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More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

bluewin.ch

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

#111

This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"

> so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you" New York’s Metro-North and LIRR have 95%+ on-time rates [1]. (EDIT: On time is defined as less than 6 minutes late [2].) [1] https://www.metro-magazine.com/10217862/metro-north-lirr-exp... [2] https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/reports/pdf/report-9-2025.pdf

That seems... poor? A one in twenty trains late stat will basically mean every person will have to deal with a late train roughly every week?

I bet, however, it's not uniformly distributed and some lines are late more than others.

Hopefully that 95% is them being honest about the current state, while they push higher.

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

#112
In heaven the cooks are Italian, the lovers are French, the mechanics are German, the police are British, and it's all organized by the Swiss.

(In hell the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the police are German, and it's all organized by the Italians.)

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

#113

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…

Deutsche Bahn is wholly owned by the federal government ( https://www.deutschebahn.com/en/group/ataglance/aufsichtsrat... ). This is exactly the same relationship as SBB has to the Swiss government. I don't think the corporatisation (not privatisation) is the problem in this case.

DB is just a holding company. The companies below are not 100% state owned.

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

#114

This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"

Not sure why you'd want to lump all of America in to one category of failure when it's demonstrably untrue. Quick example - BART in the Bay Area has a 92-93% on-time rate.

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

#115

This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"

This is by no means true across the country but I’m sure it plays well to the “American public transport sucks” sentiment some folks like to cling to.

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

#116

This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"

It's absolutely crazy to me! I can see my uber driver on my phone stopping to pick up a pretzel from the convenience store, but I can't see where the bus is or get any kind of estimate of when it's going to arrive at the busstop.

On vacation this summer in europe, all tram stops had estimated arrival times. Ridiculous, 5-10 minutes out at worst, they wouldn't even need the electronic signs, just a placard that says "just skim your phone for a bit, it'll come".

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

#117

DB has the worst company culture that I'm aware of. Everything has to go by plan, and when it doesn't, someone has to be responsible. So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks. This has removed the potential for improvisation in dispatching (no one wants to be responsible for delaying that other train), making the train network unable to give any trains room to make up their delays. Ther…

>So everyone is just ass-covering all them time and not taking any risks. Heaving lived and worked in Germany for a few years, I realized that's the reason behind all the excessive bureaucracy and processes for everything: extensive ass covering. If something goes to shit under your watch then it's not your fault because you did everything by the book and you have the extensive paper trail to prove it. And nobody wan…

I worked technical support at a mid sized company that sold some equipment that had very expensive support contracts. These support contracts made up a large % of the company income and our customers were happy to pay them.

When I joined the team first thing the director told me was "everyone fucks up, you will to, just tell the truth and you'll be good". I learned quickly that there was no finger pointing allowed in that team. If something went wrong we'd figure it out later and in the meantime do the right thing to help the customer.

It was a great culture in that group. There was surprisingly little bureaucracy in the tech support team. You could do what you needed to to get things done / got the help you needed. Almost every call that came in was immediately answered, and our customers loved us.

Later (after a series of other acquisitions and etc) we picked up a company that had more than 4x the number of support techs and they solved less than half the number of tickets. Even the tickets weren't "solved" as much as they went through the motions and they hit their metrics.

That group was all about finger pointing, they didn't seem to know how to do anything else. They weren't even good at finger pointing. One manager who loved to come up with theories as to why our team was "cheating". He somehow triggered an "investigation" into his theory as to why his team didn't solve tickets and others did. That investigation found found that his very specific theory as to how other teams were messing with the number of closed tickets .... that his team was the only one playing that game. It was so bizarre.

Unfortunately, due to the bad acts / crappy culture from the new team we ended up with a slowly evolving / massive bureaucracy too all designed as CYA type setups where everyone "did what they should have done" but really never solved any problems.

I feel like that's often the source of bureaucracy.

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

#118
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.

It worked OK for the UK. Passenger numbers, which had been steadily falling, started to increase. On the other hand, there are complaints about high fares.

Passenger numbers were generally CLIMBING in the 80s, Intercity was massively popular and successful, which was the reason for sectorization - let the bits that should be funding the system as a whole succeed, and let the bits that need subsidies fail.

Sectorization was, of course, the prelude to privatization.

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

#119

This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"

That quote sounds like my experience with Deutsche Bahn.
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