how did germany come to this, they have such a rep for keeping shit orderly, investing in infrastructure etc. did the merger of east and west back in the 90s fuck things up or?
A bunch of stuff. First of all the merger between east and west german railways happened in 1994 that was due to a lot or rail connections having to be rebuilt and a number of high speed lines were built or improved to Berlin. That however cost a lot. Then the German government was thinking about privatizing the railways. To do that a stock company was formed with the goal of turning a profit. So they stopped maintaining tracks and avoided new investment as much as possible for quite some time. In the meantime both passenger and freight railway demand in Germany increased a lot, while very little to no new track was opened. Also the ICE service was increased and unlike most everywhere else, it is run for the most part on improved old track and not new lines. Regional rail and freight run at roughly the same speed, if you consider the regular stops of regional rail. HSR runs faster, so other trains are either in the way or they have to move to the site.
As a result most of the German mainlines are at capacity or above it. As in there is demand for more trains, but the tracks do not have the capacity for it. So if anything goes wrong on any train, it results in a traffic jam, which causes delays for everybody else on those sections. However since long distance trains go through the entire country, nearly all of them do have to cross those sections.
The obvious solution is to built more railway and especially add high speed rail lines in parallel to the current lines. However NIMBYism is strong in Germany and when combined with a strong car lobby, it makes building new lines nearly impossible. Every single project ends up in a decades long planing stage, with mulitple law suits and even with construction you end up with stops, due to legal problems. For the most part the construction work is doing just fine, it is really just politicans being corrupt.
how did germany come to this
Neoliberal policies: austerity fetish, privatization of public infrastructure and the expectation that rail has to be ‘profitable’ led to massive under-investment.
Same for Sweden. Most right-voters of course still belive the government runs it and become upset with me when I explain that they are complaining about a Chinese corporation and that they voted for this.
Germany has an extremely strong automobile lobby. They’re very dependent on the car industry. So politicians taking the money from these companies, which is a lot of them, sabotage infrastructure programs, and instead pump more money into cars. Similar issue to America really, and it’s an issue caused by America having a massive presence in Germany and playing a big role in West German law & reconstruction.
Former East Germany generally has significantly better urban design & public transit infrastructure than former West Germany, but the government neglects the east part of the country as well as implementing the car-ification I mentioned before, plus the AfD (basically the modern Nazi party) is becoming in-charge there, so it’s getting worse over time.
