I would say the root cause of the DB issues is rather the failed attempt to privatise it, which caused ~~years~~ decades of infrastructure underinvestment to cook the books to make it look more attractive to private investors.

But of course the strong car lobby also played a role in that.

Additionally, the number presented is most likely too high, since it's more important to tune the numbers than to provide good service.

Example: a late train can be taken out of service and replaced, or even not. Voila! Not late anymore.

I wish this wasn't the reality.

The American auto industry effectively killed trains here. I’d love to have often-late high speed trains instead of “you want to go from Texas to Chicago? Fly, drive, or go fuck yourself.”

It’s super funny because at swiss train station they always say

“Train X is delayed by Y minutes, this is due to delays in France/Germany and not the Swiss railways” on the megaphone LOL

Yeah, but the integrated timetable for Germany is just around the corner. 2070 😭

The Swiss railway network is nuts. From Not Just Bikes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc

I went to switzerland two times via train the last few years (usually I go with my dad by car), and both times this happened. Once we had to sleep there overnight, because after we got in with another train, there were no more trains through the mountains.

The infamous Scheuer-Wende.

For the non germans: say a train is supposed to go from Munich over Hamburg to Kiel, and then return back to Munich. If that train accumulates so much delay that it could not even start the return trip on time, it might just stop in Hamburg, dump all the passengers, and turn around heading to Munich.

Now the skipped stops don't count as delayed, since the train never stopped there, the train is on time again for the return trip, and hundreds of passengers are pissed off and stranded somewhere they never wanted to be.

Yeah Is Slovenia the worst in europe or 12th best? Most probably it's just random which countries are in the graph.

I'm pretty sure Germany uses the exact same logic.

I just read that every 10th train voming from Germany into Switzerland is late, and they don't wait anymore, because they mess up the rest of the route.

People really underappreciate trains in the Netherlands. Not only are they relatively punctual (even in a worldwide ranking), but having that in addition to having a dense schedule is really pretty impressive. In that sense, only Japan truly has us beat, I think.

From my experience, their problems are just of a different nature. Dutch trains are punctual, but the carriages are often in a filthy state.

Zugfinder seems to use a consistent definition of anything below 5 minutes being punctual. So those are in fact comparable values.

In Belgium it's 6 minutes and only the arrival at the final destination is checked. Cancelled trains are also not included in the statistics, which has lead to trains being cancelled to increase punctuality: instead of starting it's journey 10 minutes late, the train starts "on time" 1 hour later. Travellers missing connections is also not included in the statistics.

So put these 3 together and the actual delays of travellers are much larger than the statistics would like us to believe.

And to add insult to injury, to increase their "punctuality", the train operator seems to increase journey times with every schedule revision. So not only are trains less punctual than they were a few decades ago, journey times are also often significantly longer.

So according to the statistics, Belgian trains are doing fine, but the actual travellers disagree.

Last time I was in geography class, it was located in Asia, not Europe. Things have changed in the world since then, but I do not think this has. Hope that helps.

Japan is just east of China, across the Sea of Japan and a hair north of the East China Sea. You can't miss it.