German public transportation is okay. The personal experience may not be great on a given day, but objectively the quality depends on what you compare it to. In most EU countries, public transport is *real shit*, but nobody complains about it, not because it works very well, but simply because there is nothing to complain about. Note that Germany is one of the few EU countries where you can use public transport *only* to get from one completely random place to another in a predictable amount of time. Yes, locals are constantly complaining about train delays, supposedly it used to be way better in the good old days, but to me (an outside observer) it works just fine, and when you add the price into the equation (Deutschlandticket for example) it's just wonderful. And for those who are still in doubt, I dare you to take a trip from any village say in Spain or Italy to another one just 50km away.
Discussion
That's a fair take, Germany is impressively well connected by rail, credit where credit is due. But i've never experienced delays as bad as in Germany. Spain and Portugal for sure have less services but in my experience they're more reliable, same can be said for the nordic countries.
Is someone aware of what's causing the deterioration of the train service in Germany? #asknostr i'd be interested to know.
> Germany is impressively well connected by rail
It's not only trains. There also buses. As a already sad, you can travel from one random location to another using public transport only, and it's very unlikely you will have to walk more then 1000m to the nearest bus stop.
> Spain and Portugal for sure have less services but in my experience they're more reliable
This is also a part of the story. If you have only 2 trains a day from A to B it's much easier for the trains to be on time. But In Germany they have trains in each popular direction (say Munich to Berlin) *at least* once in hour.
It's a good point 😄 it stands to reason that a smaller service is easier to maintain. Perhaps German trains are a victim of their own success.