Bahn 'Crisis' Meeting

Over the past two months.....three major 'crisis' meetings have been held at the German Bahn (the national railway operation).  ARD, public TV, Channel One, noted observations from yesterday's crisis meeting.

What one can say over the driving force of the 'crisis'...it's mostly over declining confidence that the national railway system works as advertised.  You can sit at the platform area of the Wiesbaden Bahnhof (train station) for an hour and observe the rush-hour traffic, and the number of delayed arrivals and delayed departures.  For people relying upon this structured method of travel.....a fair number of them had to depend on a bus or two....to get themselves to the station to start their little 'trip' to work.  Most have to depend on some tram or bus network deal, upon arrival at their destination (say Frankfurt, Darmstadt, or Mainz), and if they miss that 5-minute pause point....their next connection isn't for twenty to thirty minutes.....causing them to face the supervisor or boss and detail their woes in travel.  After enough of these, you start to think about using the car and dismissing the rail travel.

The 'crisis', if you want to call it that....is over this frustration and anger.  You could even be standing there on a mid-summer's morning and observe six out of twenty departures on a 10-to-20 minute delay pattern, with people standing there shaking their heads.

So what did yesterday's meeting accomplish?  As the ARD journalists note.....everyone had ideas on correcting delays.  But every single one of these revolve around more funding.  What the experts suggest is that the Bahn needs two-billion Euro more a year....minimum.  Some even suggest it ought to be near six-billion EXTRA Euro a year.  Where this mythical money would come from?  Unknown.  The mere suggestion that ticket prices would rise 25-percent?  It'd freak out some Germans and convince them to travel via car. 

A political magnet?  That's also part of the trouble here because various political parties are now attached to the 'crisis' meetings and want to push their agendas.

What'll likely happen?  I would view the talks revolving mostly around tickets going up 5-percent a year, for several years.....and the government having some 'donation' of one billion Euro to the pot a year for a period of three or four years.  And the results?  Even if it corrected 50-percent of the delays....it'd be called a remarkable success.

The problem here, if you go and stand in the middle of public transportation....say in Hamburg's main station, or the Hauptbahnhof of Frankfurt....the systems are taking a remarkable number of people, and moving them throughout a 18-hour day.  Because of the urbanization of these metropolitan areas....they developed like a magnet, and more people flock to this phenomenal lifestyle.  Each one of these public transportation structures is stretched as far as they can make it.....to resolve this daily movement requirement of the general public. 

In the end, without much resolution, I would expect a quarter of the population to give up and go back to using their cars.....causing the next 'crisis'.....the autobahns, streets, and parking structures unable to handle that traffic flow.