The regional trains and S-Bahn trains in Bavaria were more rarely on time in 2022 than ever before in at least 26 years. The punctuality rate fell by 4.2 points to 88.1 percent, as the Bavarian Railway Company (BEG) announced on Friday. It is the first time since 1996 that this value has fallen below 90 percent. At that time, the BEG had taken over responsibility for Bavarian local rail passenger transport.
Defaults also increased: They rose from 4.5 to 4.9 percent. For the purposes of the analysis, trains were considered punctual as long as they were less than six minutes late. According to BEG, the most common cause of delays was the infrastructure. Disruptions there accounted for 27.7 percent of the minutes of delay, and a further 8.8 percent were caused by construction work.
“The infrastructure problems are becoming more and more obvious – also because rail traffic is constantly reaching new records,” said BEG management spokesman Thomas Prechtl. “It’s not new that the railway is suffering from a decades-long renovation backlog. What is new, however, is that the situation is becoming so dire.”
Until the infrastructure measures announced by the railway are completed and the situation improves, “we all still need a lot of perseverance.”
Transport Minister Christian Bernreiter (CSU) was also critical: “With these values and the triggers for them, the alarm bells must be ringing at the federal government and Deutsche Bahn,” he said. “When renovating, you should now focus not only on the high-performance corridors, but also on routes in rural areas.”