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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
