Then, just days before, I arrived, problems were found with the brakes, too! It will take four years to fix the whole fleet, and in the meantime, for the foreseeable future, only 25% of train cars are usable. Most S-Bahn lines are running on dramatically reduced schedules (im 20-Minutentakt), and other lines - greyed out in the map above - aren't running at all. How long will this continue? Nobody knows.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Verkehrschaos
Berlin, incidentally, is in the middle of a public transportation nightmare. At the beginning of the summer, a routine inspection of S-Bahn wheels discovered that the entire fleet needed repair. (Only Berlin and Hamburg have this particular system so replacement cars or parts can't simply be ordered - besides, there's no money: the problem arose from cost-cutting, the savings given to the Deutsche Bahn and apparently not recoverable.) The system's been running at reduced capacity all summer. 
Then, just days before, I arrived, problems were found with the brakes, too! It will take four years to fix the whole fleet, and in the meantime, for the foreseeable future, only 25% of train cars are usable. Most S-Bahn lines are running on dramatically reduced schedules (im 20-Minutentakt), and other lines - greyed out in the map above - aren't running at all. How long will this continue? Nobody knows.
Then, just days before, I arrived, problems were found with the brakes, too! It will take four years to fix the whole fleet, and in the meantime, for the foreseeable future, only 25% of train cars are usable. Most S-Bahn lines are running on dramatically reduced schedules (im 20-Minutentakt), and other lines - greyed out in the map above - aren't running at all. How long will this continue? Nobody knows.
