fyi regional trains (which the deutschlandticket is valid for) are very punctual, it is the long distance/ICE trains that are always late/broken, and you cannot ride those with thw deutschlandticket anyways.
If you take a train to work five days a week and it's "on time" (not delayed by 6 minutes or more) 85% of the time, you'll be late on at least one day most weeks. Hardly very punctual.
Personally, I think they should just abandon timetables, run trains as fast as they can, and if you need to be somewhere by a certain time, you give the planner a target reliability and it uses a probabilistic model of the entire system to tell you when to leave so you can arrive on time (0 minutes delay, or earlier) with that given probability.
true, the actual word used is less important to me than the distinction between long distance trains and regional trains, since those get conflated quite a bit in this discussion.
Most local and S-Bahn trains in Germany are pretty decent, data is pretty clear on this. Its not Swiss level but still pretty good. Nothing compare to ICE.
The german trains, even at their worst, are so much better than anything in the US. Complaining can also be a sport in Germany. Take a ride on Njtransit or the NYC subway to appreciate the difference. Or try to get anywhere in New Jersey without a car. In many parts of Germany, you can get almost anywhere conveniently with only public transportation.
It's probably worse if it was once reliable and now not, compared to if it's never reliable: if it's never reliable, you've been trained to have a huge safety margin and backup plans, if it's reliable and suddenly it messes up, you're thrown in a new situation and have to think "Shit, what do I do now?". Probably very stressful, and it leads people to avoid the service altogether.
Although apparently NYC subways used to be better too.
what’s going on in New York is irrelevant. The trains in Germany are largely bad. Bad enough that I don’t use them unless I have to. Once they’re at that stage it doesn’t matter how much worse they get for me, I still won’t use them.
I can't say what your experience is and what 'absolutely broken' means. There is data on these things. I can only tell you what the data says. Could be you are in region that is worse then others. Or your definition of 'absolutely broken' is different then most peoples.
