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Having lived in Germany and experienced the wonderful Deutche Bahn, I wouldn't really associate punctuality with being German.

• ramesh31 6mo ago
  >"Having lived in Germany and experienced the wonderful Deutche Bahn, I wouldn't really associate punctuality with being German." This is relative. In Germany, people complain when the train is late. Everywhere else, the train is just late.
  • pja 6mo ago
    IIRC DB currently has a worse punctuality record than the UK rail network. That takes some doing.
  • dgb23 6mo ago
    The Swiss nervously check the time when a train is 2-3 minutes late. When a train is late, the situation is basically on the brink of a national emergency.
    • alex_young 6mo ago
      In my experience this is often commiserate with an announcement that the service is late due to it’s arrival from [Germany, Italy, France].
  • arkensaw 6mo ago
    > In Germany, people complain when the train is late. Everywhere else, the train is just late. You think people don't complain when the train is late in other countries? That's hardly a uniquely German thing
    • saalweachter 6mo ago
      To be honest, I complain more often when the train is on time.
  • sersi 6mo ago
    I mean I've regularly seen trains in germany arriving AFTER the next train. Statistically they are worse than pretty much any european country. And outside of trains, my german friends run the gamut of being always on time to systematically being 30 minutes late. Don't really see much of a correlation between being German and punctual. Japan on the other hand I do associate with punctuality, when I worked there I was made to sit in the seiza postion for the m9rniny meeting if I was late by even 3 minutes. My friends there were overwhelmingly ontime except (and proving my point) for a German coworker I had there :)
  • Zababa 6mo ago
    This is not true, people complain a lot in France when the trains are late.
  • GTP 6mo ago
    I am currently living abroad, but I come from northern Italy. Rest assured that we complain a lot about our trains being late.
• SvenL 6mo ago
  The Deutsche Bahn rather cancel trains completely instead of them being late - which also says something.
  • chironjit 6mo ago
    This. Put another way, if it's harder to solve the problem than the statistic, then change the statistics. Obvious in many ways once you've lived there
  • eigenspace 6mo ago
    People love to parrot this, but it's not true and makes no sense for them to try and game the system this way. The mandatory compensation and bad press from cancelled trains is way more costly on them than having poor punctuality statistics. The reason that a late train can sometimes be cancelled is to try and stop a cascade of delays from happening. Tracks only have so much capacity, and if train gets delayed into a time-frame that is highly congested, trying to fit the delayed train into that time-frame will result in delaying other trains, which could then cause further problems down the lines and throw the entire network out of order. They accept a certain number of cascading delays like this, but sometimes it's just known that a certain delayed train will just be too disruptive to the network, so they're forced to just cancel a train to try and save the network's stability.
    • probably_wrong 6mo ago
      By the time a train is delayed enough to be canceled the mandatory compensation applies anyway, and I'm not sure how much DB cares about bad press. I can see the cancellations as a means of stopping a cascade of delays, but it's also true that doing so means the train won't count in the delay statistics for the remaining stops. If DB doesn't want people to accuse them of gaming the statistics, perhaps they should calculate said statistics in a way that doesn't directly benefit them when they inconvenience their delayed passengers even more?
    • SvenL 6mo ago
      You are absolutely correct and the context is also right. My comment was a little bit out of frustration (happend several times). I only heard about it from an amazing ccc talk (https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit_ist_eine_zier https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10652-bahnmining_-_punktlichkeit...).
• dxdm 6mo ago
  Alas, the tendency to overgeneralize from isolated samples over whole populations is universally human.
  • shermantanktop 6mo ago
    Everyone does it.
• tokai 6mo ago
  Most of the German stereotypes are not just untrue, reality is actually the opposite. Germans are not efficient as an example, they love layers of formality and documentation for its own shake at the cost of getting stuff done.
  • lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
    It's also not as clean as the stereotypes would suggest.
  • finaard 6mo ago
    As a German, after encountering Russian bureaucracy once, I commented to my wife that the main difference between Russian and German bureaucracy is that in Russia at least you can pay your way out.
  • smitty1e 6mo ago
    As a student of German (80 on DuoLingo) I'm fascinated by the definite articles. If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please? We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.
    • danans 6mo ago
      > If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please? > We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion. German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.
      • smitty1e 6mo ago
        Oh, don't drop a pfennig in me about the arbitrary genders. I'm contending that enumerating the article variations should spare us the ambiguous overlaps. Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it".
• ekr 6mo ago
  Sometimes, the Deutsche Bahn is so late, that it's early. Wrapping around. The previous train in the schedule sometimes was so late, that it was just a bit before the next one was supposed to depart. So the next one is cancelled or delayed. I experienced this a few times. But with the cheap Deutschland Ticket, I couldn't really complain at the time. Tho, Arnhem to Hamburg, even 8h late, was not the most enjoyable of experiences (again, Deutchland Ticket, around 2023 IIRC. so no IC trains, which didn't suffer to the same degree).
• danans 6mo ago
  You would associate it with punctuality if you had experienced the timeliness of long distance trains in the US.
• Markoff 6mo ago
  same goes with car quality, long gone are the times when German engineering was synonym of quality, if I had to choose something German or Japanese in the last at least 15-20 years the choice would be easy...