Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month | Hacker News Reader

Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

deutschland.de

302 pointstaubek333 comments

My wife had a daily 45km rail+2km bus trip to work which was 200€ per month.

That's massive savings for many people who choose not to drive with cars. Her colleagues drive to work with cars for 2 km trips and ask her whether she does not own a car (we do).

Taking the train is a) cheaper b) more relaxed (can read) c) better for the environment d) it's even faster in her case

The €49 ticket could give public transportation a massive boost - worst case is, no additional people use trains and buses but people who can't afford cars or use public transport for enviromental reasons save quite some money.

I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late). So there's not much reading that can be done. Also, try reading while you're waiting in the cold for a bus that keeps on getting more and more delayed because of weather. My personal record so far was nearly an hour with busses promised but then suddenly vanishing from the app.

Compared to this, the corresponding car trip takes about 10 minutes. I never sat in heavy traffic because you can easily circumvent that in a car. However, I have been stuck in a bus sitting in a traffic jam for more than 30 minutes on many occasions. The bus can't change it's course and the bus drivers don't like letting you exit anywhere that isn't a bus stop. But at least you can read while your colleagues have already been home for a while.

Most people overlook that travel to and from stops and waiting for a connecting bus can add up significantly. And then there are all those things that time tables won't tell you.

It's obviously not convenient for everyone - but no single measure is.

I'd also cut down on your walking time by taking a bycicle - you could probably save 20 minutes by that alone. My wife also takes a bike ride to the train station (and she packs quite a few bags on the bike).

Nonetheless - yes, there are situations in which cars are still way better.

Or take it as a benefit: half an hour of walking a day can clear your head like nothing else (not even a bike-ride).

30 minutes mild physical exercise is a terrifying proposal to the average person.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to bring a bike into a crowded commuter bus and the stretch between home and bus stop can't be efficiently used by bike without commiting several traffic violations. I can, however, do the entire trip by bike (which I often do in summer), using a different route. That takes only slightly longer than the trip via bus.

In the Netherlands and Denmark, it's not unusal to cycle to a bus stop or railway station, lock the bike there, take the bus/train, and walk at the other end.

Or, to own a second bicycle and leave it at the other end.

In London small, folding bicycles serve the same purpose, but they're much more expensive.

Escooters are more practical here. I see these as the future of getting to PT.

It's also really bad for families. 200 euro per person (even if you only have, say 75 euro for kids) would be 600+ for a car. Not competitive with cars in many scenarios.

Polite suggestion: if you can drive in 10 mins you could probably cycle in 20-30 mins depending on details. Although not, I suppose, if 8 of those 10 mins are on high speed autobahn :)

When I lived in Rome I cycled everywhere. I was the 2nd fastest on the road for my 13-14km / 35min commute, but it takes time & effort to get fit. Public transport varied from 50 to 100 mins and private car was typically about 45 mins.

The only faster means were motorbikes & mopeds.

I'm fit (2000-4000km distance per yer, multiple sports). But I would never bike to work/train for longer than 5 minutes. I sweat too much (armpits, feet). And taking spare clothes/shoes, and showering in the office is too much.

There are showers and the locker room where I keep a set of clean work clothes at my work. This is normal for a medium to large company, and some small ones have the same utilities. Copenhagen.

Me and many of my colleagues ride the bike to office when it is sunny. Better than the train. It’s 30km each trip (2h). A shower once in the office seems acceptable, given the mood boost lasting for the whole day.

It's acceptable to cycle to the office at less than your maximum workout speed.

I find going through all the red lights makes up the difference.

In my case car is 25 minutes, subway is 20 minutes, bike is 15 minutes.

There are ways to avoid having buses stuck in traffic. Dedicated lanes for public transport, getting more people to use public transport rather than cars, and so on. So I'd say it's more often than not a choice in planning if it's convenient compared to using cars or not.

(There's also the problem of less developed systems often being less convenient, and because of it not having the funding needed to expand due to low usage)

Dedicated lanes exist in this city, but not every street has them of course. The line in question also services a street that does not have a dedicated lane. And that's where it sometimes gets stuck in traffic. Funnily, it used to be routed via a different street that actually does have dedicated lanes. But back then the bus got stuck in the narrower street connecting those two.

It all depends on circumstances, starting with the country you are in, that often determines the basic level of quality of any kind of public transport.

Then, the real travel time is measured from door-to-door. That includes the traveling to stations/stops and the waiting time for connecting transport. I think this is fairly obvious.

If we want to make the world a better place for people and the environment, the number one priority should be to reduce any need to travel in the first place. But if they must travel, make public transport so good (price/time) that it is the first choice of transport.

That would be the appropriate vision for the future. And it can happen in any country.

The reality is that capitalism and politics prevent public transport from truly shining. It's not even that of a political statement because we know why America doesn't have great public transport overall, especially a lack of long-distance rail lines like 'we' have in Europe. (Car companies lobbying against rail)

In most cases it is unrealistically difficult to beat the convenience and speed of private cars. If you are in a very dense urban environments, maybe. Otherwise, no.

That's why making public transport very cheap or even free does not make everyone let their cars at home.

Actually, in most cases it is unrealistically difficult to beat the convenience of public transport over private cars without MASSIVE infrastructure investments favoring cars.

Being able to get places with cars requires a lot of things: roads, parking, traffic measures (signs, crossings, stoplights, onways, offramps, freeways, more parking at destination, etc etc etc). If you only build for public transport, bikes, and walking, the savings in both space used and money spent become ridiculous.

Basically: the world looks a lot different without every building having a huge car park. In my view: a lot better.

The point is that the infrastructure investments required for public transports would be even higher, taking into account that roads are also required for public transports...

If I want a bus or a train to be right in front of my house any time I need one and I also want that bus/train to drive me exactly where I want to go, obviously the cost will be ridiculously high.

You set unreasonable expectations/ demands on public transport. There will always be some walking / biking to/from bus/tram stops. That has never been a problem.

You are likely trying to compare the USA car-centric suburbs and frankly that choice makes distances larger but that’s life. USA has a tremendous disadvantage due to the car-centric nature.

Yet even that can be changed, it will be costly, but there is no technical issue. It is all about politics. As long as taking a bus is seen as for “poor people” it will be an uphill battle.

I'm not so sure about that. The subsidies that a functioning public transport requires every year are massive as well. I wouldn't be surprised if they exceeded the cost of extra infrastructure (roads, parking etc.) required by private cars.

Public transport would obviously need much less space and would be much more efficient. It’s the car sprawl that is unsustainable in every way.

I disagree and it’s quite wrong for many European countries, for instance.

The whole idea is that public transport would be preferable in terms of time, comfort and cost. It can be done, there is no technical challenge whatsoever, it’s all politics.

In many cases traffic is so bad that cars are just as bad. But the key thing is to sacrifice / build lanes exclusive to public transport (busses) because those lanes effectively are so much more efficient.

We have a ton of electric busses already, which makes such transport even more ideal.

I am in Europe and at country level public transport will never beat individual transport overall. In specific dense urban environments where cars can be extremely inconvenient (including because all the offices are packed in a few towers all at the same location), yes but again in the general case a bus will never be able to be as convenient as my own vehicle parked right outside my front door.

And yes this is a technical and practicability challenge on top of being prohibitively expensive to run.

Trading some convenience for a much better world in every conceivable metric is just more important.

considering that short journey time, have you thought about biking?

I also bike to work when the weather allows it. The trip by bike takes slightly longer than the one by bus.

> I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late).

Can you provide more details about where you are and the distance involved? I don't understand why you wouldn't simply drive 10 minutes.

Around my area, what takes about 30 - 45m by car, can take up to 2h in public transports, and one needs to travel both ways.

Naturally I have better ways to spend 4h per day than jumping between connections.

Are you in the UK by any chance? Sounds just like my old commute before I started working from home, and my partner’s current one

Is there ample housing near your place of work with enough supply to keep prices affordable?

Is this in the US or Europe?

This is in Europe.

> Half an hour of that is walking

You could buy an electric scooter.

"I never sat in heavy traffic because you can easily circumvent that in a car" Having lived in places that actually have heavy traffic (LA) this reads like total bull. Nobody can "easily circumvent" heavy traffic.

You can if the heavy traffic only occurs, e.g., in the center of the city because of ongoing construction. I need to go from A to B. The bus does the trip via C where the traffic jam occurs. By car I can either use route D or E.

We're far away here from the traffic situation in LA or any other real city.

That's not quite in the interest of the car manufacturers that public transportation is cheaper than cars which is one of the reasons this took so long.

I don't think that people use cars because it's cheaper. Owning and using a car in Germany is pretty expensive and public transport probably was already cheaper for the vast majority of use cases.

Some German car manufacturers invest in fleet management probably foreseeing the future in which people won’t own their cars. Car sharing can be the future and the answer.

That's why it's even more impressive it took off in Germany which is normally very protective of its car industry.

We still have massive subsidies for providing leased new cars, mostly selected from German car manufacturers, to employees (about 3 bn per year [1]).

Few people in the upper middle class and above will use public transport instead of their car, if it's provided by their employer.

The results from the 9€ Ticket also indicate that people aren't using their car that less often. They are just using the ticket to do additional journeys [2].

But I suppose that having this ticket available for longer than 3 months will motivate some households to get rid of/ not purchase a second car. Also, it will probably convince younger adults in metropolitan areas (like me) to not buy a car - or to delay it until it's needed for family reasons.

[1]: https://www.exberliner.com/politics/red-flag-why-we-should-b... [2]: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/9-euro-...

One limitation of the previous price experiment is that it was only a few summer months. Nobody sells their car for 3 months, especially when they include a summer holiday. Let's see what happens when you can count on this existing for years to come.

The germans are generally quite conscious of right and wrong (see e.g. Linux and OSM usage: it's still minorities but it's much more present than in similar countries like NL), maybe very competitive pricing does help in mass transport adoption.

In my opinion it should be somewhere between dirt cheap and free if your income is in the bottom 10% of incomes (and could cost twice as much for the top 50%, which includes me, because it has to be financed somehow anyway), but as an intermediate step, this is not going in the wrong direction.

> In my opinion it should be somewhere between dirt cheap and free if your income is in the bottom 10% of incomes (and could cost twice as much for the top 50%

True, for many people 49€/ month is still too expensive - e.g. low wage, low pension or living on welfare.

In its current form, it's mostly a relief for the middle class living in areas with good public transportation.

I'm definitely happy to pay just 49€ for all over Germany instead of 80€ just for Berlin. I'd be ready to pay more and think it would be fair if the amount was tied to the taxable income, like union memberships are.

>True, for many people 49€/ month is still too expensive

But those people have to have means of transport at least to go to work. Even if they have a shitbox they pay more than that in gas and taxes. It's precisely for those people that this would be more beneficial.

As a bonus, it would reduce the ENORMOUS externalities that come from car usage: pollution, congestion, space for parking, roads, etc.

You don’t need to mention that you are in the top 50% to make your augment stronger. You should probably even actively avoid saying it so that people don’t think you’re relying on selfless reasons, (hey everyone I’m the nice one in the room) to further your point, because others may not feel that way about themselves.l, at least not to random strangers in the bottom 10%.

Anyway, making more money is just a measure of one’s ability more or less (not a causation but a strong correlation). Therefore to the extent that one works harder or provides more value to others and is rewarded for it by increased earning power, they should not be punished for it by an arbitrary tax on their transportation needs.

I think it might make sense to create countries or places where people in the bottom 10% live with minimal conveniences, a place like Thailand when everything is cheap.

In additional to above requiring everyone to pay the same amount creates equality and most likely moves technological innovation ahead that much faster because everyone feels like they are getting value for their money and more likely to spend even more on improvements.

What exactly do you mean like by

“ I think it might make sense to create countries or places where people in the bottom 10% live with minimal conveniences, a place like Thailand when everything is cheap.”

Like a “full service convenience place” for the part of society that doesn’t want to work and outsource that to a cheap third world country and make their population work at low cost for the unemployed of the first world?

Or collectively create a place where “the bottom 10 percent are left at their own abilities” ?

My take is that in many, if not most, cases people choose based on convenience and practicality unless one option is simply unaffordable.

In Europe in general affordability of public transport is not the problem so I don't expect that decreasing prices will have a big effect on use.

I would disagree. Public transportation isn't cheap either if you're not a student or have a company sponsor, in some cases even more expensive than having a car.

I didn't claim it was 'cheap'. I wrote that people can afford it in the same way people can afford a car and that other concerns are often more important.

It surely is a problem and not everyone lives in the city center or in a nearby street with a public transport stop.

Then there is the whole issue with timetables once one gets a few km away from city center, with only one connection per hour between 7 AM and 8 PM, for anything else there are taxis.

Not every location in Europe is Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan,...

it is a problem, especially if you need a car anyways.

I'm still surprised by that, but personally a bit disappointed it ended up at 50 bucks, I think it was increased multiple times during the planning and discussions about extending the 9€ ticket. At least it's not 70, which I think was also on the table at some point. Still, a huge win for people who can use it daily for commute, which is unfortunately not me. I had the 9€ one and occasionally took the train into the green for hiking or other events, but didn't even come close to 50€ in fares.

The car Minister has been trying to slow down the introduction of the ticket and increase the price while trying to look like he’s working towards the ticket. This 49€ ticket is basically a permanent continuation of last summer’s 9€ ticket, which existed for 3 months.

It's not that impressive if you consider that the current government in Germany is driving a massive de-industrialization campaign. Destroying the own car industry fits well in the agenda.

In reality Germany just last year reached the highest number of cars ever: 48.54 million cars. Now with roughly 84 million people.

They're not destroying it but forcing them to acknowledge the truth about climate.

Isn't that about the fuel and not the vehicle?

If we manufactured diesel out of wood or algae, the same cars would suddenly become very green - in case of algae cultivation for fuel, you can reach carbon negativity (the process net-decreased carbon in atmosphere).

This is likely more green than building battery electric vehicles with large capacity. Batteries are great but cars don't need more than 100km of charge. Longer trips should be on bio-diesel or bio-gas.

The process cannot be carbon negative unless you sequester the algae somehow. All the carbon the algae captures while growing will be released when they decompose.

You are right about biodiesel. Most energydense crops that we grow are used for meat production and generates a shitlod of greenhouse gases on the way. Less meat consumption would mean more crops could be used for biodiesel

When is China going to "acknowledge the truth about climate"? When it finished building the hundreds of planned coal power plants? This BS is all a pure geopolitics show with obvious traitors in power of western governments.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China

The truth about the climate is that whatever Germany does, it does not really make a difference, but also that what they have done (rolling out renewables) did not even work (high CO2 footprint, dependency on gas, coal and electricity imports).

You're parroting populist statements of political parties who actively destroyed the chance Germany had to transform their energy system and industry towards green energy. And now the same people are claiming that they were right from the beginning.

The "truth" is that the Energiewende was a wise decision from early 2000s for Germany making a case that it'd be possible to transform an industry nation to renewables and possibly export technology to other countries since we all frantically should figure out ways to reduce our carbon emissions.

Germany would be at ~80% electricity from renewables by now if the Merkel government in 2013 wouldn't have stopped it: Renewables were heavily subsidized by the German electricity customers and was so successful around 2012 that electricity prices skyrocketed; instead of finding other ways to further boost the building of more renewables while lowering electricity prices for the customers, they just stopped it. And when Merkel also irrationally decided quit nuclear energy after Fukushima even earlier (2022) and Russia quit delivering cheap gas, we're now in this pity situation in which we have to burn coal like its 1920.

So don't claim it "did not even work" because they didn't really try.

Unfortunately, they made a really dumb mistake: getting rid of nuclear power in favor of shitty coal. Doesn't exactly make them look eco-friendly.

In my country the road system has been massively subsidised in detriment of the rail system. Tens of lines that have been ongoing since the 1860s have been disabled even while they had users and were turning a profit.

Trains are constantly delayed or suppressed, lines are overcrowded in rush hours. At the same time traffic is ATROCIOUS in the two main cities where almost 2/3rds of the population lives. Then people say "why would I ever take the train if I can help it? It's almost as expensive and I cannot rely on it to go to work"...

So we waste billions on sub-par methods of transport which are (1) less efficient (2) less comfortable (3) take up ungodly amounts of space in 6-lane roads and huge parking. Sad state of things.

I don't know anyone who would prefer to suffer through 2 hours of gridlock every day to go to work, rather than cruising on a train reading a book or scrolling in their phone or just napping. The demand is there! Just the supply isn't...

How can it be better for the environment if your electricity is generated by coal ?

Energy efficiency. Even a diesel train is going to be better than a personal automobile.

Trains are quite inefficient and disorganized

Cool, if you live near a rail line in a major city. Not everyone has that luxury. Im standing about 300km from the nearest passenger rail setvice. It is 0530, -25c, and i am about to drive 18km to work (government/military). Trains or even busses are a distant concept here.

I'm pretty sure there isn't a single point in Germany that is 300km from any passenger rail station. Of course rail doesn't go to small villages, but most medium-size cities have reasonable rail connections here.

it indeed is hardly possible. See: https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

I just realized (from this site) how minimal railway system is in Greece and South Italy.

Our governments (Italy) just build infrastructure in the north, then do a pikachu face when there aren't big companies anywhere else.

I'd say that's just like the UK except the infrastructure is all in the south, but the UK government is currently in denial about any of their own actions having gone wrong at all at any point, so no Pikachu face.

In Greece the railway might be minimal but at the same time it is very deadly.

Context: a train crash last week killing 57 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempi_train_crash

That is an amazing resource!! Thanks for sharing!

It truely is. I found it years ago and have used the data in various projects since then. :)

Which browser are you using? Shows a blank page for me.

> Im standing about 300km from the nearest passenger rail setvice

Well in germany if you stand in the center of it you're literally 300km away from almost every single train station of the country.

Trains work for dense countries, if you live in the middle of nowhere in Northern canada or some shit you're obviously not the target

Whats the point of this comment? You're obviously an extreme outlier. Are you implying the 49€ ticket is bad because it isn't an improvement for every single citizen?

To illustrate that there are many people in this world who do not have many transportation options. People should not make blanket statements about how people should opt for "green" or more safe options when there are lots of people out there for whom there are no such alternatives. Trains are great, but only where they are available. The transportation revolution has to accommodate everyone, not just those in conveniently dense cities.

I think the world should look closer at how Switzerland operates trains even for very small cities

Cool, if you have a road. Not everyone has that luxury. I used to live on an island where it was 12km to work and no bridge, just a ferry which wouldn't run during typhoons. Cars or bridges were taken as a huge unnecessary expense and no serious construction plans entertained.

If you choose to go live on an island isn't that kind of the point?

The ticket also covers (local/regional) buses (which are more common in the rural areas of germany) so you don't even have to be near a train station.

But rural areas are usually better traversed by car because buses take longer (more stops, more detours, maybe not going where you want to).

Fortunately, the German population is 77.6% urban, so most people benefit.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/984679/urban-and-rural-p...

IMO, it's the other way around. I'd rather have the luxury of a 18km drive to work than my current 70km train trip + 8 minute bus to work. Which means 90 minutes morning commute, 90 minutes evening commute.

Yeah, apples to oranges.

At one point, I had a 90-minute one-way some-days commute. Even though that included an only few minute drive to the train station, that wasn't really sustainable long-term. It's just a big chunk out of your day even if driving was mostly a worse option.

If you choose to live in a remote place, you'll also have to bear the costs.

>> If you choose to live in a remote place

Lol. I'm one of a very small group that doesn't have such choices. When you are in the military you literally do not choose where you live. If you get posted to a remote location, you now live in a remote location. If you get posted to a "small" town of 20,000 people that doesn't have train or bus services... you better have a car. And if it is below -30c regularly, and you have to get to work even on those days when the power fails, that car better be gas and not diesel.

If you're in the military, no public transport will ever be right, precisely because it's public.

But:

1) Mass transport isn't necessarily public. If there's a base with one town nearby where even just 20 of the people working on that base live, that's a good reason for a private bus.

2) Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good-enough. The military is even more of an edge case than emergency vehicles, and yet nobody seriously thinks normal people should get sirens and flashing lights on their commute to get past red lights. You get to keep whatever you need to do your job, because obviously you do.

are you in Germany? in Europe?

Germany is only slightly larger than a circle with radius 300 km.

yea I figured they are probably in the US or something which means their contribution to the discourse was essentially "bad public transport is bad"

Ok, you better have a car then?

I was in Berlin once as a tourist and I was surprised how bad is the planning of buses.

They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives (in the middle of the route), with 20 people on them, wasting everyone's time. That's just incredibly dumb planning. I get that the point is to be more "reliable" and "on time" but what's the point of being accurate if you're so slow?! At some points Google maps suggested we walk half an hour instead of taking the bus because the bus was slower.

It takes some really funny priorities to reach this point. I haven't seen anything similar anywhere else, a bus stopping and waiting with people inside. And it wasn't something rare, it seemed to happen pretty frequently.

It seemed like they are artificially padding the accuracy metric by actively slowing the buses. Their schedule is far slower than their average pace, and then they slow down everything. You get that the worst case timing is now your average timing but "accuracy" increased. That's Goodhart law in full effect.

> They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives.

So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule?

The bus only ever needs to wait when there are no people getting on/off the bus at multiple stops in a row (e.g. at night-time), so then those stops will be skipped. As a consequence, the bus will be a few minutes ahead of time and so at some point the driver will stop and wait to make sure the bus is still following the schedule.

Sometimes the bus also needs to stop because drivers take their mandatory break. This usually happens at the end of the line, though, before they return or go on under a different line number.

In any case: I have yet to see a public transport system as good as Berlin's. Yes, it might still take you a while to get from A to B (it is a big city after all) but which other major city in the world offers reliable 24/7 public transport with great coverage and is not completely overloaded all the time? The only thing I dislike is the price for single tickets which is between 3.00€ and 3.80€ depending on the zone. (That used to be a kebap!) IMO they should finally put an end of all the free-riding (by both Berliners and tourists alike) and introduce electronic ticket checks at every stop.

Of course they shouldn't follow a strict schedule. You either value the time or the accuracy. If you're slowing everyone down to the worst case timing, you're wasting everyone's time just to be "on schedule". The schedules were clearly artificially longer than needed, because buses were frequently waiting in stations. I'm not talking about night buses, this happened during the day and frequently.

It was very obvious to me as an outsider that the planning is wrong. When the buses are frequently waiting minutes in stations with 20 people on them, it's watching hours of human hours wasted for an artificial accuracy. Accuracy is useless, the purpose is to have good average case end to end timing. Never have I had Google maps suggesting half an hour walks in European cities with pubic transport over public transport. Just shows how bad is the management of timing. They are waiting so frequently you might as well just walk.

Maybe it's just a cultural thing. You value how much the ticket costs and whether the timing is accurate. I value my personal time.

> Of course they shouldn't follow a strict schedule.

> Maybe it's just a cultural thing. You value how much the ticket costs and whether the timing is accurate. I value my personal time.

What an interesting clash of cultures. I don't fully understand your point though, if you can't be sure the bus arrives at 10:23 h, you have to come earlier to the station and wait, no?

There's usually an app that tells you in real time when the bus will arrive, including possible congestion. When it's minutes away it's never early so it's not a problem. The bus is almost never early from the scheduled time because it's usually the minimum time. So the bus might be late, but at least it's not standing idly while you're already in it, intentionally wasting everyone's time.

There's also a stop button to make sure the bus doesn't waste everyone's time stopping in stations nobody wants. Which is pretty pointless if we're now wasting the time earned by standing idle.

If I want accuracy, it's my responsibility to go ahead of time and pad my margins. Not the buses' job. It seems selfish to me to waste everyone's time for people who need accuracy, it's their responsibility to waste their own time getting better margins.

what if, hear me out, instead of not following schedule, so that people have no idea when to go to the station and making transport unreliable, ther'll be more busses, so that each will wait less on each station, so people would get both reliability and speed. like in Zurich or other big swiss cities...

London has two types of schedule for buses and metro trains.

On the most frequest services, the timetable says something like "every 6-8 minutes". Otherwise, it gives the exact time. With the former, the bus isn't going to wait if it's 'early', and waiting 1 minute vs. 5 isn't going to make much difference to your journey.

Since even the most frequent services aren't so frequent overnight, you often see a mix.

London bus 14, for example: https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/timetable/14/?fromId=490011285E2&dire...

Incidentally, at times I noticed the same slow pace of Berlin transport.

> So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule?

This is the Göteborg way. Want to take a tram and go there 5 minutes earlier? Ah, there was no traffic and you see the tram already leaving anyway. Now enjoy waiting 20 minutes for the next in freezing temperature and strong winds.

> and introduce electronic ticket checks at every stop

Copenhagen does this on bus. Basically every stop suddenly takes 2x as long at the very least.

Copenhagen (well, Denmark) has two NFC card (Rejsekort) readers at the front of every bus, with more at other doors on busier routes (ending A or C). People with commuter passes can vaguely wave them towards the driver as they board, or generally not bother.

If you want to be infuriated by how slow things can be, try a bus in Malmö.

Malmö (I assume Skåne) has a 2D-barcode-based system, where everyone has to validate their ticket on the barcode reader when they board a bus. This is about as reliable as you'd expect, including the usual fiddling with brightness settings etc. They used to have an NFC card system, but for some reason discontinued it.

[But I think the GP meant a system with ticket barriers on the metro/trains, like London, Paris, Rome and Madrid.]

> Copenhagen (well, Denmark) has two NFC card (Rejsekort) readers at the front of every bus, with more at other doors on busier routes

As an occasional visitor with a day pass, the experience is just the driver yelling at me, and me having to take my gloves out, get the thing and show it to the driver.

> They used to have an NFC card system, but for some reason discontinued it.

Because app is cheaper and they can gather data to sell it or just their own tracking.

Last time I was in malmö, I remember being on a large square trying to get a bus to go to our hotel. And there were like 15 different lanes named with unsorted letters, and by the time we'd found the lane we'd miss the bus. Repeat this like 4 times.

> Now enjoy waiting 20 minutes for the next in freezing temperature and strong winds.

Exactly. Berlin is certainly not Göteborg but its long and nasty winters are notorious nonetheless.

I mean, yes? It must be infuriating to see a bus artificially stopping just to get the exact schedule. Of course the starting from the first station it should leave on time, but on intermediate stations I find it pretty ok to be a couple of minutes off.

Great. So now you miss the bus when you arrive at the stop on time and have to wait for the next one. (Matters less when the next one arrives a couple of minutes later of course.) Route planning in congested cities is a complex problem and following a schedule as close as possible is one of the ways to ensure you can do any kind of route planning involving a change of line.

Would buses be arriving 20 minutes earlier otherwise? I'd very much rather arrive at the station a little earlier than knowing I could already be at my destination if it weren't for these artificial punctuality stops.

It's probably okay to drive pedal-to-the-metal on major routes, where it's 5-10 minutes between each bus. In all other cases, however, your potential gain is a couple of minutes, and the person connecting from another bus or simply hopping on in the middle of the route might end up wasting an hour waiting for the next one, even if they were perfectly on time. I'm from a city which is a lot like Berlin, now living in a region where only point A departure times are guaranteed, and it's beyond frustrating.

This rarely happens and it's the right thing to do. Missing the bus because it arrived earlier is a no-no, specially when they're sporadic.

Do you mean at every station? Or only at the start of the route?

> But the Deutschlandticket is not the end of the story: to make it still more attractive, German Rail is also planning to introduce more modern and faster trains. According to the Federal Ministry of Transport, this will create almost 20,000 new seats on long-distance services.

The mentioned trains are ICE long-distance trains. Exactly those that are not included in the ticket the article is about. It does not make sense to even mention them here, and is wrong to conclude that "it" gets more attractive.

We don't need faster trains in Germany. We need trains that are more or less on time. Punctuality is a complete disaster and probably the main reason why people hate taking the train in Germany. If you have a connection that requires changing to another train, the chance that you miss your connection is too damn high.

If German had designed the high speed network in a sensible way, and had moved quickly on creating all those line, that would improve speed and punctuality.

The problem with the fast trains is exactly that the lines are either missing or end way to early, or start to late, only to then share to few local lines with local trains.

fast is important, too

For instance, 1:30-2h by car takes 3h train + 1h cycling for me when the trains are on time.

> We need trains that are more or less on time.

i keep seeing these kinds of comments.

10 years ago i made the mistake of crossing the whole of germany by train. was a complete waste of my time.

since trains are basically a solved problem (see japan, china etc), i don't get why these issues still happen in developed nations.

China has 1.4 billion people and 150000km rail tracks.

Germany has 0.082 billion people and 40000km rail tracks.

Japan has a very different train system on an island. Germany is in the middle of Europe with a mesh of trains, long-distance and local - connected to all of Europe. One can take an excellent French high-speed train going from Germany to Paris/France. From my home-town there are freight trains directly going to / coming from Shanghai/China, more than 10000km away. There is a sleeper train going to Sweden, trains going to Switzerland. You can literally see people boarding a train here in Hamburg travelling 1000km to Switzerland, carrying their ski equipment.

> 10 years ago i made the mistake of crossing the whole of germany by train. was a complete waste of my time.

I was crossing Germany by train from south to north just this week. No problem at all.

Lets be real, Germany long distance ICE trains have a big punctuality problem. Other German trains are mostly good, but the ICE system has lots of issues.

A lot of those are political, the planning and execution of their high speed network is totally messed up.

They had a reasonably good plan in the 80s but then the reunification happens and of course building lots of highways into East Germany was higher priority.

All these things can be fixed, but it has persisted for quite a while.

Germany has very few fast trains ... going fast (not many train tracks are built for fast trains). It got better in the last few years, but there is still a lot to do (and catch up with France). As for the "regional" trains (that this offer is talking about), they go really slow and are just for people commuting. This kind of monthly offer would be sort of interesting if it were to apply to the ICE trains, as currently the price is very prohibitive (e.g. I paid last week ~90EUR for a second class ticket from Frankfurt airport to the nearby city of Cologne, not even 200km away - driving a Porsche is cheaper per km...)

As for the reason of many of the delays, it's good to know a problem specific to Germany (and e.g. not France). Human transportation trains and freight transportation trains share the same tracks. And freight is obviously very slow.

> As for the "regional" trains (that this offer is talking about), they go really slow and are just for people commuting.

That really depends on which line you are on. For example Munich - Nuremberg (~170km) takes 1:45 by regional train. That’s pretty competitive, going by car takes the same time. The ICE train on the same track needs 1:10.

Are you american?

The idea that trains are for 'commuting' is nonsense, they are for 'living'.

No I'm not American. And I don't live on a train either, not that (normal) Europeans do that either ...

The new ICE trains are still helpful for local transit because if non-Deutschlandticket trips switch from regional rail to ICE that will clear up seats on the regional rail lines for Deutschlandticket uses.

It’s a very confusingly written sentence, but I believe the “it” is meant to refer to “German Rail” and not the Deutschlandticket.

Don't expect German "Pünktlichkeit" on German railways, though.[0]

The Austrian and especially the Swiss railroad systems are far superior.

Since the "Bahnreform" of 1994 the infrastructure progressively deteriorated from the passenger's perspective. One hard fact: about 20% of the railroad network has been dismantled since 1994 (44.600km to 33.400km [1]). Way too much. Reasons for this are a confluence of excessive bureaucracy, brutal management style, powerful industry interests (think e.g. "Autobahn"), lobbying.

Today's "Deutsche Bahn" as an entity is split into eight distinct divisions [2]; DB Schenker (global logistics and freight transport company) is by far the most profitable of the bunch and single-handedly lifts the whole DB group out of the red on the regular basis, it accounts for about 50% of the total revenue.[3]

[0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AGCmPLWZKd8

[1]https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/themen/infrastruktur/schi...

[2]https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2021/en/group-management-repor...

[3]https://images.app.goo.gl/EwYJsvbHFxaWifbQ6

> The Austrian and especially the Swiss railroad systems are far superior.

At this point Switzerland regularly makes German trains wait at the border because they are delayed and would mess up their schedules.

Nonsense, Schenker is there to produce tax deductible losses on demand, the DB life's mainly from Central city area holdings sold off for development.

I'm somewhat surprised that they go for this model. It's 49 Euro per month with restrictions to regional services. However that ticket is available for tourists, students, pensioners, workers and regular people at the same price point.

I would have assumed they make that ticket only available yearly and with discounts to students or pensioners.

The way the Austrian ticket works (91 Euro per month for regulars, 68.5 Euro for teenagers/students/pensioners) is interesting. It's a yearly subscription, but you can cancel monthly. It includes all services, but train companies can sell you goodies on top (upgrade to 1st class, seat reservations etc.). I think that sort of system is more reasonable because it also enables some level of competition and it lets the rail companies charge higher prices for tourists.

One benefit of the flat pricing is that it saves a lot of overhead on having to check eligibility. I'm not arguing whether that's good or fair, but it does simplify the system.

I guess a better system would be to have different tiered pricing but not strict checks.

I guess the counter argument is that this is the only ticket that has flat pricing, even in Germany.

Conductor still needs to check the ticket itself. You would have to show your student/pensioner ID in addition to the ticket. Overhead of eligibility check is negligible in my opinion

It's not about the conductor...

Why not? You (as the seller) don't care if someone buys a ticket they're not eligible to use and has to come back for another one, or never uses it, or whatever. You'd be checking eligibility at point of use anyway.

* It’s inefficient. Eligibility must only be confirmed once while ticket control happens often. Ticket control needs to be fast. * Training all inspectors to verify student IDs is much more effort compared to training people at point of sale only. * Many places also accept tickets with student badge instead of student IDs for verification.

This is probably also the reason we don’t get discounted 49€-tickets yet. They’re sold digitally so they can’t check the student ID at point of sale.

A digital student ID could improve this but implementing this internationally is hard.

This seems to hint at a more fundamental difference in approach.

The grandparent comment is saying that the conductors should check for student IDs to validate that the passenger is travelling with correct authorisation.

Your comment indicates that because they have the ticket they are automatically authorised to travel.

In the U.K. as an example, if you’re travelling with a student (or other form of discount) ticket but cannot produce the corresponding ID card proving this, in effect you are not authorised to use the ticket and thus subject to a penalty fare, or a fine. This makes it so that eligibility must be validated simultaneously with inspection.

Not verifying eligibility at the same time as inspection means that an ineligible user may be inclined to obtain a ticket from an eligible user.

Different systems, different attitudes.

(Of course in the U.K. a flat reduction in ticket prices across the board would ameliorate the likelihood of this occurring in the first place, but that’s secondary)

They are already trained to check eligibility. Yes, that includes student IDs.

> […] higher prices for tourists.

The goal of these initiatives is to get people to choose public transport over cars. That includes making it attractive for tourists (foreign and domestic). A single ticket which allows you to just use any local public transport without having to figure out pricing and tickets beyond the basic rules of this ticket is pretty attractive.

The €9 ticket was a steal (I've used it myself as a tourist). This version is a bit on the expensive side, and not even that attractive for tourists (although certainly convenient).

The political discussion has not ended with the introduction of the 49 Euro ticket. One still hears a lot of voices calling for a cheaper ticket, even down to zero Euros, or discounts for welfare recipients. The high price is due in particular to the fact that German federal budget is currently under great pressure, especially because of the consequences of inflation, increased arms spending and high costs of other social policy innovations (expansion of childcare subsidies). However, due to the popularity of the 9 Euro ticket, I would not be surprised when some parties are going to make a cheaper or free ticket a special issue in the next federal election campaign (probably in 2025).

> I would have assumed they make that ticket only available yearly and with discounts to students or pensioners. The way the Austrian ticket works [...] It's a yearly subscription, but you can cancel monthly

What's the difference between a monthly subscription and a yearly subscription that you can cancel monthly? Either way you pay for however many months you choose to have it? It sounds like the difference is that you need to fork out the cash for a whole year up front (and get it back if you cancel early), which I could but idk about students and such

> What's the difference between a monthly subscription and a yearly subscription that you can cancel monthly? Either way you pay for however many months you choose to have it? It sounds like the difference is that you need to fork out the cash for a whole year up front

The difference is in the process mostly. They make it a process that requires a physical address, you need to return the plastic card etc. It's something that you can absolutely do if you live there, but it's something that is inconvenient if you do a two month summer vacation. You can pay month by month, so the upfront cash is not the issue.

That... doesn't sound like a benefit? Why be surprised they didn't go for this? Guess I read a meaning into that comment (that it could have been better by changing a technicality about billing period) that wasn't there.

> That... doesn't sound like a benefit?

Not sure I follow. The 49 Euro ticket is also a subscription in Germany so not sure how you interpret that "they didn't go for this".

Yearly subscriptions are usually cheaper than 12 month subscriptions. In my country you can't cancel a yearly subscription (and I don't think you can give it to someone else either).

That's actually a cool thing in my region (Aachen) that I didn't see before: you can get the yearly subscription, billed monthly, and cancelable monthly. If you have it for 2 years and 3 months, you'll end up paying 2 yearly amounts and the last 3 months are converted into a monthly subscription so you pay a bit more on the last installment (something like 5% more for each month that wasn't a full year). Why a monthly subscription exists and is purchasable, when you can also get the yearly straight away and see for how long you want it, I don't know, that's the only quirk really, otherwise this seems ideal/fair/flexible.

(All this goes out the window with the 50 euro flat fee monthly subscription of course; this thing was 90 euros a month and didn't even cover the state, let alone the country.)

It is "subscription-only" with a monthly cancellation, meaning the purchase options in practice limit it to long-term residents since you need to order by mail to a residence.

It is cheaper than the existing discounted options for students/seniors, previously those have been managed by the regional companies and I think they have an uncertain future.

People on social services still have other options, e.g. Berlin has a 9 eur ticket.

Which is precisely what it's trying to accomplish. This is BTW a very common theme for rail pricing in Europe. For instance there is INTERRAIL which is only available to EU residents and then there is EURAIL which has different prices and ticket types for non EU tourists.

Most of it seems to be pricing things more cheaply for tourists than for residents (Interail is not available in the EU country you are resident in.) And Eurail seems to be even cheaper than Interail:

Interail 7 days within one month adult 2nd class €352

Eurail 7 days within one month adult 2nd class $282 (€265)

I considered buying an Eurail ticket last time I went back to Britain though for my trips it made little difference to the total cost after factoring in the supplements for intercity trains as I was travelling off peak anyway.

The price structure for Interrail and Eurail are different which makes them tricky to compare. They in some countries don't even include the same trains.

Depending on the location, students might already have it with their student card. When I was studying it was around 130 per semester in the end for multiple things including the train ticket. Although it was limited to one federal state.

Why would it be desirable to have pensioners pay less and tourists pay more?

I imagine this model will attract quite a bit of additional tourists (without their annoying cars), which is a good thing (for most cities).

Cause if you're a tourist you're expected to spend money and a small price hike compared to locals won't impact your decision one way or the other.

I also had this reaction a couple of years ago when my city started to introduce special touristy pricings, but nowadays I don't think it's a bad thing. The local government introduced a special "city card" which is essentially a museum card + hotel discounts + free public transport (within the city) + cheaper or free access to all touristy spots. If you travel on a budget, you just have to jump through an overtly advertised hoop, and if you can't be arsed to do so you end up paying a little bit extra. Locals don't have to bother, as showing our local ID is enough to "unlock" lower pricing. Win-win in my book.

pensioners should pay less because they have less income and are more dependent on public transport.

tourists paying more doesn't make sense, because tourists are not going to use this kind of ticket anyways unless they are in germany for a few months. and even if they get it for just a short visit then they will hardly make as much use of it as locals, so there is no benefit for them paying more.

that said, there could be a more expensive version of this ticket that does not require a subscription that you'd have to remember to cancel.

> pensioners should pay less because they have less income and are more dependent on public transport.

Less income than who? Twenty-somethings? I doubt that. More dependent? Many pensioners have cars. And they, by definition, don't have a job to commute to every day.

young pensioners in their 60s maybe, but the older they get the less likely they are to drive.

more than 20% of single (or widowed) pensioners in germany have less than 700€ per month. only 40% of couples get more than 2500€ per month (that's more than 1250€ per person). the rest is somewhere in between.

so yes, pensioners do have less income. and twenty-somethings get student discounts.

especially very old people are often isolated and depend on public transport to get around.

There was a LOT of negotiation with the various regional providers that went into this.

Which is why I'm even more surprised that it ended up like this.

>because it also enables some level of competition

Does it? How do railways work in Austria? In the UK companies bid to get monopolies on routes. So you don't really have competition anyway.

>and it lets the rail companies charge higher prices for tourists.

Is that a good thing? I assume at least one of the reasons is to get people out of cars. It's unclear to me why a tourist not using a car is worse than a local not using a car.

> It's unclear to me why a tourist not using a car is worse than a local not using a car.

You need to give people an incentive to buy an annual ticket. If an annual ticket costs 365x the price of a day pass, then nobody would buy it, because it would be cheaper to buy day passes.

It's better if people have annual tickets, because then they have an incentive to take public transport every time -- otherwise they would see the price every day and would maybe take the car more often.

However, I do agree with you that public transport is too expensive for occasional users, and a lot of people might be more motivated to switch to public transport if it wasn't so expensive for occasional use. (and if there was a single ticket type instead of a dozen different types of tickets...)

> Does it? How do railways work in Austria? In the UK companies bid to get monopolies on routes. So you don't really have competition anyway.

There are routes on which there is competition (eg: Vienna to Salzburg) where two rail companies operate. For the most part the competition is quite limited, something which I hope will change.

> Is that a good thing?

Yes. Because public transit is primarily for the people who live there and pay taxes. That it's also something that tourists can use is great, but you don't need to subsidize it for them.

> Because public transit is primarily for the people who live there and pay taxes.

Public transport is transport for the public. This explicitly includes visitors. Tourism is a large part of the economy of most countries, and unless you are talking cities with over-tourism like in Amsterdam, getting rid of tourists is very much not what the people who live there (and who earn a living through tourism) want. Resolving congestion, improving air quality, and generally making cities more pleasant to live in, means getting as many people out of cars and into public transport, including tourists.

>That it's also something that tourists can use is great, but you don't need to subsidize it for them.

Although many places do. There are often city passes of various sorts for tourists. There are JR Rail visitor-only passes in Japan. I'm sure there are other examples.

> There are often city passes of various sorts for tourists.

Absolutely, but they are usually more expensive than it is for residents. In Vienna the tourist 7 day pass is ~17Euro which comes to 2.5 Euro, if you have the yearly subscription it's 1 Euro per day. The situation is quite similar in most cities I have been to.

but this is not a tourist/residence differentiation. but more like buying in bulk or not.

i have lived in vienna for years and never got a yearly subscription but bought weekly or monthly tickets as needed. and many others do as well. a better comparison to the yearly subscription is the monthly pass which is ~50€ and transferable. so two or more people can share it, and that may turn out cheaper than even a yearly pass in certain circumstances.

i never considered monthly or weekly passes to be only for tourists. they go from the beginning of the week or month which is not flexible enough for most visitors. only more recently a more flexible variant has been introduced that goes 31 days starting any day. those are obviously more useful for visitors but they cost the same.

that said, looking up the tickets now it appears that anything but the yearly subscription is considered for visitors. when i lived in vienna this was not the case. and in other cities it still isn't. tourist tickets were/are those valid for 2 or 3 days and they often are considerably more expensive because they include things interesting for tourists that i never needed even when i was just visiting. everything else was/is for locals.

it is also worth noting that vienna in general is considerably cheaper than many other european cities. which is probably why i never bothered getting a yearly subscription myself.

You have discounts for locals--at least for those using a system on a day-to-day basis. But you also see various discounts for tourists--I assume to entice people to visit in the first place. (I actually expect that so many factors go into deciding to rent a car vs. taking trains/buses that transit discounts probably don't factor in that much.)

In the UK companies bid to get monopolies on routes. So you don't really have competition anyway.

you have competition in the bidding process.

but no, there are no monopolies on all routes in austria or germany. on main routes like vienna to munich or vienna to prague multiple train companies offer services and compete for travellers.

Eurail passes are still a steal, and include long distance trains. I'm honestly a bit upset I can't buy one to use here.

This is outdated, currently the planned start date is May 1st. However, there seem to be still discussions about implementation details (availability only in an app vs. as a chip card or on paper, use of a subscription model).

It's a horrible mess - and still too expensive for people with low incomes. In hindsight, it is amazing that the 9 Euro ticket experiment last year worked at all.

It's at least good that they're moving in this direction at all. Maybe the pricing isn't spot-on, or the capacity isn't there, or there are debates over the ticketing or there are some other issues. But it seems to me that Germany has recognised the importance of encouraging rail travel, and they're taking the first steps in doing so.

I earn enough to afford the current "BahnCard 100", but the pricing versus value is such that I'm not remotely considering it. That means that taking public transport is a hassle:

- always need to buy a ticket: talk to a driver (who usually acts annoyed on behalf of the whole bus that you are holding up) or waste time trying to figure out ticket machines when you should be catching a connection;

- always need to carry cash (fun fact: there's a line from DE into NL with a big warning sign where there'd usually be ads, saying that in DE you can pay with cash only and in NL by card only, so come prepared!);

- need to check whether your ticket from city A to C is valid when taking a route that goes through city B where you'd like to make an intermediate stop (I called support for this once and could not for the life of me get a straight yes/no answer, she kept saying (iirc) wenn es auf dem direkten Weg ist which... is an intermediate stop direct ever? I'm pretty sure the answer for ticket validity is yes but she sounded like no, I'm still not sure 3 years later and I still commute between those towns, just usually via a different connection that doesn't stop in B);

- in many regions, you can't buy a ticket online via the national rail company, you need to separately deal with the local line operators to make your trip planning even more fun!

In NL I've got a chipcard plus a 2€/month subscription which gives me 40% off on weekends but, more importantly, lets me beep in and out of any mode of transport without wasting anyone's time and it automatically bills my bank account (instead of having to top it up prepaid, as is the default without subscription). I go where I please and don't have to deal with billing.

That's why I'll be getting the 49€ subscription straight away. I want to use public transport, but besides the limitations of the system (how fast you get from A to B), it's currently additionally a hassle to deal with billing. Even if the poorest aren't helped, everyone else now has less of an excuse not to use it. I'm much more okay getting an extra ticket for the long distant transport (intercity) that is usually just one leg and is not a spontaneous journey anyway.

> always need to buy a ticket

I buy all my tickets online. That's largely possible in Germany. I can't remember when I last needed to buy a physical ticket.

Bahn afaik isn't allowed to sell you tickets when the start and destination are within a regional operator, and my regional operator (to get to work) doesn't have a web shop.

The bus drivers are comically confused when I try to buy "einen Viererkahrte zu Aachen, drei Stück" so that I don't have to deal with it every other office day (this I can pay with a convenient 50€ bill and lasts about a month, give or take). Then I still have to stamp them per trip and will be last in line for a seat, but at least I don't have to bother the driver most days.

The DB app allows you to buy tickets for local transport associations - not sure if it includes everything, but so far I always found the regional tickets there.

When I book a train ticket, the regional trains are already included. My local public transport system (HVV) has online & smart phone ticketing for many many years now.

A regional operator where the ticket can't be bought online or via a smartphone should be really really rare in Germany by now. Which operator is it, which has no online payment option?

But only largely and not always and not always through the same app or site.

How nice or bad it is differs MASSIVELY depending on where you are in Germany (sorry for the caps).

E.g. in Berlin it works rather simple and straight forward. But then recently someone I know went to another city and Germany and was completely inable to figure out if a ticket they had bought to get from A to B also worked for A to C (close by B). That wasn't a stupid person but someone rather clever.

Similar in some areas the local public transport companies bounded together creating some kind of "common organization" (e.g. VBB for Berlin & Brandenburg) and in some areas you have a splinter network of many smaller local transportation companies.

> talk to a driver (who usually acts annoyed on behalf of the whole bus that you are holding up)

It is still an interesting cultural observation that here in NL, even people who manually buy a ticket at the driver while struggling using the card terminal do not seem to get an annoyed response inherently even on a half-filled bus, whereas in Germany it seemed almost expected to get chewed out for not having exact change or taking more than 10 seconds to gather a pile of coins - in the pre-app era, of course.

I guess in the Netherlands, you have to be nearly demented to not be able to use the ov-chipkaart. Beeping it when you step in and out could hardly be simpler, but my grandparents don't want to learn a new system¹ and also don't want to drive highways anymore. It's different if a 90 year old asks for a ticket at the driver's compared to 30 year old me.

¹ Pinnen existed before ov-chipkaart to they're okay with one form of electronic payment but don't even want to try out another... I'm waiting for the day where I am that old, probably then I'll understand!

I’m from US and periodically visit Netherlands for work; on my most recent trip, some local colleagues dropped me at the train station for the ride to AMS. They kindly asked me if I knew how to buy the tickets and were shocked when I said I just my OV card. Neither had one (which I thought was equally surprising).

We have non of these problems in Switzerland, this is all just organizational.

Buy the ticket at the bus station or use your phone.

I don't know how often you do intermediate stops, that seem nice case to me. But even then, you just add 'via' when you book your ticket and that's it. Easy as pie.

> - in many regions, you can't buy a ticket online via the national rail company, you need to separately deal with the local line operators to make your trip planning even more fun!

Is this actually the case in Germany? That's crazy, we solved this long ago in Switzerland.

> We have non of these problems in Switzerland, this is all just organizational.

Sorry if I came across differently, indeed I don't think any of these are unsolvable or inherent with public transport. The Netherlands and Germany each have strengths (the former a more convenient and reliable system in cities; the latter better service on the countryside), so clearly it can all be done.

It's not really that bad.

Practically for most areas in Germany it can be available from May the 1st as an in-app only ticket.

That is what matters.

---

PS: No idea why anyone is discussion chip card, it's not an option. Every public transport system in Germany (should) have the capability to scan QR codes from APP or paper. Partially due to DB RE/RB/IC/ICE trickets having "include local transportation at start/destination" options. (And I think roughly that system was also used for the 9€ ticket.). Chip cards on the other hand can not be read by many public transportation systems and even if it would be a mess due to how such systems work, i.e. chip card systems (as used by public transportation) are generally not build to be accessed across disjoint independent systems and are much less flexible. They have their benefits, but non of the benefits matter for a person bound monthly fix price ticket in the context of how public transportation works in Germany. So integrating chip cards would be just a grate wast of resources IMHO.

Contactless paper tickets exist (MiFare Ultralight and others). Those cold be utilised to generate a non-refillable start/destination ticket.

What do you mean it's not an option? I already ordered the ticket as a chip card here in Berlin.

I did that now, too .... I seem to have had very wrong information.

> still too expensive for people with low incomes

It can be said about anything. 49€ per month for transportation in all cities is 5% of a low-income salary; Saying that this effort is not enough validates the theorem that no government is left enough for a leftist to stop saying “It’s not really left”.

If 49€ is too much, how are they getting to work now? If they can walk or bike to work, they don't need rail. If their current fare is less, they presumably can continue using it.

In my area, lower-income workers still usually need cars. They spend at least this much on gas each month. There's a lack of reliable transit options which makes a vicious cycle of low ridership and fewer options. I wish we could build out the bus/rail system we need and promote it. The city's not that big and everywhere could be within 30 minutes if buses and trains were as frequent as they are in other countries.

I think the German transit authorities are looking at the situation and saying that there are a lot of people who currently drive that could be given a little incentive to take rail. Sometimes when you make something free, people stop valuing it. If the goal is to boost ridership, a nominal cost makes people want to get their money's worth by riding. But at free, they might continue to drive and keep the train just for days when the car is in the shop. People are weird like that.

45% of people in Germany don't work.

Many with low incomes who do work have access to free or cheap transport tickets as part of social benefits.

Looking at the stats, something like 35% of the population is under 16 or over 64 years old. Then Germany has a labor force participation rate of over 75%. Presumably the remainder are disabled, full-time parents, independently wealthy or otherwise not willing to work.

I'm trying to identify which person is unable to buy a rail ticket who otherwise should have one. On whose behalf is the OP pleading?

There are unfortunately too many people in Germany, who will struggle even with 49€, though it is a huge improvement for many. I am thinking mostly about retired people with a small pension, which struggle to just pay for food towards the end of the month. For them, the 9€ ticket was a game-changer, I hope there will be some support programs to make the 49€ ticket available for all retired people. The fact, that it covers regional trains all over Germany means a lot for their mobility.

Do we have to polarize this simple question of whether 50 euros for transportation is affordable for specific income groups as a leftist versus rightist theory thing?

It’s more that the 9€-ticket did some serious price anchoring.

Mind that the ticket excludes all fast trains, it's only for local trains. Still pretty good, but you shouldn't get the wrong idea and think you can suddenly use every train.

This is correct and to show what that means: Frankfurt to Berlin with a fast ICE: 4 hours, no changes. With regional trains only: 10-14 hours, 3-6 changes.

With a car this trip is 5 hours. No one in their right mind would ever do such a trip with regionals only, it is extremely painful. In addition, the chance that one of the connections will be missed is extremely high.

You can still try that, but that's not the intention. The target audience are basically commuters. I had a colleague a couple years ago that went around 100km total both ways to work. He briefly considered switching to train but balked at the price of about 200 per month. This despite the fact that gas cost him more, his car commute was longer and he was paying for a parking spot. I guess the logic was he already paid for the car, so he better use it. But at 50 per month, he'd ditch the sunken cost that is the car in a heartbeat.

I’m skeptical given that reducing your colleague’s cost from around 1000€/mo all-in (inc. parking) to 200€/mo wasn’t enough that a further reduction to 50€/mo will tip the scales.

Fair, but I think people are not good in looking at the big picture. The old price was in the ballpark of the costs people notice (gas). But the proof is in the pudding, so we will see.

How do you know it was 1000€? Maybe if it was closer to let’s say 500 and an extra 300 was seemed like a reasonable price to them for the additional convenience.

It’s 400€ or more for fuel alone, plus maintenance, distance-based-depreciation, and parking.

Interesting logic! Even with the sunk cost of car, insurance, etc. it'd still have to be significantly cheaper or quicker for me to use it over a train, on which I can do other things. (I suppose its privacy is something, but not worth as much to me as the freedom to read or close my eyes.)

In the US, I'm about 45 miles from the nearest large city where I worked (many days) fairly briefly. I'd be about $400-500/month for commuter rail, commuter rail parking, and in-city transit passes. But the reality is that I'd be something close to $40/day driving (plus any parking) even given that I owned the car anyway.

I always took the train unless I was doing something in the evening--in which case the train was a poor option in general. (Once you got out of commuting hours there were only a few trains for the rest of the night.)

Sure, but if you miss your connection you can just take the next train. Frankfurt to Berlin might be impossible, but Hamburg to Berlin is manageable (4-5h), if money is tight, as is Hamburg to Sylt (3h) and many other connections in the 200-400 km range.

Assuming there is a next train.

Two weeks ago, the usual "person on the train line" cancelled all traffic for two hours, with the usual cascading effect for connections.

So instead of arriving at 7pm, I ended up reaching home about 10pm. I was 30 km away from home.

I don't think it's meant to let you replace all car trips you could possibly make with a single 50 euro payment per month.

Nobody in their right mind would, yeah. So they just have to pay for the train if they don't want to buy and maintain and fuel a car for such journeys. Myself, I'd never consider going by car between such well-connected cities, I'd have to drive (can't read a book for those 5 hours) and deal with parking and either rent or borrow a car (or buy, I suppose).

I think the game changer of this ticket is to replace the second or third family car. The few occasions that you actually needed more than one car you could now just do with public transport without a lot of hassle.

Question is if the 600€/annum is cheap enough for people to opt for this. But at least many companies are looking into giving the 49€ ticket at a discount - and that is actually desired from the state as the state also gives the company a discount if they do so.

Still great for everyone who just cannot afford a ICE ticket or even a car. And there is a huge in-between area between local connections and long distance. There are a lot of medium distance connections, where the time difference isn't that large and which become suddenly "free" for those ticket owners.

We used to do that as students. There was a ticket that would allow germany wide travel with regional trains on weekends. It’s long, but it was cheap and on trains isn’t too bad.

True, and it's a bit of a problem that the pennywise are now lured into abusing regional trains for long distance travel. Because that can considerably worsen the experience for commuters.

The main improvement is that now a subscription to your home public transit can also be used when you visit a different city, this is huge. Just like a car registered in Munich can be used to get groceries on a visit to Hamburg without registering there.

The inclusion of regional trains is mostly a side effect of keeping it simple while not excluding those whose commute includes regional trains if done by public transit (which isn't rare at all, and excluding them would be impossible because they are the most well-heard group in politics).

Is “fast” here just the higher-speed inter-city services, or would some intra-city services also be excluded?

It excludes ICE and IC trains, other regional trains like RE or RB and local means of transport (Trams, Buses ad U-Bahn) are included.

"Fernverkehr" (long-distance: ICE, IC, EC) is excluded, "Nahverkehr" (RB, RE, S, U, Bus) included.

still you can for example go from Berlin to Munich in about 10h with the latter option. (was 50€/day last time I tried for fun...)

Its also worth mentioning that there are express connections between big cities that are relatively close. For example, there is a sprinter connection between Nürnberg and Munich that takes about 90 minutes using a regional train instead of the 60 minutes it would take with an ICE.

Same for Dresden-Leipzig. I usually take the ICE since I have a Bahncard 100. In addition to the real time saved, it also feels a lot faster if you're not stopping every 5 minutes.

Most IREs are included as well.

The important point is not with rails, but with local public transport (s-bahn, metro, buses, streetcars, ...), and that the tariff zones are basically eliminated with that.

iE in hamburg where I live, a monthly subscription costs around 120+€ per month, assuming you only need the "center" of the city area. If you live a bit more outside, or even in some adjacent village, you have to pay for every single tariff zone you pass through, this can _multiply_ the original costs.

so this is a massive financial benefit for everyone who doesn't want to commute by car (gas is getting expensive, parking spots can cost 100€+ per month near work, ...). yes, sometimes it takes significantly longer to commute, but financially it totally makes sense now to NOT use a car for that.

Having the option to travel by train into more distant targets for free is a cherry ontop of that. even better: you can use public transport in your destination city for free now!

but for me, the single biggest benefit now is to not having to deal with these tariff zones at all, they are a huge mental energy drain. Would pay double the price just for the convenience of not having to think about this.

In Berlin, the monthly ticket is 89 euros for the two main zones. It goes to 107 euros for all zones. Basically, halfs your monthly outgoings just for Berlin travel. Then add in the ability to travel it's looking really good. Can't wait for it to be available.

you can pay double: 236.40€ gets you 5 rings which is most of the whole area if i read the map correctly. the outer rings beyond that are some small regions or selected lines only anyways.

Traveling short, local trips via public transport most places in Europe is getting very economical, while I feel traveling distances outside those local zones is getting prohibitively expensive compared to air travel. I used to be able to get from my home in western France to Amsterdam via trains for much less than flying or driving, whereas last fall I priced train tickets and it was going to run me over 350€ round trip. I could fly for less. Except I don't live near a major airport and thus no direct flying. Its getting to the point where for long trips I could drive for much less than the train (especially if I go longer routes and avoid some tolls) which I feel is the exact opposite of what needs to be promoted. I wish there was more high speed, affordable long distance train travel so I could avoid flying all the time. But it is only getting significantly more expensive.

Prices can be all over the place.

My cheapest ever flight was either £9.99 (or €9.99?) for a one way from Berlin to London Gatwick, the train onward from Gatwick to Havant cost twice that.

I've also had round-trip air tickets on the same route for about 300.

Also, at the start of December I had a week long trip to the UK, and my flight back from Stansted was cancelled while I was on the runway and the first replacement flight Ryanair's website listed was a week later, so (after further nonsense I will not repeat here) I took the train to Portsmouth, the ferry to Cean, and then a train to Berlin. The combined cost of all of those and the hotel in Cean was about a third the cost of any earlier direct flight from any airline listed on Skyscanner.

Its sad really, each country and the EU itself all have the totally wrong approach to high speed rail.

The EU seems hell bent on turning Europe in England for some reason.

France and Spain believes that High-Speed rail is basically an airline. They miss basic stuff like one line should connect to the other, and are bad in terms of connecting high speed rail the rest of the infrastructure.

German has political problem building out a rational designed overall network and is vastly under-funding lots of rail infrastructure projects that are total non-brainers. But because its all politics with little planning.

I am extremely pissed that Switzerland build a huge tunnel threw a mountain, only for Italy and Germany to basically do nothing. Everybody expected Italy to be behind, but Germany is still not done its part.

Switzerland on the other hand basically doesn't believe in high speed rail at all and that is kind of a problem if we ever want a real European high speed network that doesn't suck. Thankful some people are pushing for such a line. We basically need a line Genf-St.Gallen, and Basel to Lugano. And then connect those to the high speed lines of the nations around us.

Britain in the meanwhile is actually building high speed rail, but constantly trying to cut it down, and at the same time they are not connecting their net with Europe because of stupid immigration policies.

Belgium has the slowest high speed rail ever.

Netherlands and Germany can't seem to figure out basic East-West connections.

We have long way to go in Europe to actual get high speed rail correct.

It would be great to have real high speed trains in Switzerland. Unfortunately it's just not possible though. A train can only go very fast if the tracks are very long and straight. In switzerland there just is no space for that. The non mountainous parts of the country are densely populated. Even if you have tracks where you could go very fast such as the Gotthard tunnel it's not worth it to buy trains that go that fast for the very few passages that actually allow them to make full use of their speed. Besides if not all trains on the network can go this fast you need to increase the interval between trains which you obviously don't want to.

Sorry, but hard disagree. For the main route that goes threw the population, from Genf to St.Gallen, you can absolutely make a new high speed rail line.

Doing such a high speed lane would open up massive amount of capacity. More local trains, more regional trains and importantly more cargo trains.

Switzerland has a modal share of over 20% for rail, and if we want to boost that to 40%, then new high speed rail is a must.

> The non mountainous parts of the country are densely populated.

Switzerland is not even close to as populated as Southern England, and somehow they are building high speed rail. And the British aren't exactly known to be great infrastructure builders.

> Besides if not all trains on the network can go this fast you need to increase the interval between trains which you obviously don't want to.

You would use special high speed trains on the new high speed lines and use all the other trains on the other lanes. Just as they will do on HS2.

I will buy this. Current ticket costs 165€ a month. My employer is forcing to come to the office 4 days a week. Living at the last train station I will get a seat in a train and can use my commute time as working time. By car it’s twice faster of course, but then commute time isn’t working time.

I switched to this ticket in Berlin and the process was (surprisingly) straight forward, could do it in online so I wrote about it. They did try to make the digital ticket default instead of a physical card.

https://www.arbeitnow.com/blog/bvg-monthly-ticket-to-deutsch...

You can already apply for your monthly subscription to change to this ticket. That's what I did. So instead of 66 euros for Berlin (VBB area) a month from May, I'll be paying 49 and can access the local networks across the country

i find this the most appealing aspect of the new ticket, that it competes with and underbids the local and regional monthly tickets. i expect in the long term many of these local offers will disappear or drastically be reduced in price.

i remember some time ago when i lived in NRW the monthly ticket for the city i was in was open to all of NRW on weekends which i thought was awesome. and now the whole country for the same price, that just adds so much more flexibility especially for those commuting across regional borders.

Interestingly the ticket the OP owns will not disappear and can still be monetarily beneficial in some cases.

While the 49€ ticket is cheaper and has (way) more reach the "VBB Umweltkarte" has some additional benefits.

Like:

- in the evening (20:00) and on week ends you can take an additional adult as well as a child along for free

- it's not person bound so you can pass it to other people

This means that e.g. for a family of two parents and one child a single card is enough to cover all weekend family trips and when the child is to old to be covered it also normal has a "school ticket" which I think is free since some years(?).

Similar there are still other tickets of relevance, e.g. a ticket to be able to take your bike on the train (in areas where it's allowed and a separate ticket is needed).

But by itself I agree, especially for people crossing regional boarders in a unlucky way this ticket is a blessing. E.g. if you live close idk ~30min by care close to Berlin you often would have to get a Berlin ABC (or BC) + 2 regions ticket which is just supper expensive to a point where many people will not even consider it and just take a car. But this isn't because it need to be that expensive but because they have no lobby behind them which negotiated better tariffs. This was shown e.g. by Potsdam universities which negotiated a Berlin ABC + "ALL regions and cities in Brandenburg" ticket at a normal student ticket price.

Anyway I love it.

"VBB Umweltkarte" has some additional benefits

good point, but a lot of people will switch, and offers like these may want to lower the price to remain attractive.

Let's see if this will have a noticeable impact on university enrollments. Personally, I know a few people who re-enrolled after finishing university, including one person who even got a PhD, solely to get the ticket for their full-time job.

It would not surprise me if universities experience a significant drop in enrollment due to this issue, especially at larger universities. An article from 2019 estimates that at one university, up to 9k out of 36k students may enroll without any academic intention.

> 9k out of 36k students may enroll without any academic intention.

but this isn't just because of the "semester ticket" students get, at least where I live the ticket is the least relevant reason of multiple ones why someone might sign up for university.

Other reasons include:

- healthy insurance/tax, especially until you are 25(??) you can be health insured through your parents, even afterwards the health insurance flat rate can be nice in some situations. And the tax model of student side jobs is nice too, through with some long term drawbacks people tend to overlook

- not being officially unemployed, when spending a year for yourself e.g. traveling the world

- having an excuse for your family and similar when you have absolutely no idea what you want from live

- forcing parents in broken families to pay child support longer

- using healthy insurance and tax of students to (pre-) bootstrap a one man self employment company and try out various side jobs to find yourself

- starting with the intend to study but then losing that intent due to you realizing that is not what you want to do and not finding a way forward for year or more

- abusing BAföG

- officially studing one topic "for fun, taxes, health, etc." while waiting for a spot in the study track you care for to open up, (that was a thing I have seen quite often)

- study for fun for people which don't need to work and a bored (thats how sometimes 60+ year old people appear in as students).

As a side note, in my experience most, nearly all times, when people sign up for a study track without the intention to get a Bachelor/Master they sign up for tracks which always have free "left over" spots each semester. On one hand because this makes it nearly guaranteed they get in, on the other hand because it would be pretty shitty if you prevent people which want to study from getting a spot when you have no intent to study.

I guess it will have a small effect. There are more reasons for a „fake enrollment“ than just the ticket.

- child support money

- free public health insurance

- private insurance is often also related to „kids being in education“

Especially if the kid under 25 just wants to travel around, play fortnight at home or work on the next big thing.

My bachelor programme (maths + cs in a small German city) pretty much only exists due to that. Great student/tutor ratio because most only enroll for the student status (low fees, no public transport ticket).

What are you taking about? You don’t need to be a student to get the ticket.

Apart from the significant cost savings for people that use local public transport a lot the biggest benefit is probably that it removes a lot of the unnecessary complexity around buying tickets for many people. The German public transport network is divided into many small providers with different tickets and rules. This can make it rather confusing and annoying at times.

That's half the price of what my region of Sweden charges for a comparable ticket, and it covers the whole country, not just one region. Not bad.

Same for Germany. My region (about 30km from one end to the other) charges about twice as much currently as this nationwide ticket will cost.

And that's not to speak of the Netherlands where you'll pay a few hundred a month for this service, regional subscriptions aren't a thing, though you can buy a subscription per route (those aren't cheap per km either).

It's nearly half of what a monthly ticket for just Berlin's public transit costs.

Berlin currently has a 29 € ticket which is much more interesting if you don't travel the rest of Germany often. Hopefully it gets extended beyond April.

> Hopefully it gets extended beyond April.

Very unlikely, it was explicitly meant to only be a transition ticket until the thing which now became the 49€ ticket is ready. In a certain way it was a (expensive) publicity stunt of the local government.

Through for very low income people there is a separate even cheaper ticket, through only Berlin AB.

There is no way they will permanently reduce the price of the VBB Ticket below that of the 49€ ticket AFIK.

Ironically the reason the 49€ ticket is a thing and cost 49€ and not more is because they assume most people don't travel Germany too much and will buy the ticket from their local transportation provider and in turn the "use where vs. bought where" ratio will somewhat average out to a point where with a bit sampling when checking for tickets you can fairly handle the resource allocation (through then it not being a free market but a state subvention-ed one plays a big role, too).

The 29 ticket is not a per month ticket. You need to pay 1 year upfront lump sum. Otherwise you pay 60 per month.

You don't have to pay upfront.

I got my card in February and I only have a 29 euro transaction in my bank statement for February, and then another for March. It is also possible to cancel at any time.

That's not what it says here though ? https://www.bvg.de/de/abos-und-tickets/alle-abos/vbb-umweltk...

Says i need to pay 1 year upfront for the discount otherwise it's 63 euro per month

Edit: okay their website is just a nightmare and eventhough they say it's 63 euro they bill 29 euro

Well yeah it's for people who actually live here, tourists can pay the full price

They are going to make a lot of money with this. When NYC first rolled out the unlimited metrocards it was $50/m to travel anywhere in the NYC area by bus or subway. Suddenly all the places that people didn’t go because they didn’t want to spend the subway fare were now on equal footing.

Fast forward twenty years and that same pass now costs $200/m and they say now they are going to start adding a transit fee to everyone’s income tax as well. Not nearly as good a deal. But somehow I think Germany will avoid that fate.

> The start date for the offer has yet to be finally fixed; currently it is set for 1 April 2023.

That appears to be outdated or wrong information. The first date was supposed to be the 1st of January, but it has been pushed to the 1st of May since not all questions regarding the financials had been cleared.

As oil & gas prices blast off, it looks like importers (Germany and others) will be doing all they can to minimize domestic demand for fossil fuels:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60502451

"Oil hits seven-year high but shares rebound on Russian war 24 Feb 2022"

https://splash247.com/european-gas-prices-soar-following-dam...

"European gas prices soar following damage to Nord Stream pipelines Sep 28 2022"

Accelerating the transition off fossil fuels is good news, and better access to electrified public transit systems are right in line with that goal.

I can ride all the regional trains in my region in Italy for 35 euros/month (full price, before reductions for eligible categories)

Italy is more complicated than Germany railroad wise, but I would also argue that beyond the region you live in, slow regional trains are much less useful.

In Rome I pay 10 euros/month (the subscription is paid annually though) to use every public transport including buses, subway and trains that start and stop in a train stations inside Rome area, even if they are directed to or come from a different city/region/country.

By showing the card I can also park for free in several selected parking lots around the city.

Many people don't know about the advantages public transport provides, but they are real.

yes Germany is NOT leading the push to make public transportation more affordable and easier to use

through they did jump on/followed the push and it get's more international press attention, probably due to the not always correct image people have about the German train network, and because it having one of the larger train networks in the EU

Sorry, but still not worth is. Public transport in Germany is a mess. I've been commuting with the Deutsche Bahn for over one year. Not one week where something didn't go wrong. (Train way too late, train not coming at all, train not stopping at destination, train stopping way before destination + transit bus).

I'm so happy with having a car again.

I have a love-hate relationship with this. I love it conceptually and I think it's the right model, but it has a lot of problems.

For one, people on unemployment benefits don't even have close to 49 Euros allocated to them for transport. They'll likely be overpaying for local trips and continue to not be able to afford long distance trips.

And two, the infrastructure here is just not ready for more passengers. The 3 months where the 9-Euro ticket existed, public transport was unusable. I upgraded to long distance trains (which were deserted) several times to bypass the hours of delays and the overfilled trains (where masking mandates could not be upheld). I don't have a car and I didn't plan to ever have one (until now, maybe), so I fear my only mode of transport is going to be even more hellish than usual.

Handling of very low income situations is separate (and exists in all?/most? areas of Germany), and most areas have their own very low income ticket for much less then 49€. This ticket was never targeting income groups which are already get income related social benefits (through Germany could make a low-income/social version of this ticket in the future).

> The 3 months where the 9-Euro ticket existed,

This was a very unusual situation where there where a lot of dynamics making people take advantage of the ticket at least once in exactly 3 month. Some people did things they normally wouldn't have done because they felt they would else wise lose out. Additionally the month before that time many people did feel constrained and used that time to compensate for the month before.

I wouldn't expect this to be a problem as the dynamics around it are very different. Not limited to 3 month, not that much cheaper then your normal monthly ticket (and especially more expensive then one or two full-day tickets), not hyped up that much, not the first time something like that was possible, etc.

The 9€ ticket was a special event, the 49€ ticket is more an improvement of the daily live expenses and convenience.

I expect many people to buy the 49€ ticket, I don't expect a massive increase in local transportation usage short term (but a constant slow incremental increase due to people slowly changing habits).

> for one,...

Obvious problem, so obviously gets addressed, but no reason to include all details in this short overview. TLDR: they pay much less.

> infrastructure not ready.

Agreed, but chicken/egg and time limited and basically free is very, very different than permanent and 49.

I wish the UK would do something like this. Our rail prices are the stuff of nightmares.

Sadly, this will likely not provide much incentives for infrastructure improvements. Local commuter trains around here have deteriorated substantially over the past decades. The trains have become dirty and unreliable. More passengers will only stress the infrastructure more, so it will become even less attractive.

Maybe it would be wiser to spur the competition between various commuting alternatives such as shared cars and buses, and thereby putting pressure on the railway operators to improve their infrastructure, offering it at a more reasonable price and with more transparent pricing schemes.

Or maybe it would be wiser to actual invest in your infrastructure. Railways don't get magically more efficient just because the is competition from a bus. Investment is political not depending on competition.

Regional trains in Germany are not run for-profit. For each route there is a public tender for subsidies every 10 years or so. Private companies that win these contracts have to fulfill whatever local authorities put into these tenders (like timetables, capacity of trains etc). So your suggestion simply wouldn't work. Instead, your local authorities must improve whatever they require from the companies (and then also increase the subsidy accordingly of course).

Berlin(the biggest city) is miserable in this regard. My former tram line(M4) used to be 50:50 with old and new trams. In the last year before I moved, they had almost 100% old trams in there. Same goes for S-bahn, even new carriages are not equipped to deal with the weather. I dreaded using them in summer.

The city has an excellent network in terms of coverage, but the trains are outdated.

It’s a fantastic step forward, making commuting with public transport much more affordable for many. But another nice thing about the 9€ ticket was that it got rid of all other tickets for occasional users, too. If you’re using public transport just a few times each month, 49€ is too high, and you will still have to deal with 4x tickets short tickets, AB/BC/ABC zones, day tickets and whatnot. Which is unfortunate, as that’s annoying, and they have to keep the complicated ticket vending infrastructure in place as well.

Its not about commuting. I hate the focus on commuting. Its about living, doing everything you want to do whenever you want to do it, its not just about going to work and back.

Would be nice if it was complemented with a €2 hour ticket, a €5 day ticket and a €20 week ticket, then they could probably get rid of the other tickets.

Nice yes, but...

Part of the reason why the 49€ ticket is that cheap (compared to a lot of other monthy more limited local tickets) is because you commit to it for a month.

This ticket is meant to make abandoning cars easier for Germans and be also a nice pressure reduction for some of the people hit hardest by inflation (low income, can't afford a car anyway(1), but not (nearly) no income in which case the state pays your ticker anyway (oversimplified)).

Providing a hour, day or week ticket would defeat that purpose. It's explicitly not meant to reduce cost for people which have a car and just from time to time buy a ticker or tourists (through it's still grate for tourists which tour multiple cities in Germany if they stay ~2 weeks even through they "lose" 2 weeks).

I disagree wholeheartedly. People who have a car should absolutely have cheaper and less complicated ticket options, so that they leave their car at home more often.

well that is why some argue that buying the 49€ ticket should be mandatory for anyone owning a car.

Funnily the people I know who say so are car owners which mostly use cars and hardly ever the train, but they are also rather well off.

This is a great idea in general. Yeah for cost savings for sure but the convenience of actually only having to deal with 1 ticket system around the entire country is a game changer.

Here in Hamburg the local Transit district (HVV = Hamburger Verkehrs Verbund for 3.67 Million people) is also offering a version where the employer pays a share of the 49 Euros. Thus the monthly cost for a Germany-wide regional transport ticket (local trains, regional trains, bus, ferries, ...) then is reduced to 34,50 Euro and the owner needs only to pay for months when it is actually needed.

I read the text but for me it was not clear the following: does this include intercity trips or "only" a plain ticket within the city?

It include any trips using regional trains or city public transport (so, broadly, any train with an "R" or "S" in the name). That includes travel between cities, but it won't include the fast intercity trains (IC, ICE, EC) that most people use to travel longer distances.

So essentially you can get across most of Germany with this ticket, but for longer distances you'd probably be looking at a significantly longer and more complicated journey than if you just took a more direct intercity route.

Inter-City Trips are covered as long as you take the slower "regional-Bahn". They usually don't go long stretches so you have go change multiple times on long legs .

The actual high speed intercity lines are not covered.

I have read is the successor of the 9 euro ticket. You travel between cities but only on certain RB trains, not on IC nor ICE.

I wish Australia also has this :(, we have different cards for different states lol. what a joke, also its very expensive!

Wish the UK would do this.

How about we get a single return fare (even restricting to realistic commutes, not whole country) down to €49 before we worry about multiple use!

I paid £34 one-way from London to Winchester yesterday. It's a bit more than 100km and a ~1hr ride. For 2 people doing that round trip, it's cheaper to rent a car for the day.

I also paid €30 for a plane ticket to Norway recently. How is rail so ridiculously expensive/uncompetitive here???

> How about we get a single return fare (even restricting to realistic commutes, not whole country) down to €49 before we worry about multiple use!

Nah, we're just getting rid of return fares instead :-)

The price reduction is very welcome, but they better work up that pontuality, specially in regards to missing connections.

It's already been delayed to 1.5. and next year it's going to increase in price. Ridiculous.

So this is a public transport ticket for urban areas. It's a good idea to make them valid across regions. If they can make it work, that is. There is still the task to distribute revenue in some adequate way, and currently politicians like to in indulge in wishful thinking and disconnect from reality in Germany, so let's wait if anyone has bothered to solve the hidden problems behind this. Could play out like the disastrous Energiewende (energy turnaround), which made people wonder if they have heating in winter. It's probably not as impossible as a full socialist central planning economy, but it's the same spirit.

In most of Germany urban areas and metropolitan cities are just a 30-45min train ride away. At the normal ticket pricing you will pay 32 euros for the roundtrip. Now you pay 49 for the whole month. It's a game changer for a lot of people living in rural areas despite everyone without any knowledge living in those areas arguing against it but it's Germany of course everyone and their mom will argue against it with arguments that have no meaning for the people it really effects.

And most people do live in the cities and don't do such round trips too often.

And many people doing a lot of city jumping fall into a more high income area and use IC/ICE trains not covered by the ticket (faster, and more convenient).

And that is grate! Because it part of what enabled the push for such a ticket.

Now we get a ticket which mostly is just about having a 49€ ticket for you local public transportation, while also having the convenience of not having to bother when taking some week end trips to close by lakes or similar, while being a big benefit for the people living in the "countryside" which is overdue IMHO, while also giving people more options to live outside/close by a city which can take a bit pressure from the housing market. And to top it off it makes it easier to sell it to better earning car focused people hopefully helping with a shift away from people owning/using cars all the time.

i don't think revenue distribution is a problem. most goes to DB anyways, and each region has local tickets that are valid across multiple companies, and they already worked out the distribution, so now they just need to extend the same process to the whole country.

> So this is a public transport ticket for urban areas

It isn't. It is a ticket for all of Germany.

True, I meant say local public transport.

Germany is a small country, area-wise. You can reach large parts well with regional trains which are included in the ticket.

By way of comparison, 5 days of all-day, all-zone tickets in Hamburg currently costs €91, so this is a YUGE saving.

I still don't want to travel by train in Germany, because the service right now, quite bluntly, is shit. Delays, overcrowding, poor communication.

I was travelling this week three times in Germany with long-distance trains. No problem.

Both of the ICEs I had were very modern. Four of the regional trans were modern. One train was older.

> I still don't want to travel by train in Germany, because the service right now, quite bluntly, is shit. Delays, overcrowding, poor communication.

Many times it is not a problem.

A big part of why there are so wildly differing accounts regarding punctuality of German trains is that a lot of the delay is limited to a few specific lines that are overloaded even on the regular schedule. Most of these lines are on the dense part of the long-distance network [1], around the Ruhr area and the Frankfurt area.

By contrast, I usually use routes in Eastern Germany, such as Dresden-Berlin-Hamburg/Rostock. These lines have been recently built and are not overloaded, so services are nearly always on time (or, at most, 10 minutes delayed) and connections are very reliable.

[1] https://assets.static-bahn.de/dam/jcr:b4fca34a-4b95-4d82-98d...

It's not consistent across the entire country, sure, but my wife had difficulty on trips to Munich and Graz in the last few weeks, my nephew on his trip from Berlin to Hamburg last weekend and don't get me started on trying to get to Brussels or even the local closures in Hamburg of the S-Bahn U-Bahn. The issue is as much comms as it Engineering work.

They know they're doing engineering work, but do they allow for it? No. The bus goes, oh I can't go any further, all passengers get out and continue on the S-Bahn. Walk into S-Bahn, platforms all closed.

Arrive at HBF, 15 minute delay. Keeps changing. Keeps going up. No reasons given.

Journey to X, shortly before arrival, oh, the station is shut we're going to stop early. No notice in order to help friends and relatives reorganize.

Fuck me, the UK is bad at a lot of things with public transport, but it is better coordinated than this. The roads are the same, random closures, no diversions set up, no planning with other closures to check they're not trapping people inside loops.

It's the focus on cost rather than correctness that is frustrating.

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