I think many people who complain about DB simply have no idea what it’s like elsewhere. I recently returned to Toronto, Canada from spending a few weeks in Germany. We relied on the train system for all of our travel within the country, and yes occasionally trains were late/delayed, but we were actually able to get everywhere we needed to without driving. This is with two adults and two kids with a stroller and occasionally luggage.

Coming back to Toronto was a bit of shock. Our municipal train system is adequate but nowhere near the level of, say, Berlin. Our regional train system is fundamentally broken because you still need a car at the end of your journey. There is virtually no train network in any of the destination cities.

Instead you are forced to drive. And our highways are congested. It takes hours of sitting in traffic to get around outside of the city. And this is completey normal here, people do this every day.

Edit: The other thing that was practically magical was the DB pass that we bought. A single pass allowed us unlimited travel on all the regional trains as well as all the municipal transit in every city we visited. This is unheard of back here.

For the past 7 years using DB. I can probably count on one hand if I was delayed more then 2 hours.

However being delayed between 30 mins to 1 hour is extremely common. Often half my trips.

For every important trips, we do go the night before and then stay local.

Worst I’ve been delayed was 5 hours, that’s because a signal between Frankfurt and Köln failed

This is a very good quote about the nature of people complaining about german trains:

Passengers do not complain about trains they cannot take, because those trains do not exist.

Solution: Decrease the number of trains /joke

It was never a joke. It has always been an insult.

It’s just a long Facebook style rant…

I was expecting some data like percentage of delay per hour traveled. That would solve every complaint the blog author had and actually change people’s mind.

I booked it on Europe’s best rail website - bahn.de

Definitely not. Just last week it took me over an hour to book a train on bahn.de. I needed multiple tries as I was constantly being flagged as bot - even though I was logged in and I had windows as browser user agent. Linux is being blocked by default. The payment options are Paypal, Card payment with Mastercard or Visa and Open banking by Tink (Visa). No European payment options.

The only reason to book with bahn.de is because they have cheap tickets. The website is garbage.

I think there really are two loud groups at work here. The first being people that know how the DB used to be (always on time whatever the weather, though this is also heavily influenced by rose-tinted glasses, survivor bias and nostalgia) and secondly people that like to hate on Germany (Germans that mostly hate modern Germany as they themselves are from 1933 and those that see the DB as an opportunity to smear some dirt on the label of German efficiency). Now I presume that, like with everything nowadays that is happening online, there’s a lot of propaganda and lobbying involved.

But to be fair, it is frustrating to be late when you have no influence on it. In the car at least you get the idea that you have some influence on your delay, false as that feeling may be.

The problem with the high workload of the train infrastructure is also one of the reasons for the amount of roadworks in Germany. Germany simply has the highest traffic in Europe overall. Partly because it is the largest economy, but also because it is located right the center of the EU. A lot of cross border traffic will cross Germany.

I commute by train in Austria. The only time the trains are late are when they start in Germany. As I have a valid ticket for any train this sometimes works in my favor, as I can take the ICE that has been late two hours straight from the platform because it fits when I leave work.

It’s frankly hilarious that the author specifically calls out everyone but Green voters as the problem and in the next sentence identifies Schröder as the root (the infection vector in Germany for neoliberal shitfuckery was actually Kohl, but close enough):

Ultimately any German who has ever voted for any party other than the Grüne also deserves what they get. The Third Way / Die neue Mitte of Gerhard Schröder from the late 1990s is at the root of all of this […]

Who, again, were the coalition partners of Schröder’s SPD and whose voters are thus just as responsible for Germany’s catrastrophic neoliberal course? Toot, toot, it’s the Greens.

The only major party we can (as of yet) count on the make-things-better-for-normal-people side of this is Die Linke; as usual, unfortunately, 'cause they have their own issues.