At the same time, I had smaller problems due to late trains than due to flights. (I travel a lot for work.) Those 15-minute delays are annoying, but I agree with the upstream poster: the situation is better than it's said to be. Those 64% look awful, and the situation is merely bad, not awful.
I heard the minister is considering reducing the investment in track improvement to spend the money on autobahns, though, so maybe it'll become as bad as it currently looks.
The 15 minute delays are annoying, the trains that do not arrive at all, however are travel ending. Bonus points: the DB was encouraged to cut train travel short or skip rail stations to make up for lost time because at least until recently the official statistics did not cover trains that did not arrive at all. That on top of the dozens of punctual ghost trains I seem to miss while praying for an actuall train to arrive at a train station under cunstruction that can't handle half the advertised train traffic.
> the situation is better than it's said to be
It is better in parts of Germany, there is a CCC talk from a few years ago that ends with a "free upgrade" slide, if your train had to travel through any of the listed stations you where basically guaranteed a travel delay of at least one hour.
The delays and the uncertainty that surrounds them make it very difficult to rely on DB when you have a connection to another train or a plane. With this level of reliability something is almost guaranteed to go wrong when your journey involves more than just one leg
I heard the minister is considering reducing the investment in track improvement to spend the money on autobahns, though, so maybe it'll become as bad as it currently looks.