I really like the examples from the article and ideas presented; however, as someone who has lived in Munich for 10 years there are two major problems with its approach:
1. with virtually all S-Bahn trains running through the unified track in the center, there is a single point of failure. If anything happenes on the shared track (and it does every other week) the whole city's S-Bahn network is blocked.
2. With the spokes all just going to the center, travel from the end of a spoke, to a close-by end of another spoke always has to go through the city center, which usually is a big detour distance wise. This especially shows for trips to the airport which is at the end of one of the spokes.
On (1), this is downstream of Germany’s underinvestment in its railway network. A single point of failure is not a problem if it doesn’t often fail! Meitetsu in Nagoya has a similarly-complex network, and the Zürich network has even more branching.
On (2), this is an issue with every radial railway network. There’s rarely enough traffic to justify circumferential connections, except in megacities like Paris, which is currently building a circumferential line.
I understand your main point, but you don’t give it credit by showcasing Munich as a successful example. I live there. It is the single biggest clusterfuck of all clustered fucks on this earth. I don’t have a single positive thing to say about it aside from the trains being relatively new.
I think Munich actually is a success, as borne out by the raw passenger numbers. And also the fact that it exists – cities like Manchester or Boston would very much appreciate having a network like the Munich S-Bahn!
Of course, it’s also a victim of its own success, and a victim of Germany’s underinvestment in its network. The zweite Stammstrecke should have been built a long time ago, given the passenger numbers and the number of trains from different routes going through the tunnel. The delays, costs, and cost overruns are distressing. It also suffers from the problems you find all over Germany, which are downstream of a lack of investment in smaller, less flashy upgrades.
The obvious lesson from this is quite banal: if you want good railway services, you need to pay for them. Munich spent money in the 60s and 70s to get the S-Bahn and U-Bahn, but Germany as a whole has refused to spend money on its railway network for decades.
Heh. Arguably much of the clusterfuckness stems from the fact that the tunnel is overloaded and every small glitch in the system cascades to a total system failure. When the second tunnel is opened (whenever *that* will happen) this will be alleviated somewhat. We hope.
I agree with you. I also live in Munich, in the above-mentioned neighbourhood of Freiham. While partially agreeing with Fringilla too (though for a limited time in the winter of 2023-2024,), now this area got the S5, which is a blessing during rush hours. We basically have an S-Bahn every 10 min towards the centre, even though we live quite far away. It’s the best case for Munich I guess. I’d say Deutsche Bahn is trying. It’s not perfect, yes, but we must agree that the attitude in the article actually is pretty objective and we live in a cool place with a cool transportation system. And as Matthias said, once the new U-Bahn lines and the second main tunnel will be ready, Munich is gonna become even cooler and a leading example :)
I primarily travel with the S7, which is notorious for its unreliability. So in ways it’s the worst line of the worst part of the Munich transportation system. However, knowing that others have less trouble doesn’t improve my commute. The single Stammstrecke is naturally the main culprit, with delays affecting all lines. Until December last year, the S7 ran all the way from Wolfratshausen in the south, through the city and out to Kreuzstraße in the south-east. As the S7 is partially single-tracked, this layout was became so unmanageable that they decided to split it into two, which is why it turns around before the Stammstrecke today. Last year, there was a landslide due to heavy rain that resulted in a replacement service (SEV/bus) to the nearest station for six weeks. They only managed a partial repair, which is why they plan another 6 week halt this fall. I don’t blame DB or MVV for this, but it all adds to the frustration. I think my biggest gripe is with how they manage and communicate disruptions. The replacement service didn’t follow a timetable for the first couple of weeks and ran about twice an hour, so you simply had to go to the bus station and hope that you timed it well. The bus and S-bahn were also not coordinated, so you’d frequently end up having to wait another 15-20 minutes in Icking. All in all, there were days where the normally 50 minute commute took over two hours, one way.
There have been so many occasions where I’ve been on a delayed train to the airport and all of a sudden been told to get off a few stops before because the onward journey had been cancelled. Just like that. “We’re too far behind, wait for the next train.” It’s on a level where it’s unusable in some scenarios, eg early flight for work.
I understand that the whole system looks great on paper, with great reach and accessibility, but the reality of living with it is less so.
Great article–particularly relevant for New York as you conclude. I am the Chair of ReThinkNYC, and closed a speech this week I gave to an infrastructure conference in New York sponsored by City & State publication in favor of a through-running conversion using adaptive reuse instead of a start from scratch approach at Penn Station stating:
"So, why has the Greatest City on Earth been dragging its feet for decades on through-running? London is already onto its third iteration of through-running with the completion of the Elizabeth line, which Andy Byford helped to inaugurate. Los Angeles will have through-running in time for the 2028 Olympics. But in New York, a few well-placed through-running “deniers” confuse the debate by branding through-running as “pie in the sky”, an “engineering impossibility,” the cause of a decade of “summers of hell,” Gateway’s “death knell,” and so on.
This is just so much “noise”. The reality is that through-running has been operating – successfully – throughout the entire world for decades – including in nearby and “brotherly” Philadelphia.
So, we ask you – the infrastructure community: can it really be beyond our capacity to implement the global standard in commuter rail before the dawn of the 22nd century at a station that is already largely configured for through-running? Well, you know our answer".
Doesn’t the “ Munich S-Bahn tunnel” solution cause timing coordination problems between all the different rail lines? Not sure how many tracks are in the tunnel, but I would assume that you cannot run all rail lines through them at one time. This potentially means that if one line is delayed, it affects all the other lines.
Nuremberg may not have a main line terminus, but its through-station Hauptbahnhof pretty much leaves the northern part of the city stranded. There's a single low-capacity spur line from the NE terminal station that doesn't really go very far, and that's it.
I really like the examples from the article and ideas presented; however, as someone who has lived in Munich for 10 years there are two major problems with its approach:
1. with virtually all S-Bahn trains running through the unified track in the center, there is a single point of failure. If anything happenes on the shared track (and it does every other week) the whole city's S-Bahn network is blocked.
2. With the spokes all just going to the center, travel from the end of a spoke, to a close-by end of another spoke always has to go through the city center, which usually is a big detour distance wise. This especially shows for trips to the airport which is at the end of one of the spokes.
On (1), this is downstream of Germany’s underinvestment in its railway network. A single point of failure is not a problem if it doesn’t often fail! Meitetsu in Nagoya has a similarly-complex network, and the Zürich network has even more branching.
On (2), this is an issue with every radial railway network. There’s rarely enough traffic to justify circumferential connections, except in megacities like Paris, which is currently building a circumferential line.
I understand your main point, but you don’t give it credit by showcasing Munich as a successful example. I live there. It is the single biggest clusterfuck of all clustered fucks on this earth. I don’t have a single positive thing to say about it aside from the trains being relatively new.
I think Munich actually is a success, as borne out by the raw passenger numbers. And also the fact that it exists – cities like Manchester or Boston would very much appreciate having a network like the Munich S-Bahn!
Of course, it’s also a victim of its own success, and a victim of Germany’s underinvestment in its network. The zweite Stammstrecke should have been built a long time ago, given the passenger numbers and the number of trains from different routes going through the tunnel. The delays, costs, and cost overruns are distressing. It also suffers from the problems you find all over Germany, which are downstream of a lack of investment in smaller, less flashy upgrades.
The obvious lesson from this is quite banal: if you want good railway services, you need to pay for them. Munich spent money in the 60s and 70s to get the S-Bahn and U-Bahn, but Germany as a whole has refused to spend money on its railway network for decades.
Heh. Arguably much of the clusterfuckness stems from the fact that the tunnel is overloaded and every small glitch in the system cascades to a total system failure. When the second tunnel is opened (whenever *that* will happen) this will be alleviated somewhat. We hope.
I agree with you. I also live in Munich, in the above-mentioned neighbourhood of Freiham. While partially agreeing with Fringilla too (though for a limited time in the winter of 2023-2024,), now this area got the S5, which is a blessing during rush hours. We basically have an S-Bahn every 10 min towards the centre, even though we live quite far away. It’s the best case for Munich I guess. I’d say Deutsche Bahn is trying. It’s not perfect, yes, but we must agree that the attitude in the article actually is pretty objective and we live in a cool place with a cool transportation system. And as Matthias said, once the new U-Bahn lines and the second main tunnel will be ready, Munich is gonna become even cooler and a leading example :)
Ouch. What are some of the problems that you see? Do you think that the S-Bahn tunnel design is one of the causes of the problem?
I primarily travel with the S7, which is notorious for its unreliability. So in ways it’s the worst line of the worst part of the Munich transportation system. However, knowing that others have less trouble doesn’t improve my commute. The single Stammstrecke is naturally the main culprit, with delays affecting all lines. Until December last year, the S7 ran all the way from Wolfratshausen in the south, through the city and out to Kreuzstraße in the south-east. As the S7 is partially single-tracked, this layout was became so unmanageable that they decided to split it into two, which is why it turns around before the Stammstrecke today. Last year, there was a landslide due to heavy rain that resulted in a replacement service (SEV/bus) to the nearest station for six weeks. They only managed a partial repair, which is why they plan another 6 week halt this fall. I don’t blame DB or MVV for this, but it all adds to the frustration. I think my biggest gripe is with how they manage and communicate disruptions. The replacement service didn’t follow a timetable for the first couple of weeks and ran about twice an hour, so you simply had to go to the bus station and hope that you timed it well. The bus and S-bahn were also not coordinated, so you’d frequently end up having to wait another 15-20 minutes in Icking. All in all, there were days where the normally 50 minute commute took over two hours, one way.
There have been so many occasions where I’ve been on a delayed train to the airport and all of a sudden been told to get off a few stops before because the onward journey had been cancelled. Just like that. “We’re too far behind, wait for the next train.” It’s on a level where it’s unusable in some scenarios, eg early flight for work.
I understand that the whole system looks great on paper, with great reach and accessibility, but the reality of living with it is less so.
Great article–particularly relevant for New York as you conclude. I am the Chair of ReThinkNYC, and closed a speech this week I gave to an infrastructure conference in New York sponsored by City & State publication in favor of a through-running conversion using adaptive reuse instead of a start from scratch approach at Penn Station stating:
"So, why has the Greatest City on Earth been dragging its feet for decades on through-running? London is already onto its third iteration of through-running with the completion of the Elizabeth line, which Andy Byford helped to inaugurate. Los Angeles will have through-running in time for the 2028 Olympics. But in New York, a few well-placed through-running “deniers” confuse the debate by branding through-running as “pie in the sky”, an “engineering impossibility,” the cause of a decade of “summers of hell,” Gateway’s “death knell,” and so on.
This is just so much “noise”. The reality is that through-running has been operating – successfully – throughout the entire world for decades – including in nearby and “brotherly” Philadelphia.
So, we ask you – the infrastructure community: can it really be beyond our capacity to implement the global standard in commuter rail before the dawn of the 22nd century at a station that is already largely configured for through-running? Well, you know our answer".
Sam Turvey
Interesting article.
Doesn’t the “ Munich S-Bahn tunnel” solution cause timing coordination problems between all the different rail lines? Not sure how many tracks are in the tunnel, but I would assume that you cannot run all rail lines through them at one time. This potentially means that if one line is delayed, it affects all the other lines.
Nuremberg may not have a main line terminus, but its through-station Hauptbahnhof pretty much leaves the northern part of the city stranded. There's a single low-capacity spur line from the NE terminal station that doesn't really go very far, and that's it.