Germany's €9 transit ticket cuts 1.8 million tonnes of CO2

I’ve been to Berlin once in the last 10 or so years. Took the bus. Had to pay with a 20€ bill. The driver looked at me as if I’m trying to hand him something poisonous and waved me through.

It's true that Berlin public transit has no physical fare enforcement (e.g. there are no ticket gates at subway stations), but the state operator of public transit is anything but lax on fare dodgers: the tickets are being checked randomly by undercover ticket inspectors, and every so often there's news of an inspector being violent [0]. The reality with ticket inspectors stands in stark contrast to the witty and playful online identity maintained by the BVG. Additionally, repeated fare dodging is treated as fraud by the German law and repeated offences can land you in jail [1].

[0] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/bvg-berlin-strassenbahn...

[1] https://taz.de/Haftstrafen-fuer-Schwarzfahren/!5529577/

You can add Seattle to your comparison. Fare enforcement is almost non-existing at the moment, and more and more groups are traveling for free. However transit quality is not nearly on the same level as in New York or Berlin.

As much as maybe fare evasion is a secondary concern, I think the main reason they're cracking down on the subways in NYC is because people weren't feeling safe on the trains anymore.

As much as I love a free and open and fair society, you can see why people not my size might be uncomfortable next to people growling, sleeping with trash bags filled with their belongings, drinking out of brown paper bags, rolling and smoking blunts and cigarettes. (I mostly bike these days but I saw all of that in recent subway trips during the early summer).

And then there was the rash of incidents on the subway with people getting shot at stations, the guy who tried to set off a smoke bomb and pulled out a gun on the car and started shooting, the guy who smeared shit on someone's face, the people who've been pushed onto tracks.

These incidents are _incredibly_ rare, but the way humans work doesn't let a lot of us shake off that perception of the subways being less safe than they used to be.

I'm not one of those people, I base my fears on statistics, but you can't expect every human being, especially smaller people, the elderly, and women to be as carefree.

I live in Dresden and can’t remember exactly what when the last time my ticket was checked in the bus or tram. IIRC last time was July and I ride the tram and bus daily

But I always have my ticket with me; as another mentioned, there are undercover control checks that will surprise you

It's the Holy Roman Empire of modern times.

Yeah, it was quite tiring for the agents and strained the infrastructure, but they now have solid data on the effect of such policy, and can now plan how to incorporate the policy completely, or find a middle ground, and adjust the infrastructure accordingly.

The "PATROIT" act did have sunset clauses. It kept getting re-uped but finally expired on March 15th, 2020 mainly due to Trump's veto threat. The vote on the bill to extend the act was indefinitely postponed.[1] So you are right that having those sunset clauses are important.

That being said, many of the surveillance provisions in the act were retained in other bills and the history and current situation is pretty complicated[2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Section_expiration... [2]https://www.justsecurity.org/78753/rethinking-surveillance-o...

1) The 9 € ticket wasn't about CO2 reduction, it was about providing cheap(er) public transportation for the masses.

2) Even 10 billion is not really much money for a state like Germany. If the 9 € ticket, or a successor, would be rolled out permanently you'd expect savings in different areas which could make up for the additional cost of a subsidized ticket. Make the ticket 30 €/month and you'll only have a third of the costs left.

3) Sounds fine to me: People who would normally not be able to pay for a train ticket were able to do so, enjoy what they could reach by train and have a nice summer. I don't think there's anything bad in this, especially for people with a lower income.

What this "experiment" clearly showed is:

- Make public transportation easy and cheap to use and people will use it

- German public transportation massively lacks capacity

You might call it a "hoax" but it showed that we're just as bad in public transportation as we are in broadband internet access. Politics didn't do anything to improve this situation in the last 20 years because gas was cheap and everything else was fine, too.

The program made mobility accessible to many more people as well, so it's not like you can divide the cost by co2 savings

Reducing CO2 emissions was not the primary purpose of this program. The goal was to financially support people because prices, especially energy have increased considerably.

This program was made to help the German people with the rising price of fuel for the Russian war. Not to cut the emissions, this is only a consequence.

Well, because the served page is just a shell, and the actual article content is served via a separate graphql query. Obviously the only way to do it!

For content like this (ie not actually interactive content that might require javascript), I send it to archive.ph, and then almost always you can load the page in readermode or at least with javascript disabled)

It's not hard, but you're probably not their target audience so they don't care. The best you can do these days is to either use a compromise like and archive.org plugin or ublock origin.

Not everyone has the same belief in market based solutions as you do.

In the UK road tax is based on your car's CO2 emissions.

The problem is when the VW scandal broke, lots of people had bought diesels to lower their CO2 and suddenly diesels were evil and needed disincentivising. So the problem is anything like that isn't cleverly designed enough to be trustworthy, or even if it is, political whim could still overturn it.

It would be the number one way to not being re-elected. I think herding people towards a better alternative via creative strategies while not creating public outrage is a good way to go from a politician's perspective.

We do. In Germany emissions from burning fuel for transportation and heating is taxed with €30/kg CO2, rising to €55/kg CO2 by 2026.

There's also a cap-and-trade scheme at EU level that covers various industries [1]. It was very tame for a long time, with prices hovering around €5/kg CO2, but since 2018 prices have gone up a lot and it now sits around €80/kg CO2.

Still, German public transit is in need of some reforms, and seeing that an experiment produced greenhouse gas reductions is a positive signal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...

[2] https://icapcarbonaction.com/en/ets-prices (click on systems to filter)

> If the goal was to reduce carbon emission

It wasn't, but it's a neat side effect.

But that really wasn’t the intent. The intent was to lighten the burden of the parts of the society that did not profit from the gas subsidy. What you see here is basically the knock on effect of what essentially-free public transport changes in travel behavior without the time to actually affect vehicle inventory (ie it’s a lower bound)

There is also the point of scale, I wouldn’t bet on the capacity for carbon removal on that scale exists today (not that I would be against investing that amount of additional funding for carbon capture technology)

It was part of a relieve packet to help people through high fuel prices: make it easier to travel by public transit, along with a reduction in gasoline tax (that cost us 3.15 billion euros).

Seeing that one of those two even reduced emissions is a nice bonus. It didn't have to do that at all to be a success.

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2022/kw20-de-e...

But how much money flows into their coffers from increased tourism/isn't spent to bail out businesses with less customers?

I think this leaves out that people who can more readily access more of Germany spend more money when they get off the transit systems.

Direct air capture hasn't been proven to work at scale. And the key thing we need to do is to reduce emissions, which is done exactly by incentives like this. Was the €9 ticket perfect? No, but it was a good first shot, now we have data and can improve.

Furthermore, as others have stated, this was not even the primary goal of this program.

Of course this isn't the whole story.

- You need to subtract the cost of road maintenance that may have been saved with less cars driving.

- You need to add gas tax that wasn't collected.

- You need to add the sales tax for trips that people took that they may not have otherwise.

- You need to subtract the healthcare costs of reduced pollution and accidents.

- Capturing carbon is less efficient that preventing it begin produced in the first place because that ignores the carbon emitted in the production of fuels and materials.

Basically the word is incredibly complicated. It is hard to equate this "nearly free" far with direct carbon capture.

> That’s $655 per metric ton of CO2. Current direct air capture technology is estimated to cost between $132 and $342 per metric ton

Ah yes. Let's totally forget about the actual traveling of passengers that this allowed in the first place.

107€? That's the most expensive monthly pass (it includes Zone C, which is the area beyond the city limits). The 86€ pass is plenty for most, and a yearly abo would reduce it to 63€ a month. It's also tax-deductible.

https://www.bvg.de/en/tickets-tariffs/all-tickets

For me it's the opposite: I wouldn't use public transportation and resort to my private car if masks were not mandated. I know getting covid is now the coolest thing on earth by I'll take a pass while I can.

I can't imagine that masks alone were the reason. I use them for two 1h commutes per day and I simply can't understand how they are such an issue. It is a bit annoying but you get used to it. Even longer distances like three hours are easily manageable.

I would understand tough, if they would switch to the car because of increased risk of catching the virus.