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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

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Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#951

Post by mort96 »

Svip wrote: post #291
ffuxlpff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By always talking only about non specified "problems" and getting people not to expect any further information it is easier to hide when it's a suicide.

I cannot speak for other countries; but in Denmark, they are always crystal clear when the train has hit someone (»personpåkørsel« in Danish); and even when they suspect they might have hit someone; so when I say "technical problems", I mean technical problems. Besides, I am not sure I see the point of hiding when they've hit someone?

I'm in Norway, I was once at the railway station and someone collapsed on the platform and needed medical attention. Conductors of both trains currently at the platform attended the person, so train traffic was delayed.

The official reason for the delay, according to the Ruter app, the info screens and announcements over the PA system, was "signalfeil" ("signal error"). So at least in Norway, we clearly have a culture of describing all sorts of problems, including completely non-technical problems like someone having a medical emergency, as a problem with the train signals.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#952

Post by mort96 »

stefanlindbohm wrote: post #882
slow_typist wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the DB became a public limited company, their services worked remarkably well. I know from first hand experience because I was already a customer then. The privatisation and the crazy idea that it could somehow not being run on a deficit is what ruined it. Of course the competition thing is artificial, and the internal structures are kaput, but I doubt that more competition would fix it. Surprisingly, 90% of t…

The main issue is over-utilisation and under-investment of the rail network. Like in many other EU countries. There is no evidence that a state monopoly would perform any better given today’s state of infrastructure and increased traveler numbers.

The under-investment stems from the neoliberal idea that it should be run at a profit and that competition will make everything super efficient.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#953

Post by mort96 »

trvz wrote: post #468
tzs wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netherlands is in the EU. English is the most widely spoken language in the EU, even after the UK left, because it is by far the most common second language. Nearly half of the people in the EU can speak it. In Northern Europe the percentage is even higher. In the Netherlands there are almost as many people who speak it as there are Dutch speakers. Taking into account people from other EU countries who are there…

Ideally announcements should be bilingual, but if there’s only one language, it’s better to inconvenience any number of foreigners than even a single native who doesn’t speak English.

Nobody suggested that dutch announcements should be removed. You can make announcements in two languages.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#954

Post by ciex »

ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote: post #859

DB is a joke and a disgrace to Germany. I have actively avoided traveling by train for many years. The company is customer-unfriendly from start to finish. I find the confusing ticket prices particularly bad: Sparpreise, Super-Sparpreise, Frühbucher-Tarife, Flexpreis, Sparpreis Gruppe, BahnCard, Gutscheine, ... If you don't want to pay extra, you have to book six months in advance and be familiar with the fare system…

Cost of a car is extremely hard to predict, not just because of unexpected repairs but also because the price of gas is literally political.

The train experience in Germany is as bad as it is because of lobbying by the car industry and corruption both in the government and train operators. Not enough investment over decades paired with the absurd idea that train fares need to cover operating costs. Nobody would ask this of road networks, it’s just infrastructure that a society pays for. In addition to that the Deutsche Bahn suffers from common inefficiencies of large corporations that are not mitigated in effective ways by its leadership.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#955

Post by ivan_gammel »

stefanlindbohm wrote: post #886
ivan_gammel wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous. A complex system that delivers customer further from destination than they were originally from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and now they also have huge aging and retiring workfor…

DB does not decide how much to invest in infrastructure, that’s decided by politicians.

Politicians do not dictate operational decisions. If they allocate X for infrastructure, the company should scale up or scale down to match that budget, rather than overpromise.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#956

Post by snowpid »

ffsm8 wrote: post #350
snowpid wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the owner of DB is owned by the German federal government, they all rule the whole company, who gets the profit? The German federal government? (It's a sign of stupidity to claim DB is privat. It is not. It is not.)

That's why I said it's incredibly corrupt. It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . (Or pay out to their shareholders? Lol, nope). losses get pushed to be picked up by the state/taxes. That's why it's privatize profits, socialize losses. But ther…

" It's an Aktiengesellschaft which is fully owned by the state, so profits would remain in the ownership of the company and their leadership to do with as they please, e.g. pay themselves whatever bonuses they want . " That's plain wrong. The owner decides which happens to the profits and how much the leadership got paied. Besides that, it is just rambling. Again calling the DB privatised is a sign of stupidity.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#957

Post by hnuser123456 »

zahlman wrote: post #421
jltsiren wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had trouble buying train tickets with a credit card in Germany. If I had to guess, your issue was that you were trying to use a card that didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments.

> didn't support chip-and-PIN or contactless payments. As opposed to... swiping the card? Are there really cards out there that exclusively support that?

Yes, magnetic strips are easy to skim or erase.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#958

Post by vetrom »

bcye wrote: post #186
indiantinker wrote: post #17

DB is weird. They seem to make their own rules and then run the game and “dont tell the rules to anyone”. I was on my way to catch a flight from Munich to my home (Madrid). I didn’t knew that apparently at one point the train splits into two parts and the front part goes to the airport and the other part just goes to the nearby cattle farms and comes back in 3 hours. Google Maps - No idea Citymapper - what? English a…

Splitting trains is a quite common thing in Germany (though more long distance) and communicated in the official app. If third party apps don't show that information that's on their part. Usually it's also said after departure inside the train by the conductor, though maybe just on long distance trains.

If you can read a modicum of German wasn't this sort of thing on the timetables in a standard way pretty much forever?

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#959

Post by scotty79 »

this_user wrote: post #546
scotty79 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.

"I was just following orders," is a bit of a meme, but it's also true, and even more so in the context of Prussian-style military discipline. Disobeying an order was not an option. You carry it out no matter what, but the responsibility lies with the commander. It gets more murky for the civilians who theoretically could have walked away, but a lot of them had a similar mindset that they were just doing their jobs. A…

> Disobeying an order was not an option.

There's always an option. You could die. And if you didn't choose that option before committing atrocity as ordered you definitely deserve death afterwards.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#960

Post by scotty79 »

tempest_ wrote: post #518
scotty79 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you were just implementing the rules, and you cannot be held accountable That kind of explains why they tried to pull it of at Nuremberg. And why some nazis that weren't sentenced internationally got good jobs in post-war Germany. For Germans they weren't really at fault if they were just following procedures.

They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis. At the end of WW2 a strong West Germany to oppose the USSR was more important than punishing some middle manager and the quickest way to get the West German state together was to use a lot of the existing bureaucracy.

> They got good jobs because the Allies did not really care about punishing the Nazis.

And the fact that Germans did not really care about punishing nazis didn't matter at all?

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