Sure, it's nice to be able to take a train, but if my experience is that I'm never on time and also not sure if it will start or arrive at all, what good does it do? I don't want to miss my flight in another city, so am I gonna take the train? Or the one before that? Oh, I was taking the first one of the day, that's bad luck.
But a few cases of delayed or canceled trains, pushed in the media since it's easy to beat that horse, thankfully picked up by opposition-party-of-the-day (often those that were in government just a few years prior), and everybody talks as if no train is ever on time. And you can expect that car industry lobbies like that development too, without starting conspiracy theories here. (Tbh, if I was PR responsible for a car company, that's where I'd direct some funds..)
In 2022, only 65,2% of German trains were on time. In some regions, that ratio was under 50%.
https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/puenktlichkeit-bah...
https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
Within 5 minutes was at over 90% in july 2023 and within 15 minutes was around 98% in july, and it was even higher in the beginning of the year.
But you don't get that as front-page news.
The "Total passenger traffic" (Personenverkeher) values (which are the ones you quote) are calculated in some opaque way designed to hide the fact that "Long distance traffic" (Fernverkeher) are really bad.
More importantly, every single indicator in that page is going down, not up, and they are all worse now than they were in January 2022 [1].
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20221209074309/https://www.deutsc...
It's easy to select a subset of trains to make the statistic of this subset look bad. Take a single train that was canceled. In that subset, the "on time" statistic is 0%. Really bad, eh? Or take one that was on time. 100%. Great, eh? Well, not useful, just like all other anecdotes.
So, yes, sure, we can all pick the subset for which the statistic suits our narrative and then keep disagreeing about the facts. It's not a useful way of debating though and only suits lobbys in pushing their agenda.
(Or we take the facts as they are.)
P.S.: Even the 80.6% that you quote are not "really bad". Ever been in North America? No train traffic at all sounds worse than 80.6% to me. The German train system has its issues, but it's by far not as bad as the public perception seems to believe.
P.P.S.: Check out the German "Staustatistik" some time. Over a thousand every day. Of course nobody who wants to make trains look bad and implicitly push the car as the better alternative talks about this.
Two friends of mine have bought cars to go to work. A third is often crashing with me because they can't make it to their destination due to delays. And I changed cities in no small part due to a one-year train line closure that's six months behind schedule and counting. DB schedules ten minutes connections for trains that arrive nine minutes late and then argues "it's just nine minutes!" disregarding the actual fifty one minutes that it takes for the next train to arrive.
I love trains and I'll keep using them for as long as they remain the greenest option. But I hate DB with a passion and I dream of a day when those at the top end up in jail.
And FWIW, getting an appointment (both doctors and Bürgeramt) has been getting better and better every year here. Bürgeramt is now fully online, you can even pay by credit card, I’ve had an online diagnosis with a skin doctor that my health insurance paid for via OAuth, I can now have other appointments via websites.
This was Partially driven by COVID, partially because it’s simply advancing.
The train situation is a good starting point: an industry that used to be great and has been in slow decline for years without anyone doing anything other than shrugging and saying "well, that's how it is" or "yeah, but we are still better than X". I cannot speak for major macroeconomic trends but, as an individual, I can say that getting a doctor's appointment, an apartment, internet (not just the speed, but also getting the actual connection), a mandatory appointment at the "Bürgeramt" (and don't get me started on my citizenship application!) and (of course) traveling by train have been getting slightly more frustrating every year.
I know some of it is part of wider, world-wide tendencies (thanks, AirBnB), but it's also fair to recognize that the German government is getting asleep at the wheel. I actually appreciate that the government tends to err on the side of caution, but I also have to recognize that there's a line between "caution" and "paralyzed". I don't need to pay my taxes with Venmo, but I do need an apartment that I can actually afford to rent.