9-Euro-Ticket
bahn.com
bahn.com
These tickets are good for all “Nah- und Regionalverkehr,” explicitly excluding ICE, IC, EC (international) and long-distance busses (like the one between Munich and Zürich)
If the train number begins with RE or RB, you’re good, but of course, those are the slow ones that stop in every village along the way.
This is for the benefit of people who live here and are struggling with 2 EUR/liter fuel, not the kind of people who blithely paid 60 EUR to take the ICE. There does not appear to be any residency requirement, but remember, you’re not the target market for this (unless you live here and are struggling with fuel prices…)
Wow. Things must have improved incredibly in the last ten years.
Better data: https://de.statista.com/infografik/13644/laenge-von-arbeitsw... Can't find how to change the language, even though it's an international page. The graph shows minutes per single way. The pie diagram seems to be a popular vote on "maximum acceptable time".
Public transport is pretty good on this connection, but overall it takes me 75-90 mins, because I need to change twice and there are wait times.
° Well, I'm working from home now...
I used to live in a different, larger, city, and worked on the opposite side of the same city. Distance 13km. Driving commute 30 mins (middle of the night) to 45 mins (rush hour) each way. Public transport 90 mins...
Edit: As a student I pay 90€ for a "semester ticket" once every 6 months.
A gallon is 3.785 litres, and the euro is roughly $1.05.
So 2 euros per litre = one gallon costs $8.
A US liquid gallon is defined as 3.785411784 liters, the US dry gallon is 4.40488377086 liters, while the imperial gallon is 4.54609 liters. And that's just the currently used definitions...
If I ask Google for "1 gallon in liters", it assumes Imperial gallons which would account for a good chunk of the error.
That's not true at all. There's lots of direct service to notable destinations. It's rather if you want to go to un-notable destinations (which is of course something that people do a lot in their daily lives) that you can expect to have to transfer.
I, for one, used to travel a lot through Germany using only the Wochenendticket, which is the predecessor of the "Quer durch's Land" - Ticket and was only valid on Saturday or Sunday.
It's 3 months
> For 9 euros, you can travel throughout Germany on local/regional trains for a whole month in June, July or August.
or start later...
My point was only that the 75 EUR is already a price reduced monthly ticket.
> The 9-Euro-Ticket is available in the period from 1 June 2022 to 31 August 2022.
> It is valid for one calendar month, from 00:00 on the 1st until 24:00 on the 30th/31st.
Even if you really want to get to B, it’s more adventurous and cheaper than taking a direct train.
I can easily see teenagers or pensioners use this to backpack through Germany for a month. Even if you don’t know whether you’ll like it, it’s cheap enough to give it a try.
So even then it's a good deal.
The "traveling across Germany" advertisement is less about "you want to get to place B as far as possible" but more about "you want to travel and see a lot of places eventually ending up at place B" something the DB believes students like to do (if you look at other ads or thinks like the "Quer durchs Land" ticket.
Anyway the ticket is mainly for people which use (or maybe now have to use) public transportation for daily usage (e.g. to/from work).
I.e. the people mostly profiting from it are the people which don't have a lot of money. Which is grate as they are also the people hardest hit by the increased costs of more or less everything.
"Dutch public transport is the most expensive in Europe": https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/dutch-pu...
Only because the UK is no longer in the EU.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/01/dutch-transport-servic...
Yes. On the other hand, the comparison in frequency, punctuality and cleanliness between the cheap Italian regional trains and the average Dutch ones clearly favors, and by a large margin, The Netherlands. This might have an impact on the costs :)
GP is still very much right that The Netherlands, while being better, isn't good enough yet for most people to get rid of cars.
>cleanliness
Eh.. they certainly aren't clean here.
13:30 hours - 120 €
Look up Flixbus. It's slow, but cheap.
FlixBus seats, when reclined, are on par with economy seats in any airline I used. But FlixBus seats have considerable more legroom.
Also the bus takes breaks on journeys that last for that many hours.
Even some of the direct FlixBuses Berlin–Hamburg (3.5hs) take a 5min break at a petrol station somewhere in the middle of the journey.
For example, you could do Decin (Czech) to Glanerbrug (Netherlands) in 12.5 hours with only 7 changes, all on RB/RE and S-Bahn trains.
Of course, that's still going to be a long journey, but you can break it up anywhere you want and stay at cheap hotels in random German towns along the way that you otherwise would never have considered visiting!
Buuut... I was on a school trip to the UK once where I spent 13 hours on a bus and I remember hating every second of it. Well, we'll consider it :)
If you want low cost, park in a P+R garage outside the city and you get a free train/tram/metro ticket into the city.
A few days ago Deutsche Bahn has started to label some trains with an RE number (e.g. running Norddeich-Bremen or Stuttgart-Singen) with "9-Euro-ticket not valid".
[0]: I know of one exception, though it looks like an honest mistake.
Edit: I tried in English and the warning didn't show up... Hopefully this link works as an example: https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/traininfo.exe/en/45678/209...
Paywalled article in German: https://www.nwzonline.de/plus-wirtschaft/9-euro-ticket-gilt-...
People are used to use a regional ticket with those trains, and they show an "RE" number. This will likely lead to loads of discussions on the train if they will follow through with that.
There are other connections between these two places without having to go on an Intercity and these do not show the message.
It has been confusing even before the 9 Euro ticket.
It is painted in white and the floor is carpeted, making it a IC train.
> long-distance busses (like the one between Munich and Zürich)
Zurich is too deep in Switzerland to be covered anyways. (Salzburg, Kufstein, Basel Bad Bf, etc. however are in Austria/Switzerland but part of German rail rates and included in 9€ tickets)
And that DB bus doesn't exist anymore since the new electrified railway line to Lindau was opened two years ago, as Munucih-Zurich got way faster by train. (I guess Flixbus still offers it but Flix isn't part of 9€ either)
By bus it's 225 minutes, but the bus is often up to 30 minutes late.
I can see why you said the train takes 221 minutes.
However, "225 minutes" for bus? I know y'all are known for punctuality, but are buses in Switzerland/Germany that precise?!
Also, is it customary to tell such durations in minutes, as opposed to something like "4 hour 45 minutes" or "4 and 3-quarter hours"?
Where I'm at, nothing runs on time unfortunately. Over here I sometimes feel arrival times of trains should just say "morning" instead of showing an actual time like 8:20 am.
Source:
https://news.sbb.ch/artikel/109510/puenktlichkeit-2021-zweit...
I say this as someone who lived in Zurich for two years.
Even if sometimes they are not punctual, the density saves you and you rarely think about it.
And there are dense schedules, so that if one bus is delayed to some problem the next one is close by, thus gap is little.
They improved the line (electrification which allows better trains, moving tran station in Lindau from the island with old town to the shore etc.) in the first year they went from 4h30 to 4h. Where the trains were standing for about half an hour at St. Magrethen at the Austrian-Swiss border. In 2021 they improved signalling and adjusted schedules and got rid of that half an hour wait, so it's now at 3h35.
Well, that is not exactly true now, is it. REs do actually skip the vast majority of "villages" and are far from being the slow ones, comparatively.
Anyway, for comparisons sake here is some Hamburg -> Berlin options:
- By car (with low traffic, according to GMaps): 3h20
- Regional Trains (the ones you can use with 9-eur-ticket): 4h10, including 1-3 train changes depending on connection
- All trains: 1h50 with no change
Given that going by car will be considerably more expensive than a regional ticket (even the none-9-eur version) I would say that +1h might be a reasonable trade-off for a lot of people.
Also the travel takes ~4h15m (RE->RE) instead of ~1h50m (ICE).
If your traveling at a time where the RE is not over crowded and you can spend the time well it's okay. If not, especially if the train is overcrowded in parts of the travel and it's really hot it's shit.
I can't speak for all of Europe, but here in Austria trains, trams, and subways are way more predictable than taking the car. Sure, sometimes there are delays, but 99% of the time you get to your destination on schedule. When you drive you always have the risk of random delays due to traffic.
But I also want to point out that I didn't say that public transit is 99% on time, I said I get to my destination on time 99% of the time. Often when a train/tram/subway is late I can just take a different one and still get to my destination on time.
If there is a delay on a long journey, I usually know hours in advance, and I can let people know I'm going to be late. But it's a very rare occurrence in my experience.
One of the delays that I experienced with DB couple years ago was related to a complete change of the train route that happened after departure (!). Some unlucky passengers had to leave at the next station and check how they can get to their destinations at Reisezentrum. Travel time was increased by 1 hour for me.
It feels like every direction I want to go with my car, there's always construction, with detours, closed exits, or just a section of highway with a 60km/h limit and traffic jams, because they are adding another lane, or building a new bridge, or resurfacing the road, or adding noise protection, or something.
Lot of the problems have been created by decades of prioritization of roads over rail. No suprise not everthing goes smoothly if you try to increase capacity on a long neglected system afterwards.
Some predict complete chaos caused by the 9 EUR ticket. Such a cheap price should result in dramatic of demand. But supply can't grow a whole lot on short notice.
Well, I am not in Germany. I'll read it from the news.
A delay of an hour is pretty ordinary and, in the last timetable, they stretched the journey times almost back to the 1980s levels, in order to have at least some semblance of regularity.
We need some high speed rail like hell, there just isn't enough tracks to carry our admittedly massive rail traffic. Any irregularity will throw everything out of the loop.
Unfortunately, NIMBYs and BANANAs are doing their best to prevent any development of anything anywhere ever. This is a movement that really fulfills the "the dose makes the poison" adage. In reasonable amounts, it can prevent highways from being built brutally across residential areas like in China. In current amounts, it can prevent you from building a detached house on your own property in a normal residential area full of other houses, because f-k you that's why, your lot has always been an overgrown ex-garden and will stay so until I die.
edit: actually I just looked up Czech high-speed rail and found a wikipedia page. Apparently there are a set of HSR routes already approved and planned out, with a more direct Prague-Brno line via Jihlava supposedly due to start in 2025. Any idea if this is realistic, or if it should be taken with a generous pinch of salt?
Car trip will look like:
1. Travel from start to location (3:20)
2. Find parking (0:5)
3. Walk from parking to location (0:10)
Your train trip will look like:
1. Go from start to train station (0:20)
2. Wait for train (0:10)
3. Train to Berlin (1:50)
4. Train station to location (0:20)
5. Wait at location because there was no better train (1:00)
It stil might be worth it to use the train, as you can work/read in the train which you can't do in a car.
But for the train to be working it needs planets to be aligned: start location must be within reasonable distance to train station; end location must be within reasonable distance to train station; train travel speed is significantly faster than cars; train schedule is aligned with desired arrival time. If any of these conditions are not met, the train option does not work
Are you massuming a 3h40m trip for a specific time-based appointment? I think the use case of this kind of train is more similar to a flight with one or more nights at destination, so that the specific arrival time is not that important.
Sorry but that has to be the most contrived and ridicilous statement I've ever read. And this is coming from someone -- me -- who owns two cars, lives in Berlin and practically never uses public transportation.
That's the pessimist's view. The optimist wanders around and randomly finds a place they would never have found otherwise. I mostly do the first. Sometimes I find something truly interesting. Sometimes not, but I don't think the unproductivity you mention has harmed me. (Yes, occasionally I absolutely have to hack something, so I search the first place where I can use my laptop. But I try to avoid that in all but the most familiar cities.)
In Germany the trains are also faster than cars on the Autobahn, even if I theoretically could drive 180km/h. All my travels from Dresden to Berlin, Leipzig or Frankfurt are faster by train than by car. ICE only.
Now with this offer, the slow RE trains only, it's slower than by car, but still more attractive. Just if I have a meeting far outside a big town, and bad connections (say the bus only goes every 30min) and I have to walk 10min, I'll take the car. For my next travel to the Leipzig Kanupark I'll take the car, but all other business and leisure trips are by train. For the last 3 years already.
Short 3.5 minutes Docu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOL0MZQiELI
Long Cab ride:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg608B6CgC4
Track: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanne-Eickel%E2%80%93Hamburg_r...
OP was explicitly comparing car and trains, not flight and trains.
If that's the case, then we are more in the context of a "city trip", and Hamburg -> Berlin might not be the most representative case. Something along the line of Hamburg -> Rome is more accurate as people usually like more change of scenery. Flight from Hamburg to Rome is 2:20 and train is 19 hours. Even accounting for airport wait time, the difference is ridiculous.
The issue for passenger transport with rails is that it's not good for small distances as cars have the advantage because of the added convince/flexibility, and for long distances, flight is better due to speed.
For freight, however, train is amazing as these extra hours don't matter too much and the reduction in emissions is massive. The issue is that there aren't that many dedicated cargo flights. Most cargo revenue come from transporting freight in the holds of passenger jets. So moving cargo from flights to trains does not lead to a direct reduction in CO2 emission since those planes are going to fly anyway.
Is this really true? DHL, FedEx, and UPS (and Amazon?) all operate their own freight aircraft. There are also contract freight operators. Most major airports have an entire area that is exclusively for freight operations.
Yes some freight does go in the holds of passenger jets, but is it "most" or even close?
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-10/air-freight-prices.ht...
Worst case, like in the outskirts or smaller towns, you can just park in the parking lot of a big supermarket for 2 hours for free.
I am familiar only with Italian and German trains (i.e. use these regularly, but occasionally I also used trains in/to Austria, Luxembourg, Hungary).
You seem to think that in order to go to Berlin by train someone living, say, in Rostock, first goes to the station then looks when the next available train departs.
In reality you can just use apps on your phone to get not only a timetable of departures but also find out how long it will take for you to get to the station using public transportation.
Example: this Sunday I go visit friends near Hamburg. I have booked a 7:08am train already (with iPhone) and on Sunday morning, depending when I am ready, I can walk to the station (25 mins) or look what bus to take and at what time from the nearest bus stop (5 mins from home).
For example, if that train arrives at 10:08a, say, and the next train is the 9:09a which arrives at 12:09a, and you had an 11:00a appointment, you're going to wait 45 minutes at your destination because you couldn't arrive closer to the target time.
If you're travelling a significant distance by car for an appointment at a fixed time, don't you have to allow extra time for traffic?
(Depending on just how much traffic there might be) if the roads are "normal" you might well end up arriving at the destination 30 mins or even 45 mins early?
I don't actually live in Germany, so I don't really know how frequent these trains run.
I have really only one example, where I missed a train from Frankfurt to Bingen, and had to pay a fortune for a cab ride because the next train was 3h later and I'd miss my planned day.
But if that's a common frequency, the train can work out to be inconvenient, because you will have only a very few times you can plan on without building in lots of waiting.
If you're going a far distance with an hourly service, it's probably convenient enough for most things, provided you never miss a train.
Until we have Star Trek teleports no single method of travel is "absolutely best". But dismissing trains altogether because they do not run at your own convenience looks a bit of a strawman to me.
I do not own s car anymore, but when it is really the best option I rent one. But I also check first if a bus or train gives me reasonable guarantees to reach my destination in time (if they do, they are also way cheaper, especially since COVID, at least here).
Exact same situation as train proponents [correctly] pointing out the additional time needed for airline security theater or transit from city center to airport adding to the door-to-door time for airlines, making airliners slower than trains for some city center to city center trips.
I believe that the main difference in our viewpoinylts is this: people who drive a car tend to reason and plan as if the car is the most appropriate solution, and would not even think of checking fir alternatives unless special circumstances apply.
People who learned to rely on public transport do the opposite. As I wrote already: I do not own a car, but I can drive, so if trains or buses do not offer viable options I just rent one. (The problem is that post Covid rental cars prices hiked, at least here, so the convenience in being more flexible gets often trumped by higher costs).
We did, and it was vastly faster, cheaper, and more pleasant that flying, but it really showed the power of default thinking on people.
Yes, but once we start going down that road you're taking the 5:08 train. I don't think the variance with German trains is lower than with roads.
Traffic can vary, too, and you want to allow significant padding for traffic jams. If I drive from Hamburg to Berlin I’d start 3:30h before my appointment at the destination. With the train, 3h is probably realistic, although there is variance as the train only goes once per hour.
It’s more extreme on the distance Berlin Munich, where taking the train is vastly faster. At night you can max out your car and drive an average speed of 200km/h down the Autobahn (although it’s extremely tiring to do that for hours), and then you can make the distance in 4h by car. During the day, 6:30-7:30h is more realistic. The train takes 3:45; add to that an hour for public transport on both sides.
It’s different when you don’t go to the big cities. You can take the train from Munich to a ski resort in Austria, but it will take twice as long as the car, and you need a cab for the last few kilometres. But nothing beats the train when travelling between large cities in Germany (not even flying, unless you have a private jet).
https://www.golem.de/news/deutsche-bahn-wlan-im-ice-wird-kos...
https://www.golem.de/news/statt-repeater-bahn-holt-5g-durch-...
edit: it is funny how youtube thinks the person on this IP address is waaaay into trains.
Can’t do that on the train, there’s a ton of “not spots”, even excluding the tunnels.
It’s crazy the phone companies don’t have better coverage on the train line.
1. There's only one driver in the car, so all other passengers could still work/read during the drive.
2. The cost is split. With three kids and two parents, the cost would be 45 EUR vs 50 EUR traveling with a somewhat fuel efficient car with an internal combustion engine. This is only fuel price and deprecation of the car is not accounted for and would be more.
3. The stress of switching trains multiple times with small kids, putting clothes on in the cold, making sure they don't bump into people, etc can totally negate any "you don't have to navigate traffic" benefits.
4. You usually don't travel from main railway station in city A to main railway station in city B. Getting to your actual destination can also be a slow and complicated affair with public transportation, especially in conjunction with 5.
5. Luggage can be problematic. If you are traveling with children, moving multiple heavy suitcases from one train to another while simultaneously taking care of kids can be a nightmare.
I think having some familiarity with the infrastructure can go a long way into making the trip easier. Knowing where platforms are, which stations are easier to transfer at, etc.
2 – Don't forget road tolls, parking, and surprise maintenance.
3 – The most consistent "pain point" I've seen with transferring is simply walking from platform to platform. I can only think of a handful of stations that I'd actually consider difficult (e.g. BART's Millbrae and Madrid's Atocha station).
4 – Again, parking. In most big cities you're not going to roll right up to your destination and park.
5 – My experience has been it's as difficult as you make it. Hell I saw someone bring a refrigerator on Muni. Some places like Japan have low cost courier services that entirely negate the need to bring luggage with you. Just drop it off with the courier at the airport and have it sent to the hotel or nearest 7-11. In other places you'll find luggage racks or areas on the trains. Alternatively, pack less stuff. If you're traveling by car and need to use a rooftop box don't forget the hefty fuel consumption penalty.
My most consistent pain point when changing trains is the uncertainty about the delay and whether the connecting train will be waiting or not, how far is it going to be (it may be on a very distant platform and platform use isn't consistent even on the same railway station, much less in different regions) and whether I will have to run even with a heavy baggage and/or pain in my knee (which I sometimes have).
Delayed direct train just means you'll be a bit later in your destination. Delayed train with a missed connection may mean 3 more hours in the railway station or even a necessity to stay overnight in a place you barely know.
With rail, as usual, it depends. Connecting between bigger cities is easier, some countries make things particularly difficult. Most of my train experiences are on metro or commuter rail, most of the longer trips I've done were direct. German (DB) stations were generally easy to navigate and staff were universally dour, but travel itself was relatively painless. Berlin (Mitte) to Amsterdam airport at night? No problem. UK? You learn to just lean back and think of England. The Tube is great and relatively easy to route around closures, GWR is an expensive fucking shit show.
I've spent more time flying than doing long-distance rail trips and yeah delays happen which is why I pick connecting cities carefully. I'd much rather be stranded in New York than Atlanta or Houston.
But cars bring all sorts of uncertainties too. Let's say it starts snowing and you don't have chains (oops) or the roads are closed. Yep you're gonna get stuck for a while.
This past Wednesday I went out to what I always thought of as a semi-remote beach (about 25 miles away from home) to catch the sunset. After that was said and done my car wouldn't start. If I walked a mile back to the beach in the dark I might've been able to find a spotty signal and text for help. I decided to sleep in the car, and when the sun came up I walked ~6 miles to the nearest state park and then another mile or so to the ranger station. About half way there I got a signal for long enough to get cat pictures someone texted me the night prior, but for some reason my carrier decided to block outbound messages "Unable to send message - Message Blocking is active." The park wasn't open so I wandered around until I found someone who offered to give me a ride into the nearest town with a tow truck. A few hours later I was in the tow truck, on a two lane road, on my way home and traffic in the other direction was at a standstill. Someone had run their car off the road and judging by the number of cars waiting they'd been waiting for a while. I took that in stride but that would've been hell with kids. If I didn't know that area was low crime I would've had to schlep all my stuff into town.
That said I agree with you, travelling with kids is more convenient if done by car.
Also, at €9 for a ticket that lasts a month, you're going to save an awful lot of money compared to taking the car.
A Uber/Taxi also easily costs more then 9€ even for short distances.
Source: just came back from a week long trip to Berlin and I still have 2/4 tickets unused.
So for locals it's still a grate deal.
And the tickets show how long they have been active, so activating them when you see they check might not pass at all (depending on the person checking, the often let it pass anyway).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/22/in-no-city-hav...
But I have seen multiple cases of Ticket controlling sub-contractors acting out of line against Berlin citizens you could describe of "looking German" ("looking German" from the POV of a potential racist person, not mine POV).
I also have seen people acting out of line against the ticket controlling sub-contractors, including in the way the contractors claimed the black person did. But also worse. Like to a point where I was surprised the contractor kept calm and half expected needing to step in. Because many people would have lost it if "insulted" to that degree.
The increased tension between contractors and citizens in recent was the reason they changed their policy recently (for some time? still ongoing? idk.) to no longer have the subcontractors wear civil clothes even through it means they will miss more people without tickets. I also have seen more security people (which job does not include controlling tickets, luckily this is kept separate).
There’s an old joke that BMW engineers couldn’t understand why they should add a cup holder.
-> I’d challenge the 3:20h driving time, would probably more like 2:30h in ideal conditions
I usually took the train and would constantly beat my colleagues taking the car significantly (1-2 hours)
I get the feeling that there might be a whole lot of "it sucks in my country so you probably have a bad experience too" replies here (not yours as it's quite a clear illustration of details people might miss), and I would almost immediately assume it'll be mostly people from the US who are car-bound for their transport needs.
The idea that you can life a nice and productive life and go places as you please without dring a car is very foreign to some people. Even the idea of switching it up and having some work commute by bike or bus seems like a 'poor people thing' to some people. It's weird.
Don't get me wrong, I often prefer the car, but that post is comically one-sided.
Berlin-Hamburg has intercity trains approx every half hour, so on average this wait will be approx 15 minutes. Which could be filled with some useful activity, like some shopping… equivalent to going to the gas station for drivers.
And includes a reserved seat.
I went for 4.99€ last month – twice (taking early morning trains).
I.e. unlike DB there are no overcrowded FlixTrains where people have to sit on floors or stand. FlixTrains have a maximum occupancy dictated by number of seats.
Anyway, it remains to be seen how that develops. I'm expecting overload. Especially in times of Covid, I'd be (still) wary to use it.
/me sings: I wan't to ride my bicycle, baaaicycle, baaaaicycle!
Yet there is no need to guilt people into it being "German only". The ticket is priced on the slow trains so it already selects for people who care more about money than time. Anyone who chooses a 9 Euro, 4-hour train over a dozens of Euro 1.5 hour train is already not the "upper class".
Since it’s not obvious, I’m not German, merely a permanent resident (US citizen).
If 2 EUR/liter is too much for Germany, than it's enormous for my Eastern European country.
I know we should support the war and sanctions and all those nice things, but some poor people depend on transportation for their living. If it costs too much, they might not be able to work. Already surges in food prices and utilities prices made life very hard for the most unfortunate of my countrymen.
[0] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/der-geschoente-armutsbe...
> If 2 EUR/liter is too much for Germany, than it's enormous for my Eastern European country.
Germans are always complaining although they are amongst the richest in Europe. In Finland it's 2,50 EUR/liter (somewhat less in the very south) and at least IT salaries are mostly lower.
What I did not see mentioned here that gas(US)/petrol(UK) will also be temporarily subsidized (by tax reduction) by the same law package as this 9 EUR ticket.
(German living in Finland.)
It’s very nice because as long as you don’t mind it taking a lot of time you can take the train on holidays for very little money.
My main worry is whether they'll have the resources to put up with the increased demand. Guess I'll see soon...
My train ticket inspector vents to everyone how they do not. (they get the heat)
I think it will work out, but will be very crowded at times. Or rather, even more crowded. They are already bad at scaling up or down, at a sunny sunday for example. Also this is, because they have allmost nothing to scale up. This is a long term investment.
It's also for people normally using public transport.
There's a city in northern Germany where a ticket for one day public transportation costs nearly 9€.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Do you mean that non Germans should refrain from buying these tickets?
They’re for making short, local trips more affordable in a country that has a lot of people struggling with fuel and inflation, and for encouraging drivers to consider transit instead more often, and long-distance trips to the sea shore and mountains are a nice side benefit that is a pleasant thing to discuss when we all feel like there’s a shortage of pleasant things to discuss.
That they’ll make local transit uncomplicated for visitors (no trying to work out where to buy a given city’s tickets, or exactly which fare you need for a particular subway ride!) is also a nice incidental, and I, a taxpayer here, will be happy to see tourists using them, but that’s not why the Bundestag is spending 2.5 billion EUR on this.
There arent that many travelers in summer so By making it cheaper you promote tourism and people appretiate it.
The “you shouldnt nuy it its not for you” people just have no idea and probably dont even use trains or live in the area.
Yes, exactly.
The main benefits are in context of in and around city travel. Like e.g. a regular in-city ticket (area A,B not C) in Berlin cost 86€/month (but there are many ways to get it cheaper). Now for this 3 month it's 9€ per month and covers all areas and you can even use it to get to day trip locations close to Berlin (like the "Spreewalt").
So it's really a grate deal for locals.
But if you want to travel longer distances IC/ICE are still the choice to go (if you can afford it), like Berlin->Kiel with IC/ICE is ~3.5h switching trains 1 time but with only using RB/RE it's >6h with switching 5 times.
I converted this for Americans like me:
2 EUR/liter is about $8.02/gallon
A 17-gallon tank costs $136.74 to fill.
(Using exchange rate of 1.06 and 3.785 liters per gallon)
I have no idea if that would work for inter-city transport but for inner-city transport the HVV for example (the public transportation network responsible for hamburg and surrounding areas) sells 30 million tickets a year and I wonder how much it truly costs them to do that with all the relevant factors mentioned above.
With inner-city transport, while free would undoubtedly have some marginal impact (and more over time as residential and commute patterns shift) there probably wouldn't be large shifts in use.
I suspect for inter-city, you would actually see significantly increased usage, which could outweigh all the benefits cited.
For example, in Munich, there is a ~10% cheaper version of the monthly ticket that is only valid after 9 AM. This kind of incentive shaping falls flat.
(That is not to say I object to the new ticket, to be clear.)
Here in Croatia, we had "free" public transport in some places for i.e. students travelling to school. But the price was still paid for by the cities/government to service operators. Which led to inflated prices for the service because there's always a way for the operator and some officials to collude together for extra profit. And the increases weren't transparent until at some point the tickets were no longer "free", and suddenly their cost was way over what it was before it became "free".
Indeed. I've taken the train in Romania with a Romanian friend. The ticket for both of us would have been X$, say, but she talked to the conductor and paid him 1/3 X$ in cash to "look the other way" and ignore us. Conductor pocketed that, we traveled cheaper, and the company lost the revenue.
Here in Germany, there were many voices in favour of making the ticket completely free. What I heard about the reason for not doing so is that the government wanted to easily measure the actual demand in different regions for such a "free" ticket. So the price is low enough that anybody who wants to ride practically "for free" is buying it, but so high that most people who do not really use it won't buy it.
I expect that if the ticket is a success, it will be replaced by real free rides in the future. And the results of the test period could help determine how the costs should finally be shared between the different regions and local governments.
What’s your confidence level here? Because if you can make me believe that the ticket is effectively a vote for ticketless/free ÖPNV I will buy them for everyone I know.
[1] At a moment's notice, I could only find old estimates from 2008 that amount to 25 billion Euros per year (more than 300 Euros per inhabitant per year) for local and regional transport (not including long distance transport) as of which only 9 billion Euros (35%) were paid directly from tickets or similar. This means 16 billion (65%) were already payed by the public (aprox. 200 Euro per inhabitant per year) -- see: https://www.zukunft-mobilitaet.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/0... (in German).
Edit: Looking at your link, it seems the difference might be accounted for to some extent because the 75 %-figure - might possibly not include heavy rail
- like I said definitively doesn't include grants for major capital projects and only looks at day-to-day operating expenses
- is looking at things from the perspective of the local transport operators, respectively counties/cities that mostly are directly responsible for financing any shortfalls, so the compensation payments for the state-/federal-level mandated fare reductions for pupils and handicapped people are included as part of the regular farebox income
Then again, regardless of the rules and processes we make, there will always be people misusing/abusing it.
You should always think of the cost of public transport as ticket price + hourly wage * time spent - value of anything you might get done on the bus.
"We now have a one-time promotion that represents a field trial. At the end, we can analyse the data and know exactly what we need to improve in order to get people to switch to public transport."[1]
[1] Original: "Wir haben jetzt eine einmalige Aktion, die einen Feldversuch darstellt. Wir können dann am Ende auch die Daten analysieren und wissen genau, was müssen wir verbessern, um Menschen auf den ÖPNV umsteigen zu lassen." -- https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/verkehrsminister-zum-neun-eur... (in German)
One example was the city of Templin in Brandenburg.
The project was eventually abandoned because lots of people were just riding the busses out of boredom and busses were permanently full with costs exploding for the city.
See: https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/artikel/nahverkeh...
> And not every trip seems to have been truly necessary for the passengers. "On rainy days the kids would take the bus out of boredom" says Templin's mayor Detlef Tabbert (Die Linke ["The Left" political party]) to manager-magazin.de. Groups of men with a crate of beer were also not uncommon. "If something is for free, it will be used - whether it makes sense or not", says [marketing responsible of the local transit provider][marketing responsible of the local transit provider] Pohlan
In the end they went back to paid tickets, but charged 44EUR for an annual ticket that can even be transferred between people as needed. That still leaves them subsidizing public transit, but that's a political decision based on what the alternatives would be: pollution, road infrastructure (another form of subsidy), better quality of life, ...
A decision that, as you might be able to tell, I personally happen to strongly agree with.
Edit: forgot to paste the translated paragraph :P
No, that was just your fantasy reading words I never said.
I said people were riding out of boredom, not homeless people sleeping on the bus.
It doesn’t matter anyway who was riding. The point is simply that people were riding the bus without actually needing to.
One should notice that there a no Communist economies anymore in Europe for more than 30 years. Democratic wellfare states provide in my opinion the best balance between individual incentives and social responsibility.
I would argue that a lot of state-managed sectors in various European countries work a lot better than in the US (health care, higher education, correction, ...). One has to look into the details to see what works better in which sector.
Extent and details are, of course, something that needs to be permanently evaluated. But in general there is enough wealth produced each year to provide everyone with an at least modest standard of living. However, the differences between the countries are still very large: GDP per capita in the EU is aprox. EUR 32.000, ranging from Luxemburg's EUR 114,000 to Bulgaria's EUR 10,000.
While it is true that there is quite a difference in GDP per capita between different EU countries, please consider that Luxembourg has a very particular standing and as an outlier is not representative of the "wealthier" EU members. Most of those are in the range of 40k-50k, with only three above this: 114,370 Luxembourg 83,990 Ireland 57,140 Denmark
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union
Primary school is free, libraries are free, parks are free, etc. To know whether public transportation is more like free libraries or more like free parking, you have to run the experiment.
Random example, MTS: https://www.sdmts.com/fares/fare-chart - the 1-day pass is priced just above a round-trip ticket cost.
If you can afford buying a ticket to ride the bus for no reason every day, no one is going to stop you.
However, most people won’t spend money on things they don’t actually need.
Consequence of late night negotiations on top level of the federal government, without involving respective experts from states, who are running public transport. ("Wait, we're subsidizing fuel, so we should subsidize public transport as well! Any quick idea?")
They are planning to reduce energy taxes on fuel for June though August, after they imposed CO2 taxes starting in 2021.
The German government tried to force people to use more renewable energies and electric cars by introducing the CO2 tax.
Since both are not adequate replacements, costs for heating, electricity and transportation exploded.
When the German government realized that was a problematic development and could push people into poverty, they hastily came up with the 9 Euro ticket and the fuel rebate (which is just reducing the energy taxes to a minimum) in the hope that the problems would resolve themselves alone sometime in the future.
However, the problems will be back in September when the rebate period is over.
Since both are not adequate replacements, costs for heating, electricity and transportation exploded.
This is total nonsense. The subsidy for fuel prices were introduced due to rapidly rising costs for fuel shortly before the war started.
Those costs didn't rise because of the CO2 tax.
The fuel subsidy also doesn't reduce energy taxes, but explicitly fossil fuel taxes for cars only.
A ticket for $0 would have done it.
Still have to book for it, and probably should have rate limits like other pseudo free services (Google don't charge you for search, etc).
The "price" is for ensuring fair use (on such a big scale)/registering the influx; yes, 1€ could also do the trick but in the case of DB AG we are talking about an highly over-bureaucratized ... so one order of magnitude higher and you arrive at the current pricing.
[0]https://www.waternet.nl/en/veelgestelde-vragen/tap-water/wha...
Not quite. Many people (eg commuters) have monthly train passes, almost all students have a "Semesterticket" (university enrolment is about 350 EUR every half year, but that includes all public transport in the region).
Now, the 9-Euro-Ticket is cheaper than those options, so out of fairness the holders of all those tickets are getting a refund of 3 months worth of their pass minus 3x9=27 EUR, which is a huge administrative burden for the public transport providers and universities. That substantial burden would not have been reduced by having the ticket for free.
> "Theoretically, all students would need to be reimbursed or credited 79.98 EUR each," says [speaker of Bochum University] Dessaul. An enormous administrative effort, because almost 43,000 young people study there.
> The AStA (student council) [of Duisburg-Essen University] would have to initiate 40,000 bank transfers [for the refunds]. "This would be an incredible effort, especially given the limited number of people we have in treasury, finance, and on the board, that would be extremely difficult to manage and would probably also take considerable time"
https://www.businessinsider.de/politik/deutschland/trotz-ber...
[1] Some of the big cities are actually even closer to break-even as far as day-to-day operating costs are concerned, so in those cases the budget would have to be increased by an even larger factor in percentage terms.
You aren't taking into account the money saved from eliminating all the infrastructure needed for collecting and enforcing the fares like OP mentioned..
Unless farebox recovery ratio already subtracts the money spent to collect fares? That's not my understanding though.
Aside from that, though, it's not as if the money not collected in fares is lost. That's money that people get to keep. It's a direct economic benefit to people using transit, and a smaller indirect benefit to everyone else.
The ticket is part of a support package signed off by the German parliament. The will pay approximately €2.5 billion for the ticket offer, as a response to rising energy prices and the resulting high costs of individual mobility.
But your comment kinda makes sense. It’s not really worth trying much in Germany. The more one tries, the more one becomes the source of funding for others while not really getting any personal gratification or gain.
In fact, those buses are on exactly on those same roads. The existence of those roads facilities convenient public transportation.
I think this is a good program, but anything that costs 1/1000th of a large country’s budget is a large expense to my mind, not “nothing”.
It's unfortunate that you can't derive any gratification or gain from your more-than-half of the extra money you make when trying more. But it probably won't help to blame it on less wealthy people commuting to work.
I also have a mother in Germany who I pay the rent for. She's a pensioner with a minimal amount of money. I am very much looking to Nebenkostenabrechnung next year for heating.
But I still don’t understand your broader point. Mathematically a progressive tax system is going to have high income people pay more taxes than they receive back in government services, to fund the services provided to low/zero income earners
The real injustice is that capital gains (i.e., unearned income) are taxed less. But of course that's also very common internationally.
I don't believe you do not benefit.
Ask the people of Ahrweiler what is it like living without that infrastructure.
The infrastructure needed is not the same for goods, and public services compared to tens of millions of people driving, and thus doesn't cost nearly the same. So the point of my post still stands -- I pay for a lot of things I don't need as it is, including the ridiculous gas tax reduction so everybody can pretend it's business as usual that will end up being more expensive than the 9 Euro train ticket.
You miss the point completely. You need it. You don’t drive but you consume services directly depending on this infrastructure.
Anyway you don't get to pick and choose with taxes - although car owners are the absolute worst at wanting things like bicycle licensing.
And there needs to be a discourse about which lifestyles and life choices should at all and to what degree they should be subsidised by the government and why this is legitimate.
There are a whole lot of subsidies that are neither fair nor sustainable and over time we need to transition away from them.
This is painful and becoming a little more evident these times but it needs to happen.
Letting the price for energy rise is necessary until it'll have become carbon neutral and you're feeling it.
Not all government subsidies, benefits, etc are supposed to help everybody equally, this should not be a hard concept to grasp and yet comments like yours are so common that it makes me think that people don't really understand how taxes and government spending works.
First: Its not free, its subsidized by the state. Free would suggest for some "not worth it". Not you, most likely, but this is why some free offers are not taken (seriously). If you want to see what free does, look for the Luxemburg experient: https://www.mobiliteit.lu/en/tickets/free-transport/
Second: Higher price point would make a difference for less subsidy payments for the state, but the psychology is "not even 10 bucks". I know that some will argue that 10 Euros will be hard for low income/poor/out of the system people - but again, this is seen as an experiment and a simple message. The data from the usage will help to understand how one can/might change public transportation on a grand scale.
Third: Its during the summer holidays. People with children in school have to book vacation during that time and so the traffic volume in every year before was less than usual on average. In reverse, a lot of people are on the autobahn and the high speed trains on the first and last days of each school holiday, which are different in each federal state.
„The state“ doesn’t have its „own money“. It is subsided by the taxpayer.
That used to be completely true, but seeing the US government consistently spending 150% of its revenue every year make me doubt that. Money printer and price go brr
At least Germans are getting train tickets and not shiny new drone missiles.
Germany is actually getting both, train tickets and armed drones [0]
[0] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220408-germany-buys-140-...
But on point. ECB manufactures banknotes. As in, it prints them and hands over to individual countries. ECB is owned by central banks of all 27 countries.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/educational/explainers/tell-me...
Taxpayers money comes from the work they execute. For example, when I do a contract for someone, I get paid for the service I did. If I don’t do the work, I don’t get paid and “the state” doesn’t give me anything. Furthermore, if I do a lot of work in a year and the next year I have a misfortune of falling ill and can’t sustain working, I’m screwed because “the state” wants its share in case of future profits, and just takes it from my account leaving me with a hole. “The state” doesn’t care.
I remember such a conversation I had once with a representative of “the state”: “you don’t have our money?”, to which my immediate thought was “yeah, because we were sitting nights together trying delivering those projects”.
So it was funny when I visited my sister in a rural town in England, and there was a festival so we took the bus to get there. It was obvious the bus was more crowded than usual, and people were grumpy, but from my point of view it was almost empty; people were within an arm's distance from each other, which for the locals probably used to less than half the people that was very crowded.
I wonder if the same will happen on the trains in Germany. Japan is used to this though, and they have powerful ventilation and aircon systems to alleviate the situation in summer.
Unless people start sitting on each other's lap the aircon capacity is not going to be exceeded.
It will be a less comfortable seat than a long distance train.
... well ... the ICEs AC is known to fail regularly at elevated temperatures :-)
Even the trains ordered in 2000 were designed for an every-100-years summer (40°C sustained outdoor temperatures) which now some regions are hitting every year as well.
The issue isn’t the ACs, the real issue is climate change ;)
I've been in a couple of people-shoving-level crowded commuter trains when traveling to popular consumer trade fairs, and it was ok. Most people took it as part of the experience.
The biggest issue will be people trying to cross the country, packing 40 year old REs beyond their limit in the hottest time of year.
OTOH, the 9-Euro-Ticket is for all (!) local transport (incl. bus, ferry, ...) and regional trains. That means here in Hamburg I can use all bus, underground train and ferry connections. It's also all month, 24hours/day.
Still better than nothing, I guess.
Those remaining <25% are not really important here and can still use their cars.
Unrelated to this topic but that explains why Germans are so eager to remove forest in order to build windmills. People in the city obviously don’t notice it anyway.
You argument is the usual fear-mongering by (often right-wing) conservative politicians, wanting us to keep buying oil and gas from dictatorships. As you can see in France where they routinely have to shut down nuclear power plants to not overheat their adjacent rivers in the summer, nuclear is also no build and forget solution.
Regarding Hambacher Forst. Does it not make you wonder why the situation quiet down while the country is going though an energy supply crunch?
As for Hambacher Forst, you failed to mention that most issues have been either finalized in courts or were dealt with in protests/politics. I'm not taking sides since this was never a black or white situation, it is always a multi faceted problem. (Empathic example: For the people living in the villages that were destroyed, the loss of their homeland is for most of us simply unimaginable. Then again for some time, germany needed the energy from these deposits under the villages.)
Unfortunately Germany has less than 10% true forest left, most ist just foreign trees maximizing for wood revenue. They can’t withstand a storm or a hot summer (really good with the extreme climate events which are coming up).
Any forest is not a forest.
1. You want to tell something 'unrelated to this topic'. That's a bad idea because it clutters our discussions. I assume you have some inner pressure and strong emotions about the windmill topic and want to release it.
2. You're picking on city people. They don't notice the decrease of forests because they don't see it when they look out of the window?
3. You are telling us that the decline of the forests in Germany are caused by… windmills? Really? That's so wrong that I don't know where to start to explain.
I don't know where the hatred against windmills or against 'city people' comes from. But its origin is certainly not windmills.
We need the windmills to fight the decline of the forests, you know. And to fight mass extinction. We need the windmills to avert the demise of many species. Including our own.
2. Yes.
3. No, I‘m saying that forest is being removed for windmills. You are assuming that I‘m having some dumb argument. This is what I see where I live. Windmills in a national park with more trees removed for service roads. But please, continue educating.
Very arrogant to claim 21 million people are not important.
In Austria that's already a problem. Due to overcrowding, they're kicking people with valid tickets but no seat reservations off the trains telling them to get the next one.
In particular, the government reduced the taxes on gasoline due to the high gasoline prices, a purely populist insanity in these times of climate crisis. Then they remembered that they were elected on a pro-environment platform, and concluded that they also had to support those using public transport, and this was the result.
Like the woman I saw in the grocery store a few weeks ago on the verge of tears because the cheapest cooking oil available was 6 EUR/750ml bottle organic canola oil, and that’s still often the case.
Inflation in Germany is every bit as bad as it is in the US, so this is also a bit of a welfare payment to all the people who take public transit anyway because they can’t afford to drive.
I’m 100% for this, by the way; it’s an excellent use of my tax Euros. It will probably make the U-Bahn less pleasant for me, but that’s ok.
- rent (+13 % if I don’t move, at least +30% if I move).
- groceries (+20% up until + 50%)
- eating out / going out.(+20%)
For this year only! Most prices have already risen in 2021 “due to Covid”…
I guess for elderly people in cities it will be similar, probably less going out even and more groceries.
So I really wonder how they come up with this number.
Almost all my normal food groceries have gone up by the same percentage amount (raw chicken, ground beef, eggs, milk etc.), and these should be unaffected (at least for now) by the war in Ukraine.
I also wonder what happens to the people who control tickets fulltime. Their job seems pretty pointless when almost everyone has the ticket.
And that's not even case of UK just being generally more expensive, e.g. cheapest StAlbans - London (~25 km) yearly pass costs around £4k. About a 1000 pounds more than Switzerland GA travelcard which covers basically any form of public transport in Switzerland.
The joys of free market efficiency in "public" transportation - maximum efficiency for the owners/shareholders, minimum efficiency for the people.
The Swiss SBB is also again and again under assault to be fully privatized, luckily so far this hasn't happened yet, and I hope it never will...
* Buses (outside London): yes. Private and (mostly) deregulated.
* Buses (inside London): kinda. Private, but heavily regulated (fares, routes, everything)
* Trains (outside London): both. The infrastructure is now public, after the company it was sold to became insolvent and got essentially renationalised by stealth. The companies running the trains are mostly heavily regulated private (some fares, routes, and other things are fixed by their franchise contracts, some fares are flexible). A few companies are 'open access' (private without franchise) and only their routes/timetables are fixed, they can do their own thing with fares and rolling stock. A few places (such as long-distance trains on the East Coast mainline) are run by a subsidiary of the state directly.
* Trains (inside London, including the Tube): Infrastructure also public (some run by Network Rail, the national organisation, some by Transport for London). Some services (e.g. the Tube) run directly by TfL, some franchised as nationally.
* [Edit: Eurostar runs (lightly regulated) services to France and Belgium via the Channel Tunnel and sets its own fares]
The main difference from other countries (except for the insane web of contracts and inter-organisational dependencies) is that the policy of the UK Government is to put the cost of public transport as much as possible on its users rather than subsidising from general taxation. We've had above-inflation rises in the regulated fares nearly every year since privatisation in 1994, for example.
And even that is cheap compared compared to Oslo and Stockholm where it costs 12-13 EUR a day. On the whole the London Underground is quite reasonably priced compared to many major European cities.
If you're commuting and have monthly ticket it will cost 93.70€ (AB), though you might get around with a cheaper ticket if you're living in the center (zone 000).
The bus companies which operate official lines for Verkehrsverbünde will get paid the same as always, they’re not affected by the 9-Euro-Ticket.
However, I fail to see how that business, which usually involves a time constraint and direct point-to-point travels, would be impacted by this kind of ticket.
Secondly, the 9€-Ticket is valid in all of Germany, so you could travel the length and width of the country if you wanted to. You'd just have to change trains a lot.
Apart from the fact that I'm opposed for principled reasons. If we want to make people's life easier, we should cut down on taxes, not engage in more deficit spending. Especially as the economy is headed for hard times anyway, for exactly that kind of reasons.
https://www.spiegel.de/auto/neun-euro-ticket-verkehrsbetrieb...
Are they also thrilled by "additional market distortions" like subsidized oil import and processing and road infrastructure?
Or should we remove all tax-funded infrastructure investment and go back to the middle ages?
See for example this [in German]
https://www.busnetz.de/9-euro-ticket-bdo-warnt-vor-negativen...
Its surprising to me that someone would even consider bringing this up as a valid counter argument. Interesting to see how deeply Neoliberalism has seeped into western culture.
I used it with a group of friends to travel to Berlin from The Netherlands in 1993. I was a bit of a rail geek (still am, I guess) and had purchased a "Kursbuch" on a previous trip to Germany. This was a 2000 or so page, 3 pound book that contained all the timetables for all German trains. We pored over the timetables for hours to find an optimal route from the closest German border station to Berlin. I remember it being relatively few trains, something like Bad Bentheim - Osnabrueck - Bielefeld - Kassel - Dessau (!) - Berlin. It was a fun trip, lots of people were traveling long distance on local trains and Berlin attracted very...interesting people at that time.
After arriving in Berlin we sold our ticket, which was still good for another day, for 15DM.
The ticket is for local transport operators, too. One can also buy the ticket there. A subscription ticket will be automatically converted. One can for example buy it at the local Verkehrsverbund (transit district), which here serves in Hamburg several million people with all kinds of regional trains, city trains, underground trains, busses, ferries, ...
Thus one can use all (!!!) local and regional public transport for 9 Euro for a month, 24 hours a day, for all of Germany, for all public transport operators. The is done for three months, each month costs 9 Euro.
Asking people for a lot more money in order to decrease the regular use of their cars (either through higher gas prices or forcing them to purchase relatively expensive newer EVs) is really not fair if you don't offer something in return.
I am happy that they are experimenting with bringing it back.
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/chaosta...
Ticket machines can be used without need to identify.
The single market. Refusing to sell to other EU citizens is very illegal.
These are almost certainly subsidized tickets, financed with taxpayer money, it is common to restrict the sales to those who pay taxes in the covered area. And I don't see how it could be illegal, it is like forcing Germany to provide health care for the French and vice versa.
That's literally how it works [1]. EU citizens are treated the same as local citizens in every country.
[1]: https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/europe-travel-insurance/ehi...
And healthcare operates by your local health system reimbursing the system in country you were visiting - you need to have European Health Insurance Card on you, from your healthcare provider, which helps route the payments appropriately.
For example, in Paris, some "all zones" tickets are only available to residents (pass Navigo). The Japanese "Japan Rail Pass" is only available to tourists, and the "Interrail" pass is complicated: you have to reside in Europe but you can only use it in your own country for a single round trip.
Edit: looks like I was wrong -> see replies. You can also search for "9-Euro-Ticket übertragbar" (übertragbar = transferable) yourself to get a number of different German sources for that.
That's a restriction that wouldn't violate any EU law.
Biggest hurdle will be getting a Germany ticket machine to accept a regular credit card!
But otherwise, isn't discriminating based on nationality for good and services illegal?
Pretty sure it's just Germany being pig-headed about it for some reason. Everywhere else in Europe is perfectly happy to accept a credit card. I do 99.999% of all my spending on a credit card, like most millennial people or younger, and the only people in the developed world who this is a problem for is the Germans.
Why not at least google some statistics before you lose yourself in some pig-headed chauvinistic rant about what in the most charitable interpretation amounts to nothing at all.
Paying with a credit card in shops? That's just not done excepting American tourists, same as in a number of European countries. It's contactless debit cards mostly. Building a credit rating by using a credit card is not part of the system.
The EU has imposed caps on these interchange fees [1], which is one reason Europeans are not inundated by junk mail offering credit cards, and may be a reason that credit cards are not ubiquitous. Having said that, I find that I can pay electronically in most places, including Deutsche Bahn ticket machines (or just buy them in the app).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#European_Union
That pig-headed reason being that Germany went trough two different repressive regime during the last century.
Regimes that made plenty of use of large scale surveillance and data collections [0] to find a lot of their victims.
That's why cash still reigns supreme in Germany; It's anonymous and third parties can't just remotely disable it by disabling your bank account.
It's also the reason why Germans value their privacy, at least used to.
However, contrary to what is said multiple times in this thread, it is NOT transferable. You have to put your name on it and have some form of ID with you.
https://www.rnd.de/politik/9-euro-ticket-ab-wann-erhaeltlich...
Google Translate: https://www-rnd-de.translate.goog/politik/9-euro-ticket-ab-w...
And yes, I understand why this wouldn't work well in other countries.
Luxembourg has more tax evading corporations registered than actual people. I'm sure i can make a public transport system work well for free given those conditions.
The standard bahn.de site still allows stopovers, but since the pandemic you can no longer book Eurostar segments through it. Sad face.
Already here in Hamburg the busses are not at all empty!
The S-Bahn and U-bahn are usually only crowded on peak hours (2 or 3 hour intervals in the morning and evening).
So far, many claimed that a lack of availability was the reason public transport wasn't used more. I guess the next three months are a good way to validate that.
Also according to https://www.science.lu/de/faktencheck-gratis-oepnv/was-bring..., while some smaller cities who have experimented with free public transport have seen substantial increases in passenger numbers (but still often only a limited number of conversions from car drivers), the biggest city that tried this so far (Tallinn) only saw an increase in passenger numbers of 8 %. In the recent case of Luxembourg, unfortunately the effects of Covid make it rather difficult to draw any valid conclusions.
While I am not opposed to some moderate fare reductions, it should be kept in mind that in Germany, the average farebox recovery ration for local and regional public transport before Covid was around 75 %. Making public transport completely free would therefore mean quadrupling operating subsidies – and if through some miracle politics was really committed to spend that much more and for the long term, I'd much rather see the majority of that amount being spend on better services.
Unfortunately for me who commutes to Copenhagen on a daily basis for work, this offer does not include trips to Denmark (monthly ticket costs ~250 EUR).
(source: https://www.bvg.de/de/tickets-und-tarife)
So basically millions of people will ride the train for three months for almost free, and the cost will be in the same ball park as 4km of one highway.
Instead they could build it a couple kilometers further out to still connect the ring, the distance in drive time would probably be less than 5 minutes.
But they stick to stupid plans they made 10 years ago like they always do in this city.
On Subways, Buses, and Trams you might not be allowed to take a bicycle at all depending on the city’s regulations.
Regardless of that, you will always need to buy a special bicycle ticket.
In fact same goes for dogs. So this 9€ ticket will be really useless for dog owners since they need to pay normal ticket prices for every fare for the dog.
And here I am in Belgium, stuck with the SNCB/NMBS, a small country where doing a few miles by train takes an hour, the trains are always late, there's no place to sit, and it's expensive.
I love Belgium, but not its trains.
A quarter of a year might be enough already to find out how much demand for low cost public transport there actually is. I consider it an useful experiment at this point.
All of this compares very favourable to the US where vaccination is 65% and boosters are 31%. Plus vaccination, mask usage and lockdowns became deeply decisive topics, substantially reducing the effectiveness of all of them. In the end it’s place the US in bad spot for resolving the the pandemic quickly.
Not anymore. In Hamburg, nobody wears a mask, even in the supermarkets in the busiest hours, even though during the big pandemic spikes almost everybody wore it properly.
Maybe another wave with a new variant or in autumn, but it'll most likely be mild as omicron is and there is so much resistance built up now.
So for all practical purposes, Covid is over at the moment.
They already ordered a few hundreds of millions of vaccines.
The ticket exist to relieve citizens due to rising energy costs
What a nice idea to double the price! i suggest to triple it, so they can make even more profits!
Wait, i suggest aligning it to the cost of a similar travel with a car!
Are you american by chance?
https://www.stoag.de/en/dialog/neuigkeiten/detail/9-euro-tic...
> We support the idea of the traffic light coalition to temporarily relieve not only drivers, but also the millions of public transport commuters in their mobility costs. It is a clear signal for local public transport as an efficient, climate-friendly and already inexpensive alternative to the car. The industry is working on a technical and entrepreneurial solution in the interests of passengers. The ticket is to be launched nationwide on June 1st.
That was unneccessary. _Microft shared several German news articles in the past.
I would wish they actually align their normal prices with a car.
It's absurd that it's cheaper for two people to travel from Karlsruhe to Frankfurt by car, than to take an ICE train. And that applies to almost any train connection inside a Germany.
No wonder people like their cars here.
I guess the only way round this is that the per-person cost should be so much cheaper on the train that a car only makes sense with, say, 4 passengers.
The thing is, most people already own the car so they don't consider tax/servicing as part of the cost of travel whereas on a train, this is all added to the ticket and the servicing is pretty extreme on the railways.
For example, Nürnberg - Berlin can cost up to 127€ for second class ticket, if you buy the ticket the same day you need it.
Buy the ticket, for the same connection, 2 weeks in advance, and suddenly its only 39,90€ for second class and 53,90€ for first class.
For those affected by inflation, the reduction from 90 to 15€ would already be noticeable, the additional 6€ would be neglectible to the consumer in comparison to the already offered discount (not to mention that these new tickets can be used in the entire country).
And those who will now leave their car in the garage will probably be saving even more. At least in my case it was always cheaper to use public transport to go to the city, at least if I also considered the parking cost. This for a 1-day ticket, which already costs a bit over 6€.
[0] https://www.vvs.de/tickets/zeittickets-abo-polygo/monatstick...
Pretty sure they wouldn't be making any profit at 15e or 27e either.
* don't have to sell tickets at all
* don't have to check tickets in trains and reduce costs
The overhead of selling tickets with the new price points might actually eat up all what's left of profits.
At the same time there are about 2 million rail customers a day, so the 9€ ticket will bring 18M€. I'd say they probably break even.
Math is fun, but the entire point is a bit moot. Germany is a civilised country and if you laid off the entire staff for three summer months with no pay, the union would eat you for breakfast.
At least in Berlin which this covers most trains/buses/trams have 0 people checking and there's a few people going on random ones to occasionally check so the ratio here is probably 1 worker to 50+ vehicles.
But quite apart from the person and their ticket-scanner, there's also the whole infrastructure associated with fare taking— fare-free advocates argue that if you get rid of the machines and websites and apps, and all the associated upkeep, it ends up being a wash. Of course this only counts if you're getting rid of all fares rather than doing a one-off summer special.
0. https://flughafenexpress.deutschebahn.com/fex-en/Tickets-and...
Personally, I think there is an ideological and pedagogical element. They don't want people to get used to the idea that something like free transportation is possible.
I heard an interesting talk a couple of years ago about university tuition fees. Germany has fairly low fees compared to other countries. At some universities it is more like a token fee, a couple hundred € per year. Many students get living expenses paid from the state anyway (BAFÖG). It is silly to then pay back some of that immediately. But the thesis of the talk was that the tuition fees were introduced for educational reasons, not to cover the actual cost of teaching. Students were supposed think of themselves as customers, and of education as a good. And they could back this with quotes from neoliberal think tanks. As the FDP (free market 'liberals') is in the coalition, I'm sure one precondition was that the ticket couldn't be free.
The infrastructure for selling tickets is already in place, the marginal cost of selling one extra ticket type is essentially zero,
don't have to check tickets in trains and reduce costs
Assuming you have to have at least one person working on the train anyway, for safety reasons if nothing else, having them also check tickets doesn't cost extra.
That’s actually wrong, regional trains (where this ticket applies) usually have only the Lokführer driving the train, but no additional staff. Checking tickets is done purely by patrols checking trains randomly.
The trains are made of multiple cars without connecting doors, and the driver sits inside a locked cockpit. Tickets are currently checked by personnel that randomly patrol the trains, which are the only staff that passengers see.
It's actually rare to have your ticket checked, but the fine is ~10x the price of the ticket, so it's still worth buying one.
And selling tickets will be an extremely minor overhead, probably <5% including re-programming machines.
A free Android app attracts the worst kind of people and insults hurled at you on support channels. A $0.99 price is enough to make most support emails friendly instead.
It's part of this: https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Standardar...
Now I think when the times comes (3 month from now) for the program to run out, we might see discussions about continuing it at a price that makes it a more sustainable, permanent offer. But that's my opinion speaking (I wouldn't even mind if it was mandatory like back when I was attending university, as long as it is affordable for people with low to lowest incomes).
Seems pretty unlikely that they'll be able to after a 3 month period of operating at a loss (for the government) and likely having more issues due to increased usage.
//edit: As I said, I didn't mind paying for the mandatory students ticket (most universities have that), even when I eventually stopped using. I'm in the "make public transportation free" camp, and think this is a good step in that direction; even if we end up with "affordable for all" instead of "free". But as I said, that's opinion, not knowledge.
Don't ask me how exactly they assign the tax money to the train companies, but probably they get a fixed amount per ticket sold, which would be another reason why it is important to "sell" those tickets.
edit: clearified a sentence.
We take this so seriously, any stop, even unplanned, where the doors might open aside from absolute emergencies must be on a platform of sufficient length.
Here in the UK we run trains that are longer than platforms quite frequently. I'm talking about 9 car trains stopping at 2 car platforms here as well, not 9 car trains where the front and rear doors of the first and last carriage don't open.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_door_operation ("Selective Door Operation enables trains to call at a station where the platform is shorter than the train.")
It's my understanding that the capacity of the UK train network is mostly limited by the granularity of the signalling.
It will also give access to public transport to those in extreme poverty who have no other means of mobility, whom Germany has been prosecuting as criminals and putting in jail when their fines add up enough. Speeding and parking offenses are civil offenses. Public transport without a ticket? Felony.
(Also, e-bikes exist too, if you’re really worried that people exercising might eat a little bit more.)
Also coal is still being burnt. So I don't think it is mostly renewable.
40% ~ 400MW of this coal plant go directly to DB. They argue that it’s only used for freight and not for public transport but meh - a useless differentiation IMO.