11–20 of 105 posts
Germany, like America, is operated by and for the benefit of car companies. Their infrastructure difficulties share root causes with America's.
Edit: also, I found the English UI to be the best in the EU (yes, better than UK's) and traveled the continent on DB, so while I sympathize with wanting things better... as an American it was a pretty good system.
The punctuality of the trains has been more of a joke for quite a bit, I don't think it's a big part of German identity. The part that is really terrible are the long-distance trains. Not that the regional trains are always punctual, their reliability varies a lot per route. But they're not as bad as the long-distance trains. One big recent improvement is the Germany ticket, for 58 EUR per month you can take any regi…
I moved to Germany 10 years ago and while regional and suburban train service has been great, the long distance service has been terrible, with high prices, almost no high speed service and no competition. I'm Italian and therefore I had very low expectations, but at least high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany (at least until recently, when lack of regular maintenance work ultimately made its dent into t…
> regional and suburban train service has been great In which city?
YMMV
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it's from August 5th. It includes some nice graphs, apparently the punctuality really plummeted around 2020.
I wish the author would dive into that even a little bit. It looks like COVID killed the performance. Why? And what about post COVID?
I moved to Germany 10 years ago and while regional and suburban train service has been great, the long distance service has been terrible, with high prices, almost no high speed service and no competition. I'm Italian and therefore I had very low expectations, but at least high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany (at least until recently, when lack of regular maintenance work ultimately made its dent into t…
I moved to Germany 10 years ago and while regional and suburban train service has been great, the long distance service has been terrible, with high prices, almost no high speed service and no competition. I'm Italian and therefore I had very low expectations, but at least high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany (at least until recently, when lack of regular maintenance work ultimately made its dent into t…
Not to excuse the German performance, but part of the reason is that the Italian high-speed railway network is significantly simpler than the German one, also in terms of interconnections with neighbouring countries:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Italy_TAV.png#/media...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ICE_Network.png#/med...
It was wonderful.
BTW, the D community is all over the world. We schedule a zoom meeting each month. When we began the meetings, and the meeting started at, say, 8, the meeting organizer would say "we need to wait a bit for the rest to join us". I put my foot down and said when the meeting is scheduled for 8, it starts at exactly 8.
And everyone shows up on time! It's amazing how that works.
The punctuality of the trains has been more of a joke for quite a bit, I don't think it's a big part of German identity. The part that is really terrible are the long-distance trains. Not that the regional trains are always punctual, their reliability varies a lot per route. But they're not as bad as the long-distance trains. One big recent improvement is the Germany ticket, for 58 EUR per month you can take any regi…
I got the impression they have a different cultural definition of "late" -- they'd get as mad about a 15 minute delay as folks in the states would get about an hour plus delay.
