Hacker News Reader

I still think it should be cheaper. The rail card thing is just a scheme to overcharge casual riders and tourists. It's reasonable for people who regularly go by train, but for people like me who do just one or two trips a year it feels like a rip-off.

Especially if I want to take my kids, I need to get a different rail card for families, and when you add it all up it's a lot more expensive than taking my car.

For some reason, public transport is always priced in a way that makes it really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.

If you only ride on public transit occasionally, and you have a car, then taking the car is almost always cheaper. It shouldn't be like that.

> For some reason, public transport is always priced in a way that makes it really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.

At €1.32/l for gas in Vienna and 10l/100km this trip would cost you €63 in gas alone with an ICE car. This doesn't account for wear and wasted time so it's actually not that unreasonable at all and actually pretty cheap if you're going by yourself. With a family, I agree, it's more expensive. Although I'm starting to see the appeal that traveling by train has with a family, being able to walk around, entertain the kids more easily, etc.

I (used to) do commuting by train, one hour door to door, and 45 minutes out of that was pure work time - reading emails and newsletters and doing documentation and such. If I did that ride by car, I would have to stay at work 1.5 hours more. How should I quantify this?

I have a family of 6, and with that it's almost always going to be cheaper to drive than to take any other form of transportation. Before kids, the math was very different.

Better to have full cars using the roads and all of the otherwise solo drivers in their largely empty cars attracted to public transport.

There'll be various reasons why a large family can't take a train, but drastically fewer reasons why a person or a commuter travelling alone cannot (or, a group of friends, or a couple, etc.)

Maybe one day that'll change again, but at least now it helps reduce the amount of pointless traffic on the road.

Do you actually live in Austria? Because I've seen comments about family tickets. I only know Switzerland - where your kids under 6yo will travel with you for free and your under 16yo half price.

Kids under 6 are free on almost all public transport in Austria.

For older kids there are a lot of discounts, but many of them are only cheap if you use public transport regularly. (eg. rail card family from the ÖBB for 19€ a year, or upper austria regional tickets for school children for 77€ a year, etc.)

One problem is that it's not just train tickets, but you also need tickets for bus/tram/subway, and every city/region has different systems, so for every trip I spend about 15min trying to figure out which tickets to buy.

Well at least in CH you only have one ticket for everything (yes including regional rail providers, buses, ships, even many cable cars), so maybe AT could follow the idea. Plus you have that nice little feat called "EasyRide" (initially from a startup) where you enter that you start the ride and who accompanies you, and it will compute your final ticket costs only when you say "checkout". 90% of the cases it comes cheaper than I would have thought when buying the tickets by myself (the rest 10% of time the price is the same as estimated)

> really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.

That probably makes sense. If your goal is to increase ridership / reduce emissions, you want to appeal tho those traveling every day. Each person you convert gives you 500+ trips a year. And of course people are most price sensitive to something they do every day.

On the flip side, if I travel a few times a year, on one hand I am "less important" because capturing my business won't lead to that many trips and on the other I am less likely price conscious. If I do something once a year, I might chose to drive regardless of train cost, just cuz I want to drive. Or, I may want to avoid driving so I am happy to pay the higher ticket cost anyway.

That's one way to look at it. Another way:

Every sunday hundreds of people drive from all over Austria to visit the zoo in Schönbrunn. They take the car because the train is way too expensive. If taking the train was cheaper then some of those people would take the train.

Yes, for each of those families it's just one trip. But in aggregate it's also a lot of people.

Why is it more important to get one person to use public transport for 500 trips rather than getting 500 people to use public transport for one trip?

> They take the car because the train is way too expensive

OEBB (Austrian Federal Railways, the state train operator) does offer a family railcard ("Vorteilscard Family"), and it's hardly expensive:

"The Vorteilscard Family offers you a particularly inexpensive option to travel together with children. For only €19 a year, up to 4 children under the age of 15 can accompany you for free."

It sounds cheap, and it's probably a good deal if you ride long distances or frequently.

But when I recently planned a trip from Linz to Vienna for our family it would have cost around 120€ for the train (not including tickets for bus or subway to get to/from train station). Driving costs around 40€ for gas (not including parking fees).

I suspect you'd get a different picture if you include the additional depreciation/wear on the car.

It's 184 km one way. German tax authorities assume 30 cents per km (~110 EUR for a round trip), Austrian tax authorities use 42 (~154 EUR for a round trip). Now, the actual marginal cost may be lower if you already have the car, but it's far from obvious once those hidden costs are considered. Especially as you have to actively drive for those 4 hours instead of reading a book, watching a movie, ...

Sure but cash in hand always trumps hidden costs for a majority of the people (if you're on HN, you're likely not working class majority - people who make below median income). If the European governments were actually serious about climate change vs mostly theatre, they'd figure out how to make public transportation cost less. The pricing of trains in Europe has always felt stupid to me

> The rail card thing is just a scheme to overcharge casual riders and tourists. It's reasonable for people who regularly go by train (...)

At least for me, one return trip at the reduced rate pays for the price of buying the railcard (which is valid for 12 months).

It's not like one has to sit down with Excel to figure out where the break-even point lies! If I don't make any additional rail journeys in Austria over the next year, I'm still not out of pocket...

If you do only one trip a year, then that trip costs 140€ (37 * 2 + 66)

If you do the trip 10 times a year then it costs 81€ per trip (37 * 2 + 66 / 10).

So in this case the occasional rider pays 59€ more per trip than the regular rider.

Here in the US, a shorter trip of NYC to Boston (~364km/226mi) is about 4.5 hours to drive or a little faster by train (faster train "acela" is 3h45m, regular is 4h20m). I'm assuming a "walk-up fare" is just day of, when you arrive at the station. That's generally not something we can do here as trains sell out, but for tomorrow tickets are $170 for the longer train, and between $140-$220 for the faster train (depending on departure time). Prices are one-way. Flying is often cheaper even at these distances, which is infuriating to me.

I'd love to have that $85 full walk-up fare you're getting. I really wish we cared about rail travel here, it's far preferable for me to flying or driving on trips at this distance.

One aspect of train travel that is particularly interesting in Germany is that ticket prices do NOT include seating. That is to say, the fact that you bought a ticket does not imply that you can expect to sit during your ride. You have to buy a numbered seating reservation if you want to have a guaranteed seat, which is not necessarily offered for all lines.

A trip of 364km should not take 3h45 or 4.5 hrs. 2 hours should be expected on a route like that. The train would go at 185 km/h average speed. That is not even Japan or Chinese style high speed - just a well maintained railway infrastructure. With a 2 hour trip time you could get many people to switch...

Even during the lockdowns there were times of no checkpoints on the borders again. It was such a relief to finally see them gone. I hope they aren't back again.

But yes that is amazing value and travel by train is just nicer.

> Even during the lockdowns there were times of no checkpoints on the borders again. It was such a relief to finally see them gone.

Unstaffed, or actually gone? :)

Last time I drove into Austria from Germany there were no border guards there to actually check anything, but all the traffic calming measures, warning signs and speed restrictions were still there ("cars use left-hand lane, larger/freight vehicles right hand lane").

As one might expect from Homo sapiens behind the wheel, the frantic changing of lanes by vehicles approaching the (unmanned) checkpoint caused an enormous queue and resulting delay almost as bad as if there had been border guards actually checking every single vehicle.

Just the usual slow down to 60km and 80km which are always there if I remember correctly.

The border between Germany and Austria near Salzburg is a special case. Since the refugee crises there are regular big controls.

Locals avoid it whenever possible, even thought this is the most direct way for many connections.

Avoid taking a bus over that border, and if you do don't panic when they enter with dogs and machine guns and expect a 2 hour delay

I think your car is completely flexible too? It can also leave and arrive anywhere you want.

Cost may be a bit higher though. You’re liable to burn through 30ish liters of fuel at a price of around €50.

Prices for travelling by car should contain way more stuff than just gas. There's taxes, insurance, repair and all that nasty stuff that really makes very high costs per mile or kilometer if you do the math.

Though if one already have a car, then it might make sense to use it to get better value from tax and insurance

I'm not sure if I'd agree. This might as well be another mutation of sunk cost fallacy. Anyway, the sooner you sell your car, the higher the price. (ignoring really old and valuable cars here)