On Reddit, there was a discussion about Friedrich Merz’s proposal to reduce Deutsche Bahn’s services. The idea was that this would prevent delays. Very short-sighted, but that’s not the point here. My focus is on a comment that viewed the railway as a relic of old times—a narrative from the last 50 years that has also contributed to the neglect of our rail system.
His proposal, freely interpreted: In the future, we should focus more on electric buses and carbon-neutral flying. That’s the future, and expanding rail infrastructure is pointless. What this user forgot, however, is the capacity a train has. An ICE train can carry an average of 800 passengers, and a regional train likely has similar capacity. That would be at least 15 buses, all of which would have to depart within 10-15 minutes. At a 15-minute interval, a bus would leave the station every minute for each new line established. Or it would take at least three planes, assuming we can make the typical short-haul aircraft carbon-neutral.
To put these numbers into a more dramatic perspective, let’s look at the figures from 2023. Last year, the railway transported 1.8 billion passengers. Ignoring fluctuations, that’s roughly 5 million people a day. That sounds like a lot at first, but it also means that at most 6% of Germans travel by train daily. It’s probably even fewer, since many commuters make two trips. And these are just the figures for Deutsche Bahn; regional transport authorities are not included.
Let’s do a thought experiment: We replace the railway with buses or planes to get rid of this “relic.” A bus typically has 52 seats, and for a plane, I’ll assume 240 seats. If we were to replace the railway with buses, it would mean an additional 96,000 bus journeys per day. The situation doesn’t look any better with planes. An extra 20,800 flights would be needed to replace the railway. Per day. For comparison: Frankfurt/Main Airport has 555 takeoffs per day, according to its operator Fraport. This includes cargo flights, which amount to roughly 55 per day (5,500 tons according to Fraport, with an average payload of 100 tons).
But okay, we already have a railway, so these numbers are purely hypothetical. Unfortunately, not really. Our government actually wants to “double passenger transport performance” by 2030. A shift from road to rail. Or should we rather use buses and planes? Let’s just mix them; then we’ll only need 50,000 more buses and 20 new airports the size of Frankfurt.