The value of an item is primarily determined by its price.

The supporters of “strong rail” know this too, and have been demanding for years that the state should finally invest more money in rail infrastructure.

And not only more per se, but also in relation to the biggest competitor, the road.

The motivation for this shift is obvious: It would probably be the clearest sign that the state is serious about the traffic turnaround.

The coalition agreement between the SPD, Greens and FDP also contains the sentence: "We want to invest significantly more in rail than in road." If you ask a year later what happened to this resolution, you get a thoroughly mixed picture : It depends crucially on how one calculates.

Corinna Budras

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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If you start the small survey with the donor, the FDP-led Federal Ministry of Transport, the answer is clear: "The federal government spends far more money on the rail mode of transport than on the road mode of transport," says a ministry spokeswoman and calculates: For the new According to provisional figures, the federal government invested 7.1 billion euros last year in the expansion and maintenance of the rails, which would be less than the costs for the federal trunk roads.

However, one still has to add a number of subsidy programs in order to get a complete picture, for example for the train stations (around 125 million euros), the subsidization of train path prices (almost 1 billion euros), and also the investment funds under the "Municipal Transport Financing Act" (around 900 million Euro).

This alone adds up to more than 9.1 billion euros.

The spokeswoman emphasizes that the decisive factor is how much money is spent overall on one or the other mode of transport.

"And the facts are clear."

Actually it should be more

You could get caught up in several places.

Alexander Eisenkopf, Professor of Transport Policy at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, does the same with the sum of 7.1 billion euros.

"Originally, the federal government had much more ambitious goals, but they were significantly undercut."

That means: Part of the money cannot be spent at all.

This has happened again and again in recent years.

A lack of engineers and bottlenecks in building materials ensure that the planned money is not spent.

The representatives of the rail transport industry intervened on a second point.

The association "Die Güterbahnen", a network of European railways, considers the addition of further funding pots to be a "transparent experiment".

The subsidies for train path prices, for example, go to companies and do not flow into the railways.

"None of these means have any capacity-increasing effects on the rail network."

The association of private rail competitors, Mofair, and the advocacy group “Allianz pro Schiene” also think it makes more sense to only compare the basic costs.

So specifically the 7.9 billion euros (road) with the 7.1 billion euros (rail).

Because if you wanted to look at the total costs, the road mode of transport would also lack a number of items, for example the promotion of the tank and charging infrastructure for alternative drives and support programs of all kinds, including billions in purchase premiums for e-cars, further tax subsidies in the billions and the tank discount, complained Allianz pro rail.

"The Ministry of Transport is cheating," sums up Mofair Managing Director Matthias Stoffregen.

"It is also trying to use sleight of hand to obscure the failure to meet its sector targets in climate protection."

The total cost of the road is not charged at all

The Berlin professor of transport Christian Böttger opens an even bigger barrel.

He points out that, unlike the rail network, a large part of the road network is not financed by the federal government, but by the federal states and municipalities.

How high this total is is not collected in Germany, he criticizes.

He once made estimates of the total costs for the network of European railways: for the year 2021 he puts them at 40 billion euros.

However, the Federal Ministry of Transport can still think of a few additional billions that it is putting into the "rail" system and that it would like to see taken into account in the discussion: Last year, the federal government finally transferred "regionalization funds" amounting to more than 10 billion euros to the federal states in order to help finance local rail passenger transport.

In addition, there are 2.5 billion euros for the 9-euro ticket and a further 1.2 billion euros for the Corona rescue package, which the federal and state governments have stretched over local public transport to compensate for the dramatic losses caused by the decline in passenger numbers.

In view of this billion-dollar battle, traffic expert Eisenkopf comes to the sober conclusion: Comparing the pure investment sums in the different modes of transport is "a childish event".

"It is only about the symbolic effect, it is not checked at all what transport performance the individual carriers provide and whether this really means more rail traffic is produced." Instead, it must be about a sensible expansion of rail traffic.

His conclusion: "We have to expand the planning capacities and put the railways in a position to spend the money."