Deutsche Bahn’s once-admired service has descended into chaos. Whether decades of poor investment or the company’s unusual structure is to blame, it’s a huge headache for a coalition trying to meet climate goals
As an American who used DB for the first time, their shitty transit blows the best travel experiences here out of the water. I’d rather use German trains than fly first class in the US. Not even close TBH.
i donno, amtrak is pretty great on the east coast. there’s absolutely nothing from the mississippi to the west coast so if you’re going that way youre going to have a bad time.
As a general tip: you usually have to apply for assistance beforehand. Doesn’t mean it isn’t shitty though, and if your train is delayed then and you miss a connection…
yah that is what we ended up having to do for my family.
i think the bigger issue was the surrounding buildings and some of the stations not having adequate assistance.
they nearly dumped my father into the water in Amsterdam.
i live in DC and commuted every day on the MARC for years and never saw anything so disasterous.
the ACA is a force to be reckoned with.
Frequent delays. Poor frequency. Weird routes. Slow average speeds that can barely compete with a bus. Always getting bogged down by track-sharing with freight.
The Northeast corridor is the only section of the entire system that is even remotely decent and is basically subsidizing the crappy lines that they are congressionally mandated to run so it’s not even that cost competitive with other modes.
To be fair, most of this isn’t Amtrak’s fault but just a reflection of the fact that America doesn’t care about passenger rail.
I kept reading the article trying to find the reason why DB is so crappy now, only to realize that a 10 minute delay is catastrophic by German standards. I’d love to just have any kind of public transit near me.
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?
As an American who used DB for the first time, their shitty transit blows the best travel experiences here out of the water. I’d rather use German trains than fly first class in the US. Not even close TBH.
You can’t compare a first world country to a third world country.
i donno, amtrak is pretty great on the east coast. there’s absolutely nothing from the mississippi to the west coast so if you’re going that way youre going to have a bad time.
Have you ever been to Europe? The Amtrak is terrible
yah ive been to europe. some things are nicer but amtrak is way more accommodating for people with disabilities.
As a general tip: you usually have to apply for assistance beforehand. Doesn’t mean it isn’t shitty though, and if your train is delayed then and you miss a connection…
yah that is what we ended up having to do for my family. i think the bigger issue was the surrounding buildings and some of the stations not having adequate assistance. they nearly dumped my father into the water in Amsterdam.
i live in DC and commuted every day on the MARC for years and never saw anything so disasterous. the ACA is a force to be reckoned with.
If Amtrak is the best we can do we should all be embarassed.
what’s wrong with amtrak?
Frequent delays. Poor frequency. Weird routes. Slow average speeds that can barely compete with a bus. Always getting bogged down by track-sharing with freight.
The Northeast corridor is the only section of the entire system that is even remotely decent and is basically subsidizing the crappy lines that they are congressionally mandated to run so it’s not even that cost competitive with other modes.
To be fair, most of this isn’t Amtrak’s fault but just a reflection of the fact that America doesn’t care about passenger rail.
yah the north east corridor is great.
I kept reading the article trying to find the reason why DB is so crappy now, only to realize that a 10 minute delay is catastrophic by German standards. I’d love to just have any kind of public transit near me.
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?