Because D66 leader Rob Jetten stood still for three hours with the train ‘in the middle of nowhere‘ in Germany, he came very late attended the recording of the winter special broadcast on Thursday Casa Di Beau. The politician was far from the only traveler with a train delay in Germany. Last year, 37.5 percent of German long-distance trains arrived late at their destination. Like this unpünktlich have not been the Deutsche Bahn (DB) in at least 21 years. That reports the German newspaper South German Zeitung Friday.
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At the request of German media, DB provided all arrival times from the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2024. According to the transport company’s calculation methods, a train with a maximum delay of 5.59 minutes is still on time. Ten years ago, in 2004, 84.3 percent of long-distance trains were still on time, an unprecedented record to date.
“80 percent of all delays in long-distance transport can be traced back to the outdated, failure-prone and overloaded infrastructure,” a spokesperson told the German newspaper. In June, parts of the track in Bavaria were impassable due to flooding.
A month later, Austrian supporters missed the first half of a football match during the European Championship in Germany due to train delays. The newspaper signed a comment Die Zeit on that the German one Pünktlichkeit and solidityall true ‘made in Germany‘ stood for, could now be replaced by ‘late in Germany’.
Invest billions
To combat the high number of delays in the future, DB has invested almost seventeen billion euros in rail infrastructure by 2024. If investments remain at the same level over the next two or three years, delays will decrease, says the CEO of InfraGo, the German counterpart of ProRail, in conversation with the South German Zeitung.
In the event of a delay of at least sixty minutes, a traveler can reclaim (part of) the travel costs. According to Richard Lutz, CEO of Deutsche Bahn, customers have done so en masse. In conversation with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel he states that the transport company must repay a “significant” amount of “hundreds of millions of euros”.
The arrival times of regional German trains are improving. In 90.3 percent of the cases, a regional train arrived on time in 2024.