[dominicl]

There is something fundamentally flawed in the maintenance cost of the Deutsche Bahn. According to the Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) it's costing the Deutsche Bahn 312,000€ per year to maintain a single kilometer of rail tracks. Given that and the already high subsidies of 10 billion € just to keep DB running, any kilometer additional track built is just increasing that hole.

I feel we are in a shit triangle here. Ticket prices are too high <-> quality is too low <-> overall cost is too high. There have been ongoing attempts to fix this by increasing rider amounts but at Germanys population density it's impossible to ever get even near to Japanese levels [2] of low total kilometers built with high usages. After my interpretation of things there is some innovation necessary to bring the per KM cost down before the Deutsche Bahn can play a more important role in the transportation.

On the same coin the cost of public transport for families vs. car ownership is just ridiculous. I've got a family of 5 - For every German intercity route going by car is significantly cheaper than going by train - usually 5x cheaper but often more. Same is true for traveling within a city that isn't your hometown (where you might have a monthly ticket). At this point I'm not even sure whether this is a problem that can be solved socioeconomicly.

I feel electric cars, robotaxis and in the future electric planes are much more likely to solve the larger part of of transportation than that railway is going to do it. Especially given that building another set of rails now in Germany is going to take from planning to delivery 15 years. The change of technology should be planned in.

[1] https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.34457... [2] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/141066/1/vjh_v63_i03...