It is nighttime and sometimes even going a few towns over can lead to a long dark walk depending on where they live.

But also DB usually doesn’t tell you how late they’ll be, they just increase the delay 15 minutes at a time. Then you have a sunk cost fallacy.

Plus with the heatwave everyone is exhausted. An unplanned 5 km hike at night sounds less than appealing. Although so does sleeping at the station

Op is right. Plus that walk would’ve been 4.5 hours…