31–40 of 105 posts
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…
> high speed trains in Italy run better than Germany 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...
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Germany, like America, is operated by and for the benefit of car companies. Their infrastructure difficulties share root causes with America's.
Or there is a sane explanation - People drive cars -> People push their politicians to improve road infrastructure -> less money for other infrastructure -> trains are underfunded -> trains and tracks are having maintenance issues a reliability starts to fall apart -> people drive cars even more.
When I toured Germany in the 1980s with a train pass, there were clocks all over the train stations. If the train was scheduled to start at 11:07, when the big hand clicked to 7, the train started to move. 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…
I think I'd get tarred and feathered if I did that at my company.
No longer? They were bitching and moaning when I visited fifteen years ago in my hostel. They got horrified when I told them they're coddled to be annoyed about 15 minute delays and spoke on how things are in the states... anyways this is troubling I guess... but it's not new . 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 w…
>they're coddled >bitching and moaning Why is this always the American answer when anything good about EU gets brought up that maybe turned worse? Vacation, workdays, sickdays, parental leave, free schooling and healthcare? and public transport as here. It is a question of money, investment and what society you want. You chose the Ford F-150. For me in Sweden, we also have worse rail now, also due to the same issue.…
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Are you implying it's a WW2 reference? Did not occur to me before I saw your comment.
[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-15/stop-sayi...
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?
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.
When I toured Germany in the 1980s with a train pass, there were clocks all over the train stations. If the train was scheduled to start at 11:07, when the big hand clicked to 7, the train started to move. 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…