Erratic Deutsche Bahn services make our commutes a misery. Luckily, their meaningless announcements are an art form
My favourite excuse is an expression that might one day be emblematic of contemporary Germany. I hear Deutsche Bahn wants staff to stop using it, but it can’t banish it from our minds. Verzögerungen im Betriebsablauf – “operational delays” – is meaningful and meaningless in a way that only the German language allows. One day it might even become one of those golden words co-opted into the English language – like zeitgeist or schadenfreude. (Let’s retire Blitz, a word that is jaded and overused in sport, politics and beyond.)
Verzögerungen im Betriebsablauf is the magic phrase for not getting anywhere fast while also suggesting everything is full steam ahead. It is sinister in a beautiful way. It is a phrase Kafka might use if he were writing today, a perfect description of a situation where no one can do anything but everyone is busy.
It’s not the privatisation per se. It is the privatisation accompanied by a lot of other circumstances bringing the worst of public and private businesses to the table. The main problem is that DB is a private company that is incentivised to let the infrastructure rot. The solution is actually pretty easy: split up the company, return infrastructure to public hand, and open up the operations to fair competition. Flixbus showed how competition absolutely decimates prices even in transport business.
This is more or less what they ended up doing in the UK after rail privatisation, taking the infrastructure back into public hands.
But you can’t have anything like fair competition on train services. It’s not like anyone can just plonk a train on the tracks and outcompete the other trains. They’re awarded franchises, which typically have a monopoly over a particular type of service on those tracks. They can’t be outcompeted, the only way they lose their franchise is if the govt is forced to step in to pick up the pieces (which has happened several times in the UK).
Flixbus showed how competition absolutely decimates prices even in transport business and Flixtrain did as well, even though it is heavily sabotaged by the entitled DB aristocrats.