DB is better than it's reputation. What is really amazing is German postal service. Contrary to some reports it is reliable. And they do understand how to work digital.
Compare with Belgium. For many years it ranked below moldovia in the world postal reliability report. Delivery is unreliable, many packages disappear. During COVID I wanted to buy stamps. In Germany you just print the stamps. No printer? Just use a pen and write a code on the letter. In Belgium they offered to send me stamps by postal mail. After I lost many packages and one was going back already to the US (address cant be found) I wrote a real nasty email to the Belgian minister in charge of the post office. They actually rerouted my us package back and were able to deliver it :-). The postman got a nasty talk with his both for forging my signature for packages he just put in front of the door and that goes stolen. 500 dollar loss...
No way. I use DB quite often, and its bad reputation is well deserved. Traveling Cologne <-> Leipzig I don't think I've ever had a train that was less than 20 minutes late, and since the beginning of the year, I've had two trains cancelled on me (with no compensation for the reserved seats) and two missed connections. Polish trains used to be a joke in comparison, but not anymore.
Just in the past 4 years things have gone from tolerably bad to really bad. Even Ukrainian trains operate better (personal experience), and they're dealing with Russians knocking out their infrastructure each day.
Seconded by someone on the opposite spectrum, who has had to deal with the fallout from people who use DB pretty rarely. Just last week a couple of them flew into the country and decided to take DB (after being forewarned of the risks) from two different cities to same destination (not a Euros 2024 hotspot destination). Both randomly canceled and missed wedding reception.
At the same time, I had smaller problems due to late trains than due to flights. (I travel a lot for work.) Those 15-minute delays are annoying, but I agree with the upstream poster: the situation is better than it's said to be. Those 64% look awful, and the situation is merely bad, not awful.
I heard the minister is considering reducing the investment in track improvement to spend the money on autobahns, though, so maybe it'll become as bad as it currently looks.
The 15 minute delays are annoying, the trains that do not arrive at all, however are travel ending. Bonus points: the DB was encouraged to cut train travel short or skip rail stations to make up for lost time because at least until recently the official statistics did not cover trains that did not arrive at all. That on top of the dozens of punctual ghost trains I seem to miss while praying for an actuall train to arrive at a train station under cunstruction that can't handle half the advertised train traffic.
> the situation is better than it's said to be
It is better in parts of Germany, there is a CCC talk from a few years ago that ends with a "free upgrade" slide, if your train had to travel through any of the listed stations you where basically guaranteed a travel delay of at least one hour.
The delays and the uncertainty that surrounds them make it very difficult to rely on DB when you have a connection to another train or a plane. With this level of reliability something is almost guaranteed to go wrong when your journey involves more than just one leg
What's good about it exactly? They're not reliable, they're overpriced compared to any other form of transportation, you need to reserve a seat even if you pay for first class and the internet sucks. I find it hard to see anything good about them.
There many things DB can improve on. But I think they have a good coverage with modern and clean trains. They are often late, but I think it's also really hard to run a punctual train network with a country of this size in the middle of Europe, where you also need to consider all neighboring countries that have an effect on your planning and so on (a constraint, for example, that Japan doesn't have).
Sure, for example SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) is more punctual, but the complexity is also much lower due to the country size. Also mind that the Swiss just don't let DB trains into the country when they're late more than ~ 30 min.
Price: I think dynamic pricing is fine, but the range is crazy. If you book ahead of time, you can get from Hamburg to Zurich for like € 30 (8 hour trip). You'll pay double that to go from Hamburg to Berlin (2 hour trip) if you book like one day before departure. But I think on average the prices are not too high. Consider that you can go to every major city in the country within 8 hours for less than € 50 if you plan ahead 1-2 weeks, in a clean train with a nice board bistro.
Wifi: Yes, it sucks.
I take the ICEs often for long distance rides. My strategy: Plan with up to 60 min delay (especially important if you need to change trains) and don't schedule calls or tasks that require a good internet connection. With this two tricks and the right mindset you'll be fine!
But not a single ounce of reliability to be found among them.
> but I think it's also really hard to run a punctual train network with a country of this size in the middle of Europe
If it was just the punctuallity. However they can't even notify people of delays correctly. Just to take the most obvious example to ever exist: Last year the entire state of Bavaria got snowed in, most predictions put restoration of rail travel at around a week. For the first day the DB app reported cancellations one hour in advance, the following days it used a 12 hour window to cancel trains. At no point did they bother to put a realistic "don't bother we wont even get to your station for the next 5 days" anywhere on the app. The event may have been an outlier but them failing to anounce cancellations when they become aware of an issue is systematic, worst case you wont be aware that your train wont make it anywhere is when the conductors start handing out complaint forms the moment the train leaves the station. The entire DB is a clown show without equal.
YMMV. I travel often enough between Zürich and Munich. As soon as the train crosses the border into Germany it starts to accrue delays. I'd say 80% of the times I arrive in Munich with 20+ minutes delay and 20% more than 40 minutes.
On the way back the train enters Switzerland with enough delay to fuck up Swiss timetables and so it accrues even more delays. So much so that makes an overcrowded Flixbus an alluring alternative.
So, long story short DB is absolutely terrible IMHO. The worst railway company in Western Europe by far among those I traveled with enough times to have an opinion (SNCF, Trenitalia/Italo, Renfe, DB, OBB).
> What is really amazing is German postal service. Contrary to some reports it is reliable.
Not for parcels which are handled by DHL. They have no shame in claiming delivery attempts that never happened and then make you stand in line for up to hours to retrieve your stuff because they can't be arsed to hire enough staff.
> And they do understand how to work digital.
There has been some improvement in that area but basic things like step by step tracking for the postal service isn't available (because they want you to buy their more expensive DHL products). It's absurd that if you order something from abroad you get frequent update while the package transits in bumfuck nowheristan a but then as soon as it gets to germany it's all silence and all you can do is hope it arrives within the next months.
Not that I am anyhow a fan of DHL, but thats completely unrelated and private company to Deutsche post, its failing are its onw. Or does DHL in Germany take over (some) deliveries from DP?
Well. They run. Compare to public transport in the US.
They have Internet on board. Not always, often slow, but they have it. They have bullet trains and you can use all slow trains as much as you want for 49 euros a month.
Sure, China is better, cheaper. At my time without wifi, maybe this has changed. But compared to most countries DB is pretty good. I love trains.
It's well deserved, though. Those who take trains only occasionally don't notice, but once you depend on them it's a whole different story.
I spend so much time waiting for delayed trains that I made a social media account to keep track of them. In June alone I experienced 15 days with delays - shortest I keep record of is 10 minutes, longest in June was 43 minutes. And I have a friend whose weekly delays are hours long.
If I commuted daily (and I don't) my own stats mean I have a 50/50 chance of missing a connection. For my regional trains that means I need to buffer at least half an hour for a 45 minutes trip. Factor in the lack of benches (God forbid the homeless sit on them), the dirty stations, the drug users living in them, the broken equipment...
Two trivia points: the "Deutschlandtakt" program will supposedly bring the trains back to their former 90s glory. It is scheduled to be finished in 2070. And the government is reportedly planning to redirect train repair funds to repairing highways instead [1].
The train situation is bad and they deserve every critic they get.
In the century XXI there is a tendency to try and decouple reputation from performance.
If there's a politically important but poor performer, that fact will be ignored and the deliberate attacks on their reputation will be discussed instead.
well, it's hard to find people who like how DB is doing. Shame that they were privatized a couple of decades ago.
me and a friend want to travel through eastern europe by train next year - we purposefully exclude germany from our trip because we fear that we'll miss a connection[1]. this can happen in other countries, too, but we all have personal stories where german trains have f*cked us.
[1] Germany isn't eastern europe but we'll start from central europe so germany could've been a destination in our trip. now we'll go via austria...
They are private in how they act - improving profit by cutting costs while raising prices. Well, raising prices is now effectively capped by the Deutschland Ticket (for slower trains at least) so the focus is even more on cutting costs.
I’m no fan myself, while keeping in mind that it is their previous exceptional precision and performance that people measure against rather than comparison to the rather abysmal peers, not only in Europe, but the European world in general. Try talking Amtrak somewhere and then get back to me. Make sure to plan several days longer than you think it will take you to travel using Amtrak though.
As much as “they” recently really screwed me due to the strikes, which was not really their DB fault since the strike was the conductors’ union, which related to your comment about “acting private” while not really being either private or public, probably leading to the worst of both, rather than the best of each.
To give the DB entity some credit though, it appears they are in that very kind of bind of being stuck dealing with the bad conditions of both being private and public, and in a country which was set up after the war to be as self-deconstructing and self-sabotaging as possible.
How do you deal with problems you both have immense responsibility for and over, while at the same time being unable and not having the power to actually affect, and the very avenues by which you could change that condition are also sabotaged and feckless and mired in self-sabotage to improve it? … you simply abandon, throw up your hands and walk away, but considering the nature of the system, you can’t of course do that as a whole, so you become passive in areas; which is what I experienced when it wasn’t actually the DB that sabotaged me, it was the conductors’ union that really committed a breach of contract and engaged in what should and possibly is criminal activity against me, causing me damages and suffering through their stupid strike in which they didn’t even want more money, they wanted to work less.
I’ll leave it at that, and I agree that I don’t see any of these things really improving, considering the fatal actions and atrocities that have been imposed on Europe now too, but on the sinking ship that is European civilization, it is surely not the DB that is there worst among the bad simply because it is no longer exceptional in the public transportation segment. I won’t go into the mind blowing impressive nature of the freight handling and hauling and logistics efficiency of the DB rail system, but is one of those things that is not nearly as respected as it should be for what it is, once you actually realize what you’re looking at.
Cost cutting is one of the issues for constantly being late. To give two examples:
1. Transporting people is less profitable than transporting goods, so those trains have to wait for the more important ones. They share tracks due to cost and difficulties with planning new routes.
2. Until the 90s there was a person physically using the railroad switch lever. This meant that these almost never malfunctioned, and if they did, someone was there to immediately fix it. Today they are centrally managed and electrical, and one of the biggest reasons for delays.
Now the thing is that there are many areas where the DB could both cut costs and increase reliability, but are blocked by the unions / Betriebsrat. Rails is an area ripe for automation but in my experience at every little nook a union representative will find a way to block it as it might make some employees redundant.
As I understood it the issue with the infrastructure is not so much that electrified switched fail, but that there is not enough personal to man the monitoring and control stations for those switches.
Which results in tracks getting blocked for traffic, as there is no-one who could monitor the system.
So the issue is not really about unions blocking automation. Now, the recent union win about the 4 day week is not going to help with that.
But generally, the problem seems to be more with infrastructure management/investment and less with the people or the unions.
There are a lot of problems with the current arrangement. Privatization is not one of them for reasons that others have already explained. As far as I can tell, the real problems are: a) Ownership of tracks and stations are not separated from the running of train services, leading to discrimination against alternative train journey providers, and b) Insufficient investment. The last one is not insignificant. Germany spends relatively little on its train infrastructure, which is good for the government budget, of course, but definitely bad for train passengers.
IMO what needs to be done is separation of DB into a fully government-run infrastructure company and a fully privatized and publicly listed train company. Subsequently, the infrastructure company must be injected with lots of cash to fix the current infrastructure problems.
In 1994 it was transformed from a state-owned thing into a profit-oriented, private Corp with state-ownership. Half of the employees were fired, "non-profitable" lines were canceled, ever since the focus is oriented towards profit instead of public interest.
the motivation and goals have shifted, that's what i meant with privatization. it's now a company with stocks, belonging to the state.
public transport and capitalist profit-oriented mentalities never go well together. not saying the state itself would handle DB way better. but in my opinion, it does not help that it was turned into an AG[0]
excuse the half-baked business/corpo terms, it's a bit hard for me to translate german business terms into english, and i wasn't sure where you're from.
State owned and controlled - the legal form doesn't really matter (the owner could also change the form if so desired. Might need a supermajority in both houses if going beyond art. 87e GG). Hence it is all about what the owner does/want/etc. - so I don't see the state "off the hook" here on its ownership and control.
But, yes, the initial plan to actually privatize did some damage, but that has been abandoned now for a couple of decades.
i disagree. but let's not waste time on kleinigkeiten, i'm pretty sure our disagreement stems from our respective political viewpoints and not DB specifically.
There is no market in those shares hence no observable price and the Bund is controlling DB (including changes to its legal form - subject to art 87e GG or a need to change that one, but even that isn't impossible). I don't see a political angle here. It is a state-owned and controlled entity - wanting to turn a profit or not is ultimately a decision by the owners, not by someone else.
It's semi-privatized in effect. It's run as a profit-oriented business while at the same time being publicly controlled and funded. It's the worst of both worlds in that sense. In fact, in addition to DB there's DB Regio as well as its various subsidiaries including DB RegioNetz with its own various subsidiaries. Other direct subsidiaries of DB are DB Fernverkehr for long distance trains, DB Cargo and DB InfraGO which was created as a merger of DB Netz (not to be confused with DB RegioNetz) and DB Station&Service. Most of these subsidiaries are intended to operate in such a way as to be independently profitable. There's also DB Energie because of course a corporation of this size needs vertical integration.
Just now the coalition government decided to move funds intended for rail infrastructure into road infrastructure and build/extend another stupid highway. At the same time existing highway bridges are falling apart and the rail infrastructure is in desperate needs of improvements. German railway is at the same time kneecapped by its need to operate as a profit-driven business as well as being controlled by the policy-driven government.
It is not privatized - it is the owners (the state) giving it certain objectives. The state has control as well as ownership and is making choices. If the owners wanted to do something different, they could do so (as you pointed out with the redirection of funds). The choices that were put into art 87e GG, for example, are still choices.
Or in the UK - my experiences with Avanti West Coast have been particularly awful. The Avanti trains are actually quite nice but only about 50% of the trains I want to get seem to actually run and then the trains that do run become totally overcrowded with the people from the cancelled trains....
Edit: Used a Frecciarossa in Italy recently and was very impressed - Business class was very comfortable (better than LNER 1st class) and ticket prices very reasonable at a small fraction of what you'd pay in the UK.
What are you basing this comparison on? Any more details why you think the hungarian train service is worse? In any case don't you think the expectation for quality of infrastructure should be higher in one of the "richest" EU countries?
If you want cheap luxury I recommend first class trains in Poland. I had the whole cabin to myself, with curtains for less than lunch at Starbucks, and I travelled between cities.
Compartments usually seat 6 (though DB ICE trains often have a family compartment that seats 5, with a little toy cubby that you can use to store a buggy).
Six seats, three on each side. That means someone needs to sit in the middle, and unless you're traveling in a group, it's 5 other strangers.
Personally, I prefer rows of 1 and 2 like normal 1st class, so nobody has to sit in the middle.
Yes please. I'm always thrilled when I can get a pair of seats and a table alone in a room with a door. That makes train travel even more enjoyable than it already is.
What makes you assume that you will have the compartment to yourself? Do you buy six tickets?
The reality is that most people will actually prefer being in the "public space" of an open plan train car with many random strangers over being closed in in the "private space" of a compartment with a small selection of random strangers. Even if they firmly believe the opposite.
I've found the compartments to be nicer than airline-style seating, even with strangers. A lot of the time though, you do get the compartment to yourself, or share it with just one other person. And of course, if you are travelling with friends or family, they can be in the compartment with you.
The empty "hallway" space outside the compartments is also nice. It means you can go out and walk around without bothering other people, not so easy on a airline-style car.
If you are agile, in a compartment you can climb up on the luggage racks above the seats and sleep there (I've done that). You need to give some (maybe non-verbal) assurance to the other people in the compartment that you aren't crazy. Again that's easiest when it's just a few people.
If the compartment has just 1 or 2 people, it's easy to lie down on the bench seats and sleep. With 3 or 4 people, you can flatten out the seats and everyone can sleep if they don't mind a little bit of squishing. As a college student I was fine with that. Maybe most of us here are too old for that by now.
A full compartment is imho certainly not noticeably worse than open plan seating. A non-full compartment is definitely better, if you have a bit of luck and get one. So think of buying an economy airline ticket that automatically comes with a chance of a free first-class upgrade, vs. one without such a chance.
> What makes you assume that you will have the compartment to yourself? Do you buy six tickets?
I've ridden in various trains with 2-seat and 4-seat compartments, which were wonderful. Some of them were sold by the compartment rather than by the seat: you always pay for the whole compartment for your party, so that (for instance) a 3-person group still has the compartment to themselves.
And yes, in cases where they're sold by the seat rather than by the compartment, I will absolutely buy 1-2 extra seats for that purpose.
But even if not, I'd happily take a six-person compartment with a door, and less background noise.
I found even full compartments to be preferable to airline-style seating for various reasons, such as being able to walk around in the "hallway" without bothering other passengers. But also, at least back in the day, you had a fairly good chance of getting a non-full compartment. On a long-distance route you even would find yourself in a compartment with someone interesting and if both of you were up for it, you'd have some time to get to know each other. I'm too old for such things by now, but travelling around on compartment trains as a college student was quite a nice experience. It's disappointing if it's not around any more.
Edit: Meh, semi-dup post, the earlier one took a while to show up so I thought it had been lost.
I think the heart of the question was whether it is even a valuable service. Does it serve enough people to be worthwhile. Even if it’s tax-funded, everything has to pay for itself one way or another (i.e. tax receipts).
Voters and societies don't decide these things very often, in my experience. No one says "we're going to give these benefits and in exchange you're going to see cost of living rise, reducing the value of your savings". If you leave it to point issues, people would want free transport run by people paid a lot of money, somehow. Subsidies make it not a simple issue.
Why? Is the military breaking even, for example? Societies can decide how to spend their resources and it can be subsidies to things people want to have exist.
It is costing money in return for "security" (and some more welfare like things in the US, too, for example). How that is valued is a social/political decision, not one of simple cost calculations - the same can be true for other public spending.
Only for a completely private enterprise. For public transport the tickets are only part of the income. Often citizens already pay taxes which can be used to subsidize transport. Just like roads are really.
> Charging for use below what it costs to maintain that use is probably a bad idea.
I disagree. that's absolutely not a valid conclusion for a service (public transport, road infrastructure, healthcare, etc) that has a substantial benefit to society as a whole.
i.e. providing it at low or no cost at point of use can be a great idea.
Of course 49€ a month for unlimited local/regional travel is not economic. But it has nothing to do with DB. Local/regional traffic is ordered and financed by the states (Länder). The 49€ ticket is a political project.
DB has long distance, local/regional, and freight business.
How much local/regional traffic companies are harmed by the 49€ ticket I have no numbers handy. But I feel DB is impacted relatively little compared to many other operators.
The local companies are the ones where most people buy their 49€ ticket while I imagine DB gets almost no income from it. Doesn't really matter though as both DB and local operators receive subsidies anyway, including ones specifically introduced for the 49€ ticket.
I think so, yes. Just going by how many people are using the service now and going to nearby towns to visit other people or roam around, the ticket should pay a significant part of itself in taxes soon enough.
IIRC the arguments for it being economic were that all the money you lose on accelerated depreciation would be made up by less people using cars thus removing the negative externalities of pollution.
while db was (semi- ?) privatised the ticket you refer to is a project by the government with subsidies, it is not meant to be economic but to be part of positive transformation.
Isn't the 49€ ticket restricted to slower regional trains than the 150€ alternative? I still pay a small fortune traveling between west and east germany to save a few hours of travel time.
It depends on where the parent commenter is living - in Berlin I was paying over 80 EUR a month for a travel card which only applied in the state of Berlin before the Deutschland ticket () - I could believe that a monthly pass for other cities (Frankfurt?) could reach 150 EUR.
( Not directly before, there was the 9 EUR ticket in summer '22, and then BVG offered their monthly ticket for 29 EUR for a while).
I'm not sure exactly which former ticket they meant, but such an approx. 150€ ticket was probably not just restricted to regional transport just like the Deutschlandticket, but also only valid in a small part of the country. Prices would have varied somewhat by federal state or region. The card that gives free travel on all trains costs €380 per month (€4550/y).
Even for slower trains you could easily pay well above 49€ before. Even just a montly ticket for the city where I live cost over 60€ and that still required you to pay extra for regional trains to nearby towns. That doesn't mean that 49€ is too low as both prices are subsidized (explicitly for the 49€ ticket and indirectly via infrastructure grants before).
DB is bad and honestly they are proud of it. Biggest problem is Germans love to complain but never take action.
They prefer to speak in hushed tones if it will affect their personal reputation
Compare with Belgium. For many years it ranked below moldovia in the world postal reliability report. Delivery is unreliable, many packages disappear. During COVID I wanted to buy stamps. In Germany you just print the stamps. No printer? Just use a pen and write a code on the letter. In Belgium they offered to send me stamps by postal mail. After I lost many packages and one was going back already to the US (address cant be found) I wrote a real nasty email to the Belgian minister in charge of the post office. They actually rerouted my us package back and were able to deliver it :-). The postman got a nasty talk with his both for forging my signature for packages he just put in front of the door and that goes stolen. 500 dollar loss...