[Tichy]

public transport isn't that broken, I get around quite well. The water supply things seems to be mainly a battle of ideologies, again my water supply works fine atm. Presumably the tech companies will at least pay taxes and alleviate the debt. I am no specialist on that subject, but I suspect it also comes from the unique history of Berlin, not (just) financial incompetence. Problem for a long time has been that Berlin is very big, yet has no big industries.

Actually I often wonder what all the people here do for a living. I guess the main employer is the government now.

[Xylakant]

> I am no specialist on that subject, but I suspect it also comes from the unique history of Berlin, not (just) financial incompetence.

Financial incompetence and bad planning are a strong factor. West Berlin used to be subsidized before the wall fell and since nobody ever questioned the amount of money flowing here they could basically do what they wanted. After the reunion Berlins administration expected the population to grow to 5 million by the year 2000 but that growth never materialized. Still, they kept spending money like they used to.

> Problem for a long time has been that Berlin is very big, yet has no big industries.

It actually used to be the core of the german tech industry. There's whole quarters named after companies: Siemensstadt, Borsigwerke, ... and whole blocks in the city that used to be factories - Oberbaum city that used to be the Osram Lamp factories, Varta, ... A lot are now converted to office space.

> Actually I often wonder what all the people here do for a living. I guess the main employer is the government now.

Government is a strong factor. A lot of media companies moved to Berlin and a lot of service and support, especially for companies which trade a lot with eastern europe. The BASF has their whole eastern european business support in Berlin - that big tower at Warschauer Strasse. Berlin is fairly strong with biotech startups as well. No industry to speak of, though.

[rmk2]

I'll reply to you regarding public transport, but this goes for all of the other replies, as well. The repeated failures every winter and overall frailty of the network seem to be a consequence of years of mismanagement and increasingly aggressive under-funding/cost-saving/corner-cutting by the Deutsche Bahn. While this certainly does not result in immidiate widespread collapse, it is just one sign of the degradation of the underlying infrastructure. So while "broken" might be somewhat harsh, I do think that this is directly the direction we are heading.

The water supplies do work fine, the problem however is, that, much like Dresden's sale of its city-owned flats to the Gagfah (an investor), selling core infrastructure to investors risks long-term sustainability in favour of short-term profit. You might be right though that this is somewhat down to ideology.

[raverbashing]

Berlin's public transport system is probably better than 90% of systems all around the world.

London and Paris are comparable (and worse)

Cost cutting by DB? So the problems are in the S-Bahn rather than the subway/BVG?

Edit: ok I read some answers, I'll add that DB is rebuilding the bridges on Yorkstraße