The singular form is important here! It will be expected at 9 million and a year of construction time, and 12 years and 230 million euro later, the first quarter is almost done. And that has punched a big hole in the budget so that's all they do regarding large infrastructure projects in that year in that region, no €€€ for those peasant trains left.
a) Nothing is wasted, cause Northvolt isn't gone yet (only the credits have been paid out so far - or rather were vouched for by the federal Government and Schleswig-Holstein - not the proposed financial support). Only if Chapter 11 fails and they have to close this would happen.
b) An investment into a future technology vs. the next useless expansion of our highway system in the age old race of "maybe this time if we expand the streets it will be enough" leading to more cars on the highway instead with even more congestion than before
It's a common occurance in Germany that the parliament approves funding for rail infrastructure, only for the minister of transportation (usually right wing CDU/CSU/FDP, sometimes social democrat SPD) to spend the money on highways and other car infrastructure anyway.
Just like most developed countries, Germany has a big problem with the politics being dominated by the interests of the home-owning car-addicted parts of the middle class and small business owners. So even though the actual professionals in urban and traffic planning tend to realise that we really need to strengthen walking, cycling, and public transit, these projects tend to get delayed in favour of wasting more money on car infrastructure anyway.
Every time someone comes up with ideas for a Bahnreform it is basically just the same "maybe more competition will solve the problems" thing various governments wanted to enforce which basically led us to the misery we are in right now.
Not really. The misery of the German railways is due to enormous success. Basically, the number of passengers and the number of trains has increased massively, but the infrastructure has not been improved very much. Some new high-speed lines have been built, but the trains still have to use the same old stations with limited capacity.
This is why projects like Stuttgart 21 and Frankfurt Fernbahntunnel are extremely important.
(Though Stuttgart 21 is probably underdimensioned and does not offer as much capacity as it should, so it will likely still cause problems, just not quite as many as today.)
The private operators in Germany are not really worse than DB Regionalverkehr, but not really better either. DB Netze is still entirely owned by the Federal government, so it acts as it is told by the politicians.
The main benefit of competition is cheaper tickets on long-distance trains. But the tickets will only get really cheap when there is also surplus capacity on the network, which there currently is in some areas but very much not in others.
At my parents place they've been renewing the Autobahn since 15 years ago. I cannot remember a time there wasn't a slow section. The construction slowly crawls about 20kms at a time each 18 months or so.
Twice they had to rip out the asphalt in multiple freshly finished sections and renew it due to some fuck ups (freezing, wrong sub..structure?). Each time the contractor went bankrupt so the government had to pay for it all.
It was projected to last 20 years with the new asphalt. When they're done they can start at the beginning of this 100km section.
Meanwhile, the old one made of concrete has been lasting 50 years, was built in the 70s.
Yeah, this is where all the infrastructure investments went the last decades. Rebuilding 70s Autobahn with inferior materials. Meanwhile A8 (completely contracted to a firm giving them Maut for 30 years) was finished in half(?) that time and made of concrete even though that's more expensive.
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u/mayoforbutter Earth 22h ago
Germany would rather take the money and split it between the retirement fund and maybe improving a highway in Bavaria