I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason, why DBahn can’t get the trains to run on time. This isn’t Italy after all. The Swiss and Japanese manage to do it. Can someone explain?
DBahn was privatized in a way that combines the worst of both worlds: private but 100% owned by the state. Opaque labyrinth of 600 subcompanies.
Also, some textbook examples of bad incentives. For example, repairing bridges is paid by DB. If a bridge is beyond repair, then the tax payer pays. Predictable result: doing hardly any maintenance until the bridge fails. (That example is by now fixed, but shows the clear lack of planning)
Finally, the system is just over capacity. Many more trains but same infrastructure as decades ago. If you got rid of half the schedule and used a swiss-like system of stopping several minutes at every station, the trains could be on time. But the trains already are overcrowded, so then what do you do with all the passengers?
Germans are generally quite precise, which can be both good and bad. It can mean that things are done correctly, but it can also mean that people waste endless time obsessing over how to exactly implement every minute detail of a rule.
Just to give you an example of the latter: a Vietnamese-German woman (a German citizen who speaks German natively) was recently in the news because the local authorities have refused to issue her baby a birth certificate for over 6 months.[0] When she went to get a birth certificate, the authorities told her that her last name, Le Nguyen - which already appears on all of her German documents - does not meet their standards. They refuse to issue a birth certificate for her baby until she changes her last name to something the German regulations allow.
To make the situation even more absurd, the problem is that the German regulations state that double family names do not exist in Vietnamese (surprise: they do).[1] If the mother had a French double name, it would be no problem.
The problem is not even the baby's last name - it has the father's last name. The problem is that the birth certificate has to list the mother and father, and the authorities refuse to write the mother's name.
Instead of just giving the mother a bit of leeway and issuing a birth certificate, the authorities insist on inflexibly following some completely incomprehensible interpretation of the regulations. Suddenly, after thirty-something years of living in Germany, this lady has to suddenly change her last name, and until she does that, her baby - a German citizen - has no official documentation and cannot receive any government benefits.
Repeat this daily across many aspects of daily life, and you can see how it would become a problem.
It's the classical combo of poor budget and conflicting budgeting with aging infrastructure and bad management. DB was privatized 20, 30 years ago, but parts of the infrastructure is public property and managed by the state. So DB willingly let rot them until the state will start renewing, which does take ages of course. At the same time, DB also started saving significant money, because that's what private companies are doing, so they removed parts of the infrastructure, which later started harming the planing on a nationwide level. And on top of this, there are parts of the infrastructure which are literally up to 150 years old, but still in use for whatever reason.
Or in other words: classical underfunded, overused legacy system showing its age.
> At the same time, DB also started saving significant money, because that's what private companies are doing, so they removed parts of the infrastructure
As strongly encouraged by their regulators (the Bundesnetzagentur and the Eisenbahnbundesamt), though, too, because for a long time the main political mandate regarding the railways was mainly to save money.
