Accountability sinks

Germany is somewhat rubbish.

I arrived at the train station in the night after 6 hours train journey. German Railways app shows there will be my final leg train in 45 minutes. I wait in the cold at night, sitting in the station building because it's warmer there. 5 minutes before departure I go on the platform. The local display shows no train, even though the all still shows it. I waited for nothing.

Syncing the app with the train station? Somebody else's problem.

In half an hour there should be a replacement bus for another cancelled train. There are no signs in the app or the station that indicate where that bus is to be found. You just need to know.

Putting sings for replacement buses due to degraded service that's long planned and already happening for 2 months? Somebody else's problem.

An old man asks if the bus will allow to catch the train connection at its destination. The bus driver bitches at him for asking that question -- not his job. Somebody else's problem.

Training the bus driver that, being an official replacement of a train, he needs to know that, clearly also somebody else's problem than that of the German Railways.

It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.

The bus is ice cold for an hour. When am old lady gets off and tells the bus driver that it was freezing all journey, he asks "well what can you do". Bewildered she answers "turn on the heating"? He didn't expect that. He seemed to think that everything except driving was somebody else's problem.

This is just one night's bus journey story. I also got my SIM card deleted and a parcel was lost in the subsequent week. Documenting here the amounts of "somebody else's problem" I encountered in their customer support hotlines is somebody else's problem for me for now.

And the root of all that? Privatization.

The German mail rail and track operator (Deutsche Bahn) isn't private but 100% state owned (and control sits with the federal government). They wanted to privatize it a couple of decades ago but abandoned it. There is still some hybridization between supposedly it being a business and also a public service left in the law, though.

There is some degree of accountability for DB: Other organizations like Swiss and Austrian railways stopped taking schedules of DB seriously and stopped waiting or booking through.

Given how good the rail systems are in several Asian cities despite/thanks to being private, you might want to reconsider that opinion.

No, it's not. It's bureacracy, and it exists in every big organisation, private or public. I'd actually suggest that public sector bodies are often worse for this.

They are only worse because they are bigger. If the private replacement organization gets as big, they get the same problems.

Really?

The more focused a company is (the more reliant it is on its core service) the more accountable it can be. I'd argue many companies are if anything more accountable than the government. It doesn't have to be true, but I'd argue it often is.

The Deutsche Bahn AG is in fact a private Aktiengesellschaft(which is to say a stock company) with the german gov't owning 100% of the shares. I'd very much argue that it is run mostly like a private enterprise and only occasionally compelled by the government to act like a public service.

You sure the ~600 companies that the Deutsche Bahn is made up of can be compared to one state-owned entity?

Yes, but doesn't change that it is 100% state owned and controlled with a mixed mandate (business/public service - see art 87e GG). No reason to absolve the owner and the associated politics from their responsibilities.

The legal form doesn't determine whether something is state owned or private.

All rolls up into one 100% owner and having a lot of subsidiaries isn't unusual.

The actual root is even widely acknowledged: DB has been underfunded for a long time.

I believe they make a good point: making a vertically integrated entity could matter more than just buying most of the shares.

If we are discussing tendencies of "privatized vs public", it's hard to ignore that factor. Public entities that historically worked well weren't just masses of 600 subcontractors.

But again, that is up to the owners - and the owner is the state. Also, the state didn't buy most of the shares: it had full ownership before and kept it while the legal form changed.

It's still the government running the company if they own all the shares. So what's your point?

I presume running a national rail system is somewhat different from a railway for a single city. How good are the national rail systems in these countries?

It’s an AG, why should it be funded?

Japan’s is the greatest in the world, for one.

Why would it not given the legal framework put in place?

Most of the world agrees that public transport has external benefits and therefore is deserving of public funding.

> the root of all that? Privatization

Honesty, it's German politics doing precisely this that's part of the problem: flippant diagnoses too broadly applied from afar.

I would say Deutsche Bahn has managed to combine the disadvantages of public services with the disadvantages of private companies into one coherently terrible package.

Exactly.

Being a bus driver used to be a decent job for semi-retired construction workers, and such.

But then privatization hit, and over the last 20 years, there is no niceness left. They're even trained to disregard customers, and penalized otherwise. It's insanely inhumane.

And the causal effect is very clear, there can be no doubt about it. It's not the bus driver's fault.

Well it's pretty much the same with the SNCF in France. However, surprisingly it is still more reliable than the DB (less accident, more on time); which is quite shocking considering German's reputation...

There is still a meaningful difference. Businesses usually need to have some profit even if minimum so they will run leaner for the same output because of efficiency.

I agree that there are many big businesses bureaucracies but they tend to be in areas closely linked to the state/government because of heavy regulation: banks and insurance for example. They tend to survive despite their terrible efficiency because it is way too costly to enter their business for a small actor. Any of their real competitors is already big enough that the bureaucracy is already well established...

> It's pitch black outside, the windows are opaque due to moisture, so I can't tell where we are even though I was born the area and lived here for 18 years. The bus driver makes no announcements about the stops, there is no display. Knowing when to request a stop to get off? Somebody else's problem.

I have experienced this many times. Thankfully the bus drivers here in Hungary are pretty helpful (well, in my county at least), and worst case: you ask other passengers who also happen to be friendly. When it is pitch black outside and the windows are opaque due to moisture, it is not only your problem, but everyone else's, and people often find a way to cooperate and work together.

A business only needs to make a profit efficiency is not required or desirable.

They still don't make money off of being rail systems, they make money off of real-estate developments.

So, sure, you can have a rail system self-fund as long as you let it build whatever the fuck it wants at stations and funnel all the profits back into the train line.