‘It’s the same daily misery’: Germany’s terrible trains are no joke for a nation built on efficiency

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.

Permanently Deleted

If Amtrak is the best we can do we should all be embarassed.

Have you ever been to Europe? The Amtrak is terrible

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.

Can't go one thread about about Germany without that shit being spouted.

Optimization feels a lot less optimal when it leads to enshittification. I have worked on the tech side of accounting systems in the US for the last 10 years and can say that American companies have largely embraced this category of innovation as well.

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.

Fork of one of the Lemmy frontends and add code to specifically hide the embedded images and then deploy it to your choice of hosting providers.

You can hide comments.

The web app Voyager hides them by default, as far as I can tell. You can sign into this with whatever instance account you’re using.

https://vger.app

"The postal service is losing money!"

No, the postal service costs money. It's a service. It doesn't aim to make a profit. It costs money, and we are in turn rendered a service that is useful.

I swear people are delusional.

Yet nobody ever expects the road system to turn a profit. Why should trains be any different?

I first remember it becoming an issue when a failed businessman turned president wanted to run the country like one of his failed businesses.

You want to put pressure on these things to make them more cost effecient. You're in a capitalist system which does that job very well. But since this is not really a replaceable company, the government has to own these companies until they go public.

When did we start becoming concerned with a public service being “profitable”?

Late 80s, early 90s, with the rise of the rise of the Chicago School of neoliberalism.

Yeah but the bus uses the same road as cars so other than being cheaper, you're getting stuck with traffic

Yeah the strikes and union action hasn't helped either. Just give them what they want so we can go back to regular ish trains lol

Had some Germans visiting Norway recently. They said Germany is becoming way too individualistic. It's a race to the bottom now. Liberalism has taken it's hold, so efficiency will fade away.

Oh, it‘s no better over the ocean. A German colleague of mine just settled in the US and civil servants attitude and bureaucracy is the same shit. Bureaucracy seems to be an international culture.

In my experiences the SNCF Infra, rolling stock, station experience is...pretty good! Customer service on the other hand

yes, IF you're in the inner city. Else, if you live the outer parts of the city, or if you have to go there, you're mostly doomed to ride on 30+ years old junk (or even see tram line 2 next to the parlaiment with those 60 years old not nice trams), with many transfers and long walks. But the transport in budapest handled by the (oppositional) city, not by the stateparty. However the stateparty takes as many money as they can from the city, just because the people in the city not voted them, so it's hard to improve the city transfport without money.

Wind farms are literally being dismantled to make room for coal extraction.

Edit: Source: https://euobserver.com/green-economy/157364