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More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland

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

#241

Post by j-wags »

vel0city wrote: post #217
meroes wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You watch travel vlogs where fights break out on planes? I'd love to see those channels! I suspect not. I suspect you don't watch actual vlogs, rather you see 1 minute long clips we all see. Sometimes we want to watch the whole unedited experience to get a sense of what it's like, rather than for 1 minute entertainment bits. I've watched Tesla Self Drive from SF to LA over several days to see what it's like for examp…

Greyhound's on-time performance in 2021 was 90%, with on-time defined as "no more than one minute early or five minutes late". I suspect your travel vlogs don't accurately reflect everyone's experiences and shouldn't be used to judge overall reliability or on-time statistics. https://www.firstgroupplc.com/~/media/Files/F/Firstgroup-Plc... I could tell you about a 14-hour flight I took between Dallas and Charleston (…

Thanks for sharing these numbers. I'm actually baffled to see the on-time performance so high and the passenger injury rate so low. I wonder how these numbers would look if they broke it down into greyhound vs. other operations, and whether cancellations are factored into their on-time performance. I've seen verbal aggression on so many of these buses and stations that I can't square it such a low injury rate. Maybe I've just been a major outlier in my travels.

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

#242

Post by vel0city »

j-wags wrote: post #237
vel0city wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are watching videos of people's negative experiences really an unbiased way to understand the actual statistics on how often busses are on-time? People probably post videos when things go wrong, do you think a similar rate of videos get uploaded when nothing notable happens? I see videos of fights breaking out on airplanes, hear about horror stories of being stuck on a plane and not allowed getting off. I take it tha…

I think you're misunderstanding. GP isn't saying "drawing randomly from all videos of unsafe situations, a large fraction of them occur on long-distance buses". They're saying "drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations". There are a number of travel vloggers who do a trip exactly once and report on what happened. The same vlogger will make videos about…

Read my other comment. I have ridden inter-city busses in the US on many occasions and picked up people at the stations. They've generally been on-time. My personal experiences have been pretty alright. A few times the WiFi didn't work but that was about it when it comes to my own negative experiences. The bus stations haven't exactly been in the nicest parts of town, but I've never experienced anything like violence there. Outside of chartered trips I haven't done a multi-day bus trip, most have been straight city pairs. Houston Dallas. Dallas Austin. Austin San Antonio. Etc. But I'm not then saying that's always typical, to actually judge the performance I'd look at the larger statistics.

> the on-time performance is maybe around 50%

I posted Greyhound's on-time statistics which was 90%.

> who do a trip exactly once

What a way to collect statistics. I just stepped outside. It wasn't raining. I guess it'll never rain.

> drawing randomly from all long-distance bus videos online, a large fraction of them have unsafe situations

Well yeah, once again, are there really going to be a lot of popular videos of "I took a five day bus ride, nothing happened, here's an hour-long video of the travel!" And are those really random videos or ones the algorithm have bubbled up to the surface? Think a video with crazy stuff happening would bubble up in the algorithm rather than an hour long video where nothing of note happens? Maybe analyzing statistics by one-off example YouTube videos made for clicks isn't the best way.

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

#243

Post by ivan_gammel »

user90131313 wrote: post #123
ivan_gammel wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DB is in major crisis with the workforce with tens of thousands of boomers retiring soon. They don’t have enough people for any redundancy.

is this specific to DB only? I feel like Germany needs a lot of workforce at German quality but no way they can fill that with any type of foreign immigration. They lowered a lot of immigration requirements to entry because of this. But still it will be not enough. It's a cultural thing and low wages in Germany can't fix it.

Well, we just got one million of Ukrainian refugees, half of which is not going to return home according to dome polls, but you are right, the demographics cannot be fixed by immigration alone. I myself currently work on a corporate healthcare project with the goal to reduce sick leaves and reduce health-related early retirements. The parental benefits in Germany are quite generous, but it all breaks into the growing cost of living wall. Everyone understands what’s going on and the urgency, but real solutions are yet to be found.

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

#244

Post by dash2 »

NikkiA wrote: post #118
dash2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here is evidence that you are mistaken: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_...

This is only a Wikimedia page, so if you have better evidence that contradicts it, feel free to present it. But note that it cites trustworthy sources.

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

#245

Post by dash2 »

GordonS wrote: post #45
dash2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think very few Brits would agree that rail privatisation has "worked". Poor and old carriages, overcrowded, slow , late trains, and generally a lack of investment. Oh, and ridiculously high fares (often well over air fares!), which seem to increase above inflation every.single.year.

Some of us remember pre-privatisation as being a lot worse: carriages were older, trains were slower and there were less of them, staff were ruder and didn't care about their customers, announcements were inaudible. Fares were probably lower though.

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

#246

Post by muro »

systemtest wrote: post #126
trgn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

You are describing a well-off high density city in Western Europe. I unfortunately live in "we used to have trams, most of them were scrapped in favour of bus lines, then the bus lines were scrapped because they were not profitable enough, go buy a car" Europe.

Where is that?

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

#247

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Chris2048 wrote: post #223
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the later a train is, the more likely it is to disrupt other trains. So the amount of unpunctuality matters.

In that case, "late" would be quantative.

The article does in fact quantify: 15 minutes for certain ICE trains, 10 minutes otherwise.

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

#248

Post by codegeek »

Freak_NL wrote: post #95
codegeek wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood but from my perspective, the cause doesn't matter. I booked through DB and it was not a good experience. Was my very first Time and I had a few minutes to decide what to do as I had people waiting in Ljubljuana. Didnt even have time for a refund for that portion of the journey. I have decided to not take the train next time for sure if I can. Will try bus first.

Regardless, your experience has nothing to do with this topic or DB. And you could have gotten a partial refund quite easily, even after taking alternative transport. Refunds for delays is something DB has worked out pretty reliably. Filling out the online form is trivial, and if you use the DB app most fields are prefilled.

I disagree. I booked a train ticket online at one single place. It was a single ticket with a QR Code. It had connections. I don't care who the underlying providers are. I paid to one entity. It was their job, not mine to track.

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

#249

Post by avidiax »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #176

Switzerland seems so practical. If this sort of thing was done in America there would be endless whining and it would be rolled back.

Their train system is one of the best things about living there.

The grain of salt is that it's a small country that's basically the size of the Bay Area, and it was never car dependent.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/thetruesize.com/mockup.html#?border...

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

#250

Post by myth2018 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #239
myth2018 wrote: post #187

I visit Germany more or less regularly. The deterioration in the overall experience with DB is very noticeable. Last time I was unfortunate enough to take an ICE, they started an informal poll with the passengers to decide whether to cancel a stop in Frankfurt. I was astonished. They eventually decided not to cancel it, seemingly after a lot of time deliberating or waiting for something, but most of us lost our conne…

Well their finances were broken by a series of changes: 1. Lockdowns wrecking everything. Ticket revenue plummeted etc. 2. Soon after, the government there decided to make train travel nearly free. 9 EUR a month to travel as much as you want anywhere in Germany. Justification: climate change. This doubled short-distance usage of the network immediately. Huge increase in usage + hardly any new ticket revenue = network…

Those are reasonable arguments, which I've heard previously indeed. But, truth be told, although the pandemic had an impact, all this mess started to become visible at least a couple of years before it — maybe even earlier.
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