If you take a traditional definition of Continental Europe, including islands like Britain and Ireland, and going all the way into Russia as far as the Ural and Caucasus mountains, then Europe is slightly larger than the USA. But if you're talking about just the European Union, then the EU is much smaller than the USA. Less than half the land area.
> Continental Europe, including islands like Britain and Ireland, Continental Europe doesn't include Britain and Ireland.. That's kind of the point of the phrase.
Yeah he meant the European continent (the western half of Eurasia) rather than Continental Europe.
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 c…
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.
Eh?? I thought they were quite similar... Mmm, yeah, EU population is only 447 million. You must be counting Russia and other countries too but those are outside of the socioeconomic system we're talking about.
The EU alone is under half the surface area of US, though, so it's like 3x the population density.
Let me guess: Your commute was in East Germany? Reliability is a lot better there [1] [1] https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...
No, it was the route from Hamburg to Munich or similar.
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 subwa…
> 4. Sylt (think 'the German version of Nantucket/Martha's Vineyard') will burn to the ground.
As a non-American, I'd appreciate some further elaboration.
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 subwa…
> 4. Sylt (think 'the German version of Nantucket/Martha's Vineyard') will burn to the ground. As a non-American, I'd appreciate some further elaboration.
The suggestion is that it will get overrun with more tourists than it can handle.
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 c…
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…
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.
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 subwa…
> 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 cov…
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.
If passenger rail increases, then goods rail must decrease and go onto trucks. Or, one could let goods rail go at night, but Germany is noise -sensitive, so that's unlikely to happen. In the long run building more tracks are probably the only real solution.
Uh... Goods rail is running at night in Germany, and lots of it. So much in fact, that some connections are utilized at full capacity pretty much 24/7 and causing huge problems when they're blocked.
> Continental Europe, including islands like Britain and Ireland, Continental Europe doesn't include Britain and Ireland.. That's kind of the point of the phrase.
Yeah he meant the European continent (the western half of Eurasia) rather than Continental Europe.