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More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

bluewin.ch

51–60 of 309 posts

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#51
post #9

For context German trains over the last few years have become increasingly delayed. To the point that it is now the norm. Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders). It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the c…

Climate goal and public transport is also more of a joke than scientifically sound. For example, the gear for the participating teams at the latest EM in Germany was transported in parallel by the empty buses the teams usually use. The whole VIP travel caused a lot of additional cars on the street. Don’t confuse means for an end. There is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy.

These 3 reputable, scientifically backed, sources disagree with your anecdote:

United Nations:

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2021/10/trans...

US Department of Transport:

https://www.transit.dot.gov/climate-challenge

WRI:

https://www.wri.org/insights/current-state-of-public-transpo...

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#52
It's a classic case of efficiency vs latency.

Swiss railways optimise for punctuality, sacrificing line capacity (compensated for with double-decker cars).

Meanwhile every other European rail transport authority seems to be bent on squeezing out the most of the lines it has.

I grew up in a city that had two parallel rail lines in the east-west axis - one for long-distance connections, cargo and everything else, the other a refurbished old main line with trains only once per hour.

The latter was punctual almost to the minute(even if comparatively slow at an average 30km/h including stops), while the former was a mess and you were often better off driving instead.

My friend living in the suburbs close to that refurbished line always boasted how it took him a grand total of 18 minutes to get to the city centre and he could rely on the train to always arrive. That was quicker than I could get there by any means, despite a similar distance.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#53
post #9

For context German trains over the last few years have become increasingly delayed. To the point that it is now the norm. Official Deutsche Bahn figures are likely underreporting the extent of the problem as the reported times and actual timetables are -aggressively- out of sync (to the frustration of many riders). It's hard to dissect the true source of the problem as there are various factors at play. However the c…

Climate goal and public transport is also more of a joke than scientifically sound. For example, the gear for the participating teams at the latest EM in Germany was transported in parallel by the empty buses the teams usually use. The whole VIP travel caused a lot of additional cars on the street. Don’t confuse means for an end. There is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy.

If you question something like public transportation being climate friendly as being scietific sound, maybe you should bring up some evidence or data to back this up.

Also some anecdote about how buses where used at some major event does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about public transportation in general.

Also "there is a lot of marketing and money involved - especially in green energy" is a rather general polemic statement, which could also some clarification.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#54
post #27

Hard but entirely relatable. Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company…

> now to the most complex train system probably in the world. Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting t…

The ticket splitting thing you refer in the UK to works in other countries also.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#56
post #48

Hard but entirely relatable. Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company…

Besides the point that Deutsche Bahn is goverment owned, it is worth pointing out that Western and Eastern German had " to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. " + much much debts. Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.

The process was called Bahnprivatisierung.

See Wikipedia article here. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung

Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that. The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#57
post #46

Hard but entirely relatable. Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company…

"Privatizing" is not the correct word for it - DB was reformed and is now a company instead of a government agency, but it's still 100% owned by the state. Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, favoring short term savings over long term sustainability, which led to the sorry state in which German rail infrastructure is today. IMHO the major issue with the reform is that the…

It's the words that were used in the 90s. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#58
post #16

How humiliating. A teacher did the same thing to me, it worked.

Based on kdrama, this seems common in Korea. You're 10 seconds late, you can't enter the school grounds.

Why?! How does this help? That sounds insane and pointless to the education process. Unless the point was to educate your kids to be obedient slaves with childhood trauma for their corporate overlords.

We used to have something similar during communist rule in my European country, to teach kids who's boss and to respect authority.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#59

> Another figure illustrates why the practice is necessary from a Swiss perspective: in 2023, 92.5 percent of all trains in Switzerland reached their destination on time, compared to only 64 percent for long-distance trains in Germany. To add a bit more detail: SBB (Swiss federal railways) consider a train on time if it reaches its destination with less than three minutes’ delay [1]. DB (Deutsche Bahn) puts the thres…

15 min already? Damn, I remember, when the threshold was at 5m59s and that was already kind of outrageous.

Re: More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

#60
post #15

Just compare the colored rings (green = on time, orange = delayed more than 3 minutes, red = delayed more than 9 minutes) between the trains in Germany, Switzerland, and France here to get a general feeling of how bad things have become with Deutsche Bahn: https://travic.app/?z=9&x=890440.8&y=6126327.9&l=osm_standar... And today is a good day in southwestern Germany, just look at the current general redness in the Ru…

You can scroll up and look at Sweden as well. Not a pretty picture.
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