Comment by notTooFarGone
1 year ago
Hard but entirely relatable.
Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company and the bad from the government bureaucracy.
Deutsche Bahn is wholly owned by the federal government (https://www.deutschebahn.com/en/group/ataglance/aufsichtsrat...). This is exactly the same relationship as SBB has to the Swiss government. I don't think the corporatisation (not privatisation) is the problem in this case.
DB is just a holding company. The companies below are not 100% state owned.
> now to the most complex train system probably in the world.
Having seen the US attempt and lived with the UK railway, the German one is definitely a huge improvement. Yes, it does go wrong sometimes, but my experience at university in the UK was the end of term had two carriages with twice as many passengers as seats, that regularly terminated 20 minutes before the official destination, and my experience visiting the UK now that I live in Berlin is that the UK rail fares are (or often were pre-pandemic) more expensive than the flights to the UK. There's even a standard "money saving trick" on UK fare prices where you split a journey from A to B into A->C, C->B, where C is one of the stops in the route from A to B so you don't need to disembark.
That doesn't mean there's no room for improvement, neither the UK nor the US railways are role models. (I assume Japan is still a role model for rail? Not heard much since the 90s…)
Honestly it's a very low bar and Germans should aspire for better and not for a meager "we are not the worst there is".
I would say you need to compare DB to other Western European railway operator/networks. In my personal experience, DB comes dead last and it's not even close to the 2nd to last. Renfe (Spain), Trenitalia/Italo (Italy), SNCF (France) have much better services, at least on the long-distance routes (> 200KM). So much so that they are a viable alternative to domestic flights.
Additionally, most of those countries also have a much worse geography to contend with (e.g. Italy with the Alps and Appennini) and they still manage to have a nice high-speed rail network that works.
Finally, answering your last point, Japan still is THE role model. So much so that you can get stuff delivered to a train station your train is transiting through (at least with the Shinkansen lines) because the carrier knows exactly when your train will be there. I was astonished by that.
Italy's geography is not universally worse. The mostly linear shape limits the number of required connections between stations: you only need a couple 1000km long distance lines to connect everything on the north-south axis, whereas in Germany they must go 500km+ in every direction for full coverage.
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Long distance with Deutsch Bahn is an embarrassment. I don't know if they have any line where a car isn't faster.
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And we're talking about high speed rail here (ICE trains). The UK has exactly one line that qualifies - from the channel tunnel to London St Pancras, and I don't think the US has any.
UK also has HS1
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The ticket splitting thing you refer in the UK to works in other countries also.
How does it work? In my country (at least non-regional trains) the ticket price is calculated as ax+b where b is a constant price and x is the distance in kilometers. So splitting the ticket is always more expensive than buying two separate ones (but there are other reasons to do it, for example it's a trick to use when there's not enough seats to ride a->c directly - but that's an edge case)
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Privatization has brought some truly crazy incentives into the spotlight. Like how bridge maintenance is paid by the company, but when a worn out bridge needs replacing it's suddenly a government investment.
I consider it safe to assume that the reason for this is that it had been just the same when it was still a government org, but a government org will see its responsibilities very different from a company eagerly cosplaying shareholder-value while the sole shareholder happens to be the government they can freely rip off because of an ongoing legacy approach to the principal-agent problem.
As for delays, I think one reason, besides lack of maintenance and the massive interdependence in that large network that allows neither a star nor a main axis simplification is the high speed Autobahn: if they weren't overambitious in terms of travel times they would perhaps put bigger time buffers in their schedule and that would certainly help a lot.
Japan did it in 1987 and the shinkanzen is still well known for its on time percentage.
And they don't cheat either with an x minute grace period. On time means the minute on the timetable.
So it's certainly possible.
Japan is also heavily consolidated compared to other countries.
The largest shareholders for all the privatized rails in Japan are a mixture of Mitsubishi Group, Mitsui Group and Mizuhou Group.
Western anti-trust doesn't allow that level of consolidation - everything is basically owned by a handful of Keiretsu.
I highly recommend reading "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap to learn about this [0].
[0] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
It’s hardly consolidated compared to Germany??
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"Privatizing" is not the correct word for it - DB was reformed and is now a company instead of a government agency, but it's still 100% owned by the state. Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, favoring short term savings over long term sustainability, which led to the sorry state in which German rail infrastructure is today. IMHO the major issue with the reform is that the trains and the infrastructure were left in the same company (with other train operators forced to use the tracks provided by the "incumbent"), which leads to all kinds of conflicts of interest.
" Which however didn't stop it from acting like a profit-oriented private company, " Except it does not make any profit. It is tightly controlled by the government. They could change any management behaviour. But they don't.
So its just a goverment agency.
I think it's worth adding the fact, that not only the Deutsche Bahn has been privatized, but also the Deutsche Bundespost (mail service/telecommunication) has been privatized and split into Deutsche Post and Deutsche Telekom coming from the same policy.
As far as I know this all boils down to the fact, that the European Union (or better it's predecessor) wanted to get rid of state monopolies. It did work out for the "Deutsche Post" (more or less) and very good for "Deutsche Telekom". But "Deutsche Bahn" was a failure coming from that policy.
> very good for "Deutsche Telekom"
It didn't work very well for Telekom's competitors, though.
I've switched apartments about once every two years in average and every.single.time I've had to wait more than a month without internet (after already waiting a month for the scheduled appointment) because Telekom is the owner of the DSL lines and they connect their competitors' customers only when they feel like it.
Isn't Deutche Telekom one of the main reasons why Germany's broadband and internet coverage is abysmal in comparison to even significantly poorer countries in Europe these days?
Except Deutsche Bahn is not private but 100% owned by the German government.
It's the words that were used in the 90s. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung
That's a general article about privatizing state-owned railways all over the world. If you look at the part referring to Germany, it links to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnreform_(Deutschland), and "Bahnreform" is the term that's more commonly used to refer to what happened in Germany.
Besides the point that Deutsche Bahn is goverment owned, it is worth pointing out that Western and Eastern German had " to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. " + much much debts.
Calling the Deutsche Bahn private is a very good indicator that the person isn't able to look up Wikipedia Article and think critically.
The process was called Bahnprivatisierung.
See Wikipedia article here. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnprivatisierung
Translating that to english is train privatization. Does this lead to a privately OWNED company? I never said that. The decision to privatize and to make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows.
It is important to click one more on the header on Wikipedia. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisierung and this is refers to my POV.
In German private means privately owned. It is rare that people out of Germany care about the legal status of Deutsche Bahn thus I used the German meanings and many posters as well.
" o make austerity measures instead of investments shows today. In the past 30 years the streets were more important for governments and it shows. " I refer to the time before 30 years. It was a very problematic time in West and East Germany though were a Goverment Agency by legal.
Can’t comment on the 90s, but it only seems to have become truly unreliable in the last 5 years maybe? I take a train through Germany 2-3 times a year, and delays and faults are pretty much inevitable on every journey.
I’ve been to Germany twice to visit family. All of my trains had delays (one was because a suicide though), and every time Ive heard from family, they are also having train delays. It’s very unreliable.
My experiences in France were quite the opposite. So much for stereotypes.
I can't say what it was like 5 years ago, but I take a DB train 2-3 times a week and I can never be sure that I'll get to my destination on time, or that I'll even get there on the train.
If you privatize with the right rule structure and policing from the government, with payment as a function of being on time or not. You can have a good system.
> privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail
It worked great for rail in Japan, so I’m not sure that’s the obvious lesson to learn.
It HAS NOT worked great for Sweden.
Source: I live in Sweden there was a DN article recently about it. Here it is
https://archive.is/zaGtb
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240721074607/https://www.dn.se...
(Its all too segmented, the trains, the track all different companies now nobody sees the full picture)
and https://archive.is/MztnY
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20240726054426/https://www.dn.se...
(The land is not enough to fix trains and the land next to it was reserved but somehow sold to build a sports arena because the train land section became a company that had to post good numbers)
I hear UK is not too happy about their rail too. https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k?si=yNWcAUZ69nN1B29O
Seems like it just does not work to separate rail and traffic like that.
100%. That was a whole series of articles in DN about how the Swedish railways have been run into the ground.
Separating maintenance from operations is a terrible idea and has never worked well on any railway that I'm aware of.
Came here to say this.
Alos, one important thing that happened in Sweden was that the part that was not privatised was also ran like a for profit company.
The railway infrastructure "CEO" basically stopped a lot of repair work and long term projects and was able to show some very good numbers to the goverment, which they very much liked. 10-15 years later things started falling apart, by which time she was long gone.
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It's actually a different system - Japan's network was privatised and split into competing companies with all shares publicly traded (bar some exceptions), the Deutsche Bahn was privatised into a single, state-owned company. As such it is beholden to slow, non-deciding German governments, including investments into the network.
How is that privatized, then? If it’s state-owned, the only thing that changed was the legal framework that applies to the entity, none of the incentives of privatization actually applying to it.
But if it's state owned, surely it's not privatised? In what what is the ownership private if it's 100% public?
It worked OK for the UK. Passenger numbers, which had been steadily falling, started to increase. On the other hand, there are complaints about high fares.
Are you sure about that?
I still remember "traingate", the smear campaign that followed Jeremy Corbyn (1) and how leaked CCTV video proved him right much later (2).
(1) https://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-walked-past-em...
(2) https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/virgin-release-traing...
This has been true for Germany too. Passenger numbers are at an all-time high, but that's part of the problem - the infrastructure is at it's limit, but building new infrastructure is met with strong resistance by locals. e.g. the planned relief for the notoriously overcrowded Hamburg - Hannover track got effectively canceled, and this is only about the get worse with increased traffic from the new tunnel to Denmark that is set to open by the end of the decade.
I think very few Brits would agree that rail privatisation has "worked". Poor and old carriages, overcrowded, slow, late trains, and generally a lack of investment. Oh, and ridiculously high fares (often well over air fares!), which seem to increase above inflation every.single.year.
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Passenger numbers were generally CLIMBING in the 80s, Intercity was massively popular and successful, which was the reason for sectorization - let the bits that should be funding the system as a whole succeed, and let the bits that need subsidies fail.
Sectorization was, of course, the prelude to privatization.
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Japan did it differently than the EU counterparts:
>The most basic, fundamental difference between the British and Japanese railways is how they were privatised. In Britain, the tracks were split from the trains.
from a ft article I apparently can't link
The split of infrastructure and the invisible hand of the train operator market seems to be a correlation.