s network
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It's funny, I was ranting about-it in another thread,
In like 10 years Germany went from My train is 10 minutes late, the DB ist immer lät das ist nicht akzeptable too Actually, mein trip went quite well Der Zug war only 30 minutes late
Not sure what happened.
The free market and austerity happened. They transformed the DB from a government service into a (still state owned) private company and split it up into several different entities in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Then greedy MBA suits broke everything in order to enhance their salaries and bonuses by cutting back maintenance. Their greed and stupidity at one point led to a high speed train derailing and crashing, killing over 100 people. This didn't wake up anyone, a lowly scapegoat was convicted, some minor changes were made, everything else went on as if nothing had happened. Also the infrastructure was left to rot, as pretty much all of German infrastructure, thanks to all major parties making austerity into a state religion. Now the infrastructure is sufficiently rotten to cause a whole trainload of delays, and attempts at repairing it, of course, lead to more delays, because in order to do a wholesale replacement of a large section of track, you need to close down that section of track for quite some time, leading to more traffic on other routes leading to more delays.
Turns out that the famous German efficiency isn't that efficient after all, but even back when that wholesale theft of public property that is the privatisation started, there were people who already called this out. Just nobody listened.
The moral of the story: Don't become like Germany, don't let free market cleptocrats take over your entire political system.
Whoever pulled the brakes on that privatisation deserves a medal.
And whoever started it deserves something entirely different. It's really just blatant theft of public property.
It has been pretty bad for way more than 10 years TBH.
At least my perception is that when i was using regularly the DB network in the the early 10's it was expensive but fine, large delay did happened but weren't uncommon. Nowadays I feel like that every-time I take the DB network, I should expect at least 30 minutes delay, and plan at least one hour for a connection.