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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
yearsdecades 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 <insert-name of current minister of infrastructure>-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. I’d love to have often-late high speed trains instead of “you want to go from Texas to Chicago? Fly, drive, or go fuck yourself.”
I mean you are still building massive highways. Most european countries aren’t 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.
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?
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).
Fun fact: German ICEs (high-speed trains) are not allowed to enter Switzerland if they are delayed too much so they don’t disrupt the Swiss schedule. This year more than 10% were not allowed to continue.
It’s super funny because at swiss train station they always say
“Train X is delayed by Y minutes, this is due to delays in France/Germany and not the Swiss railways” on the megaphone LOL
In Austria they’re not as direct as this, but usually say “because of delays abroad” which is easily decipherable as these trains usually travel from Germany.
Yeah, but the integrated timetable for Germany is just around the corner. 2070 😭
The Swiss railway network is nuts. From Not Just Bikes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc
I went to switzerland two times via train the last few years (usually I go with my dad by car), and both times this happened. Once we had to sleep there overnight, because after we got in with another train, there were no more trains through the mountains.
German long distance trains are 64% on time because up to 5 minutes delay are not counted for the statistics and guess what? Trains that never arrive (due to being way too late to continue their journey or because of technical problems on the trains or track system) are not included in the statistics either!
The infamous Scheuer-Wende.
For the non germans: say a train is supposed to go from Munich over Hamburg to Kiel, and then return back to Munich. If that train accumulates so much delay that it could not even start the return trip on time, it might just stop in Hamburg, dump all the passengers, and turn around heading to Munich.
Now the skipped stops don’t count as delayed, since the train never stopped there, the train is on time again for the return trip, and hundreds of passengers are pissed off and stranded somewhere they never wanted to be.
“Wir bitten Sie, die Unannehmlichkeiten zu entschuldigen.”
I could hear this in my head and now I’m angry.
There is not much long distance in Switzerland… Can we have that normalized for average length of continuous rail?
Ah yes, the 12 countries of Europe.
Yeah Is Slovenia the worst in europe or 12th best? Most probably it’s just random which countries are in the graph.
Well we do suck in the train department bit I do think there are worse offenders.
In Belgium trains are considered on time when up to a 6 minute delay, but what really schews the statistics is that cancelled trains are not counted. Even so, the number in this overview is completely incorrect. It was 87,5% on time in 2023.
I’m pretty sure Germany uses the exact same logic.
trains that are “cancelled” are not counted in germany, at least by train companies and politics, everyone else counts them as betrayals. sometimes trains are cancelled officially, just to arrive later with the same engine, wagons, staff and guests but under another train number just to not show up as that bad delayed any more, because its officially (renamed to) another train then!! that seems to happen on very few routes only, however, trains that are late would regulary never arrive at their final destination but be told to turn around and skip some stops to catch up with their time schedule at those stops the train is counted as cancelled => which is not counted then. bonus: the company knows the delay sometimes hours before that turn around to skip some stops, while people at those stops are left olone thinking that train will arrive until shortly before it should arrive only to be told that it will never arrive. sometimes trains show up as arriving in 2 minutes, then 1 … then now … and its gone! … without any train passing by (mainly at remote locations with only 2 platforms or trams do that regulary too) guess those ghost trains are good for statistics, counts as in time, but does not use any space nor repairs, neither energy, and cannot be delayed by broken tracks or engine failures, also company does not have to pay for the driver of ghost trains. sometimes when the arrival platforms are changed for a train, someone through the speaker says, the train will arrive on platform 7, while the displays show it to have been changed to platform 2, and you have 1,5 minutes to get it after the first note from the company (bonus: sometimes both platforms told to you are wrong, then the train arrives (maybe) on the original platform that is empty bcs all ran to either 2 or 7)
when visiting other countries in europe, nearly everywhere i love how good public transport works (maybe in spain not that much) but in gemany its way too many lies delays, absurd rules a.s.o.
Read again , it’s say long-distance trains.
So TGV/Eurostar only I’m guessing.
Het woord dat je wil gebruiken is “skews”, landgenoot.
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TIL Train punctuality is the art of lying with statistics
In Germany’s defense, if you miss a train connection due to delays, you just board the next connection without needing to have your ticket re-issued for another connection, which is cool.
But the joke is real, I was coming back from Spain to Poland by train recently and everything was fine, until my VERY FIRST STATION IN GERMANY where I got my first delay.
I just read that every 10th train voming from Germany into Switzerland is late, and they don’t wait anymore, because they mess up the rest of the route.
Yes, there is a standby train in Basel, for when the ones coming from Frankfurt are delayed again.
Switzerland has an integrated cyclic schedue, and relatively tightly planned line utilization so delays can cascade pretty strongly.
Its better for the system at whole to send the standby within the scheduled slot of the German train, have that train return from Basel to Frankfurt directly (making up time in the process so the way back is regular), and people who wanted to go to Zürich have to get off and use the next train to Zürich half an hour after the standby, in the next regular slot.
The downside is cost of the standby train and situations like this: Last time I had to change in Basel myself, and had to guide an older lady and carry her suitcase, because she was quite confused by the sudden unplanned change of trains. Then she talked my ear off on the way from Basel to Zürich :-)
Yep, same for Austria. “Punctual as the German railway” used to be an unironic figure of speech in the 80’s and early 90’s. Once they started privatizing, everything went to shit.
Germany is strange. Their economy is one of the strongest in the world but if you want to move around reliably in the country you need a horse.
The punctuality of trains in CENTRAL Europe.
Zugfinder doesn’t cover it all.
What’s funny to me is that the Dutch people I know complain about their trains as much as the Germans I know.
People really underappreciate trains in the Netherlands. Not only are they relatively punctual (even in a worldwide ranking), but having that in addition to having a dense schedule is really pretty impressive. In that sense, only Japan truly has us beat, I think.
I think the Swiss beat you aswell. They run a rather dense network too. Not dense like NL in the urban sense of the word, but Swiss connections are very well frequented and they run through some quite difficult terrain adding to the difficulty of running it all smoothly. The Swiss and Dutch network has quite some resemblance actually in how it is ran, both more perceived as a transfer model with rather easy to read, logical timetables (“runs every half hour”: 13u00 13u30 14u00 etc), both barely having any real high speed lines.
From having travelled with trains in Europe, i’ld intuitively say in Europe Swiss wins, followed by the Netherlands and then perhaps the Austrians or the French. Belgium up there is this ranking is just lies and deceipt, in my experience the Germans the Belgians are about as reliable (not), but the germans do still win from Belgium because they are (often but not always) more fair in the communication and they hand out “request a refund”-forms in delayed trains.
The Swiss network is amazing as well, and I was considering mentioning them too. It really is quite a feat to have it run that well given the terrain, but given that the busiest routes in the Netherlands have trains running every ten minutes, I leaned to limiting it to Japan - but can definitely live with Switzerland at #2 as well.
(I’ve also had more delays than I like in Germany, and more often than not on those delays I’ve not been handed those forms, in which case it wasn’t clear how to request a refund :/ )
Slow reply but it might still be worth it. It got easy to request the refund if you’ve booked in their DB Navigator app, then it’s just: open the trip, go to tab “ticket” (where qr code is), scroll all the way to the bottom for “more actions” and select “submit compensation request”. No paper form required! Quite the feat for a German bureaucratic company!
Oh thanks! Unfortunately these were anecdotes from a while ago, so nothing much I can do now. Generally, though, I tend to have a printed ticket that I received via email, not in an app. It’s possible that there’s now a procedure you can find out about via their website - I just wasn’t able to back then. (Or possibly I did manage in the end, but it was just a lot of digging - not sure.)
I fucking love your OV. In Germany it’s shit (especially in Schleswig-Holstein). I’m super jealous.
From my experience, their problems are just of a different nature. Dutch trains are punctual, but the carriages are often in a filthy state.
Nah bruv, i don’t think so
First one still gives 5.8 in regards to cleanliness and that is from a Dutch perspective not from a European perspective. Second one is reddit (!) and is mainly talking about the outside of the trains, which I don’t think matters as much for the commuting experience 🙃. I think “filthy” is absolutely an overstatement. I mainly ride around den Hague and Rotterdam, but have taken plenty of trains in other directions. Compared to Germany in which i have traveled plenty by all types of trains and compared to what i saw while interrailing i deem the Dutch trains to be pretty clean (at least on the inside)
Our experiences differ then. And the Dutch perspective is the whole point, as the comment I responded to wondered why Dutch people are complaining.
Ok, but the comment was about how it is funny that the Dutch complain as much as the Germans although their trains are better. So it was about a lack of broader perspective on that issue. So yes the whole point was about the Dutch perspective, but about the fact that their perspective seems to be warped from a european perspective.
So the conclusion i would draw from our interaction is that what a Dutch person experiences as filthy seems to me wildly more clean than what could be considered filthy in a European context. Good on you to be able to have high standards, hope the rest of European rail will strive to get to that high level.
But that’s just like, my opinion bruv. Maybe I should have stated that more clearly
I already commented here, but I think this deserves its own comment. I’d like to see how this stacks up against Japan and China. I can already tell you how the US stacks up. On top of fifty-to-seventy years of rail underinvestment, the freight rail companies have been deliberately fucking with Amtrak for years now by making their trains too long to fulfill their legal obligation to pull off onto side tracks and yield to passenger traffic. And yes, you read that right, the vast majority of Amtrak’s alignments are shared with freight rail.
And yes, you read that right, the vast majority of Amtrak’s alignments are shared with freight rail.
Isn’t that kinda normal, though?
My understanding is that most passenger rail in Europe and Asia runs on dedicated tracks. I misspoke, I should have said tracks, not alignments. It would be much less of an issue if Amtrak had its own tracks on a given freight alignment. Instead, they share tracks, and regularly get delayed, speed capped at lower speeds than they could safely operate at otherwise, and generally jerked around by the freight operators.
I think this perception is false.
On many big rail corridors like Antwerp/Rotterdam through Germany/Switzerland to Milan/Torino/Genova a lot or the rails are very shared by freight and passengers.
There are dedicated passengers rails mostly on (expensive to ride) high speed lines and there are dedicated freight tracks within ports and such, but a lot of tracks are still shared by both.
Plenty of saturated lines where you can see everything pass by: intercities, S-bahn style, freight all on same tracks and only at certains stops can they overtake each other.
Thanks for this feedback, it’s caused me to re-evaluate some positions!
From my experience in Germany, that’s not really true. Freight trains regularly run on the same tracks and through the same train stations as passenger trains (of course they don’t actually stop at passenger train stations). There’s some dedicated tracks of course, especially to and from freight stations, but I AFAIK that’s not the majority of tracks they’re running on.
Could be separate tracks in countries that actually have well-run train networks, though.
I am suspecting that the major reason why trains are so often so late in germany is because the car industry saw itself threatened by effective public transport.
I have absolutely no proof to back up this claim. I’m not even sure that it is that way, but it’s the only explanation i can offer for why the germans can’t have a working railway system.
UK: hold my room temperature beer
Where the hell are you getting room temperature beer Certainly not in a pub.
From a room
This stat is kind of weird. Punctuality is defined differently in every country.
In Switzerland 3+ minutes delay is counted as unpunctual, while france needs a 15+ min delay. I think in Austria it is 5+ min but unsure. So these numbers aren’t really comparable because they aren’t defining delay the same.
Zugfinder seems to use a consistent definition of anything below 5 minutes being punctual. So those are in fact comparable values.
oh nice! I assumed it was taking from national statistics.
Having lived in both Austria and France, I would definitely have guess Austria be more punctual than france.
In Belgium it’s 6 minutes and only the arrival at the final destination is checked. Cancelled trains are also not included in the statistics, which has lead to trains being cancelled to increase punctuality: instead of starting it’s journey 10 minutes late, the train starts “on time” 1 hour later. Travellers missing connections is also not included in the statistics.
So put these 3 together and the actual delays of travellers are much larger than the statistics would like us to believe.
And to add insult to injury, to increase their “punctuality”, the train operator seems to increase journey times with every schedule revision. So not only are trains less punctual than they were a few decades ago, journey times are also often significantly longer.
So according to the statistics, Belgian trains are doing fine, but the actual travellers disagree.
No argument with the other points that you made, but I would much rather that they make the journey times longer and accurate, than shorter, but unlikely. Once a train is running behind and off-schedule, it only gets more and more late.
It’s a cop out, a way to temporarily relieve the problem without actually solving the problem. Every year the trains run a tiny bit slower and every year reliability is as bad as the year before.
Especially for small trains and shorter journeys it has gotten silly imo. Journeys that used to take about ~15 minutes now take ~30 minutes. And at the time when it took that train 15 minutes, they were really punctual and reliable, while now they’re not. I found an article from 2014 which remarked that Mechelen-leuven was going to take 26 minutes while it only used to take 16 minutes. Now in 2024 that same line is 25-31 minutes with an acceptable error margin of +6 minutes.
From my personal experience, those slower trains are not driving slower and being more punctual, they’re just spending a lot more time standing still. My small commuter train to Brussels would always spend 10 to 50 minutes waiting in the same junction. In the case of the 50 minutes, I think it was just pretending to be a later train so that it could arrive on time.
running it slower on schedule does solve the problem of being more predictable and being able to plan a bit better if you have to catch connections. I much rather have more realistic timetables over trying to achieve overall shorter travel times.
The ‘fast’ version of Mechelen-Leuven (the 25min) is a lot slower now because they rerouted it to add the new Brussels airport stop on this line. Of course a train with fewer stops will run faster. But this airport stop seems worth it to me for both cities, though longer route it now runs almost the same time as the slow stops everywhere L-train (31min) between the two cities.
Anyhow, not really punctuality to blame in this example, it’s a planning/routing choice. One you might disagree with, sure, but it’s not punctuality.
Sometimes trains become “faster” in the same way because stops get skipped more often or cancelled altogether. They could run a very fast train between Eupen and Oostende, but what’s the point if you’re not picking up and dropping off any passengers along the route? Filling up the path for a “fast” connection almost noone can actually use. Trains in Belgium are slow in general because there are just villages and stops everywhere, every single train not on an actual highspeed line has the same hard choice: how many stops, where yes, where no, how many passengers a day does a stop need to be worth it? I’ve cursed often at the Beveren stop on the Antwerp-Gent line, but there are always people getting on and off there… Our city planning has just been shit for 200 years and this is a consequence, much of our rail network functions more like a large metrosystem.
Can we please stop excluding the UK from these charts? Its still geographically European and acting like it isn’t just feeds the brexiters… also because it’d be funny to have a country with -37 as its punctuality value on here.
Is a train late if it still hasn’t arrived?
For Germany, I can answer that: No, that’s not included in the official DB stats.
There is only 12 countries on the list, it’s not complete. But of course the UK was purposefully “excluded”, must be because of brexit. 🙄
So you say Slovenia’s trains are slovenly?
