Comment by ivan_gammel
1 day ago
I don’t think it’s ridiculous. A complex system that delivers customer further from destination than they were originally from, is flawed by design. And we all know what the problem is exactly: it is the design for capabilities that the company could not afford based on its budget/planning/KPIs. DB did not invest enough in infrastructure to support the big dream, and now they also have huge aging and retiring workforce problem. So let’s not pretend it’s normal and business as usual: complexity is not an excuse for mismanagement.
DB does not decide how much to invest in infrastructure, that’s decided by politicians.
Politicians do not dictate operational decisions. If they allocate X for infrastructure, the company should scale up or scale down to match that budget, rather than overpromise.
”The company” is not one company. The infrastructure manager (DB InfraGo in Germany) is managing tracks on behalf of the state. Operators (a regional operator in the case of this article) run as many trains as they want/are allowed, which in practice is more than the system can handle reliably. There are laws regulating how track access is awarded, so even when a DB group operator runs on tracks managed by DB InfraGo there is no single ”company” that makes a certain promise. The remedy is political either way, either change how track access is awarded to limit the number of trains allowed or increase funding for added capacity and maintenance.