…sucks.

I mean, really, it does.

Even on the best days they are never on time. The subway is always ~5 min late. You’d think you could make schedules that fit the reality. The tram is usually okay, but has the problem that it shares the roads with cars. And those oftentimes block crossroads and so on. Not their fault, of course, afterall how could you expect tram tracks on a road that you only take every day of the week to get to work?

But this past week things have been even more horrid that normally. I think not a day has gone by that it did not take me 30 minutes longer to get to work or back home in the evenings. On monday it wasn’t exactly their fault – someone had jumped in front of a train. Still, this caused me to be home by 20:15 instead of 19:00.

Today was another bad morning. Wanted to be at work at 9:00, arrived at 9:50. According to the train driver the train’s brakes had blocked. No surprise, considering they still haven’t replaced the ages old trains on the Hanau-Wiesbaden lines with the modern ones. Of course the first train that arrived was also a short train (three cars), which was completely full and couldn’t take all the passengers that were waiting.

Every private company would have to pay damages to its passengers for this lousy service. Not a state monopoly – they have the law on their side.

In the end, I could have easily taken a taxi to get to work and to get back home, every day, this week and it would have been cheaper due to the additional work hours I could have put in. And that is considering my train ticket costs only a few euros – not the 80 Euros per month most people pay.