this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Anyone who might be surprised that Germany is so low here, Germans are always surprised people think it would be very high.
There is a simple reason, too: Auto-Lobby. Our car manufacturers are very powerful in politics and public infrastructure is heavily underfunded.
Funnily enough, highways and other roads are also crumbling, so good luck to the car makers when there is less and less road to drive those precious machines on.
I would say the root cause of the DB issues is rather the failed attempt to privatise it, which caused ~~years~~ decades of infrastructure underinvestment to cook the books to make it look more attractive to private investors.
But of course the strong car lobby also played a role in that.
This is the main reason. While the car lobby is no doubt dangerously powerful they are also heavily dependant on the cargo department of DB. A massive amount of industrial commodities is moved by the railway network and not the ubiquitous trucks. If they worked to defund the railway infrastructure they would eventually hurt their own supply lines.
I think you're both right
There are no private investors. Its 100% owned by the state...
Yes, hence me saying "failed". They cooked the books because they wanted to put it up for sale on the stock market, but in the end that never happend for a lot of different reasons.
They cooked the books, but not for potential investors. At least not in the last two decades.
If I recall correctly the last serious attempt to privatise it was shortly before the 2008 financial crisis, so I guess you are almost correct with two decades. Time flies...
But they are organised as and run like a private company and driven purely by short term profits and will pay big time bonuses to their executives (usually ex polititians) every year.
Yes, the point I was trying to make was not that being owned by the state makes it work better: in fact I think it is absurd that it is a "for profit" company which has no incentive to make profit as it's owner will never hold them accountable by letting them go bankrupt, as that is not an option. We have the worst of both worlds, almost as if public necessities ("Daseinsvorsorge") and natural monopolies do not make sense to run "privately"....
Additionally, the number presented is most likely too high, since it's more important to tune the numbers than to provide good service.
Example: a late train can be taken out of service and replaced, or even not. Voila! Not late anymore.
I wish this wasn't the reality.
France does the same, a cancelled train isn't delayed according to SNCF.
There is also the infamous -Wende (turnaround). In order to not be late anymore some trains just turned around two or three stops short of the actual destination.
The American auto industry effectively killed trains here. Iβd love to have often-late high speed trains instead of βyou want to go from Texas to Chicago? Fly, drive, or go fuck yourself.β
I spent nearly a quarter century working for a German company.
The Germans think about the Swiss the same way we think about the Germans.
Who is "we" in that sentence?
I mean you are still building massive highways. Most european countries arenβt building highways anymore.
Not really. It's mostly maintenance and only a few new projects due to shifting demand.
Germany is still expanding highways both in length and in with rather than doing maintenance because it's easier to sell politically.
America is much the same in that regard. We have probably the most laughably terrible train network, both in terms of freight and passenger, for any western country, especially relative to any meaningful metric like GDP. It's down to a noxious mix of car lobby, racism, and stupid policy choices (single family housing exclusive zoning, parking minimums, etc) all applied consistently over 70 years. In spite of all that, and in spite of increasingly enormous re-investment packages, our roads never really seem to get much better. I hope it's the same in Germany, but I've noticed that having better mobility solutions than cars and planes only is quickly becoming a pretty mainstream position in the US.
There will be more road. Similarly to the US tho, the (former) infrastructure is falling apart as road infrastructure is also underfunded (partly due to new construction like lane addition or construction of new Autobahnen).