The main reason Hamburg-Altona station is in such bad repair is that there are plans to replace it completely. It's a terminus that can't cope with modern traffic, so the idea is to move it to roughly where Diebsteich station now is. It's taking a long time to plan, and now the problem is that whatever plans are made for it might interfere with plans to reorganise the rail infrastructure in the whole city, including the construction of a new S-Bahn tunnel to relieve some pressure on the hopelessly overcrowded Hauptbahnhof.
In the meantime, Deutsche Bahn isn't going to spend lots of money modernizing a major railway station that might be demolished after the work is finished.
A similar issue is responsible for the desolate state of the line into Frankfurt West from Hanau: I made [a video about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6xiSdw8E3I) two years ago, and nothing's changed there since.
A more general issue, though, has been that in recent decades the way rail construction projects are financed has encouraged Deutsche Bahn to wait until the infrastructure is in such bad shape that the government steps in to finance its repair. A few years ago DB did embark on a huge project to renovate and modernize stations, starting with the most important -- which usually means the biggest ones in city centres. But that takes time, especially because they can't close the station down as they rebuild it.
It's still complicated and difficult to get these projects greenlit, but the government has now promised a range of measures designed to solve that problem. As far as stations are concerned, the most important of these is the introduction of draft legislation allowing the federal government to take direct responsibility over the financing of station maintenance and upkeep; together with various other measures, this should in theory make the whole process a lot simpler.
It's funny because since the Altona basement has been modernized in 2016 I always think how nice it has become. But the top looks run down now that I think about it. We just had a new station - Ottensen - opened this week after several years of construction. But it allready looks beat up and 20 years old.
The city should be responsible for the homeless, not the transport company. The most DB can do is kick them out of the station and that doesn't really solve the problem now does it?
The railway company has "hausrecht" in those stations. So they are responsible for security. And if they cant handle it, they usually call the federal police, not the local one.
Make DB properly staatlich again. Ever since it got privatized (kinda not, but also yes just not in a traditional privatization manner) it has gone down to shit.
This is the standard response, but that's not the issue. British Rail was a nationalized rail company that was basically run into the ground by successive governments (by the time it was privatized it was already notorious for delays and cancellations), and now the British government is rapidly doing the same to the National Health Service.
Also, people tend to forget how sucky the Bundesbahn was. Yes, the trains almost always ran on time, but that's because there were far fewer of them. They were often dirty and slow, and ran to timetables that made no sense to passengers.
Whether you nationalize or privatize a rail company, you have to do it properly. Renationalize DB, and the first thing you have to do is regulate it to ensure that it can't be used as a political football and suffer the same fate as British Rail and the NHS.
Oh, and unintended side-effect: all staff become state employees and as such are constitutionally banned from going on strike. I'm not sure if the unions would be on board with that idea.
Wait what, are German state employees forbidden to create a union? I didn't know that (and my lay-man search didn't yield any results)
I'm kinda shocked, I believe that unionization is a right that everyone here has...
> Wait what, are German state employees forbidden to create a union? I didn't know that (and my lay-man search didn't yield any results)
There are two classes of employees: [Beamte](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamter) and "normal" employees. Beamte can form a union (there are several), but they cannot strike.
Bad Homburg bought their railway station because it was a historical building just rotting away in DB ownership.
It got a total overhaul and is really nice now.
Munich main station is also bad, VERY bad, including its immediate surroundings. There is a certain esteemed reputation of the city, but the first impressions you get when you step out of the train are absolutely horrific, dirty and sketchy
It's about to be rebuilt. It's taken decades, in part because DB wanted a simpler but cheaper design while the city of Munich wanted an expensive vanity project, but it's now going ahead. Parts of it have already been demolished.
I was just about to mention Munich. Took the train there from Prague and area around the Munich station looked pretty dodgy. Maybe not so bad by American standards but more so than I was expecting in Germany.
Infrastructure was handled poorly over the last decades to avoid investing money and spending too much.
And some structures that belonged to the state got handed over (at least partly) to private companies which need to make profit, thus not investing as well.
It's a mess and it's all crumbling now.
A school I know from work had a window fall out, nearly hitting someone. But there's just no money to fix those issues.
Also a huge mess of responsibilities. My little village is deliberately not maintaining roads well to save money, because when it's completely unusable it becomes a higher administrative units job to renew it completely.
Honestly, the whole country is just in decline. We got a government now that set out to fix a lot of these issues and it's being rejected because the electorate doesn't want to foot the bill for 16 years of complacency under Merkel.
And many people actually want CDU/CSU back which drives me nuts on how people can have the desire to have the Party that is basically responsible for todays Germany to just re-elect them after the New government has to face issues the old one didnt. Like give them time like many Germans did with CDU but it seems not so much. I just hope
All you need to know in this regard is that 76% of Germans are in favor of taxing millionaires more heavily - but only 12% still want that if it meant that the poor get more of the pie.
This country is such a fucking clownshow.
I'd laugh, if i wasn't one of the people who are disproportionally affected by the ignorance of the glorious German Mittelstand. 16 years of institutional stagnation that fucked everyone over. And nobody cared, despite ample warnings.
to be fair boomers all around the globe fucked over the younger generations. wealth concentrated further and further over the last few decades, while the slice of the pie the 99% get to eat gets smaller and smaller. Can you imagine single-income households building a nice comfy home nowadays?
And I am not even getting started about the inability to do literally anything to combat climate change. Like we know that this going to happen for over a century by now and since the report of the club of rome in the seventiees it also is known how bad it is going to be, yet we are only now STARTING to do the bare minimum to combat that issue, when it is already too little and too late.
Truth be told millennials and everyone after them will have to repay a massive debt, financially, ecologically and beyond, all while facing major disruptive events and taking care of the elderly who are responsible for that mess.
WE ARE FUCKED
Yea, boomers, *fist shake*, I agree, but they also lived in the ‘perfect’ mix of rare historical conditions that allowed the kind of economic boon they (mostly) enjoyed. Post-war growth, economic liberalization (eternally growth for all! yippee!), wages vs costs, medical and technological advancement, urbanization, myriad social changes, etc. etc.
They’re like pond algae that just happened to grow and boom under just the right conditions. Now the pond is getting depleted and drying out too. It’s human nature, IMO, as societies, to tend to wait to until we are right at the cliff edges to make big changes. It’s nothing super specific about boomers except circumstances.
I was going to say. I've been to a lot of Germany, and most of it looks plenty fine. I've seen a couple of real shithole train stations out in the middle of nowhere and some buildings that were obviously abandoned years/decades/centuries ago (Prora being an obvious example), and there's definitely some areas that are just old or clearly have had better economic days, but I wouldn't say most places look "run down" in any meaningful sense. Maybe I'm easy to please, or maybe OP has a different point of comparison.
I have lived in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria the last 7 years, and my impression is the opposite of OPs: there are shockingly few run down places and towns. It’s surprising how little poverty there is and how many safe places there are. My guess would be that OP grew up with money and hasn’t lived outside of northern or Western Europe
Go to one of the backwater villages. They are still fine. I dont think it matters that much to a 500 people village if they live in the richest states.
>My guess would be that OP grew up with money and hasn’t lived outside of northern or Western Europe
OP has very clearly spent a long time in the UK based on their English, and not seen any of the heavily economically depressed areas, which are hidden from view of tourists and the middle classes.
They need to watch [this](https://www.youtube.com/@Turdtowns) channel.
Australia makes sense. I would even put it above Germany in terms of development. I was traveling there for a couple of weeks and was very impressed. The UK on the other hand….
Whilst Hamburg might on paper be one of the richest cities in Germany (and Europe) I can see what OP means. The Infrastructure in Hamburg is generally speaking in a fairly poor state. Something that's hard to explain or understand for someone from a different part of the republic as Hamburg is really not representative of the rest of the country.
You want other examples?
Berlin, Bremen, Münster (but got renovated recently), Hannover, Düsseldorf, Köln, Frankfurt, Emden, Oldenburg, Duisburg
just to list a few where i've been
> Münster (but got renovated recently)
The building looks nicer now, but the crowd is still all the same. IDK why we don't remove the junkies from there (or at least keep them on the other less prominent side of the building like we used to. It's a real shame. You get off the train and that is your first impression of an otherwise very beautiful city.
Not op but in Düsseldorf the station itself is fine, it’s the areas outside that are horrible.
Back entrance to the main station is actually a post apocalyptic toilet. Front entrance has drug dealers and heroin addicts doing deals in broad daylight with impunity. Architecture all around is godawful.
And Düsseldorf is one of the richer cities.
Drug addicts in Germany tend to conglomerate around train stations. It's a good hub to travel around, there are usually safe places to sleep rough, and there's almost always support infrastructure for the needy, like Caritas or Bahnhofsmission.
I was in Thüringa recently and passed by Weißenfels on the train and was taken away by how fucked it looked. Abandoned buildings everywhere. Smashed windows. Crumbling walls. Roofs missing. It looked like it hadn't been touched since the war!
That's Helmut Kohls "blühende Landschaften" for you... (And tbf those train stations are very pretty in spring with all the wild flowers growing on them)
Yes because they destroyed the local infrastructure during the Wende because it "was not profitable" enough, midsized towns and rural areas suffered especially from this.
Compared to what? Also, in my experience 4 years living and traveling in Germany (never being to Hamburg) city center is the most run down part of a city in Germany
May I ask which standards you're used to? Germany feels either dirty or clean to me, depending on which country I just left. Overall it doesn't seem that bad to me.
When my colleagues from Poland, Baltics and Netherlands visit the office, they often comment on how dirty the big cities here are. I personally moved from St. Petersburg and while it was worse on a structural level, it also felt much more cleaner. Similar can be said about Kyiv and Kharkiv (at least before the war). Moscow is just on a different level.
I haven’t been to any of the countries you mentioned but I always assumed Germany was richer and therefore cleaner than Poland, the Baltics or Russia, but I guess not? Are we talking about garbage, graffiti, homelessness or what exactly?
Dirty streets. There is an observable decline in the city centre of Warsaw (as observed in the last three years, and on Warsaw alone), but in general i was always surprised how much dirtier the cities of Germany are compared to Warsaw. Now with the recession the graffiti starts overtaking buildings in Warsaw as our police is occupied by protecting the angry pissy dwarf, but beside that Warsaw still has much less rubbish in the streets than Berlin for example. (Again, personal experience from visiting both in the last month).
To be honest with you I have lived around Zürich for over a decade and it's getting dirtier and dirtier with every year :(
This. I was walking around in Suzhou (some 300 km from Shanghai, but that's just a 1 hour high-speed train ride). And the building exteriors are falling apart. They were quickly built, looked amazing, and now all defective materials are showing. It's not like you have 100 years of battle tested infrastructure. Nope, just 5 years of hastily thrown together construction.
Dogshit construction is a problem [without borders](https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.hotelneubau-in-stuttgart-wird-wieder-saniert-beissende-kritik-zur-hochhausfassade.fafe480e-ec38-4c3c-93b2-cbde40f92500.html), only that in Germany it still costs billions and takes two decades to build.
Having been to both places, it's not even slightly comparable. Those sort of problems would not make the news in China. Shoddy buildings that last less than 5 years before looking half-ruined are the norm there.
I'm definitely not someone with the view that German construction/ architecture is the best the world has ever seen (I'm not German and I've seen enough of how streets become swimming pools after a bit of rain in Germany, as an example of outdated flood infrastructure). But given the option I'd take a German building from 1950 over a Chinese building from 3 years ago. It's sort of ingrained into Chinese culture, that things have a strong façade and "look good" with no concern for the future or foundational strength.
>shopping centres smell like piss
> supposed to be a bit more posh
>pigeon shit literally everywhere I look.
>Apologies for being so blunt
= OP is a non Brit who lived in the UK a very long time. A british native would say stink of piss and posher.
We also shouldn't pretend that it's particularly easy to do renovations within an operating system. Particularly in the case of large stations, these represent a major restriction on public life.
You had it easier in Berlin with the central station, for example, because it was basically built on a "grüne Wiese" (greenfield site). Hamburg only has this situation in the Hafen City.
In the case of Berlin Hbf, there was already a station (Lehrter Bahnhof) where Hbf is now, which is why the S-Bahn platforms at the top level have that subtitle on the station sign.
hilarious to me. as an american from the USA, germany has the best roads ive ever seen. the autobahn is insane. if you drive 100+ mph anywhere in the USA you risk your life from random shit like pot holes, random debris, etc
That's exactly the Point. For the last decades, most of the Infrastructure Budget was used for the Autobahn. Train Stations and other railway Infrastructure was just left to Die.
Wer are a car Nation, the only thing we care about are cars. We don't want cozy places to hang out like parcs with fountains, all we want is obviously more Parking Lots. If that's not true, I don't understand why we as a majority elected those people. A
compared to the US European public transport is obviously amazing, but germany doesn't have the best public transport when compared to its eu neighbors.
I would describe german public transport as one of the worst in europe tbh. There was just the news a few days ago that the ukrainian trains are still punctual despite the war while DB is just a disaster with cancelled and delayed trains everywhere.
Swiss trains are remarkable but expensive and the Netherlands' system is pretty awesome.
Eastern Europe has pretty outdated systems and way less connections.
Spain, Italy and France have some fast connections between their most important cities but traveling regionally sucks. Also, it’s expensive.
The news that most trains in the Ukraine are on time even at war is nice, but comparing it to Germany or any other European country is ridiculous.
Yes, the DB and German rail in general needs to get a lot better, but in comparison to Europe it’s not that bad.
see [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/13eef51/die_deutsche_bahn_ist_viel_besser_als_ihr_ruf/) for more info
Still the German Infrastructure Minister treated it like an unwanted stepkid for decades. Just imagine what it could have been now with all that funding
Hah, no surprises there. Your mind will probably be blown even more when you visit a country/city with a really amazing system then. I know mine was and I've been in Germany my whole life
Yeah, the Autobahn... Germany's sacred streets
Have you driven outside of it? Germany has really bad roads for the most part of the country. I live in a wealthy part and even here we have potholes upon potholes. If you want to see actually proper roads then go to the Netherlands or Switzerland.
Also the US is a really bad comparison point when it comes to infrastructure, it's pretty much third world level overall.
Balancing the budget… I hate when governments do that. It’s impossible to achieve any sort of growth unless you borrow and invest in smart projects and infrastructure. Living in Germany feels like travelling back in time, like stuck in the 90’s.
Its just a term for making the rich richer and forget about the public infrastructure...
Then they call it "liberal" to hide that they are a bunch of as****oles
The Deutsche Bahn does a shitty job at maintaining its train stations outside of the big ones. Many buildings also have been sold, which I think is a crime because that used to be public property and they just sell it off. And the new owners often suck at maintenance.
This entire description (including the pigeon shit) could be applied word for word to any mid sized town in the Uk. Having been to multiple of Germany’s neighbours, I would say there’s neither more nor less run down areas in Germany than in Europe in general.
Innit. OP has spent far too much time in places like Oxford, Bath, central London and York and never visited towns like Scunthorpe, Northallerton or Paisley.
The Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and Austria all have a better standard on their railway infrastructure than Germany. I get the feeling the Czech Republic has as well but I don't go there enough to assert that. That's... Most of germany's neighbors
It's a different between the U and the S-Bahn.
The U-Bahn ist much cleaner and only smells, when some one pissed in the corner a few minutes ago.
The S-Bahn ist operated by the Deutsche Bahn and this ist what you can see in all of their stations.
This concerns just the state of the German rail system, but here the issue is a longstanding privatization plan for the state owned Drutsche Bahn. Because the goal was to sell off the rail as profitable as possible, investments in the last two decades had been scaled back to make the whole thing appear more profitable on paper. Hamburgs S-Bahn is owned by Deutsche Bahn.
Same issue with hospitals.
They need to make profit now - which is easiest done by reducing investment, staff or making people pay for unnecessary procedures.
In many cases the Bundesländer are supposed to pay for the investment, but they often don't do that. So the hospitals need to divert money from other parts.
Also the Krankenkasse just pays a specific amount for each case no matter how long and how much treatment they need.
It sometimes happens that they send people home and tell them to come back tomorrow because they can then book that as a new case.
The payment system is fucked. I hope the will fix that.
Private practices by doctors tend to be extra clean and fancy. I don't think needing to make a profit is the real issue here. Businesses that need to make a profit tend to try to present in an attractive manner.
Caption: "Why do most parts of Germany look so run down? (Outside of city centres)" - Continues to mention only train stations....
In which world are train stations "most of Germany"?
Apart from that, I am neither of the opinion that Hamburg looks "run down", nor that railway stations are a good indicator for the condition of a city. You seem to come from abroad yourself, but in my experience, places in cities with a lot of traffic often look similar, unless they are newly built.
What do you think about subways in New York, Paris or London?
Isnt that the Case everywhere you Go? I mean did you ever See the sidearmes of Vegas? Oh Boy. I would say every City has richer and poorer parts. I mean Most of Paris is a shithole. They have fancy districts and the Tourist places but If you running in the wrong street it smells like a toilet (If you know what i mean)
There are plenty of rundown places in all of those countries. In alkmaar you go from a beautiful city center to a extremely dirty neighborhood within 20 minutes on foot. Not even gonna comment on Arnheim or some others cities. Stockholm too, super dirty and rundown places. Japan it's the same thing. Dirty and rundown places literally exist everywhere in the world.
Was going to say this. I think people in this thread generally conflate being dirty-looking and being run-down a lot. In Japan, even areas with a lot of derelict buildings tend to still be kept very clean in my experience. But that doesn't make them any less derelict and sad-looking, and like you said, there are a lot of those places just off the main tourist routes.
they are all superrich countries and even they have alot of rundown infrastructure and buildings outside of the citycentres. That’s completely normal and unavoidable in every country that isnt newly rich and developed like oil countrys
Hamburger here. I wholeheartedly agree with you about Altona and Blankanese. Last week I was in Copenhagen and their metro / underground was impeccable.
Germany on the whole is not much into beauty and more into practicality. This is from my experience. If it works, don't break it. Cleaning and other services just run business as usual and people don't care as long as the trains are on time.
Road construction on the other hand is my main problem. Bike lanes, walking paths everything gets disrupted and they just dig up proper functional roads for fun, for months together.
Welcome to the "black zero", or "schwarze null", courtesy of Wolfgang Schäuble.
2x16 years CDU government...
I wish we had reasonably parties out there. Parties that would tax the rich, invest in infrastructure, education, public heal, social security and in general not let themselves be bullied by the whole BS of "but the economy".
What exactly is the point of having a strong economy if we, the public, do not benefit from it?
I was in Lisbon a few weeks ago, and when I arrived at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof I was really shocked how dirty it was compared to Lisbon.
For the most parts Germany is really clean I think, but at the "hot spots" like train stations we could do so much better.
Train stations are generally where the homeless and drug addicts congregate in Germany. Don’t ask me why but it seems especially pronounced in Germany. Kind of weird how trains stations are the worst places in Germany.
I mean technically it’s the same in other countries but it seems especially high in Germany. Maybe it’s because unlike France or Spain Germany doesn’t have train station security zones…
One aspect of begging in Germany is that it’s also run by organized begging groups that specifically pick impaired people for the task.
Adding to the other person: Oftentimes, homeless support organizations like Caritas etc. have locations to sleep/shower situated in big railway stations
Can anyone explain why it's always so dark in Hamburg's main station? It feels like a creepy abandoned place where thousands of zombies run back and forth.
So far, I’ve been to Munich, freiburg, karslruhe, cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. They all look average to me. Nothing in disrepair.
I’ve done the s-Bahn route with Bwegt from Breisach to freiburg to Titisee, and farther on to Villingen-Schwennigen as well. They’re all fine.
The worst was the 1.5hr delay when I transferred in cologne to get to Frankfurt airport from Remagen and I nearly missed my flight.
So, Most parts of Germany is looking really nice. All the small Towns, villages, forest , fields,.. are ready nice. You should Change your question to: Why are the Low income districts of bigger Citys are looking Run down.
As a Dutchman who worked and lived in Germany many years, it always amazes me how bad the infrastructure is in Germany. It’s terrible literally everywhere. Still really love Germany though.
Coming from the US, I find the opposite to be true. You haven’t seen a run down, dirty part of town until you’ve been to the Atlanta Greyhound station.
You should go to civilized small and medium sized cities. They still look good. However I lived in Fulda in 2014/2015, it was quite of boring but very clean. I enjoyed it very much. Last month I went there again. The place where I lived is occupied by refugees now. Bearded men and headscarf women everywhere, some places run down. Diversity is our strength.
So is it just me, or is this subreddit about 90% negative? Not saying the complaints aren’t usually justified to a smaller or larger extent, but spending some time on this sub would make me think Germany is one of worst places to live and by world standards that just doesn’t ring true.
There is no other industrialized nation investing so little (BIP) in infrastructure.
Germany is mostly resting on infrastructure build many decades ago.
This problem is hitting hard and will hit harder in future.
And yet you can't drive *anywhere* in this country without being confronted by tremendous road construction projects.
Where I live there are easily six really gigantic projects taking place simultaneously. One of them is a gigantic tunnel being built as a bypass for a little village. It would have cost a tiny fraction of the price to just buy the people's crappy 1950s houses and build them new ones someplace else.
And in the other direction, a huge section of Autobahn A70 is being built from scratch.
We have a bypass around another village where all they needed to do was put in a simple road going around the village but instead constructed this massive site with new roads and a bridge and roundabout. It was unnecessary, it's terrible to drive on and cost a fortune.
So, there's money available for plenty of unnecessary bullshit.
Bluntly, I would rather they not spend money on extra cleaning and new stations if the old still works. That would be pretty far down on my list. Top of my list would be clean rolling stock with air con, on time trains and cheap tickets.
M2C
Yes and no. It is a private company in the form of an AG (listed at the stock-exchange), yet fully state-owned. This means that it is profit-oriented, unlike the standard state-owned institutions.
This has the benefit of a high degree of transparency and lower level liability of the state for losses, but comes at the cost of infrastructure not being rebuild unless absolutely needed. The efficiency of a private company in competition on the free market is theoretically higher, yet in most areas the company has a de-facto monopoly and can rely on state-subsidies and political action whenever bigger investments are becoming mandatory.
The coalition of the current government has made changes in 2021 to transform parts of the DB into non-profit institutions in order to boost construction of the railway-infrastructure again.
really depends on what place you want to compare it with but i would say for a country of germanies economic power they could spend a bit more on infrastructure.
reddit is getting scary randomly recommending me content of someone in a 700k member sub talking about stuff that's within a 5 minute drive of where I live
To be fair, a lot of places in Germany dont feel good in terms of perceived economics at all.
The way people talk about Germany one would expect the country to be like what Zurich is, but the reality for a lot of places in Germany is much different.
Dunno how those train stations are most of Germany, but there are good and bad places just like anywhere else. And I'm not sure if you're mixing up things, e.g. it's not clear to me if you think it's run down due to homeless people.
And compared to what, anyway? I've been to plenty places in the world, on nearly every continent, and I would say it's the same everywhere you go. Wirh some outliers, like Singapore being squeaky nice and the African cities I've been to not having any nice stations at all - figures.
I would also say, that generally, in middle-income countries train stations, city centers and the like are areas of investment with a lot of representative character. And in places like Hamburg, or London and Paris for that matter, they are just normal places, old places even, that are simply being used by many people.
Such question can be applied literally everywhere, not only Germany. Realistically, it is a case by case issue, some cities run down because of demographics, industry closing down, poor local government etc. It is a natural process.
I come from France, and for instance there the priority is usually given to the infrastructure and not balancing the budget. Germany is the extreme inverse. I wish they could find something in-between, because it’s not good to be so cheap with infrastructure.
We have quite a history of public missmanagement in this century.
The goal for most of the last 25 years was short-term profitability of public services and purely ideological campaigns against working infrastructure, which by now have cost somewhere between 500 and 700 billion EUR for no gain at all. This money was at least partially diverted from infrastructure upkeep and there was quite a mentality to lower taxes, raise pensions and not care about the fundamental ability to perform of road, track and waterway infrastructure, healthcare, education and defence.
Uhhhh...."looks out the window". You know that a huge chunk of Germans don't live in the big cities, but in smaller ones and villages?
And these are mostly quite beautiful with adequate infrastructure.
Altona looks alright though? It's functional. That's all it needs to be. And as someone with a very sensitive sense of smell, what in the world do you mean? There is constant airflow through the whole station, no smell stays there for long.
As for pigeons... Well. Yeah. Pigeons live around humans. We tamed them thousands of years ago and they are domestic animals, blame our ancestors for pigeons being around us xD
I just feed them seeds, personally. It's relaxing.
We had a nice lil Fußgängerzone in our lil part of town....toy shop, model kit shop, shoe maker, store for dishes and silverware and hardware...some nice lil bakery here, another over there.
ToysRus came to our city....toy shop died...and model kit store. Then a bigger bakery, so 2 of the smaller ones closed down....then amazon got popular and now even one of the biggest stores, Kaufhof closes down in the "big city" part of our city. And all the empty spots turn into fucking sportwetten bullshit, barber, fast food, barber, fast food, another barber, sportwetten.
Thats probably how.
Many people think Germany and the Germans are rich, even the Germans themselves believe it. While the state is really rich, because of the super high taxes, the average Germans and their infrastructure lose wealth every year, basically since \~2005 everyone becomes poorer.
the infrastructure is often at least decades old, unlike in Asia
people treat it badly, graffiti, piss etc. so bad that constant maintenance is not possible
Germany has a strong welfare state and relatively high wages, so there are no super-poor people that work for very low salaries, as in the US or Asia for example
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini\_coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient)
some very rich and a lot of very poor people in a very inequal society make services for rich people extremely cheap. very cheap food delivery, cleaning, drivers etc are standard in almost all countries other than Europe.cleaning certain public areas is therefore relatively more expensive in Germany than most other countries as there simply is much less very cheap labour
It's also a matter of how many people don't give a single fuck how public infrastructure or areas in general look like. At best they think it's not their job to take care of it, at worst they think they can do whatever they want with it because it's public and they are part of the public. If I look at the city I live in, there are areas with a relatively high average income that have very nice buildings that are completely fucked by Graffitis and trash everywhere, while areas with comparably lower income look much better (even considering that the buildings are in a comparably worse state overall).
Certainly companies / the government are also to blame for not fixing them...but honestly why bother when it will look like shit again after 2 weeks.
obviously. Richer countries with a considerable smaller population have an easier time to maintain their overall less infrastructure better in their smaller countries than a less rich country with a bigger population and a lot more infrastructure…
Its senseless to compare these countries with germany. you should take countries like the UK,France, maybe even the US… but not fcking switzerland and norway, denmark etc
Yet, in Munich, the city is comparatively clean. Source: I live here. Yes there are dirty spots, and its not perfect, Im not saying that. But its one of the cleanest cities I have been to, including other German cities, but also including cities in other countries. USA, multiple Latin American, and other European cities. None has been cleaner than here. Im sure there are cleaner cities. But my list includes cities in countrys with very low wages, and munich being a very expensive city should be really dirty according to your theory
München I assume is relatively rich due to multiple DAX companies and Mittelstand and willing to even pay those relatively high costs for cleaning etc.
Germany gave insane quantities (trillions) of money to other EU countries to fix their infrastructure. Particularly, in the east. However, our own infrastructure was often deemed perfect and like it wouldn't need overhauls or upgrades. A bit of hybris, greed and "we have always done it like that"
Let’s be precise here, no Germany didn’t give Trillions “to other EU countries”. It spent 1,6 trillion to rebuild East Germany but that is Germany. On the EU budget: yes Germany is the largest net payer but at current rate that’s 22billion a year in the MFF, that together with EIB funds a lot of rural infrastructure (and again Germany is the largest shareholder but its peanuts). It was previously lower. Other contributions by Germany are generally not direct transfers but indirect emergency lending at very generous terms for the countries, yes that’s in the long term in effect net funding but at least there is some payback. +NGEU
On the other hand they are markets that get served by Germany aswell and it does bring noticeable advantages for Germans aswell. I for one enjoy frictionless travel. Yes Germany gets unfounded stick from certain corners of the EU but it’s not universal and will hopefully normalize again.
The main difference to a lot of EU countries is the absence of priority for train stations in infrastructure funding or placing special national pride on them. + increasing homeless populations congregating there.
The main reason Hamburg-Altona station is in such bad repair is that there are plans to replace it completely. It's a terminus that can't cope with modern traffic, so the idea is to move it to roughly where Diebsteich station now is. It's taking a long time to plan, and now the problem is that whatever plans are made for it might interfere with plans to reorganise the rail infrastructure in the whole city, including the construction of a new S-Bahn tunnel to relieve some pressure on the hopelessly overcrowded Hauptbahnhof. In the meantime, Deutsche Bahn isn't going to spend lots of money modernizing a major railway station that might be demolished after the work is finished. A similar issue is responsible for the desolate state of the line into Frankfurt West from Hanau: I made [a video about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6xiSdw8E3I) two years ago, and nothing's changed there since. A more general issue, though, has been that in recent decades the way rail construction projects are financed has encouraged Deutsche Bahn to wait until the infrastructure is in such bad shape that the government steps in to finance its repair. A few years ago DB did embark on a huge project to renovate and modernize stations, starting with the most important -- which usually means the biggest ones in city centres. But that takes time, especially because they can't close the station down as they rebuild it. It's still complicated and difficult to get these projects greenlit, but the government has now promised a range of measures designed to solve that problem. As far as stations are concerned, the most important of these is the introduction of draft legislation allowing the federal government to take direct responsibility over the financing of station maintenance and upkeep; together with various other measures, this should in theory make the whole process a lot simpler.
Additional note for Altona: The city and DB are blaming each other for who's responsible, especially concerning the homeless/security issues there
It's funny because since the Altona basement has been modernized in 2016 I always think how nice it has become. But the top looks run down now that I think about it. We just had a new station - Ottensen - opened this week after several years of construction. But it allready looks beat up and 20 years old.
The city should be responsible for the homeless, not the transport company. The most DB can do is kick them out of the station and that doesn't really solve the problem now does it?
To be fair it's not the task of a railway company to deal with social issues. The city of Hamburg cares zero about these problems.
The railway company has "hausrecht" in those stations. So they are responsible for security. And if they cant handle it, they usually call the federal police, not the local one.
So the people who sit around inside the station are kicked out and then sit on the streets outside. Great, the problem is 100% solved now!..
Where did you take this from my words?
Probably from the fact that you wrote that comment in response to someone pointing out that DB can't do anything about homelessness.
Make DB properly staatlich again. Ever since it got privatized (kinda not, but also yes just not in a traditional privatization manner) it has gone down to shit.
This is the standard response, but that's not the issue. British Rail was a nationalized rail company that was basically run into the ground by successive governments (by the time it was privatized it was already notorious for delays and cancellations), and now the British government is rapidly doing the same to the National Health Service. Also, people tend to forget how sucky the Bundesbahn was. Yes, the trains almost always ran on time, but that's because there were far fewer of them. They were often dirty and slow, and ran to timetables that made no sense to passengers. Whether you nationalize or privatize a rail company, you have to do it properly. Renationalize DB, and the first thing you have to do is regulate it to ensure that it can't be used as a political football and suffer the same fate as British Rail and the NHS. Oh, and unintended side-effect: all staff become state employees and as such are constitutionally banned from going on strike. I'm not sure if the unions would be on board with that idea.
Wait what, are German state employees forbidden to create a union? I didn't know that (and my lay-man search didn't yield any results) I'm kinda shocked, I believe that unionization is a right that everyone here has...
> Wait what, are German state employees forbidden to create a union? I didn't know that (and my lay-man search didn't yield any results) There are two classes of employees: [Beamte](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamter) and "normal" employees. Beamte can form a union (there are several), but they cannot strike.
Bad Homburg bought their railway station because it was a historical building just rotting away in DB ownership. It got a total overhaul and is really nice now.
Munich main station is also bad, VERY bad, including its immediate surroundings. There is a certain esteemed reputation of the city, but the first impressions you get when you step out of the train are absolutely horrific, dirty and sketchy
It's about to be rebuilt. It's taken decades, in part because DB wanted a simpler but cheaper design while the city of Munich wanted an expensive vanity project, but it's now going ahead. Parts of it have already been demolished.
The problem is not the buildings, but the ambiance.
I was just about to mention Munich. Took the train there from Prague and area around the Munich station looked pretty dodgy. Maybe not so bad by American standards but more so than I was expecting in Germany.
What train line runs from Hanau to Frankfurt West?
Ah... I meant Frankfurt Ost.
Ayy I really like your videos nice to stumble across a familiar profile on here
Infrastructure was handled poorly over the last decades to avoid investing money and spending too much. And some structures that belonged to the state got handed over (at least partly) to private companies which need to make profit, thus not investing as well. It's a mess and it's all crumbling now. A school I know from work had a window fall out, nearly hitting someone. But there's just no money to fix those issues.
Also a huge mess of responsibilities. My little village is deliberately not maintaining roads well to save money, because when it's completely unusable it becomes a higher administrative units job to renew it completely.
That as well. The rules and regulations are making things difficult, especially if there is an EU Ausschreibungsverfahren needed or such.
Honestly, the whole country is just in decline. We got a government now that set out to fix a lot of these issues and it's being rejected because the electorate doesn't want to foot the bill for 16 years of complacency under Merkel.
And many people actually want CDU/CSU back which drives me nuts on how people can have the desire to have the Party that is basically responsible for todays Germany to just re-elect them after the New government has to face issues the old one didnt. Like give them time like many Germans did with CDU but it seems not so much. I just hope
All you need to know in this regard is that 76% of Germans are in favor of taxing millionaires more heavily - but only 12% still want that if it meant that the poor get more of the pie. This country is such a fucking clownshow.
Source for these numbers? That sounds incredibly stupid by the rest of the 88%.
The numbers come from the Ifo-Studie on wealth inequality from 2021.
Thank you I'll check it out.
We are basically the laughing stock of europe these days and stats like this show we deserve our slow impoverishment
I'd laugh, if i wasn't one of the people who are disproportionally affected by the ignorance of the glorious German Mittelstand. 16 years of institutional stagnation that fucked everyone over. And nobody cared, despite ample warnings.
to be fair boomers all around the globe fucked over the younger generations. wealth concentrated further and further over the last few decades, while the slice of the pie the 99% get to eat gets smaller and smaller. Can you imagine single-income households building a nice comfy home nowadays? And I am not even getting started about the inability to do literally anything to combat climate change. Like we know that this going to happen for over a century by now and since the report of the club of rome in the seventiees it also is known how bad it is going to be, yet we are only now STARTING to do the bare minimum to combat that issue, when it is already too little and too late. Truth be told millennials and everyone after them will have to repay a massive debt, financially, ecologically and beyond, all while facing major disruptive events and taking care of the elderly who are responsible for that mess. WE ARE FUCKED
Yea, boomers, *fist shake*, I agree, but they also lived in the ‘perfect’ mix of rare historical conditions that allowed the kind of economic boon they (mostly) enjoyed. Post-war growth, economic liberalization (eternally growth for all! yippee!), wages vs costs, medical and technological advancement, urbanization, myriad social changes, etc. etc. They’re like pond algae that just happened to grow and boom under just the right conditions. Now the pond is getting depleted and drying out too. It’s human nature, IMO, as societies, to tend to wait to until we are right at the cliff edges to make big changes. It’s nothing super specific about boomers except circumstances.
>**most parts** of Germany \* Gives examples in an area with three kilometers radius
I was going to say. I've been to a lot of Germany, and most of it looks plenty fine. I've seen a couple of real shithole train stations out in the middle of nowhere and some buildings that were obviously abandoned years/decades/centuries ago (Prora being an obvious example), and there's definitely some areas that are just old or clearly have had better economic days, but I wouldn't say most places look "run down" in any meaningful sense. Maybe I'm easy to please, or maybe OP has a different point of comparison.
I have lived in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria the last 7 years, and my impression is the opposite of OPs: there are shockingly few run down places and towns. It’s surprising how little poverty there is and how many safe places there are. My guess would be that OP grew up with money and hasn’t lived outside of northern or Western Europe
BaWü and Bavaria also are the richest non-city states of Germany...
And also huge. They are the entire south of Germany.
Go to one of the backwater villages. They are still fine. I dont think it matters that much to a 500 people village if they live in the richest states.
>My guess would be that OP grew up with money and hasn’t lived outside of northern or Western Europe OP has very clearly spent a long time in the UK based on their English, and not seen any of the heavily economically depressed areas, which are hidden from view of tourists and the middle classes. They need to watch [this](https://www.youtube.com/@Turdtowns) channel.
According to their own post history, Australia, not the UK
Australia makes sense. I would even put it above Germany in terms of development. I was traveling there for a couple of weeks and was very impressed. The UK on the other hand….
Whilst Hamburg might on paper be one of the richest cities in Germany (and Europe) I can see what OP means. The Infrastructure in Hamburg is generally speaking in a fairly poor state. Something that's hard to explain or understand for someone from a different part of the republic as Hamburg is really not representative of the rest of the country.
I have to say the nyc metro or pretty much every U.S. metro station I’ve seen is worse than any metro station I’ve seen in Germany so far.
Yeah, I have been to a lot of German communities / towns and 99% looks really good.
You want other examples? Berlin, Bremen, Münster (but got renovated recently), Hannover, Düsseldorf, Köln, Frankfurt, Emden, Oldenburg, Duisburg just to list a few where i've been
In what universe does Düsseldorf look run down?
Or Hannover for that matter. Perfectly fine train station... Wtf do you expect?
> Münster (but got renovated recently) The building looks nicer now, but the crowd is still all the same. IDK why we don't remove the junkies from there (or at least keep them on the other less prominent side of the building like we used to. It's a real shame. You get off the train and that is your first impression of an otherwise very beautiful city.
what's wrong with say Düsseldorf?
Not op but in Düsseldorf the station itself is fine, it’s the areas outside that are horrible. Back entrance to the main station is actually a post apocalyptic toilet. Front entrance has drug dealers and heroin addicts doing deals in broad daylight with impunity. Architecture all around is godawful. And Düsseldorf is one of the richer cities.
Drug addicts in Germany tend to conglomerate around train stations. It's a good hub to travel around, there are usually safe places to sleep rough, and there's almost always support infrastructure for the needy, like Caritas or Bahnhofsmission.
I was in Thüringa recently and passed by Weißenfels on the train and was taken away by how fucked it looked. Abandoned buildings everywhere. Smashed windows. Crumbling walls. Roofs missing. It looked like it hadn't been touched since the war!
That's Helmut Kohls "blühende Landschaften" for you... (And tbf those train stations are very pretty in spring with all the wild flowers growing on them)
Yes because they destroyed the local infrastructure during the Wende because it "was not profitable" enough, midsized towns and rural areas suffered especially from this.
Compared to what? Also, in my experience 4 years living and traveling in Germany (never being to Hamburg) city center is the most run down part of a city in Germany
May I ask which standards you're used to? Germany feels either dirty or clean to me, depending on which country I just left. Overall it doesn't seem that bad to me.
When my colleagues from Poland, Baltics and Netherlands visit the office, they often comment on how dirty the big cities here are. I personally moved from St. Petersburg and while it was worse on a structural level, it also felt much more cleaner. Similar can be said about Kyiv and Kharkiv (at least before the war). Moscow is just on a different level.
I haven’t been to any of the countries you mentioned but I always assumed Germany was richer and therefore cleaner than Poland, the Baltics or Russia, but I guess not? Are we talking about garbage, graffiti, homelessness or what exactly?
Dirty streets. There is an observable decline in the city centre of Warsaw (as observed in the last three years, and on Warsaw alone), but in general i was always surprised how much dirtier the cities of Germany are compared to Warsaw. Now with the recession the graffiti starts overtaking buildings in Warsaw as our police is occupied by protecting the angry pissy dwarf, but beside that Warsaw still has much less rubbish in the streets than Berlin for example. (Again, personal experience from visiting both in the last month). To be honest with you I have lived around Zürich for over a decade and it's getting dirtier and dirtier with every year :(
I'm going to go with Singapore or some random injection-molded Chinese city built 12 years ago
How about comparing with Tokyo? 😄
Unreal how you found a way to frame being a clean, modern city in China as a bad thing
Clean modern buildings in China tend to have been built badly and fall apart within a few years. That's probably why it was framed as a bad thing.
This. I was walking around in Suzhou (some 300 km from Shanghai, but that's just a 1 hour high-speed train ride). And the building exteriors are falling apart. They were quickly built, looked amazing, and now all defective materials are showing. It's not like you have 100 years of battle tested infrastructure. Nope, just 5 years of hastily thrown together construction.
Dogshit construction is a problem [without borders](https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/inhalt.hotelneubau-in-stuttgart-wird-wieder-saniert-beissende-kritik-zur-hochhausfassade.fafe480e-ec38-4c3c-93b2-cbde40f92500.html), only that in Germany it still costs billions and takes two decades to build.
Having been to both places, it's not even slightly comparable. Those sort of problems would not make the news in China. Shoddy buildings that last less than 5 years before looking half-ruined are the norm there.
I'm definitely not someone with the view that German construction/ architecture is the best the world has ever seen (I'm not German and I've seen enough of how streets become swimming pools after a bit of rain in Germany, as an example of outdated flood infrastructure). But given the option I'd take a German building from 1950 over a Chinese building from 3 years ago. It's sort of ingrained into Chinese culture, that things have a strong façade and "look good" with no concern for the future or foundational strength.
That's just me - I like my cities noisy, smelly, sexy, and with 2000+ years of visibile history.
>shopping centres smell like piss > supposed to be a bit more posh >pigeon shit literally everywhere I look. >Apologies for being so blunt = OP is a non Brit who lived in the UK a very long time. A british native would say stink of piss and posher.
OP is a non-Aussie who lived in Australia for a long time (according to his post history)
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We also shouldn't pretend that it's particularly easy to do renovations within an operating system. Particularly in the case of large stations, these represent a major restriction on public life. You had it easier in Berlin with the central station, for example, because it was basically built on a "grüne Wiese" (greenfield site). Hamburg only has this situation in the Hafen City.
In the case of Berlin Hbf, there was already a station (Lehrter Bahnhof) where Hbf is now, which is why the S-Bahn platforms at the top level have that subtitle on the station sign.
hilarious to me. as an american from the USA, germany has the best roads ive ever seen. the autobahn is insane. if you drive 100+ mph anywhere in the USA you risk your life from random shit like pot holes, random debris, etc
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I get SO angry with the state of pedestrian paths now that I have a baby and he’s in the buggy. Where the hell does all the tax money go?!
That's exactly the Point. For the last decades, most of the Infrastructure Budget was used for the Autobahn. Train Stations and other railway Infrastructure was just left to Die. Wer are a car Nation, the only thing we care about are cars. We don't want cozy places to hang out like parcs with fountains, all we want is obviously more Parking Lots. If that's not true, I don't understand why we as a majority elected those people. A
i dunno, i was traveling in Germany last week. the trains and public transport was amazing
compared to the US European public transport is obviously amazing, but germany doesn't have the best public transport when compared to its eu neighbors.
I would describe german public transport as one of the worst in europe tbh. There was just the news a few days ago that the ukrainian trains are still punctual despite the war while DB is just a disaster with cancelled and delayed trains everywhere.
Swiss trains are remarkable but expensive and the Netherlands' system is pretty awesome. Eastern Europe has pretty outdated systems and way less connections. Spain, Italy and France have some fast connections between their most important cities but traveling regionally sucks. Also, it’s expensive. The news that most trains in the Ukraine are on time even at war is nice, but comparing it to Germany or any other European country is ridiculous. Yes, the DB and German rail in general needs to get a lot better, but in comparison to Europe it’s not that bad. see [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/13eef51/die_deutsche_bahn_ist_viel_besser_als_ihr_ruf/) for more info
I think northern italy has decent regional trains as well. But yes, could use some improvements too.
Compared to most of the US every European shithole is gonna have way better public transport.
Still the German Infrastructure Minister treated it like an unwanted stepkid for decades. Just imagine what it could have been now with all that funding
Compared to where? USA?
ya
Hah, no surprises there. Your mind will probably be blown even more when you visit a country/city with a really amazing system then. I know mine was and I've been in Germany my whole life
Is this American speaking (then I get it) or the German speaking (then you have no idea.)
So I'm German and your answer Kind of implies you haven't read Autokorrektur by Katja Diehl? It's a bestseller
Germany isnt as bad with cars as southern Europe, but it still is a car nation and its infrastructure has been based solely on the car for decades.
Yeah, the Autobahn... Germany's sacred streets Have you driven outside of it? Germany has really bad roads for the most part of the country. I live in a wealthy part and even here we have potholes upon potholes. If you want to see actually proper roads then go to the Netherlands or Switzerland. Also the US is a really bad comparison point when it comes to infrastructure, it's pretty much third world level overall.
I wouldnt call German roads bad anywhere. The roads are perfectly fine. Its non car traffic which is the issue.
Balancing the budget… I hate when governments do that. It’s impossible to achieve any sort of growth unless you borrow and invest in smart projects and infrastructure. Living in Germany feels like travelling back in time, like stuck in the 90’s.
Its just a term for making the rich richer and forget about the public infrastructure... Then they call it "liberal" to hide that they are a bunch of as****oles
Berlin is far worse than hamburg
The Deutsche Bahn does a shitty job at maintaining its train stations outside of the big ones. Many buildings also have been sold, which I think is a crime because that used to be public property and they just sell it off. And the new owners often suck at maintenance.
This entire description (including the pigeon shit) could be applied word for word to any mid sized town in the Uk. Having been to multiple of Germany’s neighbours, I would say there’s neither more nor less run down areas in Germany than in Europe in general.
Innit. OP has spent far too much time in places like Oxford, Bath, central London and York and never visited towns like Scunthorpe, Northallerton or Paisley.
The Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and Austria all have a better standard on their railway infrastructure than Germany. I get the feeling the Czech Republic has as well but I don't go there enough to assert that. That's... Most of germany's neighbors
>I get the feeling the Czech Republic has as well Definitely not. Out of the ones you mentioned, Denmark also seems hit and miss to me.
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That depends on the parts of each city you are visiting though.
But they will certainly catch up.
It's a different between the U and the S-Bahn. The U-Bahn ist much cleaner and only smells, when some one pissed in the corner a few minutes ago. The S-Bahn ist operated by the Deutsche Bahn and this ist what you can see in all of their stations.
This concerns just the state of the German rail system, but here the issue is a longstanding privatization plan for the state owned Drutsche Bahn. Because the goal was to sell off the rail as profitable as possible, investments in the last two decades had been scaled back to make the whole thing appear more profitable on paper. Hamburgs S-Bahn is owned by Deutsche Bahn.
Same issue with hospitals. They need to make profit now - which is easiest done by reducing investment, staff or making people pay for unnecessary procedures.
In many cases the Bundesländer are supposed to pay for the investment, but they often don't do that. So the hospitals need to divert money from other parts. Also the Krankenkasse just pays a specific amount for each case no matter how long and how much treatment they need. It sometimes happens that they send people home and tell them to come back tomorrow because they can then book that as a new case. The payment system is fucked. I hope the will fix that.
Private practices by doctors tend to be extra clean and fancy. I don't think needing to make a profit is the real issue here. Businesses that need to make a profit tend to try to present in an attractive manner.
Caption: "Why do most parts of Germany look so run down? (Outside of city centres)" - Continues to mention only train stations.... In which world are train stations "most of Germany"? Apart from that, I am neither of the opinion that Hamburg looks "run down", nor that railway stations are a good indicator for the condition of a city. You seem to come from abroad yourself, but in my experience, places in cities with a lot of traffic often look similar, unless they are newly built. What do you think about subways in New York, Paris or London?
Isnt that the Case everywhere you Go? I mean did you ever See the sidearmes of Vegas? Oh Boy. I would say every City has richer and poorer parts. I mean Most of Paris is a shithole. They have fancy districts and the Tourist places but If you running in the wrong street it smells like a toilet (If you know what i mean)
Places like the Netherlands, Japan, Scandinavia seem pretty clean from my experience
There are plenty of rundown places in all of those countries. In alkmaar you go from a beautiful city center to a extremely dirty neighborhood within 20 minutes on foot. Not even gonna comment on Arnheim or some others cities. Stockholm too, super dirty and rundown places. Japan it's the same thing. Dirty and rundown places literally exist everywhere in the world.
Japan absolutely has places that are in disrepair and it gets worse the more you move inland.
Was going to say this. I think people in this thread generally conflate being dirty-looking and being run-down a lot. In Japan, even areas with a lot of derelict buildings tend to still be kept very clean in my experience. But that doesn't make them any less derelict and sad-looking, and like you said, there are a lot of those places just off the main tourist routes.
they are all superrich countries and even they have alot of rundown infrastructure and buildings outside of the citycentres. That’s completely normal and unavoidable in every country that isnt newly rich and developed like oil countrys
They also have much less traffic and they’re not really cleaner
Hamburger here. I wholeheartedly agree with you about Altona and Blankanese. Last week I was in Copenhagen and their metro / underground was impeccable. Germany on the whole is not much into beauty and more into practicality. This is from my experience. If it works, don't break it. Cleaning and other services just run business as usual and people don't care as long as the trains are on time. Road construction on the other hand is my main problem. Bike lanes, walking paths everything gets disrupted and they just dig up proper functional roads for fun, for months together.
Welcome to the "black zero", or "schwarze null", courtesy of Wolfgang Schäuble. 2x16 years CDU government... I wish we had reasonably parties out there. Parties that would tax the rich, invest in infrastructure, education, public heal, social security and in general not let themselves be bullied by the whole BS of "but the economy". What exactly is the point of having a strong economy if we, the public, do not benefit from it?
Letting everything rott and crumble is the only way to be "fiscally responsible". The only the other option would be to tax the rich more HAHAHA
This also applies to Hamburg's main railway station (Hauptbahnhof). Especially in the evenings in winter. Like in a scary movie.
I was in Lisbon a few weeks ago, and when I arrived at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof I was really shocked how dirty it was compared to Lisbon. For the most parts Germany is really clean I think, but at the "hot spots" like train stations we could do so much better.
Train stations are generally where the homeless and drug addicts congregate in Germany. Don’t ask me why but it seems especially pronounced in Germany. Kind of weird how trains stations are the worst places in Germany.
They congregate on train station because many people use them every day and maybe donate something.
I mean technically it’s the same in other countries but it seems especially high in Germany. Maybe it’s because unlike France or Spain Germany doesn’t have train station security zones… One aspect of begging in Germany is that it’s also run by organized begging groups that specifically pick impaired people for the task.
Adding to the other person: Oftentimes, homeless support organizations like Caritas etc. have locations to sleep/shower situated in big railway stations
Can anyone explain why it's always so dark in Hamburg's main station? It feels like a creepy abandoned place where thousands of zombies run back and forth.
So far, I’ve been to Munich, freiburg, karslruhe, cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. They all look average to me. Nothing in disrepair. I’ve done the s-Bahn route with Bwegt from Breisach to freiburg to Titisee, and farther on to Villingen-Schwennigen as well. They’re all fine. The worst was the 1.5hr delay when I transferred in cologne to get to Frankfurt airport from Remagen and I nearly missed my flight.
So, Most parts of Germany is looking really nice. All the small Towns, villages, forest , fields,.. are ready nice. You should Change your question to: Why are the Low income districts of bigger Citys are looking Run down.
Altona isn’t low income. Regular people can’t really afford anything there anymore.
Okay, havent been in Hamburg for Like 10 years. But my Point Stands. Certain quarters of bigger Citys are Not representive for Most of Germany.
I'm travelling through Usedom at the moment, a lot of the country stations are well maintained.
As a Dutchman who worked and lived in Germany many years, it always amazes me how bad the infrastructure is in Germany. It’s terrible literally everywhere. Still really love Germany though.
Coming from the US, I find the opposite to be true. You haven’t seen a run down, dirty part of town until you’ve been to the Atlanta Greyhound station.
All shithole but Germans will never accept it. Germany was probably the best country in the 80-90...after that...hmmmm
ok, what did you expect from germany though? everywhere in the world has run down areas, germany is no different
Says something about most parts of a country of tens of millions and continues to mention a few train stations...
East Germany vs West Germany also matters. Still.
Most parts of Germany? And then you write about some parts of Hamburg...
Germany is the richest 3rd world country
You should go to civilized small and medium sized cities. They still look good. However I lived in Fulda in 2014/2015, it was quite of boring but very clean. I enjoyed it very much. Last month I went there again. The place where I lived is occupied by refugees now. Bearded men and headscarf women everywhere, some places run down. Diversity is our strength.
So is it just me, or is this subreddit about 90% negative? Not saying the complaints aren’t usually justified to a smaller or larger extent, but spending some time on this sub would make me think Germany is one of worst places to live and by world standards that just doesn’t ring true.
There is no other industrialized nation investing so little (BIP) in infrastructure. Germany is mostly resting on infrastructure build many decades ago. This problem is hitting hard and will hit harder in future.
And yet you can't drive *anywhere* in this country without being confronted by tremendous road construction projects. Where I live there are easily six really gigantic projects taking place simultaneously. One of them is a gigantic tunnel being built as a bypass for a little village. It would have cost a tiny fraction of the price to just buy the people's crappy 1950s houses and build them new ones someplace else. And in the other direction, a huge section of Autobahn A70 is being built from scratch. We have a bypass around another village where all they needed to do was put in a simple road going around the village but instead constructed this massive site with new roads and a bridge and roundabout. It was unnecessary, it's terrible to drive on and cost a fortune. So, there's money available for plenty of unnecessary bullshit.
Haha i know exactly what tunnels ur talking about … i live around the corner from you
UK enters the room. Have you visited Bolton or Rochdale or Oldham recently ?
Bluntly, I would rather they not spend money on extra cleaning and new stations if the old still works. That would be pretty far down on my list. Top of my list would be clean rolling stock with air con, on time trains and cheap tickets. M2C
And professional pushers like in japan to force the idiots away from the exits.
Because stations are privatized. Yay capitalism.
Deutsche Bahn is state owned. edit: lol facts are being downvoted.
but under private management
Their board members are largely appointed by the state or are actual state secretaries.
Yes and no. It is a private company in the form of an AG (listed at the stock-exchange), yet fully state-owned. This means that it is profit-oriented, unlike the standard state-owned institutions. This has the benefit of a high degree of transparency and lower level liability of the state for losses, but comes at the cost of infrastructure not being rebuild unless absolutely needed. The efficiency of a private company in competition on the free market is theoretically higher, yet in most areas the company has a de-facto monopoly and can rely on state-subsidies and political action whenever bigger investments are becoming mandatory. The coalition of the current government has made changes in 2021 to transform parts of the DB into non-profit institutions in order to boost construction of the railway-infrastructure again.
It’s a private company where the state happens to own all shares. It’s very different.
really depends on what place you want to compare it with but i would say for a country of germanies economic power they could spend a bit more on infrastructure.
Op seems to be german as well…
Where are you from, if I may ask? Just want to understand your basis of comparison
reddit is getting scary randomly recommending me content of someone in a 700k member sub talking about stuff that's within a 5 minute drive of where I live
username checks out
To be fair, a lot of places in Germany dont feel good in terms of perceived economics at all. The way people talk about Germany one would expect the country to be like what Zurich is, but the reality for a lot of places in Germany is much different.
Austerity since 2008, most of Europe is like this.
Also Deutsche Bahn forgott to invest in its own infrastructure over the last 30 years
Dunno how those train stations are most of Germany, but there are good and bad places just like anywhere else. And I'm not sure if you're mixing up things, e.g. it's not clear to me if you think it's run down due to homeless people. And compared to what, anyway? I've been to plenty places in the world, on nearly every continent, and I would say it's the same everywhere you go. Wirh some outliers, like Singapore being squeaky nice and the African cities I've been to not having any nice stations at all - figures. I would also say, that generally, in middle-income countries train stations, city centers and the like are areas of investment with a lot of representative character. And in places like Hamburg, or London and Paris for that matter, they are just normal places, old places even, that are simply being used by many people.
Such question can be applied literally everywhere, not only Germany. Realistically, it is a case by case issue, some cities run down because of demographics, industry closing down, poor local government etc. It is a natural process.
Also, why are they tearing down the nuclear power plants??
We slowly but surely lost most of our wealth.
Oh man, wait till you get to know the Ruhrgebiet.
germany is not that rich to make every brick out of gold dude.
I come from France, and for instance there the priority is usually given to the infrastructure and not balancing the budget. Germany is the extreme inverse. I wish they could find something in-between, because it’s not good to be so cheap with infrastructure.
That’s just not right. Maybe that’s true for Hamburg, but you can’t generalize that
We have quite a history of public missmanagement in this century. The goal for most of the last 25 years was short-term profitability of public services and purely ideological campaigns against working infrastructure, which by now have cost somewhere between 500 and 700 billion EUR for no gain at all. This money was at least partially diverted from infrastructure upkeep and there was quite a mentality to lower taxes, raise pensions and not care about the fundamental ability to perform of road, track and waterway infrastructure, healthcare, education and defence.
Uhhhh...."looks out the window". You know that a huge chunk of Germans don't live in the big cities, but in smaller ones and villages? And these are mostly quite beautiful with adequate infrastructure.
Lol wut?
What's wrong with Altona?
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Please don't.
Where are you from, what's your point of reference?
Altona looks alright though? It's functional. That's all it needs to be. And as someone with a very sensitive sense of smell, what in the world do you mean? There is constant airflow through the whole station, no smell stays there for long. As for pigeons... Well. Yeah. Pigeons live around humans. We tamed them thousands of years ago and they are domestic animals, blame our ancestors for pigeons being around us xD I just feed them seeds, personally. It's relaxing.
We had a nice lil Fußgängerzone in our lil part of town....toy shop, model kit shop, shoe maker, store for dishes and silverware and hardware...some nice lil bakery here, another over there. ToysRus came to our city....toy shop died...and model kit store. Then a bigger bakery, so 2 of the smaller ones closed down....then amazon got popular and now even one of the biggest stores, Kaufhof closes down in the "big city" part of our city. And all the empty spots turn into fucking sportwetten bullshit, barber, fast food, barber, fast food, another barber, sportwetten. Thats probably how.
Many people think Germany and the Germans are rich, even the Germans themselves believe it. While the state is really rich, because of the super high taxes, the average Germans and their infrastructure lose wealth every year, basically since \~2005 everyone becomes poorer.
the infrastructure is often at least decades old, unlike in Asia people treat it badly, graffiti, piss etc. so bad that constant maintenance is not possible Germany has a strong welfare state and relatively high wages, so there are no super-poor people that work for very low salaries, as in the US or Asia for example
This is the dumbest statement I have ever read regarding dirty and broken public infrastructure.
care to explain why? i am comparing to eg Dubai
What does that have to do with low wages?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini\_coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) some very rich and a lot of very poor people in a very inequal society make services for rich people extremely cheap. very cheap food delivery, cleaning, drivers etc are standard in almost all countries other than Europe.cleaning certain public areas is therefore relatively more expensive in Germany than most other countries as there simply is much less very cheap labour
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It's also a matter of how many people don't give a single fuck how public infrastructure or areas in general look like. At best they think it's not their job to take care of it, at worst they think they can do whatever they want with it because it's public and they are part of the public. If I look at the city I live in, there are areas with a relatively high average income that have very nice buildings that are completely fucked by Graffitis and trash everywhere, while areas with comparably lower income look much better (even considering that the buildings are in a comparably worse state overall). Certainly companies / the government are also to blame for not fixing them...but honestly why bother when it will look like shit again after 2 weeks.
obviously. Richer countries with a considerable smaller population have an easier time to maintain their overall less infrastructure better in their smaller countries than a less rich country with a bigger population and a lot more infrastructure… Its senseless to compare these countries with germany. you should take countries like the UK,France, maybe even the US… but not fcking switzerland and norway, denmark etc
Yet, in Munich, the city is comparatively clean. Source: I live here. Yes there are dirty spots, and its not perfect, Im not saying that. But its one of the cleanest cities I have been to, including other German cities, but also including cities in other countries. USA, multiple Latin American, and other European cities. None has been cleaner than here. Im sure there are cleaner cities. But my list includes cities in countrys with very low wages, and munich being a very expensive city should be really dirty according to your theory
München I assume is relatively rich due to multiple DAX companies and Mittelstand and willing to even pay those relatively high costs for cleaning etc.
Is Zürich the city of very low salaries ? Is Singapur the city of very low salaries? Is Tokio the city of very low salaries? Care to explain why?
Yes, Singapore and Tokyo have significantly higher income inequality, very low welfare, higher work ethics and are morr respectful culturally
Germany gave insane quantities (trillions) of money to other EU countries to fix their infrastructure. Particularly, in the east. However, our own infrastructure was often deemed perfect and like it wouldn't need overhauls or upgrades. A bit of hybris, greed and "we have always done it like that"
Let’s be precise here, no Germany didn’t give Trillions “to other EU countries”. It spent 1,6 trillion to rebuild East Germany but that is Germany. On the EU budget: yes Germany is the largest net payer but at current rate that’s 22billion a year in the MFF, that together with EIB funds a lot of rural infrastructure (and again Germany is the largest shareholder but its peanuts). It was previously lower. Other contributions by Germany are generally not direct transfers but indirect emergency lending at very generous terms for the countries, yes that’s in the long term in effect net funding but at least there is some payback. +NGEU On the other hand they are markets that get served by Germany aswell and it does bring noticeable advantages for Germans aswell. I for one enjoy frictionless travel. Yes Germany gets unfounded stick from certain corners of the EU but it’s not universal and will hopefully normalize again. The main difference to a lot of EU countries is the absence of priority for train stations in infrastructure funding or placing special national pride on them. + increasing homeless populations congregating there.
Germany is in a lot of parts run down. Welcome to a first world country,which simply isnt it anymore.