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.
You have something mixed up there.
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.
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...
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.
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.
after the Butlerian Jihad.
