[eloisius]

I had a similar experience in Germany about a year ago. Train stations are mostly self-service now. The ticket kiosk ate my €50 and promptly rebooted. It didn’t print a receipt or anything. The only human I could find was a security guard. He told me to call the number on a sticker on the machine. The person who answered couldn’t speak English. My €50 is out there somewhere but it would cost me more than that to track it down.

[larodi]

That’s a sad experience and I would definitely try to chase them robots. Sadly even though German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality, though when it comes to human service you can find yourself in peculiar position. And particularly if you are not German and happen to be in one of those international cities there where Germans are fed up with visitor. You waive goodbye to your 50€ and keep a story to tell, that’s all.

Sadly I don’t expect this all to get any better with robots and LLms and thing. We will be crying to meet a human sooner than later, and my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era when you actually have people in the loop, just for humanity’s sake.

[olex]

>German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality

Ease of use maybe, although my parents and grandparents would like to argue differently. They are not as quick to work their smartphone, and the ticket machines are being removed everywhere to be replaced by apps that are much cheaper to run. This works fine for the younger generations, but older and less tech-savvy people are getting left behind.

Quality though, no way. Every single time I tried to give ÖPNV a chance in the last 3-4 years I was either different degrees of late or didn't arrive at all without switching to some alternative method of transport on the way. Doesn't even matter if I tried local routes (Frankfurt and Darmstadt) or longer inter-city connections to Munich or Leipzig, it's all completely broken. People in my company routinely book connections several hours earlier than they need to be places to have a chance of arriving in time, and often are still late. Trains are overbooked, connections are late or often cancelled altogether, seat reservarions don't work more often than they do, WiFi on the trains never works... Many, many things have to change for me to reconsider my default of taking the car everywhere, and I don't think they will in any sort of a relevant timeline.

[larodi]

> Ease of use maybe, although my parents and grandparents would like to argue differently.

at a second read (and thought) you are absolutely right, and there is a major moral to take from this story: it may be viewed as being against humanity's nature to remove legacy UIs for as long as there are old users willing to stick with them. like banning bicycles that do not run on batteries, can you imagine, as they'd be slower than other bikes!

we can definitely argue that a person in his right mind, and no matter the age, should be able to choose to stay with certain interface, if this does not incur massive costs. where I live you can still buy paper tickets from the driver, even though pay-as-you-go is the de facto choice for many, and of all ages. today I saw a minority ethnic girl buy a paper ticket rather than be penalized. everyone knew what happened, and I believe they were 100% human and much appreciated them getting paper ticket last minute from the driver.

[saagarjha]

I was in Berlin earlier this year and everything too contactless payment, no app required.

[bojan]

It's not that they don't want to have people, it's that there are no people. Germany, as most of other countries in Europe, has an aging population and the workforce is hard to find. So all these "easy" things that can get automated, do get automated, oftentimes indeed at the price of quality of service in exceptional situations.

[someoneiam]

Well, they say that, but in my experience at least, that is just conjured up as a more palatable explanation after the fact. While I do think that a certain, even significant, amount of automation is good, there is also a large mass of unemployed that can undoubtedly be trained to fill these "human interaction" kind of roles (support). This workforce is still not hard to find at all. We just don't want to do that - there is not a single western country left that has low unemployment as its key prerogative.

[Moru]

Yes, it's only a profit thing. If you cut out the humans you can make more money. If not for your boss then for the company that gets the contract to make the automation.

[larodi]

This is the challenge of 21st century, innit? To motivate those who are OK with universal minimal income, which is apparently already there scattered in all forms of scam, surplus and wasted goods.

[RandomLensman]

The automations predate any demographic issues - mostly a (sticky) cost thing.

[bryanrasmussen]

>my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era

after the Butlerian Jihad.

[formerly_proven]

> german public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality

You have something mixed up there.

[immibis]

It's definitely easy to use. You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train. No security checks like an airport. No multi step check in. Just be there and get on. In many cases your ticket won't even be checked, and when it is it's while you're seated while the train is moving. Getting a ticket is no problem: the ticket machines are multilingual, and you type in the stops you want to go from/to and the date. You can also book one online and get a QR-like code you can print or display on your phone.

Quality is mediocre. The trains are often delayed, which is a problem with the size of the network and cascading failures. Once they do get to A, they get from A to B just fine, the seats are okay, the luggage space is okay, etc. The DB Navigator app is useful for finding alternative routes but it won't tell you whether your ticket is valid for them. It will tell you if the delay is so long that you're allowed to use any route.

[JumpCrisscross]

> You show up at the station when the train is coming. You get on the train. Later, you get off the train.

The train is late. The lounges suck or are tied to a complex system of ticket tiers that seemingly don't correlate to price. You bought a specific seat but the train was changed so now no assigned seat and lol on a refund. And fuck you if you're crossing borders.

Germans travel a good amount by car for good reason [1]. When I'm in Germany, I tend to drive between cities because the alternative is burning several hours in buffers and delays.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[larodi]

interestingly you forget to mention something that was not there 20 years ago, when these trains still be running ok. all that was not so well connected with all apps, you can have a Lime calculated in your route perhaps today, which was not there. and this all IS connected with DE system of public transport, which on its own, no matter the technical underlying, is superb. and trains are lot cleaner than many other places, even those regularly servicing Berlin,

[jhrmnn]

> The person who answered couldn’t speak English.

It sounds like this was the main point of failure. I’m not sure it can be considered an error in the system. I’d consider the risk inherent in traveling in a country without knowing its language.

[scrollaway]

Germany is the only country in which I’ve had 112 (emergency services) hang up on me because they couldn’t speak English.

It’s worse than France in this regard.

[f1shy]

Yes sir. A friend of mine, the girlfriend passed out, being pregnant. In the moment of total stress, we called 112, and said “passed away“ instead of „passed out“. The guy on the other side “well, if she is dead, why are you calling?!” Very rude. He went on to explain, it was an error, an instead of just dispatch an ambulance, had to hear a 10 minute lesson in english (from a german) after which the ambulance was dispatched. When the ambulance finally arrived, she was “ok” so they had to pay couple of thousand Euros for a “negligent dispatch”…

The level of arrogance and lack of empathy and service is beyond limits.

[bmicraft]

> When the ambulance finally arrived, she was “ok” so they had to pay couple of thousand Euros for a “negligent dispatch”

That part seems really hard to believe for me. The only time you should get charged at all is for prank calling. In fact, if you call and tell them and decide you don't need EMS after all they will in fact come anyways because they need to check on every call. And you will not get charged for that.

[f1shy]

Believe me, it was charged. I could not believe until I saw the papers. This is noones land.

[aziaziazi]

Yes, but it’s still fine to have a customer service only answering in the official language. The chance are high that a random German speaks english so you’ll probably be good but if that’s not the case, blaming the company seems unfair to me.

[kleiba]

> The chance are high that a random German speaks English

Not sure how random my selection process was, but that certainly wasn't my experience when I lived in Germany a few years ago. Maybe in big cities, yes. But even in the burbs, chances are you have to look for the metaphorical needle in the haystack to find someone speaking English. Your best bet might just be teenagers and young adults.

[f1shy]

Absolutely. There is a big myth that “germans (all?) speak good English“ and nothing can be further from the truth. There are good ones, sure, maybe even more percent than other places, but go out of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich… and good luck!!!

[f1shy]

Please look my comment to the parent comment. If you do find a german that speaks understandable english (that you can differentiate “think” and “sink” or “g” and “she” or “zoo” and “sue” then may be the arrogant crap that got my friend. For that they receive years of “Ausbildung”…

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Jaa. Vell. Trai zamm Turkish or Arabic zen?

What THE FUCK is it with the expectation that everybody has to understand and speak in-glitch? Employ a local guide. Too expensive? Bad luck. Entitled little .....

[f1shy]

Well... who won and who lost the war?

[bryanrasmussen]

>The chance are high that a random German speaks english so you’ll probably be good

What does high mean in this context? I experienced what I would call the inverse Danish maneuver, the German obviously understand English because they often answered our English questions correctly - In German.

In Denmark if a Dane understands what you said in Danish but you have a definite accent they will often answer your question in English.

Maybe Germanic cultures are geared towards the rude.

[HighGoldstein]

This sounds like a language education issue. It's easier to understand a language than to express yourself in it, so possibly Germans on average have good enough knowledge of English to understand you but not enough to adequately reply in English. Conversely, Denmark has some of the highest English literacy in Europe.

[bryanrasmussen]

I mean sure, that sounds plausible, until I point out in Germany that I don't speak German and they continue trying to explain to me in German the answer to my question.

If I'm talking to an Italian and trying to explain to them in English and they don't understand then I try with a combination of my broken Italian and hand signals, not obdurate sticking to English because that's being a jerk.

At the same time, yes Danes have a high English literacy, but switching to English when someone is talking to you in Danish is rude no matter how you slice it.

[bmicraft]

They might have been rude, but that's besides the point. Even if they could speak English you shouldn't expect them to be comfortable doing so. That actually seems pretty rude in itself to me.

[bryanrasmussen]

right, if I'm trying to get information from a guy at a train ticket agent and I don't speak German but he obviously understands what I am saying in English it is me being rude for expecting him to make some sort of attempt to explain to me where I need to get off at in a language we both evidently understand instead of me just learning his language in a couple minutes.

[jhrmnn]

Sure, that’s bad, and a service dealing with train ticket machine failures not available in English isn’t as bad.

[yxhuvud]

Ticket machines are still something foreigners can be expected to interact and need help with.

[aziaziazi]

People visiting a foreign country can still expect to have to interact with local not speaking their language.

[f1shy]

Go to any museum… just brutal.

[chgs]

I tried speaking German to a random security guard in Arizona and he just walked off.

[simonask]

In Europe in 2024, it is totally unreasonable to expect every visitor to speak the local language at a high enough level. Yes, your language is big and important, but we can't all learn all of English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, which are the 5 biggest - alongside our native language.

The absolute arrogance of particularly French and German speakers is staggering. All of us from smaller countries and language spheres speak at least 2-3 languages, often more at a basic level, but they scoff at anyone who visits that didn't happen to learn theirs. Contrast this with Spanish and Italian speakers, where my experience is that they are often not great at English, but very much willing to try. To add, I've also never met an American who wasn't willing to do their best to help out.

When somebody is asking for help in a language you don't understand, your obligation as a human being is to do your best, if nothing else to help them find someone who does understand one of the likely several languages you have in common. Not everyone who speaks English at you thinks less of you because you aren't good at it, and everybody is just doing their best.

[eloisius]

If I had been buying a ticket at a window from a human, there's no way I'd have handed over 50 EUR without someone understanding me. If fluency in the local language to the level that you can have a phone conversation (which is many times more difficult than face-to-face) is a prerequisite for visiting a country, you are either an impressive polyglot, or don't travel enough.

[graemep]

I had something similar happen to be on the tube in london. My ticket got demagnetised (combined intercity rail with travel card are/were still magnetic stripe tickets) and there were not staff at the station so I could not get the barrier open to leave.

[Tijdreiziger]

There are supposed to be help points where you can call staff.

https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/london-undergroun...