Deutsche Bahn (DB) expects that one in five Germans will use the new 49-euro ticket. “The demand is enormous. In the first three days of advance sales, 250,000 Germany tickets were bought from the train alone,” said DB Regional Transport Manager Evelyn Palla of “Bild am Sonntag”. “On Monday we had twice as many hits as we normally do on our website.”
Palla assumes that demand will remain high in the future. “We expect that around six million people nationwide will take out a subscription for local transport with the Deutschlandticket for the first time.” In addition, around eleven million passengers who are already using a subscription are expected to switch to the new service. “That’s a total of 17 million users.”
The Deutschlandticket can be used in local and regional transport throughout Germany from May and usually costs 49 euros per month. Some countries are planning cheaper tariffs, for example for schoolchildren or people with particularly low incomes.
Deutsche Bahn cannot maintain its punctuality values ??from the beginning of the year in long-distance traffic. In March, the ICE and IC trains only reached 68.4 percent of the stops on time, as the group announced last Thursday. This means that punctuality has deteriorated by almost five percentage points compared to January (73.2 percent). DB has set itself a target of well over 70 percent for 2023 as a whole, after 65.2 percent last year.
A train is considered punctual in the railway statistics as long as it does not arrive at a station with a delay of more than six minutes. Train cancellations or missed connecting trains are not taken into account.
The punctuality of the train is currently mainly affected by the ailing and overloaded infrastructure. “In March 2023, DB continued the extensive construction work throughout the rail network. Up to 1,000 construction sites per day affected long-distance traffic, especially in the second half of March,” said the group about the new punctuality values. From July 2024, DB intends to carry out general renovations on important routes so that it can then offer more and more reliable rail traffic.
In regional transport, punctuality in March was reported to be 92.6 percent. It remained constant compared to January (92.8 percent) and February (92.6 percent). There are far more trains in regional traffic than in long-distance traffic.
