fyi regional trains (which the deutschlandticket is valid for) are very punctual, it is the long distance/ICE trains that are always late/broken, and you cannot ride those with thw deutschlandticket anyways.

no they are not. source: i am german and i use regional trains occasionally

Most local and S-Bahn trains in Germany are pretty decent, data is pretty clear on this. Its not Swiss level but still pretty good. Nothing compare to ICE.

not sure what you count RB/RE as, but they are absolutely broken as well in my experience.

The german trains, even at their worst, are so much better than anything in the US. Complaining can also be a sport in Germany. Take a ride on Njtransit or the NYC subway to appreciate the difference. Or try to get anywhere in New Jersey without a car. In many parts of Germany, you can get almost anywhere conveniently with only public transportation.

what’s going on in New York is irrelevant. The trains in Germany are largely bad. Bad enough that I don’t use them unless I have to. Once they’re at that stage it doesn’t matter how much worse they get for me, I still won’t use them.

It's probably worse if it was once reliable and now not, compared to if it's never reliable: if it's never reliable, you've been trained to have a huge safety margin and backup plans, if it's reliable and suddenly it messes up, you're thrown in a new situation and have to think "Shit, what do I do now?". Probably very stressful, and it leads people to avoid the service altogether.

Although apparently NYC subways used to be better too.

I can't say what your experience is and what 'absolutely broken' means. There is data on these things. I can only tell you what the data says. Could be you are in region that is worse then others. Or your definition of 'absolutely broken' is different then most peoples.

thats great, but they are on time 85% of the time vs long distance trains' 62%

https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...

see my other comment too

If you take a train to work five days a week and it's "on time" (not delayed by 6 minutes or more) 85% of the time, you'll be late on at least one day most weeks. Hardly very punctual.

Personally, I think they should just abandon timetables, run trains as fast as they can, and if you need to be somewhere by a certain time, you give the planner a target reliability and it uses a probabilistic model of the entire system to tell you when to leave so you can arrive on time (0 minutes delay, or earlier) with that given probability.

true, the actual word used is less important to me than the distinction between long distance trains and regional trains, since those get conflated quite a bit in this discussion.

Are you crazy? I use local trains daily and they are everything, but punctual. Also, S-Bahn? Worst service ever.

idk what to tell you except that your personal experience does not generalize, see https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...

the regional trains run by regional orgs rather than db get similar results, e.g. bwegt in baden württemberg or beg in bavaria

https://beg.bahnland-bayern.de/de/aufgaben/kontrollieren/pue...

https://vm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/mobilitaet-verkehr/bahn-...

> Continental USA: 8 million square kilometer.

> Germany: 0.35 million square kilometer.

This does not matter much, since most people do not travel across states, countries, continents, etc on a daily basis. Most people probably travel within a 50 km (30 mile) radius (travelling to and from work, daycare, school, shopping, etc.).

iirc, the average is slightly higher in the US, but this is probably more due to how the US has approached urban planning over the last century or so than to the size of the country.

> But the answer is obviously (trigger warning for the libertarians...) taxes.

I think many people forget the huge societal cost of owning and running cars, including infrastructure maintenance, crash-related deaths and injuries, health conditions caused by crashes, air and noise pollution, climate change, resource extraction, and time lost in traffic. In other words, the savings from reducing these social, health, and environmental costs could easily finance the ticket. A study estimated that a modal shift of 10% to public transit could save Germany about 19 billion Euros a year (https://foes.de/publikationen/2024/2024-04_FOES_OEPNV.pdf).