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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
One Nation, One Ticket - Germany's Train Network
Louis announces his move to Germany for two years, as the Transit Tangents Pod plans to continue with a mix of European and American content.
• Germany's Deutschland ticket offers access to the entire country's public transit for a monthly fee
• German transit operates on multiple tiers: ICE (high-speed), IC (intercity), RE/RB (regional), plus local networks
• High-speed ICE trains connect major cities at 250 km/h but face punctuality issues at 66% on-time performance
• German cities feature integrated U-Bahn (subway), S-Bahn (commuter rail), and Straßenbahn (tram) systems
• Small 120,000-person city of Jena has 5 tram lines and 13 bus routes serving nearly as many daily passengers as all of Austin
• Texas is geographically twice the size of Germany yet lacks comprehensive transit connections between cities
• Frankfurt metro (2.7M people) has extensive transit comparable to similarly sized US cities like Austin, Charlotte, Denver
The hosts are planning a special Northeast Corridor Acela tour from Boston to Baltimore in June – stay tuned and support via Patreon if you want to help make trips like this happen.
This week on Transit Tangents, we discuss the country that has put basically all of its public transit network accessible by one ticket, plus some upcoming changes to the show and some exciting news for Lewis. All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. Ish haza Lewis, ish haza Chris, and today we're going to be taking Transit Tangents International, and there's a reason for that, which we'll get to in a second here, but we're going to be giving an overview of transit in the country of Germany. There are a few interesting things with Germany that we'll get into. One thing that caught my eye initially was the Deutschland ticket, which is a pass that essentially works for public transit in every city across the whole country, including regional trains, which is pretty wild on one ticket yeah, like a monthly fee for it.
Speaker 2:It's amazing, because it's so hard, even in the US, to get one ticket for just one city.
Speaker 1:Right, this is just everywhere, the whole country Impressive. We're also going to kind of talk about the overview of their high speed trains, the regional trains, the infamous delays that they have, as well as kind of an overview of local networks too, so it's kind of all a lot in one. And there is a pretty specific reason why we're doing this, though, and it's because I actually have some news that for at least the next two years, I will be living in Germany with my partner, jerry, who was just offered a research position there. Your husband, jerry.
Speaker 2:My husband.
Speaker 1:Jerry, yes, kind of crazy. It's new, yes, very new.
Speaker 2:It is very exciting. People on Patreon, our subscribers. They already got this news, so if you want to get the news ahead of time, be sure to subscribe to that Patreon. But don't worry, transit Tangents will continue. Yes, yeah, for now, what we're trying to do is figure out exactly what that formula is going to look like, but we do think it's going to continue to be weekly episodes where we meet on the virtual. Couch Lewis can go do some European content, I'll continue to do US content, and couch Lewis can go do some European content, I'll continue to do US content, and then we'll come back together and then there'll be plenty of opportunities for Lewis to come back to the States and for me to get over to Germany as well.
Speaker 1:Totally. We'll kind of talk a little bit more about that sort of stuff at the end of the episode, but without further ado let's kind of jump into this. And Germany has a pretty interesting history in general, obviously.
Speaker 2:Really yes, tell me more.
Speaker 1:But to stick to the transit side of it, obviously Germany was two countries up until 1990. After World War II you had East Germany and West Germany and with that you had two transit networks. There was some inter-country travel by train in between, but oftentimes it was was pretty clunky process. The border took a long time to get back and forth across. Oftentimes you're switching trains.
Speaker 2:And it also wasn't like these two services or two countries fully developed the transit networks independently. There was existing train service between both sides of the country before it was split in half. So you had really weird instances where the borderline would cut through the country and the train line just either stopped or there was just a barrier and the trains didn't proceed Right, and I mean not to mention too a lot of this stuff was destroyed during World War II, depending on where you were at.
Speaker 1:So I mean, when these two networks kind of reopened it was not pretty for a while and you know, eventually they did build them up quite a bit, but you essentially had one country, one country. You essentially had one company in the East which was served by the Deutsche Reichsbahn, and then in West Germany you had Deutsche Bundesbahn. They operated independently and then in 1994, this was a few years after unification you have the creation of what we have today, which is Deutsche Bahn, which is the rail operator that is technically a private company but is fully owned by the German government and operates trains across the country.
Speaker 2:And we were talking about this a little bit before the episode. Like you said, private company owned by the government Sounds familiar. In the US, amtrak is technically a private company but is funded and operated and managed by the government. Big differences between the US and Germany, and this happens in a lot of countries. Germany owns all of the rail infrastructure Right. The US does not. So the US government may have some say over rail occasionally, but for the most part all of our rail is privatized.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and it's mostly owned in the US by freight operators for the most part, with the exception of a few instances.
Speaker 2:I think there's good and there's bad to that system of the government not only owning the train lines, but what I will say is the German system of the state owning all of the train lines. It allows them to do so much more and we are about to get into all that they do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Honestly, I've never really made this comparison before, but it is wild that in the United States roads are owned by the government, but why are railroads not? I mean, it makes sense to have the infrastructure to move around the country be run by the government, but why are railroads not? I mean, it's a very it makes sense to have the infrastructure to move around the country be run by the government. But whatever it may be, Are you a socialist? Before we kind of move on to more of a modern day, look at what the systems look like today. I do think it's worth pointing out a really unique thing.
Speaker 1:Maybe this deserves its own episode at one point. But in kind of doing research, putting this episode together, looking at maps of Berlin's transit network while Berlin was split in half between east and west, is pretty wild. You had an existing metro system in that city that then just had to be sliced in half and, like you were saying before, with the kind of regional rail you also had lines in the city that kind of did crisscross over and some of those lines just shut down. Other lines they would board up and close just some stations that would be accessing just East Germany or just West Germany. For those of you watching, we'll have the map up here. You can check it out. Otherwise, for those listening, it's worth a Google to go see what that looked like.
Speaker 2:So fast forwarding to today, the primary rail provider in Germany is Deutsche Bahn, and there are a couple of competitors as well. There's FlixTrain and maybe a couple other smaller companies. But Deutsche Bahn is really the largest provider in the country and, as we mentioned, this is a private company provider in the country and, as we mentioned, this is a private company. There was a period where the German government thought about sort of releasing this company as an IPO, but then the 2008 financial crisis happened and Germany sort of pulled those plans back Right and kind of.
Speaker 1:since then there hasn't really been another push for it, fortunately, because I think it's probably not the right model moving forward. But it's interesting that that is a piece of the history, that that happened here. So yeah, you know, like Chris said, deutsche Bahn, the main operator, you, you will have these other companies and even other countries are allowed to operate trains into Germany especially, you know you'll have French trains entering Germany from France, or Swiss trains or whatever it may be, especially along the kind of border areas. But from here we'll kind of break down how the system in general is laid out, from the highest level of you know kind of long distance high speed train, high speed trains down to kind of more local service in the different cities. And it's just fun, as we kind of go through this, to think about like what this could look like here at home in the United States, because you know, like Germany is also, it's still a very car centric Country.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely, I mean, think about it's such a car culture, I mean first of all, bond the other bond right like my husband Brent, who loves cars. Yeah, I had a terrifying experience where we we rented a car in Germany. I look at the speedometer and we're going're going 160 miles an hour on the highway. Yeah, I should find a video of that.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But you know it's such a car-centric culture you do still have, you know, all of these highways. It's a very highway-centric country. The US, you know, we based our highway system off of the Autobahn, famously but also all the car manufacturers. I mean some of the highest and most well-known car manufacturers in the world come out of Germany. Right.
Speaker 1:And it's just nice to see, though, that while there is this car culture there, that there's also an emphasis on having other ways to get around. Yeah, you can do both Exactly. So, kind of starting off at the highest level, the German high-speed rails are the ICE, the Intercity Express. These were first introduced in the 90s. They make up the kind of long-distance network, and they're generally the high-speed trains that get from bigger cities to bigger cities, limited stops in between each of them, kind of being the way to get around the fastest when they're on time. We'll save the delays for a second here.
Speaker 1:I had a chance to ride some of these back in October when I was out there to go visit. Before committing to the move, make sure we weren't making some grave mistake, and I took an ICE train from. I took two. Actually, I took one from Stuttgart to Frankfurt. Actually, I took one from, uh, stuttgart to frankfurt and then, uh, later in the trip, I took one from frankfurt to erfurt. Um, and, yeah, I mean they're especially as a, as an american, I mean they feel pretty amazing. Uh, you're going, you know, 250 kilometers an hour for parts of it. Um, you know some of it. You're going slower as well, but like you know, on the sections, once you're out of the downtowns and whatnot, uh, they can get going pretty quick. In addition to that, the next kind of tier down is the IC routes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and these IC routes which are the inner city routes, they're very similar to the ICE. They're still higher speed trains on better tracks. They go these similar long distances but they do make more stops in between. So I think of, like the ices is sort of these long distance express routes.
Speaker 1:The ic is going to make more of these um stops at the, maybe the smaller cities along the way too, yeah, and not even smaller cities like the medium-sized cities along the way, yeah, and in addition, I mean, like some of them even are running on, it varies, right, like some of them are running even on tracks that are mostly not even high speed too. So, the ic ones, there's just a lot more variability. Basically, I actually got to take one of these as well, uh, the smaller city of jena, which is where jerry and I will be moving to. We took one from there all the way to stuttgart, which is a it's like a long journey, um, but we took it on the, the ic train and, uh, we actually arrived within a couple minutes of our scheduled arrival time. So, um, which was nice, because the kind of one piece of this that we haven't talked about yet. So the, these are kind of like what people are using to travel from city to city.
Speaker 1:The ic and the ic, um, delays have been an issue. Uh, if you've, you know, looked into transit in germany at all, or you concern can consume transit content online, you've probably seen Deutsche Bahn delay content somewhere. The trains right now only arrive on time 66% of the time. Now, I will say, on time is a pretty tight definition in Germany, the trains that count, and the third of trains that are delayed is only a delay, starting at six minutes. So, from being honest, like it's a very, it's a very punctual society, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's not to say that like they don't have a lot of delays that are longer than six minutes, but a six minute delay to me, like that's basically on time in austin, that's on time for in general, everything 15 minutes late's on time in austin, yeah 15 minutes is almost early in austin for not
Speaker 1:even just for transit. I'm not talking about, I'm talking about just like doing anything like. This is the latest city I've ever been. I'm gonna have to really adjust my life moving to germany where, like you, need to be early to be on time, basically. But that's a that's a whole other thing.
Speaker 1:But the reason the these longer distance trains are actually running into the delays in a lot of cases is, in a lot of cases, due to the fact that rail has become a more popular option for people in recent years. So as a response, deutsche bonn has been adding more routes, more trains to the system, but the investment in the infrastructure at the same time on the tracks, the stations, the switching, all this sort of stuff hasn't come in at the same time. The German government has been lagging in the infrastructure investment. So as a result, you end up with trains that get stuck waiting just outside of the station or in between waiting for a switch. The German government is now trying to play catch up on some of that. So there's now a lot of construction that is closing tracks, which then adds to the delays, and these things kind of spiral down.
Speaker 1:Now you know if they wanted to run and have a higher on time performance. They could do it, but they would just run less trains. But at this point they don't want to do that because you want to have the trains for people to take. And you end up with a lot of like happy accidents where you show up and it's like, oh damn, my train is delayed by 40 minutes, and then you get off your other train and you're going to do the transfer and you're like, oh wait, the train that was supposed to be scheduled before it was also delayed for 40 minutes and now you're just getting on that other train. So, uh and and oftentimes these tickets are very flexible, where if you have a ticket from one destination to another and you have a delay or something and another train is going the same one like you can just kind of hop on that other train. So you get a lot of weird stuff going on there, but it can work out.
Speaker 2:So we're talking about three levels, three main levels of train service. You have the ICE. We already covered that. We have the ICE, which we just covered. The next one down is the regional rail. Yes, um, regional rail. It's going to be a series of smaller operators, so they may not be under the um deutsche bonn logo or branding but they do sort of roll up into the deutsche umbrella. These are going to be services that serve maybe city pairs or like regional, uh, you know collections of cities and they may not, you know, go to, you know, from the of cities and they may not, you know, go to, you know, from the smaller city all the way to Berlin or something. It's going to connect these smaller communities, but generally they will feed back in to the higher tiers of service so that if you are in one of these smaller cities you can still get to the major cities.
Speaker 1:Totally, and even within the kind of regional trains, they kind of fall into two categories as well, in a very similar fashion to the ICE and the ICE trains. So you have the RB and the RE. The RB is just regional bond and the RE is regional express. They do kind of exactly what you'd think. So the regional express is kind of hitting the more populated areas along the route that are going to have more riders and everything, and then the, the regional bond, will stop at every station, essentially along the way, for the most part including, I mean, when we were there in October some of these stations are serving really small rural communities, and so it's nice that they have that option to be able to connect into the rail network.
Speaker 1:Even in some of these towns that in the United States, I mean, they don't even have a bus connection. You know what I mean. There's no way to get there, or in a lot of places in the world. So it's important to see this, this sort of service, and again, just to give a personal example, I was able to use both regional, regional bond and regional express trains um again in that same sort of area between erfurt and jena, um to be able to go back and forth and they have both options. Basically every half an hour you've got a train going back and forth um and some of them are kind of alternating between the rb and the re, leaving some really small towns in between um to be able to be connected, you know, with some sort of access, but not making it so that every single train needs to stop there necessarily and it connects to. You know, erfurt, which I mentioned, which is on one of the newer high speed lines that kind of connects across the country.
Speaker 2:So those are our three higher level or higher tiers of train service that connect people all across Germany. Then we have our secret fourth level, maybe not so secret, but all of these cities then also operate their own local networks, and so if you're in a German city, you're going to see the U-Bahn. Those are things like the subway, really dense urban rail. You have the S-Bahn, which is going to be more like commuter service, think like some of the Amtrak services on the Northeast or something, or like Metra in Chicago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And then you have the Strassenbahn, which is more like a trolley or tram system that you would see in the city. Did I say that correctly? It was close.
Speaker 1:Close enough. Yeah, honestly, I'm probably saying it wrong, so it's all right, I'll get there at some point.
Speaker 2:Then you also have more unique versions of German transit, which is sort of like the Schwebenbahn which I'm probably going to mispronounce which is in Wuppertal, Germany, just outside of Cologne, and I did get a chance to travel there last year and fell in love with this transit. It is a suspended rail, so think it kind of looks like a subway car, but it is suspended from the top and it follows this beautiful river valley through this really sort of narrow winding city. It is the coolest transit I've ever experienced.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's basically like hanging. It's kind of cool. It's like an upside down monorail, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah it's, it's amazing. Um, honestly, forget gondolas. Those are old news. Uh, this schwab and bond from the 1800s. That's the way to go totally yeah, and it's uh.
Speaker 1:What's really impressive about these like local networks in especially a lot of the bigger cities, is the bigger cities will feature a new bond and s bond, and in a lot of cases, they'll have a strassenbahn network of trams across the city too, and, when you like, lay all those out on a map across the city, I mean and, and then add on buses too. Right, everything is covered. Yep, and then you sprinkle on top of that as well, like the, the regional trains that have stops to you know, that are like it's, it's really impressive. The systems integrate together very well. Um, and it's just, it's exactly what you, it's exactly what you would hope for. You know what I mean. It's like, oh, if you're going to actually plan for this, this is what you would do on that note, one of the comparisons that I wanted to make was Texas compared to Germany.
Speaker 2:Texas is almost twice the size of Germany, which is wild to think about Geographically. Geographically, yeah, but if you place the land area of Germany over Texas, it would basically take up all of like central to east Texas, and that is the most populated part of our state. Now, keep in mind, texas has 31 million people in it versus Germany, which has about 83 million people and definitely more density of cities. But I'm sitting here thinking Germany has their entire country covered in this transit network. We could do half of that in Texas and be completely covered. We could do a third of that, a quarter.
Speaker 1:And basically cover Pardon my French, yeah, 10%.
Speaker 2:And basically cover all of the populated areas in the state of Texas, and we just can't do it, and it's just amazing that one country that is half the size of our one state is able to do it. Some other comparisons that we want to throw out there the Frankfurt metro area has a population of about 2.7 million people and they have every layer of this transit network existing in their city. So it is well covered.
Speaker 1:The map is. If you're watching, the map is up here Again, not to tell you to do this twice if you're listening, but like literally, look up a map of the Frankfurt metro because it's impressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the transit network is extensive and when we compare that to US metros 2.7 million people we're talking US metro regions. We have cities like Austin, st Louis, kansas City, san Antonio All of these cities are similar size when you look at their metros Charlotte, orlando, denver there's so many in here Baltimore, all of these are similar in size to Frankfurt.
Speaker 1:And then compare the maps, it's really sad it is really sad and it's not to say that those places don't have transit, because they do, and if you're interested in seeing them, I mean some of the cities on that list San Antonio, uh, austin and Kansas City we have done episodes on in the past, so definitely encourage you to go check them out. But, yeah, it's, it's it just like I don't know, we don't have an excuse. You know we've in other recent episodes I don't know if this one will have come out yet or not but an episode that we just did on some North Carolina stuff. I mean like it was potentially taking five years, ten years, to just break ground on a BRT project, not even to finish it. To break ground Like it's yeah's, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I'm definitely very excited. Uh, again, kind of we mentioned at the beginning of this the point of us doing this episode specifically about Germany. It is where I'll be moving in just a couple months. So, um, you know that's kind of the purpose of doing this overview. I'm really excited to be able to go to a lot of these places, explore on the ground and kind of, uh, you know our plans that we're going to do all sorts of different stuff with the show moving forward. But, um, you know, while I'm there, I hope to be able to go out and go and record some really cool transit things going on there, maybe get some interviews with folks and then we'll be able to go to the virtual couch, essentially, and talk about them. So, uh, if you have specific places in Germany that you definitely want to see, or projects and whatnot there, or even in Europe broadly, I'm going to try to take advantage of the situation, of the fact that I'm going to be living there, to travel as much as I can, because once you're there it's a lot more affordable to get around than buying those very, very expensive flights back and forth. So, yeah, definitely let us know. I'm really excited to dive into it and even really small cities like the one that I'm moving to.
Speaker 1:So Yena only has a population of about 120,000 people. They have five tram lines. Now, not all of them are like their own dedicated line the whole time. I mean, it does kind of run along some trunk lines as well. But five tram lines, they have 13 bus routes. In addition to that, along some of the main trunks on the bus routes, I mean you've got frequencies of every five minutes basically all day In whole in that city, again of 120,000 people, the network serves upwards of 62,000 passengers daily. Compare that to where we live here in Austin Cap Metro carries roughly 70,000 passengers a day, which sounds like it's not that much different right Not too bad, until you realize that Austin is at least 20 times larger in population than Yenna is.
Speaker 1:Yes, so it's just obviously it's very different, right? Y know it's a very like dense small city. It's very walkable. 35% of daily trips there are taken on foot, 15% by bike, the rest are either in a car or on public transit.
Speaker 1:So, you don't even need an e-bike over there. I know I'm probably still going to get one, but you probably could. It's a little hilly, so you know, I feel like I still need to hold on to my. I'm still a member of the cult of the e-bike. We haven't talked about that in a long time. Yes, but yeah, it's pretty interesting just to see the comparisons.
Speaker 2:I am excited, though, you're going to Germany, but before you go, we're also planning an episode right now, potentially in June, where we're going to be able to make some comparisons to our more densely populated parts of the country. We are working on an episode that will be an Acela tour from Boston to Baltimore.
Speaker 1:Yes, and it will be a whole series really, because we're going to have we'll talk about the Acela and the kind of Northeast regional trains we're hoping to do Boston, Philly and Baltimore, maybe some additional things mixed in there. So definitely stay tuned for that. And if you want to help support that trip too, the best way to be able to do so is via our Patreon.
Speaker 2:Also hit us up. If you are in Boston, philadelphia or Baltimore, let us know. Maybe you can meet us along the along the way.
Speaker 1:Totally. We definitely want to hear from you, but with all of that I mean yes, a lot of exciting stuff coming up. Stay tuned for some slight differences in how the show is, but don't worry, we're not going anywhere. We're very excited. I'm excited that a lot of this is coming up very quickly. I just got our visas approved this week. From when we're recording this, I don't know exactly when this will come out, but at the beginning of May we got our visas approved. Very exciting stuff. With all that being said, if you have not liked this video already, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. Also, leave a comment. What are you looking forward to with some of the changes on the show? Is there anything in Germany or in Europe that you'd like us to go and talk about and cover? And again, you can support the show directly via Patreon by subscribing or even just checking out our merch store, which is available right below. So, with all that being said, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit.
Speaker 2:Tangents Tuesday.