German states and federal government agreed on nationwide 49€ ticket coming 2023

49 Euros is not completely covered under the unemployment allowence by the state. The max for that is 45 Euros.

Additionally, making the price 29 Euros would mean double the expected ticket sales and ultimately more money that could be used for upkeep and expansion.

    Hamburg-Munich     -- 600 km -- 6 h     vs. 12 1/2 h vs. 8 1/2 h

    Berlin-Munich      -- 500 km -- 4 h     vs. 9 h      vs. 6 1/2 h

    Cologne-Munich     -- 450 km -- 4 1/2 h vs. 9 h      vs. 6 h

    Frankfurt/M-Munich -- 300 km -- 3 h     vs. 5 h      vs. 4 1/2 h

    Nuremberg-Munich   -- 150 km -- 1 h     vs. 2 h      vs.  2 h

Train times from bahn.de; Car from Google Maps.

EDIT: I found an interesting exception, where long distance trains and the rest differ a lot on a short distance:

    Mannheim-Stuttgart  -- 93 km -- 38min   vs. 1h 50min vs. 1h 23min.

edit: in the English version the correct thing to tick is "Types of Transport" > "Regional services, other trains", after you click the "Further Options" button.

edit2: w.r.t

> monthly pass to the suburbs upstate where my in-laws live (a 50 min ride)

This is usually covered by S-Bahnen in Germany, and those are usually under the same ticket as the underground. In most places ~it's around 80ish for such a monthly ticket.~ (edit3: this last part about the price is wrong, see below.)

Commuter rail typically covers about 30mi in about an hour, unless it's a tram or an underground.

1: German, but has pictures: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional-Express

Most expensive kilometer of my live. Had I known, I had walked the short distance between the stations.

Especially considering that tracking the general population by phone is much easier and efficient.

It semms like an odd policy to split public transport into a cheap, crowded and unreliable part while you have nice modern trains running half empty.

People spend hundreds a month commuting by car so the issue is not the price of train tickets, it's that people prefer to drive as it's more comfortable and convenient. But now, if you cannot park or it will cost you a fortune you'll think 'fuck it, I will take the train'.

Of course trains have some advantages, too.

I don't know – I suppose you could say any car journey avoided is an improvement, but given the quite radical reduction of fares a figure of only 10 % avoided car journeys stills seems rather disappointing and to my mind rather confirms what was already known beforehand – while ticket prices should be reasonable and not outrageously expensive, the actual key to significantly reducing daily car usage (instead of mostly having people just make additional journeys using public transport) is by improving actual service quality and not by merely making tickets cheaper.

E.g. locally there was project where after a significant improvement in services (up to three departures per hour instead of only roughly hourly at best, plus direct connections into the city centre instead of having to change partway), 40 % of the passengers on that line were former car users!

That's what I'd call an actual success story, but unfortunately it seems that everybody has succumbed to some sort of "cheap, cheap, cheap" mania, and of course for politics slashing fares is an easier win instead of actually improving the infrastructure and somehow dealing with the evolving staff shortage [1] or the increasing planning bureaucracy [2].

[1] Not just drivers, even though that might be the most immediately visible to the general public – e.g. the local state government still doesn't seem to feel any sort of urgency in finally getting the now vacant chair of the railway department at my former university filled again, even though the former professor has been pensioned off already quite a few years ago and it's not as if we didn't also have a shortage of engineers for planning and construction, too.

[2] Instead of actual improvements, we only got a "Planning Speedup Law" ("Planungsbeschleunigungsgesetz") which in practice has hardly sped up anything at all, and sometimes possibly even made things worse (e.g. by having centralised the handling of planning enquiries at the Federal Railway Agency – but without actually correspondingly increasing staffing levels there). The only bright spot from the point of view of public transport in general and the railways in particular (though on the other hand it doesn't paint that good a picture for Germany as a whole) is that the transition of maintenance and planning of motorways from the states to the new federal "Autobahn GmbH" has been similarly botched up, and apparently the new Autobahn GmbH has quite rapidly managed to make itself rather unpopular, both as an employer for individual engineers, as well as as a contracting entity for the various individual construction and engineering companies that handle most of the actual serious work.