Germany’s rail system logged a 17% increase last year in trains that never made it to their destination. And that’s not all of the story, either.
When Deutsche Bahn released annual punctuality numbers in January and noted a decline in on-time performance for 2017, it left out information on 137,000 trains that didn’t make it to the finish line, either because they were canceled before departure or broke down along the route and were pulled from service.
The lapse was attacked by the Green Party, whose transport spokesperson said “It is pretty astonishing that cancelled trains no longer appear in the statistics… This makes it all the more apparent that the reliability of train travel is even worse than the statistics already show.”
Of the 137,000 trains, 97,000 were pulled from service and the other 40,000 canceled. While it looks like a huge number, it’s actually 1% of the 13+ million trains on Germany’s annual rail schedule. A large number of commuter and regional routes push up the numbers.
