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When taking a plane is cheaper and faster, something is wrong. I had the choice between a two times 5 hour train journey a few months ago or taking the plane fo

When taking a plane is cheaper and faster, something is wrong. I had the choice between a two times 5 hour train journey a few months ago or taking the plane for a journey from Berlin to Düsseldorf. We took the plane. It was cheaper than the train and it saved us spending money on a hotel. I didn't feel good about it. But the alternative was spending (at least) ten hours in a train. There are two problems here. 1) why does it five hours with a "high speed" ICE train (avg. speed ~100km/hours, pathetic). 2) why is this so expensive that taking a plane is actually cheaper? Deutsche Bahn is a good example of everything that is wrong in Germany. Inefficient, overstaffed, under performing, customer hostile, bad infrastructure, overpriced, too slow, and often failing to do its job entirely because of mechanical failures, poorly managed cascading failures resulting from other delays (trains waiting for each other and them piling up and causing more delays), or its staff going on strike every month or so. It's not that they are lazy but they have a lot of people doing very unimportant things very poorly and not enough people doing the important things well. There's a lot of very comfy management that can't seem to manage anything. A bloated IT department responsible for making mediocre apps/websites (their payment system is absolute shit and UX disaster zone), and layers and layers of bureaucracy doing god knows what. I've had some professional dealings with them as a startup without much success. Nobody you talk to can decide anything, they have a hopeless not invented here syndrome (they want to do everything in house and they just can't), and you are competing with professional grafters and consulting companies milking them for many millions for silly shit. It's easy to see how they are bleeding cash.

PoignardAzur 2y ago
> There are two problems here. 1) why does it five hours with a "high speed" ICE train (avg. speed ~100km/hours, pathetic). 2) why is this so expensive that taking a plane is actually cheaper? Subsidies aside, an airport network is much easier to fund than a train network. Each new airport you open brings you network effect benefits, whereas opening a new train station is worthless if you don't also build new train lines, with all the associated infrastructure costs and eminent domain issues.
- eesmith 2y ago
  I may have this wrong, but I don't think there are many new airports being built in Europe or the US. Upgrades, certainly, but even a new airport like in Berlin replaced an old airport which was shut down, right? I'm pretty sure in the US there were a lot more airports back in the 1950s when war surplus prop planes were cheap, jet service wasn't available, lots of vets had flight experience, and back before the interstate system was built. Some became general aviation fields, with no commercial flights these days. Basically, the network effect wasn't enough to keep up with the cost savings of using bigger planes and bigger hubs, given that people could more easily drive to the airport (on roads 'with all the associated infrastructure costs and eminent domain issues'). Don't know about Europe though.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    We have many military airports that nowadays also take civilian traffic, that is how they are "opening" in Europe. Mostly based on the after effects of cold war wanning, and EU. As things are, maybe they will invert trend and focus on military only again.
    - eesmith 2y ago
      Could you give me a few examples? A DDG search is proving hopelessly inadequate. It only finds information about new/remodeled terminals, and the proposed Central Communication Port in Poland, which is greenfield (literally) but hasn't started yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_Germany helpfully lists airfields in Germany which don't have regularly scheduled commercial passenger service. The first I picked was Kiel Airport, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_Airport , which fits my description of how airports don't benefit from a simple network effect. It had "27 national and international destinations" back around 1930, then was mixed military and civilian. The first terminal was built in 1965. In 1987, "Lufthansa began offering scheduled flights to Frankfurt, and later to Cologne/Bonn, Munich, Copenhagen, Kaliningrad and Riga." The last commercial scheduled passenger flight was in 2006. I'm curious if any of the military airports you mention once had passenger service, reflecting how airports used to be more common as technical limitations prevented them from carrying many passengers or going all that far.
m_fayer 2y ago
Don’t know why this is being voted down, I’ve seen some of this with my own eyes as well. They even had an in-house “startup incubator” some years ago that was straight out of German-Silicon-Valley.
DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
> overstaffed Deutsche Bahn is def. not over- but understaffed. It used to be the case that there was at least one person on each platform, they had signal boxes all over the place, and (very probably) many more workshops and train depots distributed all over the country. Now they're running (trying to run, or trying not to stand still really) everything from a few centralized places. Add to this that they have dismantled ALL freight yards in the cities (Berlin, Hanover, Frankfurt, everywhere) and Deutsche Post switched from transporting mail in special night trains to clogging the highways with their trucks and it becomes apparent that the decades-long mantra of each and every politician "we must encourage more goods to be transported by rail" was a stinking lie all the time. Compared to what DB used to be up to the 1990s, and especially before the 1980s, the state of DB can only be described as heavily damaged, partially destroyed. Destroyed also because of the many, many thousands of kilometers of tracks that have been dismantled since some time in the 1960s.

PoignardAzur 2y ago

> There are two problems here. 1) why does it five hours with a "high speed" ICE train (avg. speed ~100km/hours, pathetic). 2) why is this so expensive that taking a plane is actually cheaper? Subsidies aside, an airport network is much easier to fund than a train network. Each new airport you open brings you network effect benefits, whereas opening a new train station is worthless if you don't also build new train lines, with all the associated infrastructure costs and eminent domain issues.

eesmith 2y ago
I may have this wrong, but I don't think there are many new airports being built in Europe or the US. Upgrades, certainly, but even a new airport like in Berlin replaced an old airport which was shut down, right? I'm pretty sure in the US there were a lot more airports back in the 1950s when war surplus prop planes were cheap, jet service wasn't available, lots of vets had flight experience, and back before the interstate system was built. Some became general aviation fields, with no commercial flights these days. Basically, the network effect wasn't enough to keep up with the cost savings of using bigger planes and bigger hubs, given that people could more easily drive to the airport (on roads 'with all the associated infrastructure costs and eminent domain issues'). Don't know about Europe though.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  We have many military airports that nowadays also take civilian traffic, that is how they are "opening" in Europe. Mostly based on the after effects of cold war wanning, and EU. As things are, maybe they will invert trend and focus on military only again.
  - eesmith 2y ago
    Could you give me a few examples? A DDG search is proving hopelessly inadequate. It only finds information about new/remodeled terminals, and the proposed Central Communication Port in Poland, which is greenfield (literally) but hasn't started yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_Germany helpfully lists airfields in Germany which don't have regularly scheduled commercial passenger service. The first I picked was Kiel Airport, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_Airport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiel_Airport , which fits my description of how airports don't benefit from a simple network effect. It had "27 national and international destinations" back around 1930, then was mixed military and civilian. The first terminal was built in 1965. In 1987, "Lufthansa began offering scheduled flights to Frankfurt, and later to Cologne/Bonn, Munich, Copenhagen, Kaliningrad and Riga." The last commercial scheduled passenger flight was in 2006. I'm curious if any of the military airports you mention once had passenger service, reflecting how airports used to be more common as technical limitations prevented them from carrying many passengers or going all that far.

m_fayer 2y ago

Don’t know why this is being voted down, I’ve seen some of this with my own eyes as well. They even had an in-house “startup incubator” some years ago that was straight out of German-Silicon-Valley.

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago

> overstaffed Deutsche Bahn is def. not over- but understaffed. It used to be the case that there was at least one person on each platform, they had signal boxes all over the place, and (very probably) many more workshops and train depots distributed all over the country. Now they're running (trying to run, or trying not to stand still really) everything from a few centralized places. Add to this that they have dismantled ALL freight yards in the cities (Berlin, Hanover, Frankfurt, everywhere) and Deutsche Post switched from transporting mail in special night trains to clogging the highways with their trucks and it becomes apparent that the decades-long mantra of each and every politician "we must encourage more goods to be transported by rail" was a stinking lie all the time. Compared to what DB used to be up to the 1990s, and especially before the 1980s, the state of DB can only be described as heavily damaged, partially destroyed. Destroyed also because of the many, many thousands of kilometers of tracks that have been dismantled since some time in the 1960s.