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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

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Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#501

Post by hexbin010 »

a2fz wrote: post #63
huhkerrf wrote: post #4

DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train." I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.

Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed. I've had the last…

Some operators begin at 30 minutes

And some operators love to ignore their obligations

Our protections are good on paper but in reality quite poor. London is of course better than the rest of the country though.

I don't consider having to message a faceless social media team on "X" to get a taxi refunded good customer service at all. And they are definitely pushing for you to pay first and then get a refund, which is not in the spirit of the contract. My mother doesn't have "X" and wouldn't know where to start

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#502

Post by hexbin010 »

em500 wrote: post #37
huhkerrf wrote: post #4

DB is continually the worst train experience I have in Europe. I have never been on a train in Germany that's on time or that stops at the right station. Several times I've had to find someone young (and who speaks English) and say, "I'm just going to follow you to the next train." I've been told that the UK is worse, but I don't have much experience with it outside of Eurostar.

Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.

> UK rail is privatized

50% of operators are now state owned

Not that it's a guarantee for things to get better...

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#503

Post by frenchy »

Telemakhos wrote: post #477
this_user wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much in German work culture - and also culture in general - is about covering your own arse. If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process…

That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.

Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#504

Post by Freak_NL »

em-bee wrote: post #336
raverbashing wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what's the level of mutual ineligibility between DE NL (probably DE is easier to NL) but it's funny how Germans sometimes seem to play dumb and not understand a thing in NL

dutch is a bit harder to understand. like some german dialects that not every german understands either, like swiss german, luxemburgian or friesian (also spoken in the northern parts of the netherlands), or plattdeutsch. i grew up in austria and in the north of germany so i got an early appreciation for understanding dialects. yet learning dutch took me a few months of staying in the netherlands. on the other hand w…

Frisian is not a dialect, and is not usually spoken outside of Frisia (the Dutch province). In German Ostfriesland they do speak a German dialect with Frisian roots.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#505

Post by nickdothutton »

We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal. It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words, of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#506

Post by NitpickLawyer »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #241
dmurray wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Airlines are vague about this (at least in Europe) because different types of problems mean different obligations to compensate passengers. After the incident they will determine what's the least expensive lie they can plausibly give (perhaps the weather will change fast enough that you can blame the weather, perhaps you can't lie about an equipment failure when everyone in the airport sees you swap out the airplane)…

Thankfully the EU at least has regulations requiring compensation. On my last business trip to Europe I got 650 euros for an overnight delay. The last time I got delayed in the US I got a hearty "fuck off" from the gate agent.

Heh, on the other hand the one and only time I arrived hours earlier was in the US :) I was flying AMS to SFO via Portland, we cleared immigration unusually fast, and when I got to my gate (connecting flight was in like 4 hours) the lady there asked if I wanted to move to an earlier one, boarding in ~20 mins. I said sure, and I even got the checked-in luggage at SFO (she did say that there was a chance it'd get sent later).

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#507

Post by tiku »

And I thought the Dutch Railways (NS, Nationale Spoorwegen) where weird.. We mostly have issues with trains not showing up, but then the next one arrives in 20 minutes so it usually isn't a big problem (unless you are cutting it close).

We had a lot of issues in the past with the first leaves falling on the track or a bit of snow. And they ordered trains without toilets. So also cattle trucks.

And have I mentioned that you pay a lot for this "service"? second class, normal costs: €18,80 to get from Utrecht to Amsterdam and back, 50 kilometers.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#508

Post by ploxiln »

Telemakhos wrote: post #477
this_user wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much in German work culture - and also culture in general - is about covering your own arse. If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process…

That sounds a lot like industrial safety culture: blame the process, not the worker, so we can iterate on the safety built into the process if there is a failure, because doing so lessens the chance of future failures. It’s a great way to build airplanes.

Theoretically ... in practice, Boeing's most rigorous days in the 80s and 90s were directed by empowered individuals in the manufacturing org, and when it went full "strict process only" in the 2000s and 2010s the quality fell.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#509

Post by cyberpunk »

this_user wrote: post #403
Zealotux wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a massive German company you heard of, this sounds more like the typical German philosophy of strictly following the process -- as absurd as it might be -- and refusing to take initiative for anything that is not explicitly defined as one's responsibility. As a French, the culture shock was brutal and I never really got around that work attitude. I went through a similar issue back when I used to take a…

So much in German work culture - and also culture in general - is about covering your own arse. If you follow the procedure, even if the outcome is disaster, you are not at fault; you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable. It's the fault of whoever came up with the rules, except that is usually not a single person, but some amorphous entity that ran through some decision making process…

... I had to take out a special insurance when working from home as a freelancer, and share evidence I had done so with my client as -- if someone slipped outside my house because I'd not swept up the snow somehow the company who was paying me would be liable for the insurance claim...

... Yep.

It's for similar reasons why everyone is up at the crack of dawn frantically shovelling snow outside their homes.

Rather spoils the fun of towing the kids to school on a sled when every 5 meters there's a perfectly swept bit you have to drag it across.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#510

Post by Atlas667 »

abigail95 wrote: post #446
Atlas667 wrote: post #415

Watch the neoliberals feed off of rigid bureaucratic incompetence to pander for privatization and create for-profit bureaucratic incompetence. All with massive subsidies that citizens will pay through taxes or cutting of public services elsewhere. Gotta love the "free" market and "democracy".

Why is DB worse than other operators of similar legal structure and funding, in terms of free markets and democracy, from your perspective?

I'm not gonna pretend I know about the specifics of DB, but tales of crappy public services are plenty around the world and a lot of the critique is aimed at enabling privatization.

My anecdotal evidence is that these public entities usually suffer from lack of funding or incompetence fueled by corruption, that usually takes a few forms: - the contracting of work to a third party with kickback (incentives to continously do sloppy work) - inaction due to lack of corrupting opportunities (leaders try but cant set up a good fraud scheme) - nepotism that leads to incompetence

And lack of funding can and has been weaponized to cause a shitty service to then set the pretext for privatization. Usually there are private interests behind this public policy decision.

The more menial reason for lack of funding is sometimes massive spending or subsidies for capitalists elsewhere which skews the budget.

And of course also the intense bureacracy needed due to lack of democratic control. Yes, im saying people dont actually have a say and they could have a say. IE delegate democracy.

These are just universal problems of modern capitalist economies and their bourgeois politics.

Quite possibly DB suffers from these more intensely than others.

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