Germany is Better at Transit than Many Germans Give it Credit For.

A positive post on one of the first countries to come to mind when people mention public transportation.

If you’re new, Next Metro is the latest project from transit writer Reece Martin. It’s a blog about all things cities and transit around the world. If you enjoy this piece, consider sharing it and sending it to friends, and also consider subscribing: it’s free!

---

Note: This article starts a bit ranty at some of the Germans in my comments, but if you stay you can hear me heap praise on transit in Germany!

I love Germany. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the country, but less than I’d like. It’s always been an enjoyable time, and the people have always been pleasant — I feel particularly at home with a lot of the cultural norms as well. I’ve travelled to countries around the world, and Germany has some of the best transit in the world.

A fun fact is that I was looking into it, and I did more “Transit Explained” videos on Germany on my YouTube channel over the years than on any other country (besides Canada of course). I would say I am pretty darn familiar with the public transportation of the country.

So then, perhaps you can understand how it makes me feel when I read unending comments complaining about railways and public transport in the country, on my videos about Germany, but also when I say — mention DB somewhere else.

Naturally, I got a lot of comments on this when I did my post talking about the breakup of Metrolinx and DB’s partnership in modernizing the Toronto region’s GO train network. “No surprise DB screwed this up!” “Good thing they fired DB!” “DB is the worst possible partner for this project!” This is on top of years of comments about DB, but also about all matter of public transit in Germany — I will address the Toronto comments in just a bit.

Now, obviously nobody needs me to tell them that there are problems in Germany — particularly with the reliability of long-term rail service and some of the planning behind major expansion projects like Stuttgart 21, but people conflate this with the status of all public transportation in Germany, or all rail services run by DB. This stuff happens in other countries too of course, but what frustrates me in the case of Germany is that the delta between what people say and what the actual level of service is is probably the biggest in the world. It is also worth noting that people complaining about one thing or another with Stuttgart 21 is telling — it’s got a lot of problems, but it’s a rail project of a scale that isn’t happening in most of the countries in the world; it’s got a lot of legitimate benefits and impressive infrastructure, and the way the construction is being done is so impressive (buildings on stilts on top of a shallow new underground station) that it’s the rare case of me saving tons of photos of a project — and Stuttgart isn’t even in the top 5 most populous German cities!

Complaining Is Tiring, Probably Not Helpful, and Sometimes Out of Touch

I think that people complain because in part they know better is possible: people look at Switzerland and rightly go “what the hell is going on here?”. This is both a fair assessment, and an oversimplification. Switzerland’s rail model is amazing, but it isn’t entirely transferable to Germany. You can do a takt plan and draw elements, but Germany is larger in population and geographic size — there are just a lot of difficulties and constraints you’re working with. This is not to suggest Switzerland has not done amazing things, and in a very rail unfriendly geography — but I think people think the grass is greener, and more similar to their own grass than it is. At the same time, there are no shortage of countries that would love to have Germany’s rail network and services, even within Europe!

Generally speaking, the state of rail service in Germany isn’t just down to DB — massive infrastructure investments, such as in way more dedicated high-speed lines, are needed and haven’t been made (Switzerland’s secret sauce is extremely effective infrastructure interventions that are extremely tightly coupled to service plans).

Germany’s network and national geography also make things tricky as I talked about in my YouTube video on the ICE trains. Germany has a geography that is harder to build out a good network for, because unlike France with its star topology HSR network, or Japan with its line topology, a really good German high-speed rail network needs a mesh — because there are lots of medium-sized cities that all ought to be mutually connected, instead of one or two really big ones that just need connections to the smaller ones; that this doesn’t exist means right now the German HSR network is a collection of upgraded segments and dedicated high-speed lines that interact a lot more with legacy rail infrastructure than you see in other countries. Unlike in, say, France, there is less of an abandonment of rail service to places that aren’t the largest urban areas — this is a good thing, but it creates challenges. Suffice to say, Germany is harder to serve well than some other places, and the difficulties in the HSR network obviously also apply to the conventional network.

I think the other problem is that people just sort of like being negative and piling on. This is not helpful. Criticizing and complaining is valid, but if you care about fixing things, you can’t just criticize and complain — even just a comment saying “DB sucks” is a waste of bits; it may well “suck” in some ways today, but we won’t make it suck less if complaining’s all we spend our time doing. A complaint can be motivating, but eventually it stops doing much and just exhausts everyone involved and wastes time, and it’s not like DB’s long-distance trains are all of public transport in Germany. I don’t have the stats, but given super-long journeys are generally much less common than short journeys for network dynamics reasons, it should be obvious that even if they are particularly bad, the impact will be muted quite a bit.

The final issue here is that just complaining a lot is unpleasant, and it also makes other people feel bad. Imagine if you were relatively fit, but then you were constantly telling your overweight (but trying to lose weight!) friend that you are “so fat” — maybe they might be sympathetic that you also had a sort of directional desire, but over time you’d probably just be coming off as a jerk. When it comes to long-distance rail in Germany, at least it exists! In Canada we have train service that crosses the country, it runs every few days and it’s frequently days late — the rolling stock is closing on a century old. Canada is an extreme case, but there are a lot of countries in similarly bad situations, perhaps just in different ways. When you go “our rail is the worst in the world!” not only are you wrong, but it comes off as ignorant! It’s like those interviews of American’s who can’t locate Belgium, or France on a map!

So, now I want to briefly talk specifically about Metrolinx and DB. The idea that Metrolinx should have gotten some other operator to work with is... cute, but there was an open procurement! Perhaps the procurement was such that your preferred agency didn’t bid, but a lot of agencies don’t really do international consulting. SNCF and MTR were in the running, but others who people might like were not, and we can’t change that. At the same time, while you might know that DB’s long-distance trains are frequently delayed — do you really know if Toronto’s trains aren’t even more delayed? It’s not hard to imagine they might be given Canada’s penchant for substandard transit! At the same time, this isn’t a long-distance train project — it’s an urban and suburban project, and Germany has world class urban-suburban rail in both the various S-Bahn and regional networks. Is Switzerland even better? Maybe, but as I said in that article, this is like complaining that your running coach was not the gold medalist at the Olympics. We still have so much to learn.

Germany Is A Transit Leader

So, what then does the world have to learn from Germany — and why are claims that, as one commenter put it: “trains here are the worst in the world” so ridiculous?

Well, for one, the scale of the public transport — there are over 50 tram systems (including in many small cities and towns that would at best have buses in my part of the world), numerous S-Bahn and U-Bahn networks (Munich, Berlin, and Hamburg each have great U-Bahn and S-Bahn systems), and yes, the nation-spanning DB network. I dream of a day Canada might have public transport that is even 30% as extensive and high-quality. I’ve already mentioned that problems with DB are heavily concentrated in (not limited to though) long-distance services, but you could remove all of these services and Germany would still have far more extensive rail public transit than most of the world.

There are also so many regional train services which fill a gap that is left empty not only in North America, but in a lot of places. When I was last in Berlin I took the FEx train into the city, but a random regional train back to BER when I was leaving, and it was remarkable both how well used this rather infrequent service was, how many other services were on offer, and how nice the trains were (my only real complaint about Berlin transit was the graffiti and anti-graffiti measures).

I also want to note that I have ridden rail systems in numerous countries, and the first thing I remarked as I was leaving BER on the FEx was how incredibly smooth the ride was, to the point where you could barely tell the train was moving. I love London’s Elizabeth line (which feels smoother than rail service in North America), but riding them close together, the train in Berlin was a smoother ride to a shocking degree.

One innovation that exists almost nowhere else in the world is the unified wayfinding you’ll see across German cities. It isn’t perfectly unified to be clear — but generally speaking, it’s easy to tell where a subway or S-Bahn station is in most of the German-speaking world, and that’s something the rest of the world should aspire to.

And then there’s proof of payment. Not having to go through fare gates sounds like a minor deal until you’ve lived with it. If you have a transit pass, you essentially never need to think about fare payment — No fumbling for your phone as you enter a station or topping up a card. But, what’s even better and harder to convey is how the system opens up stations so that they can seamlessly flow into commercial centres and malls, or into other transport facilities with far more entrances than you see in gated systems. It makes using public transport an effortless joy.

The architecture and design is also great. I understand that if you use the elevators at Berlin HBF you will rightly be annoyed, but that station is an amazing work of art that I could go on about for days. And there are so many great stations in Germany, not all big! Even many minor S-train stations are surprisingly attractive and civilized compared to the bus shelters on a chunk of concrete that much of the world gets.

I also have to put it out there, but the rail and bus services I have used in Germany were much more reliable and consistent than the majority of services I’ve used in Canada, much less the United States. As someone from Toronto, the idea that trams could run on a schedule down to the minute is almost inconceivable!

And how could I forget, but probably the world’s great rolling stock (among other things) manufacturer is German — Siemens! Sure, the trains might not have quite the “platform” appeal of those from Stadler, and Siemens doesn’t make as much stuff as CRRC these days, but the trains are many and they are generally very good. The Siemens Velaro is basically the standard global high-speed train! We don’t have many Siemens trains in Canada (though the new VIA rail trains and the Calgary S200’s are beautiful), and that’s a real shame. Germans also get to benefit from excellent buses, in some ways even more notable than the trains — some of the Mercedes buses I’ve taken in the country had nicer finishings than a modern apartment!

There’s also just all kinds of innovations in transit that have come out of Germany and often (but not always) gone global. Examples include incredible airport connections (Frankfurt’s Airport station in particular is just so striking, but Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg are also great), S-Train Systems, Stadtbahns which kicked off the idea of “light rail” globally (nobody has really lived up to Germany’s standard on this though), tram trains, and of course... the Schwebebahn (ok, not everything should be emulated). Much of the world could do well to adopt far more of these innovations!

What’s amazing is that as I rack my mind for criticisms of transit in Germany (besides DB’s on-time performance), the most obvious issue that comes to mind is just not building enough. Germany is actually generally really good at building rail, especially small tram and subway projects — and yet seemingly mostly for austerity reasons doesn’t build all that many of them, or build them quickly. What excites me is that this might be changing, and if it does that would be a huge win, because the world needs more German public transit.