2023-04-16 15:15:03
Never before have German rail users had to be so patient: in 2022, only 65.2% of the trains of Deutsche Bahn (DB), the main railway company, arrived ” on time “, that is to say officially with less than six minutes late. A deterioration of 10% compared to 2021. Enough to discourage those who would be tempted to leave the car in the garage, even though the social-democratic-ecologist-liberal tripartite government has set itself ambitious objectives for the decarbonization of transport. By 2030, it foresees a doubling of the number of passenger-kilometres (a unit of measurement equivalent to transporting a passenger over a distance of 1 kilometre) on rail, as well as an increase in freight to 25 % of freight traffic.
The project is already considered threatened, because the year 2023 does not look any better for rail travelers, due to infrastructure problems. To the point that the government split a mea culpa in early April: “We can only ask rail customers for understanding, and beg their apologies. The situation is so dramatic that there is no alternative to the general renovation of the network”, said Secretary of State for Transport Michael Theurer, explaining that the government had “found, on arriving, charges inherited from the past”. The implication: two decades of disinvestment in the country’s rail infrastructure… a policy knowingly carried out by the governing parties, which are more inclined to favor the road.
In the 2000s, Deutsche Bahn, 100% owned by the federal state and owner of the infrastructure, had pursued a strategy of international expansion, investing abroad rather than on the national network. Result: signaling failures, switch problems, overloaded tracks, canceled or dysfunctional trains (air conditioning, toilets) are the daily life of passengers. Not to mention the considerable delays on freight.
Multiplication of delays
A necessary evil… before the situation improves, assure today the persons in charge of the railway company. Because since 2020, the multiplication of delays is explained by the numerous works on the tracks, linked to the increase in public investments for the modernization of the network. Indeed, 13.6 billion euros were devoted to this effort in 2022, a record. When he took office at the end of 2021, the government announced a budget for rail of 62 billion euros, by 2030. At the end of March, a new envelope of an additional 45 billion euros, by 2027, was promised by the government, financed for the first time by an increase in tolls on heavy goods vehicles.
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