Deutsche Bahn’s once-admired service has descended into chaos. Whether decades of poor investment or the company’s unusual structure is to blame, it’s a huge headache for a coalition trying to meet climate goals
Yeah it was not specifically only about Deutsche Bahn, but also an observation about one of the multiple problems that drives the enshittification.
One Point that Deutsche Bahn definitely did was to find out which connections are mostly used by people ( tickets for these connections thereby contribute mostly to DBs revenue) and kind of abandon the less profitable connections. That’s accounting in my book.
What they did (counting passangers by rail-connections) wasn’t possible before, as DB-tickets were sold not electronically and couldn’t easily (cheaply / with little work-hours) be turned into data sets and analyzed.
IIRC tickets were priced much differently - they weren’t fixed to specific trains but to connections (no “Zugbindung”). So There wasn’t even (easily available) data to when most travellers were using the trains.
Today with all the data being generates automatically the accountains know much better what costs and what earns DB money and they prioritize based on that. Once you get into the habit of that even things that are obviously always costs (like fixing rails or bridges) will be outsourced or avoided. (like the supermarket example - it’s obvious that someone has to restuff the shelves, but once you have all the data and see only red numbers you try to separate it away and not do it (so it gets turned into a subcontract with probably unrealistic conditions that some other companies are underbidding each other in order to gain the contract - even if this means that their employees will not earn a living wage from it. It’s a perfect system that also pushes responsibility and blame away from the outsourcing company. they can always blame the sub contracting company for underpaying or not follow safety regulations (even if they can only fulfill the sub contract by operating this way)).
True. Accounting is the best friend of digitization.
However, it’s not always bad to look what makes sense or drive profit and what not. It’s rather a matter of how religious one is about it.
Take the second wave of computerism for example. What we call Digitalization.
This is mainly driven by opportunities and chances of new business not so much about squeezing out the last percent of profit. This all is accounted as well, but management doesn’t care.
Interesting point of view - your accounting thing.
However, that doesn’t really fit to Deutsche Bahn, I think. Your point is rather about a Monopoly but an accounting exercise.
Yeah it was not specifically only about Deutsche Bahn, but also an observation about one of the multiple problems that drives the enshittification.
One Point that Deutsche Bahn definitely did was to find out which connections are mostly used by people ( tickets for these connections thereby contribute mostly to DBs revenue) and kind of abandon the less profitable connections. That’s accounting in my book.
What they did (counting passangers by rail-connections) wasn’t possible before, as DB-tickets were sold not electronically and couldn’t easily (cheaply / with little work-hours) be turned into data sets and analyzed.
IIRC tickets were priced much differently - they weren’t fixed to specific trains but to connections (no “Zugbindung”). So There wasn’t even (easily available) data to when most travellers were using the trains.
Today with all the data being generates automatically the accountains know much better what costs and what earns DB money and they prioritize based on that. Once you get into the habit of that even things that are obviously always costs (like fixing rails or bridges) will be outsourced or avoided. (like the supermarket example - it’s obvious that someone has to restuff the shelves, but once you have all the data and see only red numbers you try to separate it away and not do it (so it gets turned into a subcontract with probably unrealistic conditions that some other companies are underbidding each other in order to gain the contract - even if this means that their employees will not earn a living wage from it. It’s a perfect system that also pushes responsibility and blame away from the outsourcing company. they can always blame the sub contracting company for underpaying or not follow safety regulations (even if they can only fulfill the sub contract by operating this way)).
True. Accounting is the best friend of digitization.
However, it’s not always bad to look what makes sense or drive profit and what not. It’s rather a matter of how religious one is about it.
Take the second wave of computerism for example. What we call Digitalization. This is mainly driven by opportunities and chances of new business not so much about squeezing out the last percent of profit. This all is accounted as well, but management doesn’t care.