Over the past decade, if you've ridden German railways....being over the age of fifty, you might go and compare conditions. The new trains have AC, but the AC on a really hot day (say 90-degrees F) marginally functions. The seats are more comfortable than those from the 1970s/1980s, but often have gum or cuts in them. The platforms rarely if ever match up, with you stepping on the modern trains sometimes a foot below the platform, or even a foot above the platform.
So then we come to timeliness. Most folks who travel around Europe, and then compare against the German dedication of timeliness, will admit that German make a heck of a lot of effort to run on time. It would be a joke to try and even compare the Italian standard of railway timineleness to the German standard.
But in the past decade, a lot of people began to shift away from driving to work or university, and instead....take the railway system (the Bahn). So you can start to see already by 2009, there were problems in 'connecting'.
'Connecting' meant that you arrived at the Wiesbaden station by bus at 7:05 AM, and the S-Bahn train is scheduled to leave at 7:09 AM (just enough time to walk into the station and arrive at the platform). The 7:09 AM Bahn would leave about two mornings per week at 7:14 instead. Between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, at least two stops would be delayed three minutes each (for differing reasons). So the train arrived in Frankfurt around 11 minutes late, and your connect tram (to reach your job site on the north or east side of town) failed. You flip your smart-phone on, and do the calculations....to find that the next tram is 8 minutes away. So you arrive at work 19 minutes late, and the boss asking 'why'. In fact, the boss got used to 'why' and you grow frustrated with this game.
Across Germany, it's been this way for at least two decades. What the Bahn folks will admit is that the number of passengers has grown, and the capability of the network to provide that timely schedule is now tested on a day-by-day basis. Toss in bad weather, summer vacation periods for the Bahn employees, and you have a frustrated mess on your hands.
Two years ago, the Bahn decided that they'd invest money and make a 'guarantee' about not being ten minutes. At the time, I just laughed because you were inviting tons of problems and pressures upon the Bahn employees, and guaranteeing a stiff rise in ticket prices.
If you fail to reach your destination within ten minutes of the projected period.....if you submit the paperwork, you get your money back.
Well, after 18 months of this guarantee.....the Bahn folks admit that 1.5 million applications have been sent in for money-back. The money paid so far? It's near 3.5 million Euro. In fact, if you read through their material....the more that people realize the guarantee exists, and how easy it is to apply, the amount of usage is increasing. A software App is now out there....zero cost....for you to put in the info, and provide evidence of your late arrival. Somewhere, two to four weeks later, you are supposed to be given your money back.
The local RMV (our Rhein region Bahn organization) has come out in the past couple of days and admitted another additional trend.....fraudulent money-back applications. In one case that they admit....ONE single guy had fired off forty applications in one single day for late trains. Oddly, that one got noticed, and there's probably some serious legal woes for that guy.
RMV now even admits that a minimum of five-percent of the guarantee pay-backs are of a suspicious nature....meaning man-hours spent in investigating the claim and the facts. All of this means....more people involved in the system, and trying to prove or disprove the application.
A mess? Yes. But they had to do something to convince people that they were working hard to correct the timeliness issue.
What'll happen? At some point when they reach a massive rate of pay-backs....this whole game will collapse, and the promise will disappear. Lets face facts....the present system was designed and built to handle x-amount of the population, and it's probably stretched now to double that. Even adding the double-decker passenger cars, and running extra long trains.....has yet to solve the problem.
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