5 ms·
Why are the prices so high?
by scurvy 8y ago
Why are the prices so high?
- nisa 8y agoIt's difficult. They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company. They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. They need to invest a lot of money in the coming years because their infrastructure is crumbling and running on attrition. Here are the prices vs. inflation: https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533/1.2598616/default/die-preise-der-deutschen-bahn.jpg https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533... However the price for a certain track depends on a lot of things and this new high-speed track has lot's of buisness customers that avoid a flight this way - so it's priced higher. It's a complicated system with lot's of subsidies, subcontractors and so on. There is a price to pay for using the track to a different company that runs the train... Another problem is that freight train traffic is even more expensive and they simply forgot to invest in the system for 30 years - now the Autobahn is clogged with trucks...
- bogomipz 8y ago>"They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company" Can you say how it is "public owned" if it is not a publicly traded stock? It sound like their bid to list it on the stock exchange failed?
- nisa 8y agoI'm sorry not a native speaker - I mean the GmbH is owned by the state of Germany.
- majewsky 8y agoIt's an AG (a stock company), not a GmbH (a limited company). But yeah, all the stocks are still owned by the federal government, and therefore all profits get credited into the federal budget.
- bogomipz 8y agoThis is interesting. I am curious what is the upside to a stock company if all the shares are owned by the same entity(the government)? Are there some classes of the DB stack that are allowed to be publicly traded then?
- nisa 8y agoThe original plan was to somehow make the whole thing profitable and publicy trade a large partion of shares - so they bought a lot of companies and hoped that they can refinance the train operations. Turn's out it's not so easy...it was just typical management failure, neoliberal politics and pipedreams - so they stopped it in 2005 - Hartmut Mehdorn the CEO at the time is now infamous for basically destroying everything he touches. It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.
- bogomipz 8y agoVery interesting, thanks for the detailed information. I will need to read up more on this. It sounds like a good case study. Cheers.
- majewsky 8y ago> They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. Deutsche Bahn is infamous for extracting as much profit as possible, especially when they had no competition (long-distance buses were mostly outlawed until 2012 because of a Nazi-era law). A particularly well-known instance were the local express trains ("S-Bahn") in Berlin where they outright closed many depots and ignored mandated maintenance schedules until: > On May 1, 2009 an S-Bahn train of the class 481 in Kaulsdorf derailed due to a broken wheel. According to S-Bahners, the scheduled general inspection of that train had been postponed for two years. This accident led to the S-Bahn chaos of 2009, since the Federal Railway office mandated shortened test intervals and therefore at times only 165 out of 552 required quarter trains were available. Eventually, all axes had to be replaced because they were generally considered to be inadequate. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn (lightly edited because the original article reads like it came out of Google Translate)
- the_mitsuhiko 8y agoMostly because prices are fixed so it’s hard to raise then higher like airlines can do with their tickets.
- adrianN 8y agoTrain infrastructure is a lot more expensive than you'd think. This line cost about 10 billion Euros. If you want to recoup that money over twenty years at 4 million passengers a year that's 125 Euro per passenger. This doesn't include maintenance or the cost of the trains.
- Reason077 8y agoThe infrastructure will last a lot longer than 20 years. Perhaps hundreds of years, with proper maintenance.
- legulere 8y agoThe German government is extracting usually around 1 billion € yearly out of the German railway company.
- isostatic 8y agoGerman rail subsidies in 2014 were 17b a year, so not sure where this "extracting" comes from.
- nisa 8y agoas silly as it sounds it's true. Deutsche Bahn AG needs to get 850 million € a year back to the state. The rail tracks and local lines are heavy subsidized but there are different companies. They really made a mess with this attempt at privatization. It went so far that Deutsche Bahn AG destroyed their own (payed with public money in the 80ies) working and good rolling stock in an attempt to keep the market prices up? https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880 https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880