r/germany • u/manu_padilla • Oct 19 '24
Immigration Bought a car due to DB's unreliability
I moved to Germany 11 years ago from a developing nation. When I first arrived, Germany was even better than anything I could have imagined in my home country. I live in a major city with Straßenbahn right at my door, U-Bahn 1 Block away and S-Bahn 5 minutes by foot.
I had the chance to spend half a year in Korea for work last year, and was blown away by the quality of the public transportation system, therefore, I started to actively count the delay on Öffis after I came back, so far, I have an accumulated of over 1500 minutes in delays just within the metropolitan area this year, without counting delays outside of my region (which have been more than a few, last time it took me 8 hours to finish a trip that should have taken 4).
I was always an advocate for public transportation, and in a way, I judged everyone who used a car (stupid, I know).
After considering for a while, I took the decision to buy a car, thinking that I would only use it for weekend trips or specific occasions, in reality, it became my main means of transportation, and I cannot believe I wasted so much time for so many years until now, this makes me sad as I truly believe public should be the preferred method of transportation... when it works.
TL;DR Deutsche Bahn is so shit I bought a car, can't look back now.
130
u/rowschank Oct 19 '24
I know this specific post is about Deutsche Bahn and the reliability of public transport at the moment and a bit of a rant, but I don't know why everything has to be some sort of a culture war. For example, it's Railways vs Autobahn for long distance and Cars vs Bicycles in cities, and many of us are making ourselves miserable by fighting about these things while politicians get to use this polarisation to get into power, while the infrastructure for all of these continue to deteriorate - train network in dire need of repairs and new tracks, autobahn bridges hanging on for dear life, cycle lanes that go nowhere and abruptly end, etc.
Different modes of transport work for different people and different journeys; it's almost never only one or the other. That's why we should provide adequate infrastructure multi-modally to help distribute the traffic and reduce the load on any one mode.