This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The situation has severely deteriorated in recent years,” said Detlef Neuss, chair of the passenger lobby group Pro Bahn, standing outside Cologne’s main station, in the shadow of the city’s gothic cathedral with its distinctive twin spires.
Earlier this month, after weeks of speculation over the future of Britain’s planned HS2 high-speed rail link from Birmingham to Manchester, the prime minister finally announced that the northern leg was to be scrapped.
In an excoriating special report published earlier this year, the public audit body did not mince its words as it sounded the alarm, warning that the company responsible for running the national rail network, its stations and signals, along with many long-distance and local trains, risked becoming a “bottomless pit” for taxpayer money.
Despite paying some €4,400 for an annual season ticket, in recent months Winter has had to put up with a weeks-long closure of the track between Wolfsburg and Berlin for upgrades, coupled with delays, cancelled trains and lack of staff.
The company, formed from the existing West and East German railways, was freed from previous debts with the idea that it would be able, in time, to become profitable, with the goal of boosting Germany’s GDP and floating on the stock market.
The governing agreement struck by the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals in late 2021 committed them to doubling the capacity of passenger services by 2030, while setting a target for 25% of freight to be carried by rail by that date, and electrifying more railway lines amid attempts to meet climate goals.
The original article contains 1,887 words, the summary contains 258 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’ve got a joke about DB, but I’m not sure when it’ll reach you
The myth of Germany efficiency is slowly becoming unwound.
Slowly and with lots of unplanned breaks in between.
I’ve never understood why people think that anyways - if you’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with German bureaucracy, you would have lost that view instantly.
15 years ago I thought the Germans were the smartest people in the world because they understood the importance of investing in public services and had a central european style of capitalism that focused on fundamentals over financialization. since then they’ve slowly been adopting more neoliberal policies and making really stupid foreign policy decisions. I’ve lost a lot of respect for them as a world leader.
Oh no, that actually started way earlier!
The DB was supposed to be privatized in 1994, that failed. So now we have a stock based company (AG), lead like a profit oriented company, but owned 100% by the state.
Since 1994, the entire company was (due to incompentence and wrong incentives) driven on attrition. The best example: if a bridge needs repair, that’s DB’s expense, but if the bridge has to be rebuilt, the state pays. So what would any smart CEO do? Stop maintenance, wait for the bridge to fail and then have it repaired on the state’s bill.
15 years ago I thought the Germans were the smartest people in the world
What you are describing is racism - positive racism but racism none the less.
There is only one human race (Racialization)
Racism is still a problem.
Hating to break it to you, but Attributing ANY group as a whole with positive/negative traits is racism. But keep mincing words - probably the only thing you are capable of?
Don’t forget turning off all their nuclear plants to become reliant on brown coal and russian (now american) gas.
Well, it is a big fuck up that is leading to wars today. Putin wouldn’t have dared invade if he didn’t have guaranteed customers for resources.
I’m sorry but, I always find it strange when people talk about nuclear energy as the simplest solution.
Nuclear energy is extremely expensive compared to wind and solar once you also account for the cost of processing the uranium and then dealing with the radioactive waste afterwards.
Also take France for example. The EDF has (after being privatized) ran on substance without reinvesting in repairs and renovation so much that last year more than half of its 56(54?) reactors stood still because of problems relevant for their save operation. This was before the last record-breaking summer in 2022 when even more of them didn’t have enough cool water to operate. As a consequence the EDF made mountains of dept because they had to buy so much energy from Germany last summer (from all the solar and wind) that Macron (the famously socialist and anti-market-driven-everything-president of France had to re-nationalize EDF last year. If a neoliberal government like France’s nationalizes the EDF (famous for its highest percentage of nuclear energy in the mix) you can really see how great of a solution it really is.
Also: where does most of the world’s uranium come from? Russia. So not really much of a difference to the gas. France takes a lot of it from Mali as well (which explains their involvement there. So uranium isn’t that great in this regard as well).
Also: Nuclear reactors create the most important resource for nuclear weapons automatically.
In north-east Germany there’s the Wendelstein 7X an experimental stelarator-type fusion generator that since its operation blew all the best estimates for experimentation out of the water. But it can never create more energy than it takes because it’s too small. But it took decades to ensure the funding to even build a small one like this. For a fraction of the subsidies tat nuclear power plants, or gas or coal gets ever year we could’ve build many larger ones that would be much closer to be net positive in power production.
I’m not against nuclear energy per se. But it’s really annoying to hear all these voices from outside that from thousands of miles away know everything about Germany turning off its power plants.
The main advantage of nuclear in capitalism is that its central. Everybody having solar power and large fields of wind farms distributed evenly across the country make it less controllable by singular entities.
I might warm up more to nuclear energy it would be run in a more socialist society where there’s no profit-driven operation that drives companies to skip repairs. The corrosion crisis in France is a direct result of “market forces”.
If something like Chernobyl happened in France… holy shit. That country has the most tourists in the world and exporting their food into the whole wide world. And -yes - I know that the chernobyl-type reactor (Graphite-mediated and so on) isn’t used in France anymore. As someone who lived half of his life worth in 30km to “Fessenheim” - France’s oldest and now shut down Graphite-Based reactor - I can yell you that you examine the possible impact more closely from time to time and think about it more.
Solar and Wind are better. But they naturally don’t create market monopolies and dilute power over energy. That’s why they’re not pushed that hard. If a resource is spread out evenly you cannot make money from it. There’s no market. Capitalism doesn’t like this.
Nuclear is not displaced by wind and solar, it’s displaced by fossil fuels. Nobody’s arguing that we should stop building solar or wind to start 20 year long nuclear constructions (though china has it down to 5).
The continued existence of German lignite mining and their expansion of gas are due to turning off nuclear plants before the end of their lifespan.
I’m German and have been in France quite often in recent years. It’s fascinating to hear their opinions on Germany. Outside our country is still imaged as having great engineering, efficiency - that Trains run on time. It’s quite puzzling to me.
I came to the conclusion that the only real innovation in the last 30 years has been accounting. largely driven by neoliberalism. So every neo liberal country has kind of become more similar. Germany is not special, but has the advantage of having a lot of old successful companies that only slowly get sold of to international conglomerates. (Like Kuka etc). We behave as shitty as the rest, but our downward trajectory started higher up.
Modern computers and software made it possible to account for basically every item in a company with little cost. Before you’d have needed so many people and hours of work to judge profitability of small things that it wouldn’t have been sensible to do so. CAD-Software also enables a special kind of accounting - simulating hardware components enables engineers to judge which parts are necessary and how much thickness is really needed. This is a huge and complicated process of optimization.
Accounting made it possible to turn a mostly opaque company structure that ran inefficient (but mostly on par with the competition) and judge every employee, every item. That’s why supermarkets have outsourced the job of restuffing the shelves to a different company (that has to somehow make it work with the shitty pay that get). But it’s also the reason why appliances seem to hold just slightly over the warranty period. CAD-simulations made it possible for the accountants to change the products (make them shittier) so that people would need to buy new ones often.
The Deutsche Bahn is the same. Has made it possible to invest the smallest amount possible, because they realized they can just work with the deterioration infrastructure as well - most people don’t have a choice and have to take the late train anyways.
It’s the same with telecommunications here btw. With only few companys owning most Internet services they realized they don’t have to invest a lot into fiber. People need Internet and will have to pay anyways. It’s more profit to just raise prices.
Interesting point of view - your accounting thing.
However, that doesn’t really fit to Deutsche Bahn, I think. Your point is rather about a Monopoly but an accounting exercise.
Yeah it was not specifically only about Deutsche Bahn, but also an observation about one of the multiple problems that drives the enshittification.
One Point that Deutsche Bahn definitely did was to find out which connections are mostly used by people ( tickets for these connections thereby contribute mostly to DBs revenue) and kind of abandon the less profitable connections. That’s accounting in my book.
What they did (counting passangers by rail-connections) wasn’t possible before, as DB-tickets were sold not electronically and couldn’t easily (cheaply / with little work-hours) be turned into data sets and analyzed.
IIRC tickets were priced much differently - they weren’t fixed to specific trains but to connections (no “Zugbindung”). So There wasn’t even (easily available) data to when most travellers were using the trains.
Today with all the data being generates automatically the accountains know much better what costs and what earns DB money and they prioritize based on that. Once you get into the habit of that even things that are obviously always costs (like fixing rails or bridges) will be outsourced or avoided. (like the supermarket example - it’s obvious that someone has to restuff the shelves, but once you have all the data and see only red numbers you try to separate it away and not do it (so it gets turned into a subcontract with probably unrealistic conditions that some other companies are underbidding each other in order to gain the contract - even if this means that their employees will not earn a living wage from it. It’s a perfect system that also pushes responsibility and blame away from the outsourcing company. they can always blame the sub contracting company for underpaying or not follow safety regulations (even if they can only fulfill the sub contract by operating this way)).
As an American who used DB for the first time, their shitty transit blows the best travel experiences here out of the water. I’d rather use German trains than fly first class in the US. Not even close TBH.
i donno, amtrak is pretty great on the east coast. there’s absolutely nothing from the mississippi to the west coast so if you’re going that way youre going to have a bad time.
yah ive been to europe. some things are nicer but amtrak is way more accommodating for people with disabilities.
I kept reading the article trying to find the reason why DB is so crappy now, only to realize that a 10 minute delay is catastrophic by German standards. I’d love to just have any kind of public transit near me.
It is if it makes you miss a connecting train.
Also, those delays aren’t the biggest problem, there’s areas of the network which are completely messed up with hour-long delays and trains being skipped. That’s a thing that’s tolerable to commuters if it happens once a year, but not three days a week.
Not enough tracks, not enough cars, not enough reserve capacity, not enough fallbacks, and not even close to enough political will to fix the situation. Oh, yes, politicians agreed to introduce a swiss-style synchronised timetable by 2030, and that’s definitely doable… but it has been postponed to 2070, or, in other words, never.
And then you hear bullshit like “we can’t burden the coming generations with debt to build infrastructure” – motherfucker how about not burdening future generations by having them drive horse buggies over gravel roads?
Connecting trains are the big problem. I had a three and a half hour direct train from Frankfurt to Brussels end up taking 8 hours. The one direct train turned into four legs with 3 cancelations. Otherwise waiting for an additional 10 minutes is not a problem, yes.
DB has a link where you can ask for refunds, which is nice. It doesn’t offer refunds for time lost though.
Here in the US, in one of the areas with “good” train service:
– my commuter train was standing room only, every day
– longer trips, like 2+ hours, ar reservation only, so o would have had to book it well ahead of time, or not get on
