Accountability sinks

That’s a sad experience and I would definitely try to chase them robots. Sadly even though German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality, though when it comes to human service you can find yourself in peculiar position. And particularly if you are not German and happen to be in one of those international cities there where Germans are fed up with visitor. You waive goodbye to your 50€ and keep a story to tell, that’s all.

Sadly I don’t expect this all to get any better with robots and LLms and thing. We will be crying to meet a human sooner than later, and my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era when you actually have people in the loop, just for humanity’s sake.

>my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era

after the Butlerian Jihad.

>German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality

Ease of use maybe, although my parents and grandparents would like to argue differently. They are not as quick to work their smartphone, and the ticket machines are being removed everywhere to be replaced by apps that are much cheaper to run. This works fine for the younger generations, but older and less tech-savvy people are getting left behind.

Quality though, no way. Every single time I tried to give ÖPNV a chance in the last 3-4 years I was either different degrees of late or didn't arrive at all without switching to some alternative method of transport on the way. Doesn't even matter if I tried local routes (Frankfurt and Darmstadt) or longer inter-city connections to Munich or Leipzig, it's all completely broken. People in my company routinely book connections several hours earlier than they need to be places to have a chance of arriving in time, and often are still late. Trains are overbooked, connections are late or often cancelled altogether, seat reservarions don't work more often than they do, WiFi on the trains never works... Many, many things have to change for me to reconsider my default of taking the car everywhere, and I don't think they will in any sort of a relevant timeline.

It's not that they don't want to have people, it's that there are no people. Germany, as most of other countries in Europe, has an aging population and the workforce is hard to find. So all these "easy" things that can get automated, do get automated, oftentimes indeed at the price of quality of service in exceptional situations.

> german public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality

You have something mixed up there.

It's definitely easy to use. You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train. No security checks like an airport. No multi step check in. Just be there and get on. In many cases your ticket won't even be checked, and when it is it's while you're seated while the train is moving. Getting a ticket is no problem: the ticket machines are multilingual, and you type in the stops you want to go from/to and the date. You can also book one online and get a QR-like code you can print or display on your phone.

Quality is mediocre. The trains are often delayed, which is a problem with the size of the network and cascading failures. Once they do get to A, they get from A to B just fine, the seats are okay, the luggage space is okay, etc. The DB Navigator app is useful for finding alternative routes but it won't tell you whether your ticket is valid for them. It will tell you if the delay is so long that you're allowed to use any route.

The automations predate any demographic issues - mostly a (sticky) cost thing.

Well, they say that, but in my experience at least, that is just conjured up as a more palatable explanation after the fact. While I do think that a certain, even significant, amount of automation is good, there is also a large mass of unemployed that can undoubtedly be trained to fill these "human interaction" kind of roles (support). This workforce is still not hard to find at all. We just don't want to do that - there is not a single western country left that has low unemployment as its key prerogative.

Yes, it's only a profit thing. If you cut out the humans you can make more money. If not for your boss then for the company that gets the contract to make the automation.

> You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train.

The train is late. The lounges suck or are tied to a complex system of ticket tiers that seemingly don't correlate to price. You bought a specific seat but the train was changed so now no assigned seat and lol on a refund. And fuck you if you're crossing borders.

Germans travel a good amount by car for good reason [1]. When I'm in Germany, I tend to drive between cities because the alternative is burning several hours in buffers and delays.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

I was in Berlin earlier this year and everything too contactless payment, no app required.

> Ease of use maybe, although my parents and grandparents would like to argue differently.

at a second read (and thought) you are absolutely right, and there is a major moral to take from this story: it may be viewed as being against humanity's nature to remove legacy UIs for as long as there are old users willing to stick with them. like banning bicycles that do not run on batteries, can you imagine, as they'd be slower than other bikes!

we can definitely argue that a person in his right mind, and no matter the age, should be able to choose to stay with certain interface, if this does not incur massive costs. where I live you can still buy paper tickets from the driver, even though pay-as-you-go is the de facto choice for many, and of all ages. today I saw a minority ethnic girl buy a paper ticket rather than be penalized. everyone knew what happened, and I believe they were 100% human and much appreciated them getting paper ticket last minute from the driver.

This is the challenge of 21st century, innit? To motivate those who are OK with universal minimal income, which is apparently already there scattered in all forms of scam, surplus and wasted goods.

interestingly you forget to mention something that was not there 20 years ago, when these trains still be running ok. all that was not so well connected with all apps, you can have a Lime calculated in your route perhaps today, which was not there. and this all IS connected with DE system of public transport, which on its own, no matter the technical underlying, is superb. and trains are lot cleaner than many other places, even those regularly servicing Berlin,