I was let down by someone via Mitfahrenzentrale

I have been cheated by German person when using this web site

http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/

I was suppose to travel from Berlin to Bremen last Friday. I called someone advertising at Mitfahrenzentrale to come with him and agreed for everything (time, place and cost).
I went there 30 min before the planned time and waited for an hour and he didn't show up or didn't call me. I tried to call him several times but his phone was closed. At the end I used the DBahn which cost me more money but it is more safe and respect.

So, think more than one time before using this kind of transportation.

I don´t think you were cheated, but yes, very badly let down. Are you able to rate members or leave feedback (like ebay)?

I tried to add feedback about this person but couldn't find any thing to do that like ebay.

This is one of the main risks of using the Mitfahrgelegenheit scheme (the other is being killed at 200km/h by an incompetent driver). There may however have been a very good reason, for example he may have been delayed in traffic or maybe an emergency arose. Or there may have been a misunderstanding regarding the meeting point.

Since you hadn't paid anything in advance, you haven't lost out financially, and since the train is usually faster anyway you didn't lose much time either. If you want to pursue the matter, email or call the guy and ask what happened.

How many times do you reckon, would twice be sufficient? How many times did you think about it?

I have used the service 6 or 7 times and had no problems.

The Mitfahrzentrale has been around for many many years and is usually very good. It does seem a little unfair to warn against the whole network because of this one incident. What happened when you complained to the branch office? At the very least they should take steps to stop this happening again with that particular driver. The driver will be on record, I think.

Happens with trains as well, S-bahns that disappear off the electronic displays on the platforms, trains that get stuck en route and make it 1-2 hours late... we've heard it all.


Happens with trains too:

High speed train accident Germany (BBC)

Another one:
Eschede train disaster

You do realize that this is the same crash don't you? Which according to the article was the first one for seven years, now I would like to see cars go without crashing for seven years in any country with a highway.

I use the Mitfahrzentrale quite a bit, but then the other way around... I offer the rides. Usually there are very friendly people who respond, it could happen that there's someone who doesn't speak more than ten words during the ride, but hey, it makes a bit of pocket money

I have used the service a number of times and never had any problems. I, of course, prefer the train...but unfortunately (especially for spontaneous trips) it's more than double the price and would mean that I couldn't go as often. I think that the accident factor is generally not a reason for or against this form of travel, at least my reason for choosing the Mitfahrzentrale has always been based on cost alone.

@ iain: Yawn. No need to be militant, you can fish your regular accidents here (I thought the first one I posted there was the 2006 accident):

List of rail accidents from wikipedia

February 6, 2000 – Brühl, Germany: An express night train from Amsterdam, Holland to Basel, Switzerland passes a construction area at excess speed and derails at Brühl station on the main line between Köln and Bonn, crashing into a nearby house. 9 people die.

September 9, 2002 – Bad Münder, Germany: Two freight trains collide head-on after a brake failure on one of the trains. A tank car loaded with 1-Chlor-2,3-epoxypropan explodes, contaminating the station and exposing 96 firemen to carcinogenic fumes.

June 11, 2003 – 6 die and 25 are injured when two passenger trains collide head-on near Schrozberg, Germany.

September 22, 2006 – Lathen, Emsland, Germany: 21 passengers and two maintenance workers die and many more are injured when a German Transrapid train collides with a maintenance of way vehicle on the system's test track near the Netherlands border.

But please, go on thinking rail is safe.

nice to see another thread go off on a wild tangent

100% safe? nothing is.
safer than driving? almost certainly.

The statistic you're looking at is not the right one. What you're counting is how many rail accidents happen over a time period. What really matters is what is the probability of boarding a train and having an accident compared to that of boarding a car and having an accident. That is normalize the number of accidents by the number of rides.

Rail travel is statistically MUCH safer than road travel (one measures per passenger mile). It's also much more reliable in terms of timing. I have NEVER been delayed by "1-2 hours"; I think 25 minutes is my record – a delay that most car travellers would be delighted with.

The other factors in favour of train travel are speed and comfort. There's no doubt however that the Mitfahrgelegenheit scheme is usually substantially cheaper. The risk that the prearranged journey will be cancelled at the last minute is small, but significant enough to make relying on this scheme for essential travel inadvisable.

@Genie

seeing you like to quote facts and figures you should, by comparison, also list rhe number of motoring accidents with relevant number of victims that have occured in the same time period that you referenced.

Also like how you referenced the "Transrapid" accident. Copy paste SNAFU?

Can you link some references?


I don't travel all that much with trains, maybe had about 10-15 long train rides during my stay here (i.e. ICE or outside of Bavaria). I was delayed 3 times for more than 1 hour, one of them for more than 2 hours.

You're right but I have no idea where to find that information.

Compared to Road accidents these figure are nothing: Over 5000 traffic deaths in 2006.

As I say, you compare per passenger mile. This is difficult to do because there aren't many train crashes, so the statistics are a big unpredictable, but even in the UK train travel is around nine times safer than travel by car (link). Moreover, train travel is becoming safer as the newer trains are built like tanks – this was seen in the Cumbrian train crash earlier this year, where only one person died (and she was 90 years old) despite the train flying off the tracks at 95mph.

Deutsche Bahn carries two billion passengers a year, which puts your 9-people-died-here, a-couple-more-died-there figures into comparison.

According to the UK DfT as reported by the Guardian (link)


Which would seem to suggest that rail travel is significantly safer than car travel based on number of journeys. Personally I reckon you need to calculate it based on journey length rather than number, but I don't have the figures for that.

Edit: the UK Office for National Statistics has figures of deaths per billion passenger kilometres(link)
Averages for the period 1988-1997:
motorcycle 89.9
walking 68.2
cycling 46.0
car 3.6
water 2.6
van 1.9
rail 0.7
bus/coach 0.4
air 0.1

So car travel approx 5 times more dangerous than car travel, according to those figures, and if you want to group car and van together then it's looking even worse for road travel

Care to share some figures showing rail travel being more dangerous?

@STB: I agree this is the right statistic, but as they do not mention how they calculated it, there's no way of telling whether they count each passenger on a train as racking in the amount of miles the train has travelled, which would lead to a skew in the statistics since there are much more passengers on a train than in a car.

I'm still not sure which is safer, but I'm pretty sure the important and interesting question is the following - I want to go from X to Y, I have two alternatives: car or train. what is the probability that I suffer an injury/fatality if I choose to go by car and if I choose to go by train. I'm not convinced your link answers that, although it's in the right direction.

@mb: That's right, your data are convincing, these are the correct figures to look at.


As I have never maintained this is the case, I think I wouldn't care to do so.

I think this may be what you're all looking for:
Statistik: Unfälle im Verkehrsträgervergleich (2005)
And big surprise, the train is the safest way of traveling...

Edit:
An article on what people in Europe think of train and car (numbers are based on the report linked above):


57% of the Dutch think the car is the safest way of traveling. The train is considered the least safest way of traveling at merely 14%. In England only 21% consider the train the safest way of traveling. In Germany on the other hand the train gets a very good result: 43% consider traveling on the train the safest way of traveling. [...]
The risk of dying in traffic (in a car) is 37x higher than during a train ride according to Germany's latest accident statistics.

Source: http://www.innovations-report.de/html/beri...icht-13697.html

Just to get back to the Mitfahrgelegenheit thing - is hitching illegal here? Now of course it would be crazy to stand on the side of the A8 and just stick your thumb out but how about other roads?

No, it is not illegal.

Cool, never knew that!
But is it common? I've never seen anyone hitching here(granted I'm very rarely on the road).

I would never do it (as a woman), and I am not sure how common it is any more, but I am sure people do it. As for everything there is an article about hitchhiking on Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trampen (the German link, because that way it is about hitchhiking in Germany). Hope you understand German.

I often see people hitching at the ramp onto the A9 at the Frankfurtering junction. They always seem to be scruffy looking urchins who would make your car seats dirty if they sat on them!

I used Mitfahrzentrale.de for the first and only time last month at the height of the rail strike. Everything went great. Friendly driver, a bit fast but what the hell: they're German, right? For a ride from Hamburg to Dresden she wanted only 20 euro. I gave her 25 because she drove me right to the door of my hotel. The site also has a ratings system like eBay, so if the guy drives like a jerk or obviously never bathes or whatever, you can put that in your rating for them.

Are you serious?


That's really quite simple. Pick, say, a route between two major cities. I'm betting the number of train fatalities will be approximately zero, whereas the number of car fatalities will be decidedly nonzero. I don't get how this is even a question. Intuitively (there are far fewer variables/potential dangers) and statistically, rail travel is safe.

There are people out there who actually consider which way is safer to travel? :S Wouldn't you just go the way that is cheapest or fastest or most comfortable?

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