Spain announces free rail journeys from September until the end of the year

Slightly misleading part: In May, Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national railway company, launched a ticket costing €9 that gives a full month of travel from June until the end of August. Any two stations within Germany can be connected with the deal, so passengers travelling more than 50 miles can save money with a single journey.

The ticket was not introduced by DB but by a broad coalition of public transport companies and the government that finances the whole thing. The truly revolutionary aspect is, apart from its price point of 0,20€ per day, that now you can buy a single ticket at the next ticket office or machine and use it to ride all of the buses, trams, ferries and trains (excepting night trains, ICs and ICEs) in all German regions and cities, in some cases even including the first stop in neighboring countries as the case may be.

The Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen (VDV) has recently proposed to continue offering a nationwide ticket with these rules for a price of 69,00€ per month. While that would be a gain over present practices and prices (especially since this "ÖPNV-Klimaticket" would include taking regional trains between places), I sure hope that given our present situation (climate, energy, war, inflation), there will be a ticket for more like 20 or 30€ per month (which has been dubbed the "1-Euro-Ticket" since that would be its price per day). We are continuing to pour billions each year into car-centric traffic and have done so for decades while closing thousands of kilometers of railway lines in the 1990s alone. Its high time to reverse this utterly misguided policy.