Germany’s ultra-cheap train ticket saved 1.8M tons of CO2
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
One thing I heard was though is that most of the additional transit trips were not replacing car trips but were trips that would not otherwise have been taken at all. Which is not a bad thing in itself, but it would have been nice to displace more car usage.
If there was "free" or "low cost" way to "get into town" perhaps some of those would occur, not replacing a car trip but replacing a delivery.
You have to be in a very privileged position to receive affordable tickets. I am lucky to work for a huge employer that offers a JobTicket which costs me 69 euros and they also subsidize half of that. Who doesn’t work at a company that has JobTickets can buy the same for 220 euros per month
Stops aren't really a good measure of distances. Three stops by a regular all-shacks city bus? Three stops by rapid transit-type rail? Three stops on a semi-fast regional train? Three stops by long distance-express train? Those different modes of transport all result in massively differing distances as measured in kilometres (and also time).
I don’t know how small compared to overall German government balance sheet to withstand to support a program like that indefinitely but it was definitely a pleasant surprise for me coming from North America where train services are generally pretty bad. It was difficult to get seats in regional trains over the weekends though but overall trains were clean and right on time.
As much as I think this is a great model for Germany, it is not optimal to apply for places like US and Canada. I remember we took a regional train from Nurnburg to Leipzig and it took us close to 6hrs. For less than 200km distance. Now imagine US where that distance can quadruple depending on the state you are driving to.
That's just the regional trains, though. The Intercity Express from Düsseldorf Hbf to Frankfurt Airport is 1h 15 mins (for more than 200 km).
China has nearly the area (9.6m km^2) of the US (9.8m km^2), and has plenty of railroad.
Karlsruhe - Paris (~550km) -> 2.5 hours with TGV (and it's mostly cheaper than traveling with DB).
Spiegel also has an article about these exact two trains[0]. To summarize, in Germany the trains have a couple dozen kilometers where they're allowed to go faster than 160kp/h, in France the TGV travels at around 320kp/h for quite some time.
Considering all this it's not that surprising that the TGV is that much faster.
Apparently the problem is that the fast trains in Germany have to share the tracks with the slower trains, in France and Japan as an example they apparently have their own tracks.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/reise/deutschland/ice-versus-tgv-waru...
Germany on the other hand doesn't have a single city that's as extremely dominant as Paris, so to capture a similar amount of traffic on your high speed network you need something more like a mesh, where any single route might only capture a smaller fraction of the total traffic, rather than the simply radial star you can get by in France.
Of course that's not the only reason for the differing evolution of high speed rail between France and Germany, but it definitively is one of the reasons behind that difference.
200km was also a very optimistic guess, it's 300km. It looks close on the map but even in a car it will take you 3 hours. It's actually faster to go from Dresden.
The 9 euro ticket only worked for regional trains. With the ICE, the high-speed intercity trains, that would have taken 2 hours and 6 minutes if you leave right when I write this comment
EDIT: cost is important of course: DB says that would cost about 80 euros, which is a crime IMO. [0]
Taking the car would take about half an hour longer and currently cost about 44 euro in fuel [1]
[0] https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/dn?S=8000284&Z=8...
[1] https://www.anwb.nl/verkeer/routeplanner?area1=EU&area2=EU&d...
Also: hot damn, ugly URLs
Almost half of Canadian population is within the Windsor-Quebec City corridor (which includes Toronto and Montreal), which is just about 1100 km. You can definitely have a viable train considering the millions of people that live there and the many dozens of daily short flights that happen in that corridor.
Just this weekend I drove 1 hr to the edge of Toronto, then got on the subway to downtown for a Blue Jays game. Once GO expansion is done I'll be able to make that same trip on a single train in less time then it takes to drive.
High speed rail from Quebec City to Windsor is a project we should absolutely be funding as the population and travel patterns of the corridor would easily support it. Start with Toronto->Montreal with a spur to Ottawa, then as phase 2 extend to Windsor and Quebec City.
The distance between those US cities represents maybe less than half the high speed rail network in France but easily almost double the French population.
If your country is poorly equipped in efficient rails, how would that give you the right to fly for convenience? This question comes from everyone in every other country.
Pretty sure the distance from Nurnburg to Leipzig, or 'less than 200km', would not quaruple in the States, or indeed anywhere else.
There is a significant risk that you couldn't enter, because there are too many people. Sucks if you have to take multiple trains in a row, then strand somewhere in the middle of the route, and the next train will not drive for an hour or even not before the next day
The trains drive quite slowly (100 km/h?). Overall trip time 2-3 car trip time.
Trains were almost always late. You had to pray to be on time for the follow up train despite 10+min gaps. Often the follow up train was late too, which ironically helped.
Extra bike tickets were necessary, with local rules and tickets.
You don't know if you get a seat let alone a table or WiFi, so productivity is close to zero.
No idea what it did concretely. There's a big carve out for flights that are taken mostly by people traveling to further destinations.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-9-ticket-is-it-here-to-stay/a...
The federal government is footing the bill, propping up state and municipal transport companies with an additional €2.5 billion ($2.53 billion).
So don't think of this scheme as a reasonably efficient way of saving CO2 emissions (there are other much more economically efficient ways); at most it's a bonus.
It follows that it doesn't make sense to justify the scheme on the CO2 emissions benefit. I've seen a lot of that on European subreddits.
The other side of the coin is: the ultra cheap train ticket exposed the deficiencies in Germany’s rail system. For years, investments have been delayed and critical rail tracks have been reduced to the bear minimum of bandwidth. Regional trains and high-speed long-distance trains were sharing the same tracks. The former completely overcrowded, running late most of the time, and therefore affecting the latter. trains were running late most of the time, cancellations were frequent. Or even worse: Elderly people and small kids were stuck in standing, overheated trains (bonus: air con was defective) with no water, or possibilities to sit. A logistical failure.
I’m paying for a flat rate for all trains in Germany, not only the regional ultra cheap category. I’m using this to travel frequently from the north or the south of Germany for business matters. The service and information policy was abysmal. I had to take the cab about 10 times for long-distance travel, and checked on multiple times in hotels to stay overnight. Who pays for that? Answer: the taxpayer.
The Deutsche Bahn (German train company) was and is not prepared for this kind usage pattern.
(Of course free train travel is great and being able to do it while reducing emissions instead of icnreasing them is excellent in itself, but still the reduction headline would call for analysis)
[1] https://ember-climate.org/data/data-tools/carbon-price-viewe... [2] https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-9-ticket-is-it-here-to-stay/a...
But at the end of the day, would you rather for the only choice to be cars or have a proper sustainable/scalable way of transport?
Some say it is also most beneficial to richer people as they could afford train tickets but get then for the same low price and government subsidized as everyone else. Not sure I can buy that argument, richer people pay the vast amount of Germany’s federal budget via ridiculously high income tax.
From an economic perspective the 9 Euro ticket was a disaster. A popular one, though.
I mean, we might still die in the climate wars in twenty years, but the 9 euro tickets won't be among the reasons why.
Ha.
If you literally mean infrastructure companies, then no, there wasn't any direct money in it for them. Okay, a few extra trains ran, so the infrastructure operators got to charge for those additional train paths, but in the grand scheme of things that doesn't make much of a difference.
And if you actually meant the transport operators actually operating the vehicles – if the federal government mandates massively lower fares in order to score political brownie points, somebody still needs to pay for the operating expenses during that time. If you subtract that loss of income, I doubt that there was that much extra money left over, especially given significant increases on the cost side of things (rising fuel and electricity prices, staff demanding higher wages due to general inflation).
Social security laws and subsidies are usually riddeled with exceptions and rules on when you qualify which require more people (meaning more expenses for the government) to check them.
In a society that is constantly chasing for even more convenience, reducing as much friction as possible for taking public transport seems like a good idea and far from a disaster?
How so exactly?
subsiding public transit is not inherently a bad thing. If done well, the resulting transit can result in more economic growth in the area than would have otherwise occured, with that growth leading an increased tax base that outweighs the expenditure. And even without reaching that point, it is possible that the net value to the people as a whole exceeds the expenditure making it a reasonably good idea, despite being a net drain on budget. (Most government expenditures fall into this category, and the fact that is a subsidy rather than say a social security program is not necessarily especially relevant.)
But obviously it is equally possible to create poorly thought out subsidies that don't even come close to producing value equal to the spend. I'm assuming you are asserting this one falls into this later category?
Well, if the government wishes to massively lower existing fares (including refunds for season ticket holders who already bought their tickets), it also needs to pay for it of course. 9 € per month for the whole of Germany is so low a price that additional ticket sales will never make up the loss of the regular fare income during these months, and in the meantime salaries, fuel/electricity and other operating expenses still need to be paid.
It's true that the top 10% are responsible for 50% of the income tax, but income tax itself only brings. ~30% of the budget. So at the end, those rich people's income is responsible for only 15% of the budget.