IMO, the relevant question is not wether the finished S21 edifices will look nice when finished (current estimate: December 2031, when the original date was December 2019), but what that money could have been used for otherwise.

Also, ignoring cost and time overruns, replacing a 17-track stub station that has been able to handle 45 trains per hour even back in 1970 with an 8-track through-station that can only handle 32 trains per hour does not sound like an improvement to me.

Also, the latest cost estimate for Stuttgart 21 from June 2026 is 14.5 billion Euros, up from 2.6 billion during the original planning.

That is a lot of money to spend on the redevelopment of a car-centric city (that doubles as home for two of the bigger German car manufacturers), whilst the rest of the country's rail network has been suffering from severe under-investment for years and is now in such a bad state that it almost feels like they had sold off the tracks to Union Pacific.

I'm surprised that Jonathan seems to think that Stuttgart would be located in the center of Germany. Stuttgart's main train station is almost as close to the next country border as Berlin's main station is (~70 km vs ~ 60 km), and even from a topological point of view, Stuttgart is rather peripheral to the German high-speed/long-distance train network.

It sounds almost like he got Stuttgart mixed up with Frankfurt or Hannover:

https://cms.static-bahn.de/wmedia/redaktion/aushaenge/streckenkarte/Liniennetz-ICE-IC-2026-Stand-09-2025.pdf