Comment by nh2
5 months ago
Germany is somewhat rubbish.
I arrived at the train station in the night after 6 hours train journey. German Railways app shows there will be my final leg train in 45 minutes. I wait in the cold at night, sitting in the station building because it's warmer there. 5 minutes before departure I go on the platform. The local display shows no train, even though the all still shows it. I waited for nothing.
Syncing the app with the train station? Somebody else's problem.
In half an hour there should be a replacement bus for another cancelled train. There are no signs in the app or the station that indicate where that bus is to be found. You just need to know.
Putting sings for replacement buses due to degraded service that's long planned and already happening for 2 months? Somebody else's problem.
An old man asks if the bus will allow to catch the train connection at its destination. The bus driver bitches at him for asking that question -- not his job. Somebody else's problem.
Training the bus driver that, being an official replacement of a train, he needs to know that, clearly also somebody else's problem than that of the German Railways.
It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.
The bus is ice cold for an hour. When am old lady gets off and tells the bus driver that it was freezing all journey, he asks "well what can you do". Bewildered she answers "turn on the heating"? He didn't expect that. He seemed to think that everything except driving was somebody else's problem.
This is just one night's bus journey story. I also got my SIM card deleted and a parcel was lost in the subsequent week. Documenting here the amounts of "somebody else's problem" I encountered in their customer support hotlines is somebody else's problem for me for now.
There is some degree of accountability for DB: Other organizations like Swiss and Austrian railways stopped taking schedules of DB seriously and stopped waiting or booking through.
I used to work with German people (I’m Finnish) and despite being pleasant people, simple things took a long time. It was always something to do with the responsible person not being available, perhaps on holiday or sick leave, and it wasn’t possible for anyone else to take over their responsibilities.
I got the feeling that papers were being pushed around from desk to desk until a vacant desk came along and progress stalled.
In the same job, I worked with Americans. Very nice people and super easy to get along with. Always friendly and with a healthy sense of humor. A certain lightness of heart was always present even when dealing with urgent or negative matters. Only thing was that they made a lot of mistakes that often didn’t seem accidental — I saw a bit of negligence, along the lines of “if someone took just one look at this, they’d be able to tell in seconds what’s wrong”.
> It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.
I have experienced this many times. Thankfully the bus drivers here in Hungary are pretty helpful (well, in my county at least), and worst case: you ask other passengers who also happen to be friendly. When it is pitch black outside and the windows are opaque due to moisture, it is not only your problem, but everyone else's, and people often find a way to cooperate and work together.
And the root of all that? Privatization.
The German mail rail and track operator (Deutsche Bahn) isn't private but 100% state owned (and control sits with the federal government). They wanted to privatize it a couple of decades ago but abandoned it. There is still some hybridization between supposedly it being a business and also a public service left in the law, though.
The Deutsche Bahn AG is in fact a private Aktiengesellschaft(which is to say a stock company) with the german gov't owning 100% of the shares. I'd very much argue that it is run mostly like a private enterprise and only occasionally compelled by the government to act like a public service.
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The actual root is even widely acknowledged: DB has been underfunded for a long time.
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You sure the ~600 companies that the Deutsche Bahn is made up of can be compared to one state-owned entity?
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Given how good the rail systems are in several Asian cities despite/thanks to being private, you might want to reconsider that opinion.
I presume running a national rail system is somewhat different from a railway for a single city. How good are the national rail systems in these countries?
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They still don't make money off of being rail systems, they make money off of real-estate developments.
So, sure, you can have a rail system self-fund as long as you let it build whatever the fuck it wants at stations and funnel all the profits back into the train line.
No, it's not. It's bureacracy, and it exists in every big organisation, private or public. I'd actually suggest that public sector bodies are often worse for this.
They are only worse because they are bigger. If the private replacement organization gets as big, they get the same problems.
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Exactly.
Being a bus driver used to be a decent job for semi-retired construction workers, and such.
But then privatization hit, and over the last 20 years, there is no niceness left. They're even trained to disregard customers, and penalized otherwise. It's insanely inhumane.
And the causal effect is very clear, there can be no doubt about it. It's not the bus driver's fault.
> the root of all that? Privatization
Honesty, it's German politics doing precisely this that's part of the problem: flippant diagnoses too broadly applied from afar.
Really?
The more focused a company is (the more reliant it is on its core service) the more accountable it can be. I'd argue many companies are if anything more accountable than the government. It doesn't have to be true, but I'd argue it often is.
Communism is the answer!