Spain launches free train tickets for short and medium journeys from Sept to Dec

I'm not saying you're wrong, but RENFE's Rodalies service around Barcelona has been disastrous long before free train tickets.

Overbooking is illegal in Spain, as far as I know.

"Free tickets" thus doesn't translate to "seats for everyone".

They could just do what everyone else has been doing for 2 years: blame “staff shortages” for any delay

Is that not just what train stations look like in September? Has there been any analysis of how ridership changed based on this free travel plan?

Your link has nothing to do with free tickets, it is a train problem

> News will not report this, of course, they would lose their subsidies

Uhhh...what? Is spain not a democracy?

Although I'm a big proponent of heat pumps, they are not the solution here. I ran the numbers for my country and it still works out cheaper to heat with gas than a heat pump. Natural gas works out to be 13c/kWh and an electric heat pump 16c/kWh of heat. Why would someone pay close to €10k to switch to a heat pump, if the end result is going to be bills will not change?

The only case a heat pump would be cheaper today is if you have solar, as then you can produce heat and hot water without any grid usage for half the year (the warmer part though), and you probably have net billing for the other half.

In my country (and most of the EU) the elephant in the room is a lot of the electricity comes from natural gas, so switching to heat pumps alone will not drastically reduce natural gas demand. The market rates say it's better to burn directly than convert to electricity and then back to heat.

I hope this is finally the thing that forces the EU to decarbonise electricity generation and switch to green energy (inc. nuclear), but given how slow things have changed over the last decade I somewhat doubt that. We already have the technology but Russian energy has been too cheap, now though...

> I've been waiting for half a year now for a simple and effective EU wide coordinated effort.

Hang on in there bud. Spain in particular and south europe as whole have little to say in the way the eu works. Unless a diktat comes about they’ll bark for nothing.

Spain doesn’t source gas from Russia though. Spain has some, if not the, lowest, prices buy far. Like 1/3 of German gas prices.

who pays the bill? It seems noone seems to care about these things. They just care about free things.:(

I think they learned from the German 9€ ticket - people made more trips due to the ticket. With the spanish system, only people that really have to commute long-term (job, uni, etc.) will benefit, without setting an incentive to take "recreational trips".

The tickets are definitely pitched as "for regular commuters", but I'm going to take advantage of them for getting further out of Barcelona to cycle. I've spent 70€ on 4 tickets and expect that I'll receive refunds for 2 of them (by travelling at least 16 times on a ticket). A return ticket to a location 2 hours away ends up being close to 15€, so even if I get no refunds due to not travelling enough, it's still economical to buy the tickets if I'm planning on using them 2-3 times a month.

IIRC you don‘t have to do 16 trips in four months. If do fewer trips, you have to pay 10€ once (or 20€ for the mid range trips). That is still a considerable discount.

Somehow I doubt that temporarily subsidizing transit is going to have a big effect on inflation, nor is it going to have a noticeable crowding-out effect.

Also this particular spending is subsidized with a tax. This is income redistribution, not printing money.

Isn't inflation only caused by governments spending money only if money is printed in the process?

Otherwise, it's just a re-allocation of money within a fixed budget. E.g. instead of money being allocated to building a new road it is allocated to subsidising train rides. The supply of money doesn't increase.

I would say that switching from private cars to public transportation may actually decrease inflation. Would you rather have the citizens spend more on gasoline, thus potentially increasing the price of it?

Also, as far as I understand, governments spending money doesn't necessarily cause inflation. Inflation was rampant between 1998 and 2006 too, while the Spanish government was selling ownership on arguably most of their national industries.

I presume quality of public transportation will certainly degrade but by maximizing its usage (more people using it) will probably reduce energy consumption for transportation overall.

Reducing energy consumption should be a priority. If our energy consumption was 1/10th of what it currently is, all of a sudden all these inflation issues would be gone. Current inflation is a butterfly effect, caused primarily by the increase in energy costs.

There are other problems, including the cost of living crisis. This is an attempt to fix that. Maybe the tradeoff isn’t worth it, but it’s not very constructive to just deny that there’s one worth analysing.

This sort of policy, if implemented effectively, can help to mitigate high diesel prices. (Plausibly it won’t, by overcrowding the system to the point where it’s counterproductive.) It also helps to approach better pricing of externalities, since generally taking the train is more socially useful.

Covid is a problem, but, post-vaccination, it’s roughly as bad as flu, and the combination of flu and public transport is not really that much of a problem, from past experience.

Clearly, what we should do is to cram more cars onto roads. After all, cars and roads and gasoline are all free, and increased demand for all of them in face of limited supply does not cause inflation...

While it will benefit travelers, it’s likely to be used by a large number of people as an economic necessity - travel for work, study , selling and buying goods and services. The combined net economic impact is what I assume the govt hopes will offset the inflation burden to some extent. Covid transmission on the other hand is essentially endemic at this time and we have to manage it, rather than try to prevent it, especially in such a globalised world as ours

3. pollution/climate?

This is not a ticket for tourists. People eligible are frequent travelers that were yet using trains full of people six days a week. The covid risk has not changed so much really. A full occupied train can't be filled with more passengers.

Everybody in Spain had the opportunity to access free Covid vaccines several times yet. If denialists keep ignoring science, is very sad, but is their choice, they will die more often. Maybe they should reduce the risk and abstain to use the train. The rest of the people needs to move on and keep with their lives.

If we discuss the solution as not valid, we should pick the correct reason to do this. The goal is to reduce our gas/car dependency exceptionally and temporarily in some big cities. Is a dumb idea? Well, promoting public transport in the middle of an energetic crisis does not seem so dumb to me, but better ideas are always welcomed.

You’re begging the question