alt Hacker Newsfor the people who wouldn't have inadvertently clicked on the website: it's not real money, it's a campaign to nudge the German provider to care about their infamous delays
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I am pretty sure that they know about the delays. A nice thing about the Deutsche Bahn is that they exist. It's not the case in every country in the world.
Sure, they can improve, but it seems possible. The French SNCF has improved a lot in the last decade, for instance.
The problem is the infrastructure. There is already the Generalsanierung under way, it will take a decade and secure the status quo.
A lot of delays are due to rail corridors being at capacity, but overboarding bureaucracy makes any improvement there a generational project.
Hamburg - Hanover has been discussed for decades with strong opposition from NIMBY groups with no solution in sight.
But even if there is no opposition things take ages. E.g. for restoring the 2nd track and electrification between Cottbus and Görlitz the plan is now to finish the project by 2041.
This is absolutely insane for 100km of track that were removed as WW2 reparations.
And looking at previous projects it's unlikely to finish in time.
The new S-Bahn track in Berlin between the main station and Gesundbrunnen was supposed to open in 2017. It got delayed over and over and is now finally scheduled to open by the end of this month - just a delay of 9 years.
And that's with an interim station because the real station at Hauptbahnhof wasn't finished in time - and no intermediate stop, that's now also in the planning phase and will mean the line will have to be interrupted again in the near future
Thanks for the context. Since I'm not interested in betting, I had not clicked on the grey on white About link at the bottom, which says:
> All the trains, delays, and data on this app are real.But the money isn't – because for that I'd need to move to Malta. Or Cyprus. Or Schleswig-Holstein.
I wonder how hard it would be to get a court ruling or new law that DB is required to bet on every arrival, and make their bets public in easily-digestible formats like .csv
I'd really like to see that happen for the S-trains, as well--DB loves nothing more than continuing to project an on-time arrival on the station board, as the time of departure comes and goes and other trains arrive and depart.
It's incredible that about 80% of people in this thread seem to be commenting without having looked at the website.
In defense of Deutsche Bahn, countries with comparable infrastructure but more reliable transport have put in about twice as much money per capita for the last 30 years at least.
Also, it went through a pseudo-privatisation back then, which hasn't helped (just private enough to focus on quarterly profits by letting bridges decay so that they have to be rebuilt or repaired in a few years, just public enough that they have to serve a lot of non-lucrative areas by law).
I have to admit I'm rather biased as I work there, but I would say most employees do the best they can with the hand they're dealt. It's just that politicians dealt them a really bad hand. And if Germany were to properly invest in infrastructure from now on, there's so much stuff that has to be repaired that reliability would go down even more in the next decade or so (seriously, this is not something you could fix in a year or two, even with hundreds of billions).