Deutsche Bahn is a bad joke nowadays. They even released some shorts on youtube with famous comedian Anke Engelke to laugh from themselves. But the situation is everything else than funny.
I design hardware, data science is not my thing. Is it that hard to collect all the delayed train events, categorize them. Create few groups like suicides, train breakdowns, infrastructure failures, too many passengers to close the doors, etc. And then fight the issues by groups defining oldest and possibly failing infrastructure and trains. And managing trains to squeeze everyone inside. Political failure is one thing, but some things can be solved by science.
There is no mystery of what's the cause here. That is widely known and reported.
It's lack of maintenance / modernization on the rail lines. This is 100% a political failure. If the money would be allocated towards that, the problem could be fixed in a few (IIRC 5-10) years.
Of course in addition towards that there is the additional political failure of wrong incentives which creates mechanisms like the "Pofalla-Wende" (delayed trains turning around mid-journey, so that the back journey doesn't count as delay) to game the bad statistics.
Well that thing is hard and requires an actual expertise. However if you throw around some serious money to bring over senior managers into a room to make fools of themselves by jumping in front of the top-level management + the new age coach, yelling "Ka mate, Ka mate, Pünktlichkeit und Verlass! Hiiii!", appropriating the native New Zealand culture along the way, you will instill "inspiring energy" that the senior managers will now "carry into their teams" consisting mostly of agile change managers, agile project managers, agile... whatever and magically, the trains will become more punctual. No need for that silly data science stuff obviously :)
Unfortunately, they realistically cannot. Basically every major infrastructure project gets loads of local opposition which would require substantial political will. However, the currently elected government is the government that let the rail infrastructure get that bad in the first place
AFAIK to fix reliability no new major infrastructure projects would be required (at least for most of the reliability offenses). They would just need to maintain/modernize existing infrastructure and rolling stock, so all things that aren't really opposable.
To achieve the Deutschlandtakt as noted in the article, yes new infrastructure projects are required, but I think most people would be happy with all the existing service running as well as it has ~15-20 years ago.
Being a victim (some say: customer) of the Deutsche Bahn (with bahn.comfort black status): I sincerely believe they can not. After 40 years of ignoring maintenance, never setting up the East-German rail system for success, I honestly believe the system is broken beyond repair. What is indicative of that is that they believe they can make the Deutschlandtakt work by (no typo!) 2070.
There was a time when there was no railway and a time were we had a good railway. That is not out-of-reach, but it is mostly a political problem, not a technical one.
They should name their team DNS because that is what will be shown on scoreboards of all tournaments to which their players will have to travel with DB anyway.
Their reliability is so abysmal that I fly multi-hop flights from Berlin or to airports a few hundred miles off my destination if that allows me to not rely on them. Boats that go up and down the Amazon have not let me down the way DB reliably did.
Can they 360-no-scope their way to a reliable timetable for their trains? 2/3 times I've had to use them, my trip was severely affected by a delay or a cancellation.
That would be nice. Just did a business trip to Amsterdam from Berlin (and back). The return train was four hours late. Neither of the trains had even a restaurant car, and the trip is about six hours per direction.
This is pretty cool and it shows how commonplace eSports has become.
I played 'esports' before that was a term and before it was this popular and had any mainstream awareness. Essentially we had large LAN-parties with some competitive elements.. good old days of early CS and UT.
Huh, I wonder why... maybe they noticed they have a lot of gamers as employees? Maybe the work in the railway business attracts gamers in particular?
To kill the mood, maybe it's a bad idea considering one DB signalman was distracted by a phone game and let 2 trains into one train segment heading into each other: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36025951
The page takes about two different programs. The first section only talks about benefits like LAN parties and tournaments as part of your 'Ausbildung' or training. The scholarship can apply if you work for them part time. Looks like it's primarily a recruitment tactic.
Well, as it seems they have a hard time getting trains on time, perhaps stress resiliency practiced in gaming is a useful skill for customer service reps.
Gaming is dead. It was a long and meticulous process to kill it, starting from the Let's Plays and ending at a spotty railway station. It's finally dead. Good work, everyone.
I design hardware, data science is not my thing. Is it that hard to collect all the delayed train events, categorize them. Create few groups like suicides, train breakdowns, infrastructure failures, too many passengers to close the doors, etc. And then fight the issues by groups defining oldest and possibly failing infrastructure and trains. And managing trains to squeeze everyone inside. Political failure is one thing, but some things can be solved by science.
It's lack of maintenance / modernization on the rail lines. This is 100% a political failure. If the money would be allocated towards that, the problem could be fixed in a few (IIRC 5-10) years.
Of course in addition towards that there is the additional political failure of wrong incentives which creates mechanisms like the "Pofalla-Wende" (delayed trains turning around mid-journey, so that the back journey doesn't count as delay) to game the bad statistics.
Rail is a lost cause in Germany.
To achieve the Deutschlandtakt as noted in the article, yes new infrastructure projects are required, but I think most people would be happy with all the existing service running as well as it has ~15-20 years ago.
We get what we have, and that's it.
Their reliability is so abysmal that I fly multi-hop flights from Berlin or to airports a few hundred miles off my destination if that allows me to not rely on them. Boats that go up and down the Amazon have not let me down the way DB reliably did.
I must have like 5k hours at least across all Total War titles since Medieval 2 and I don't consider myself a great player at all.
I played 'esports' before that was a term and before it was this popular and had any mainstream awareness. Essentially we had large LAN-parties with some competitive elements.. good old days of early CS and UT.
To kill the mood, maybe it's a bad idea considering one DB signalman was distracted by a phone game and let 2 trains into one train segment heading into each other: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36025951
I expect we may see more things like this in the future.
My former employer sponsored an Esports team (Liquid).
https://dotheunthinkable.imc.com/