If you were standing in Munich and needed to get yourself to Hamburg, using the fastest train possible.....it's 7.5 hours.
If you were in Berlin and wanted to get to Frankfurt, it'd take 4.5 hours.
If you were in Stuttgart and needed to get to Berlin, it'd take 6.25 hours.
Now....pay attention....this is optimum time....meaning nothing fails, and your connection works correctly. So out of twenty-five trips in a day between Hamburg and Munich...with past experience at this....something will occur on a quarter of these routes....to delay the train by 30 minutes....to two hours.
So the political move to dump all in-country flights by the Green Party? Frankly, I just don't see Germans that thrilled over this situation. The Greens are assuming that the bulk of Germans are pro-Bahn (my German wife is extremely anti-Bahn and it takes an awful lot of persuasion to get her to accept a simple two-hour trip, with one change-over). I'd take a guess that more than a third of German simply won't accept this period, and another third will be grumbling in a major way.
The fix to this....to make the Green agenda occur? Well....you'd arrange a flight from Munich to land briefly in Graz, Austria (maybe 15 minutes on the ground), and then take off to Berlin or Hamburg. From Frankfurt? You'd probably land briefly in Strassbourg, France and then fly onto the German destination.
My negative factors on the German Bahn system? The AC system marginally works in the summer. The reservation system marginally works. Maintenance aren't that common, but when they occur.....you usually are sitting there at some unknown train station and trying to figure out the local train to catch, and how to get to your planned destination. Criminal stuff to continually watch for? It's always a problem in Frankfurt and Hamburg's train station.
How would the Green Chancellor get from Berlin to various state locations for ceremonies or meetings? Well....she'd have to hop on the train or get driven there.
It's just an agenda that has a hard sell situation attached to it. You are asking folks to depend on the Bahn in a way....which just doesn't work that well.
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They also like to go on strike at the most inconvenient time, and I really don't like getting stuck anywhere and trying to find a bus.
That's the selling point of the airline business. You have ten-odd airlines that fly routes within Germany, and if one goes to a strike....it's not the end of the world. You can't say that for the Bahn folks. If they say strike for 3 days....nothing on the rails move.
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