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Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

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Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#991

Post by dan-bailey »

Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was: Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover Eindhoven -> Amsterdam

As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.

Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#992

Post by skrebbel »

moepstar wrote: post #228
skrebbel wrote: post #143

As a Dutchman, I’ve come to love German trains. The joy of a first class ICE seat to with table service as the empty middle of Germany swooshes by at 250km/h is hard to describe. Those trains are very good . Super comfortable, super fast, and did anyone say “restaurant car”? Seriously, the little bottle holes in the tray in front of you seems perfectly designed to fit a .5L glass of Erdinger and I don’t believe it’s…

> I don’t remember the German trains being this late, this often, a ~decade ago. Except: they were - over 20 years ago, I did my „Grundwehrdienst“ in the German army, travel with DB from Nuremberg to Munich and back every weekend for 8 months. The number of times the ICE was on time I can count on one hand. 15 minutes delayed regularly, sometimes more. After a while we planned to use the last train to arrive in Munic…

By today's standards I'd consider "15 minutes delayed" to be pretty much equivalent to "on time".

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#993

Post by Matumio »

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.

In Switzerland, on some trains there are trilingual announcements: German, Italian, French.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#994

Post by busterarm »

geysersam wrote: post #851
busterarm wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collapse is the other end of the spectrum. This is an institution whose practices/policies only serve itself instead of its customers/purpose. It's progress, taken to its extreme. From a certain point of view it's effectively the same as collapse.

What does that even mean? We're talking about an organization that serves billions of riders per year. Their passenger numbers increased 20-30% since 2020 so even if their delays are bad clearly it's not bad enough that most people seek alternatives.

If I'm using your transit service and you take me on a several hour detour without my consent passing a dozen or more possible stops because "you're not cleared for that", you aren't serving your mandate and I'm never using your service again.

I might even pull the emergency brake before it gets that far and cause you more problems, even.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#995

Post by bytesandbits »

lorenzhs wrote: post #917
bytesandbits wrote: post #300

The issue there is the comp. 1.5 euro doesn't make sense. should be O(50). If the compensation (which for DB is a fine in a way) is not high, DB has no incentives to do better.

Good news for you! 1.5 is in O(50) since they’re both constants! (It’s 1.50 because the author has the 58€-a-month flat rate ticket for all local and regional services in the entire country. If you buy a regular ticket, you get back 25% of the ticket price for delays over an hour and 50% for delays over two hours)

25% for 1h?? L O L

it should be 100%. A delay of 1h is extremely inadmissible. Try doing this in Japan

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#996

Post by ivan_gammel »

stefanlindbohm wrote: post #963
ivan_gammel wrote: post #955

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

”The company” is not one company. The infrastructure manager (DB InfraGo in Germany) is managing tracks on behalf of the state. Operators (a regional operator in the case of this article) run as many trains as they want/are allowed, which in practice is more than the system can handle reliably. There are laws regulating how track access is awarded, so even when a DB group operator runs on tracks managed by DB InfraGo…

As I see it, InfraGo could technically fix the problem by increasing operational buffers based on failure rates and reduce number of slots. This would contain the cascade of delays, but they decide to go easy way because they are not accountable for those delays. So in principle you are right, it’s a political problem - cost of delays is not shared with infrastructure provider as it should be, and while InfraGo actually could fix the problem (because they determine the number of slots), they choose not to.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#997

Post by Psychoshy_bc1q »

rcbdev wrote: post #264

I never understood why the Germans cannot get their shit together on commercial train travel. Austria manages to coordinate a wonderful federal train system across nine federal states without issues via the ÖBB, the Swiss also seem to have it down.

We have a huge carlobby who wants you to use cars.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#998

Post by ninalanyon »

ragall wrote: post #972
ninalanyon wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that it is popular with the actual users, only with the company that they work for. When I had a company issued AMEX card the damn thing was practically useless. In fact even in the US there were plenty of places that wouldn't accept it.

AMEX cards are being used by both large and small businesses. It's accepted by hotels, restaurants, airlines, suppliers, utilities, etc... Small shops are of little importance.

> Small shops are of little importance.

Unless they happen to be selling something you want to buy.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#999

Post by junon »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #74
junon wrote: post #15

Meh. I have lived here for 7 years, and get a bit tired of these sorts of complaints about DB coming from the US. Germans have exceedingly little, if any, patience for anything going wrong. DB is always painted as this evil, completely broken system when in fact it's been a joy compared to e.g. San Francisco. I've only encountered flexibility and slight discomfort in a few cases where something has happened. I'm not…

The OP, judging by their site, lives in Germany. A lot of comments here are coming from Europeans (including Brits BTW). So, pray tell, why did you feel the need to get all defensive and blame the Murricans?

Because I'm an American living in Germany. I think you misread my comment - coming from the US, where train systems suck, it's annoying to hear Germans complain about what is otherwise an unbelievably advanced train system.

I might have missed a comma.

Re: Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

#1000

Post by MomsAVoxell »

I lived in Germany for a while, and thus had a DB card, which allowed me to get discount tickets and stuff to go anywhere I needed in the Deutsch region.

It was pretty fun, I used it a lot, those beer/disco clubs on the train between Düsseldorf and Bonn and Frankfurt, whoa, just .. really used to be fun.

So its real sad to hear of, what was once a great institutions’, demise ..

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