Summary：Germany's rail company Deutsche Bahn (DB) presented a package of measures to improve its service and punctuali...

Germany's rail company Deutsche Bahn (DB) presented a package of measures to improve its service and punctuality together with transport minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU) at a meeting on Thursday.

Deutsche Bahn CEO Richard Lutz said that "we are reaching our limits; growth leads to bottlenecks. We need more capacity to cope with today's and tomorrow's traffic." In addition, Lutz announced that punctuality in long-distance traffic would increase by 1.6 percentage points to 76.5 percent in 2019.

In 2018, Deutsche Bahn travelers were facing increasingly delayed arrivals and departures. Every fourth long-distance train operated by Deutsche Bahn was delayed last year and annual punctuality fell by 3.6 percentage points.

This year, Deutsche Bahn plans to hire an additional 22,000 staff, following 24,000 new recruitments in 2018. Deutsche Bahn hopes to prevent train cancellations and delays with more train drivers and technicians.

Scheuer acknowledged that "these measures are a good step towards achieving improvements quickly and efficiently."

At the end of 2018, Deutsche Bahn increased the ticket prices for long-distance routes by 0.9 percent on average. Affecting about one in five local transport customers in Germany, ticket prices for IC and ICE trains went up by 1.9 percent on average.

Scheuer stated that "we have the political will to invest massively in infrastructure." With around 20 billion euros, Germany's railway company is heavily indebted and in need of financial support.

Deutsche Bahn and transport minister Scheuer will meet again on Jan. 30 to discuss financing as well as the structures of the company. Enditem