Since years they've slept on separating people from fright transport. So much money sunk into someone's pocket, instead of adding more railway routes. But there also were a lot of NIMBYs blocking railway expansion, to be fair.

An anecdote of my student life:

For many years I commuted by train, on one of Germany's worst train routes and 90% of the trains had at minimum 5 to 15 minutes delay. Also like 10% right out never arrived, so you had to wait for the train afterwards. The next train is 60 minutes later. If you had to transfer to another train, this often resulted in waiting 60 minutes, miss the transfer train, wait another 60 minutes. Lose additional random amount of minutes, because even if the second train arrived on time, you'd often be later than expected. God help you, if you needed to use a bus afterwards. Guess what, wait more, because you missed the bus you intended to actually use. Same fun on the way back, for a single day. While dealing with the stuff explained in the article. This breaks you inside.

Let's do some simple math if you're still reading:

A simple job, with 8 ½ hours work per day, plus commute time, with time lost from leaving earlier too, plus sleeping, could result in spending all day away from home. Leaving you between 0 and 1 hour remaining time, to do everything, like chores, cooking, friends, family, free time (haha).

I simply couldn't do this and wonder how people have any real life, if they have to endure this every single day. For perspective, that's a distance a lot of people travel for work and you can drive there by car, but there's often slow traffic, but you'd probably save two hours or more every day, if you don't use the train, even if you're stuck in traffic.

Now people might say, you can just move. Yeah good luck with the Quadratmeterpreise for the apartment. Good luck if you're a trainee or start your Berufsausbildung.