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Thursday, December 11, 2008

I don't like travelling by train

For this weekend's roundtrip I started in Zurich with a train (InterCity Express - ICE, german "high-speed" train) to Stuttgart. And it really pissed me off. Ok, the advantages of train is, you can do something during travelling. This is true if you don't get sick. Unfortunately I belong the the group that gets, especially in high-speed trains that tilt in the curves. So no effective working during the travel. Then the air conditioning in the train. It starts with a summer-like t-shirt temperature and dropped during the 3h trip to temperatures where I almost had to put my jacket on - over the pullover. And on top of all: this train stops on every single tiny city on the road. In this 3hr trip over 200km the train stopped 7times in between. 7 times! for a handfull of people to get in. That makes an average distance of less than 30km between a stop. A plane from Zurich to Hamburg doesn't land on each airport on the way, does it? This is no high-speed train, this is an annoyance!
When I travel by car, it takes a bit more that 2hr for the same distance and costs the same - all supplemental costs included

Don't get me wrong, I think public transport is important and make ecological and economical sense. But very often I don't have the feeling the German public transportation follows the right approach. From my (and I think for a lot of other clients) perspective its slower, more expensive and less comfortable than a car. So car or plane are in most cases the most reasonable choice - from a customer perspective, although both are the worst choices considering the environement.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Can't watch movies while driving...