Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
apnews.com
apnews.com
This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess.
With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake.
I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be.
0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_de...
If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that.
Not on all lines. If I remember correctly, I have only heard it on the new announcements for the BER airport. And, they actually tell you on time so you have a chance to buy an extension ticket.
I don't know the BVG app, but if you're not regularly in some city installing an app, finding out how it works, adding your payment info is a huge hassle.
We need a single app for all German transit, that is well designed. Instead of hundreds or thousands of apps for every city and village.
What I also really liked is the chargeable chip cards in Taiwan. You could enter and exit anywhere.
Your card is charged with exactly the distance traveled.
No thinking needed. Short distances are always cheap. E.g. if you travel from zone B-C but start just one stop before B ends, you wouldn't pay for the whole of B. You just pay what you use, which is fair.
E.g. the "new" Munich airport, all Paris airports (though you could argue that it's Paris which has unusually small city limits), Glasgow, London Gatwick, Stansted and Luton, San Francisco, …
I visit Germany often and yet this makes no sense to me. Don't assume it's so simple for everyone.
S-Bahn ring, usually called ring for short, refers to a prominent circular route around the city center of Berlin.
Berlin's system is rather simple and comparably cheap.
Commuting into a city, especially without free parking, on a daily basis costs a lot.
There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.
Of course, many people don't have any of the apps, particularly people who rarely use public transport, which are also the people most easily confuse by the complicated fee structure.
Unfortunately, the new monthly ticket does little to help them. 49 EUR isn't a value proposition for them, and so they are still stuck with the awful status quo.
https://www.bahn.de/angebot/regio/verbuende
Not all of them, I'm sure, but all of the major ones seem to be covered.
I'm using it every day, because it's better than using the association's own app, which is not saying much. Or I used to, anyway, now I'm doing the 49 EUR thing.
I suppose with NFC contactless payment, a plausible future state is just supporting credit card payments everywhere, though of course this doesn't solve the monthly pass problem.
Also states like Baden-Württemberg got their act together recently and made it possible to book tickets all way through.
I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.
but the new ticket is really nice wrt booking.
I remember at some point pre-pandemic I was in the UK with a friend and we had all these these different tickets/receipts were trying to use to go through a turnstile and doubtless really pissing off the people lined up behind us but it was super-unintuitive what we needed to stick into the machine.
Prior to this, the ticket and seat reservation were seperate bit of paper.
The previous system came from the 80s and ran on multiple Tandem/Nonstop clusters.
I worked on the data prepartion for a small HAFAS installation at one point and the specification was an absolute mess of fixed with text, delimited text and XML, sometimes all in the same file!
You can just swipe your phone (Apple Pay / Google Wallet) or credit/debit card to check in and out (do not forget to check out!) and you're done. Works for all public transport in the Netherlands.
Of course there are also more traditional ways to pay for your ticket, but it does not get much simpler than this imo.
I’m also surprised airports don’t integrate it into their passenger fees and boarding passes. But maybe that’s getting a little too multi-modal to handle.
This is extra true if you're traveling with a family including kids, as I often am.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I asked at the hotel desk how to get to the airport on public transit and the guy said just take a taxi it will be faster and much easier for you.
I agree that tourists in an unfamiliar city will often just take a taxi by default though.
I bought a 24h pass at 8pm, only to find out it's 24h only if you buy it at 00.00, because they all expire at midnight.
They are basically running a legalised tourist scam over there. I can imagine hundreds of thousands of people falling for this.
(They expire at 4am, though the point remains.)
I think only foreign tourists who don't have a credit/debit card, or whose banks levy a high, fixed charge per card transaction, or who are eligible for some other discount (foreign children age 5-17) should buy an Oyster card.
1. The weekly capping always runs Monday to Sunday, so if your stay doesn't align with that, you'll get to pay an additional capping period, in which case buying a weekly travelcard aligned with your stay will likely be cheaper (as long as you know which zones you'll mainly require).
2. Having a travelcard gives you the ability to buy slightly cheaper rail tickets for destinations outside of the TfL zones. Pay-as-you-go doesn't, unless you physically get off the train in order to touch in/out at the boundary.
3. Transit nerds only: Pay-as-you-go is subject to certain maximum journey times. If you'll exceed those by staying to long within the system, you'll be presumed to have forgotten to touch out and will be charged a maximum fare. A travelcard avoids that issue.
If you don't want your travel to be associated with your bank account, you can get a chip card which can be topped up using cash.
Germany had it for a while (TouchPoint) but they gave it up thankfully — although I don't know the exact reason it was given up.
I usually do a decent amount of research about public transport in our travel destinations, so I more or less know what type of tickets or passes I'll be buying ahead of time.
But, last fall a flight cancellation left us with an unexpected day in Amsterdam.
I guided our family through immigration and customs after an overnight flight from Canada, and then purchased what I thought were the correct tickets for our train ride from the airport to downtown.
When we went past a card reader, it didn't seem to work, but there were no turnstiles and we were able to board our train.
There were however turnstiles when we got off at the station downtown, and they wouldn't let us through.
I walked over to an attendant at a podium, who looked at our (incorrect) tickets, our obviously sleep deprived selves and children and just laughed, told us we'd bought the wrong tickets, and let us through.
I always imagined the world of high-stakes metro-related international criminality would come with more consequences than being good-naturedly laughed at by a Nederlandse Spoorwegen employee.
Turns out that an “Amsterdam region” ticket does not get you back from The Hague.
We too got stuck behind the turnstiles, bewildered. We called for help through one of those intercom pole thingies and they buzzed us through.
As someone from Texas, the idea that a city 40 miles away might be in a different region hadn’t even crossed my mind :)
The new ticket is an excellent example of when national government can be superior to more local government: when the national government forces coordination to solve fragmentation problems, where local agencies lacked the...motivation to solve things on their own.
On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level. A complex system per locality can still work okay for local residents; and if it's painful for visitors, well, visitors don't vote, and it's not the kind of thing that's likely to kill tourism.
And they have now expanded that card-based system to include a mobile app, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, so now I just tap my phone and I'm all set.
The SF Bay Area really did the right thing here.
BART did their best to make a fantastic mess too and, at least according to their web site, they still only sell paper tickets at SFO. For whatever reason the three other vendors at SFO do sell plastic cards. Because three additional vendors isn't confusing at all.
* Some systems are flat rate (Muni, Golden Gate Ferry, VTA), some are zone based (Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit, Marin Transit), and some are distance based (BART), SamTrans has a flat rate depending on the type of bus you're on. Some systems are proof of payment (Muni), some use turnstiles (BART), some are partially proof-of-payment (AC Transit). And some (AC Transit, Muni) still maintain their own proprietary mobile payment systems. It's still a fucking mess.
As you note with the pricing complexity, there is just a wide divergence of views and interests on how to run a transit system. And I get it; I think there are legitimate reasons people picked those different pricing systems. But they figured out how to overcome that so I can have one card for all of that. And even better, one card that is now my phone.
If people are interested in the history that drives some of what it ended up the way it did, this is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_card
For younger developers who are used to everything being connected, it's really worth thinking about how you'd build a reasonably robust, hard-to-exploit system when many of the important terminals, as on busses, were usually out of contact.
I've had days when I've used 4 systems, for example.
If people are interested in the history that drives some of what it
ended up the way it did
For younger developers who are used to everything being connected, it's
really worth thinking about how you'd build a reasonably robust, hard-to-exploit
system when many of the important terminals, as on busses, were usually out of contact.
Even in 2010 having to wait up to 72 hours for your transit card payment to post was insane. Having to do so in 2023 ought to be criminal. Let's not forget that Clipper basically absolves the transit agencies of any responsibility – so when your card is stolen you generally cannot cancel it immediately. Let's also not forget that TransLink/Clipper's had a variety of payment problems from spurious charges to autoload failing en masse to simply not charging people as required.
I disagree. I did need a single payment system. I am glad I have it. I do not need a single unified fare policy.
I understand that you want different things. Which is fine! But it's frustrating to me that you are trying to negate my complimenting some people who worked hard and made things better just because they didn't also do the things you want. Things, I'm sure, many of them also wanted.
But it's frustrating to me that you are trying to negate my complimenting some
people who worked hard and made things better just because they didn't also do
the things you want.
Honestly I don't particularly care about a single fare system as the last time I did a big multi county trip was around the time TransLink was being rolled out. Yeah it was neat to be able to use an RFID card on some of the systems, but that didn't make up for huge gaps in service.
TransLink/Clipper merely put a few drops of CA glue on a gaping wound.
Edit: To be fair I think that electronic ticketing is a good idea, but it needs to be part of an overall simplification of Bay Area transit. On its own (the way it is now) it's a marginal benefit – and now that transit agencies have absolved themselves of any responsibility Cubic's customer support sucks.
I wonder if this company is related to the TransLink which is the one running the OV Chipkaart in the Netherlands? https://www.translink.nl/
This is also a really poor system, it took years to implement and the various services never integrated properly. They all have to have their own portals and if you forget to scan one you're screwed and have to physically go back. The card can't be put on a phone and can't even be scanned for the credit level in the app (you can view it online but it's 24 hours old which is totally useless).
Also it was cracked 3 months after being rolled out because they used older mifare cards with known flaws, which had been on the market for 10 years.
They are working on some new thing now using credit cards which will probably also suck :P
The system I like is the London Oyster-derived one, which New York MTA is now also using. It has the advantage of supporting contactless and NFC payments out of the box.
There is months worth of "pending" passes on my clipper card and neither some Clipper support number I called nor the poor guy in the booth at the local BART station could tell me how to activate them (and also not some people on Reddit and my public transit using friends, of course). It's obviously not done by using either BART or buses or SF Muni, or tagging the card against the insert-coin machines at the station, because, you know, I've done all of that a bunch of times since this started being an issue. Most of the pending passes expired by now. I'd be more upset about this if I had paid for them with actual money and not some employer based commute benefit since I haven't exactly commuted regularly since the pandemic started.
I then spent half an hour trying to purchase a physical card from a machine which refused to accept 4 different cards I tried (credit and debit both). In the end, I could only purchase it with an American card that I borrowed from someone.
Compare that to modern public transport systems in many parts of the world, where you can simply check in and out with a bank card. No separate purchase needed.
Demanding reciprocity is like saying ‘I should be able to turn right on red lights in NYC because my car has Jersey plates’.
Demanding reciprocity is like saying ‘I should be able to do $SOMETHING_WHICH_VARIES_IN_ILLEGALITY_BY_REGION.’
Now insert any other topic: abortion, weed use, transgenderism, human rights, etc.
Just because it’s not your pet issue, doesn’t mean it’s not utterly asinine to accidentally end up on the wrong side of the law due to sheer happenstance — all within the same country.
I would rather be deported and barred from entering a certain state in which I carry out something perfectly legal in my home state, but is illegal in the former state — rather than suffering at the hands of a heavy-handed and unempathetic justice system.
Of course, toll roads in the US do provide a coordination problem, and that's in the existence of noncompatible electronic toll systems. You have essentially three islands of interoperability in the US: the Northeast and Midwest are all using E-ZPass, the Southeast has some interoperability, and Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas all have a compatible system, with several other states having systems interoperable with no one else. There actually was a law passed in 2012 that required all the toll systems to be compatible by 2016, but obviously, we're 7 years past that deadline and all that happened was Minnesota, North Carolina, and Florida joined E-ZPass as well (and Georgia is coming soon™ for a few years now).
I once used a toll bridge in the Eastern US that had no indication of payment options (outside of a pass like the one you mentioned), no lane to escape once it was clear you had no alternatives, and then no method of paying the toll online after the fact. The only option I had was to wait to be issued a charge via the rental agency ($30+) and pay that once back in Australia.
Like the penny silliness--or really the fact that the US basically collectively decided that the currency denominations in widespread use in 1950 would be fine forever--it's essentially a self-correcting situation in that a lot of people don't use cash any longer.
For someone doing a lot of interstate driving NationalPass already offers transponders that are compatible with a bunch of different systems (E-ZPass, TxTag, Title 21, and EZ-TAG), supposedly also including 6C so there's that.
In Germany that did happen, for sure. I used to live in the area between Mainz and Frankfurt and the multiple public transport authorities (RMV, MVB, RNN etc.) worked together to better support the transitional zones.
Even the juggernaut Deutsche Bahn (they handle public transport in almost every municipality) couldn’t break through these structures (eg the city of Munich just couldn’t be pressured to comply with their ticketing schemes).
In the end mandating it by the federal government was the only way. Although I’m curious who’s really benefiting from it: yes we solved the annoyances for the E-Mail caste, but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure.
I'm not trying to self-aggrandize here, but I'm bad at emails and good at code. I'm sure you can find a portion of HN users that fit the description but I don't think "people like us - the E-Mail caste" is the way to say it.
(This includes mails, but also code or marketing etc. - eg people that didn’t have the slightest inconvenience during lockdowns compared to „essential workers“)
But I still wouldn't say that group is the one that cares about crossing between transit areas.
Claiming that only some elite cast of digital nomads profits from it is utterly ridiculous. In Switzerland city to city travel is more common with trains then with cars, and a huge part of the population does it.
> but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure
If the government actually correctly invests in it then it doesn't actually, specially not long term. If anything it leads to more regular more frequent service on many routes.
Although a great thing of Swiss trains used to be being able to switch trains quite easily between destinations, regardless of the train type.
No idea if that is still a thing nowadays.
Yes very much so. Not just trains, buses, ships and so on.
This is almost as simple as beeping your credit card when boarding. I've been so spoiled by that simplicity, I can't stand using needlessly complicated ticketing systems these days.
So its basically scales linearly. More land, more population. With the same tax spending there is no reason that Switzerland should be able to do anything that Germany is not able to do.
Nothing you said changes the fact that between cities you used to have different tariff systems and that people regularly travel between them.
The distance from Genf to Zürich is the same distance as many cities in Germany. Again, claiming its a luxury to go the the city 200-300km away is nonsense.
Just saying 'Germany is larger' isn't an argument, it doesn't change anything.
> goes through 2 choke points
So your excuse is that Germany is bad at planning and building their rail systems?
Switzerland has and had chock points to and yet that isn't actually a problem.
The reality is Germany has much better geography for rail compared to Switzerland.
It is so bad, that there are excuse generator websites with what the DB usually uses, or people that collect them.
http://privatundfun.siteboard.org/t78f2005-Ausreden-Katalog-...
Trains are cleaner and somewhat less delayed, but bloody hell, they are not worth the price. For £110 I reckon you can go Milan–Naples (800 km, 4h30) in high speed 1st class train, which do not even exist in Britain.
The wonders of privatisation, innit?
Many rail services in the UK are effectively not private now, and they're even worse, because when a right-wing government that hates public transport takes control, all hell breaks loose.
We have a very complicated rail network which is bad for many reasons other than "private" or "public"
But also managed decline of the railway by the Government
Subscription tickets for Hamburg which cost more than 49€ are now automatically reduced to 49€ and are changed to a Deutschlandticket.
Employer subsidized Deutschlandtickets can be reduced upto 50% for the employee.
Kids from low-income families get the Deutschlandticket for free.
Students can upgrade their public transport ticket for monthly 18 Euros...
School children pay 19 Euros monthly for the Deutschlandticket.
:-)
For a German pensioner, in many cases, this would represent more than 5% of post-rent living costs. For my girlfriend, a manager of a team of 16 people (in non-tech in Germany) it's more than 5% of her post-taxes, post-rent income.
€49/month is not trivial for a lot of working or retired Germans. GDP per capita in Germany is €46k/year, and after taxes and insurance (and rent! and that more than half of Germans that make less than that), €49/month is not a pittance.
These tickets are generally aimed at working class Germans, which often make 10-20% of a normal Silicon Valley salary.
I'm a suicidal burn out trying to drag my mind back from oblivion, I sure as shit am not on silicon valley money.
Also:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Your argument's a straw man, regardless of the fact that you're "trying to be constructive".
(And to be honest, the way you prefaced that statement had the feeling of "no offence, but...", it's a poor rhetorical practice.)
Germany has a long history of charging things at damned near administrative costs, 5% on transport just isn't a lot of money.
And also, 5% of "post-rent living costs"?
What's the percentage of overall income? Half of that? So low that your argument holds very little water.
Yeah, about that. Do you think most working class people are flippant about costs that take 2.5% of their pre-tax income?
I'm in favor of the €49/month ticket. It's a step forward. But I genuinely don't understand how (and it feels like some sort of cultural or social class disconnect) that seems trivial to people, and wonder if it's not being acclimatized to German non-tech incomes.
Anyway, I'm out - before this degrades into a meaningless flame war.
People with low-income (incl. seniors with low income) have a reduced price.
I wish most, if not all, of the world adopts the german style public transport system.
Free markets are great at reducing inefficiencies in a world in which no participant decides to coordinate with other participants for profit. which obviously doesn't work, just like communism doesnt work at societal scales.
Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid.
In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.
It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
That's blatantly false. It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
What worker productivity do you think society is loosing out on here? We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs.
The labor they provide and experience they earn in the social system is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables in a restaurant or flipping burgers at McDs instead.
Is this even something people voted on directly or is it just one point among many in each party’s total stance to vote for?
Interesting take. Is there any supporting official position on this or just personal opinion?
If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social services systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribute. How do these systems handle the rest of the 9 months every year when the teenagers are unavailable on account of being in school. Why would a healthy society operate at the very limit of crashing down because the natality dropped or parents/teenagers start refusing to provide this service?
Now I've dealt with a lot of trainees in my life. All university graduates, including with PhDs. They all take weeks to months full time on the job until they're ready to do anything productive in the simplest of jobs. I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year (with 9 month breaks) to support a country's healthcare system from collapsing. And that's not even touching on the topic that you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
The government figures and claims are supporting this opinion. In fact, it's been the government's opinion, not mine. I'm just quoting it.
>If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social service systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribut
9 months not 3, and yes, that's socialized care for you and an aging population when you have too many people in need of care, and too little contributions into the system since the economy has stagnated post 2008 and taxes are already high enough and no more money can be obtained this way. And it's not just healthcare work, but all social services like kindergartens, retirement homes, refugees homes, etc. that make use of 9 months of teenage labor.
> I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year
You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR. At least not here. Teenagers are quite smart and quick learners if you treat them well.
>you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
The military service is forced nation-wide (a system kept through democratic vote), while doing social public civil work is the alternative choice if you feel the military is not for you.
And the children get paid for it, and for many it's the camaraderie and opportunity to meet other young people from other parts of the country/city and make life long friends or meet future spouses while learning useful social and life skills and feeling a sense of self worth for contributing to society, especially in the context of the west having a loneliness and depression epidemic among teens. It's also an opportunity for silver spoon kids of privilege families to get to interact with the lower classes of society and soo how others live, through this kind of work.
You're making it sounds like they're prisoners for life, but they're still free to go binge drinking and care free sex in the south of Spain after.
I believe you but since you're passing this on then you/they must also have more than some words in support. When critical systems would collapse were it not for teenagers being asked to work a job it calls into question both the competence of the leadership to lead and of the people to choose them. There's a reason most countries don't do this beyond basic apprenticeships on limited scale. What happens if this year teenagers start looking more towards the military following events like the war in Ukraine, do those civil services come tumbling down? You and the government make this sound like a country being driven at the edge of collapse.
> You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR.
Right? Who could be more qualified to operate a critical emergency vehicle or bring someone back to life than a person who until yesterday wasn't allowed even to vote. What a thing to say...
> The military service is forced nation-wide
Mandatory military conscription is an act of desperation in the face of potential national annihilation. Most countries abolished it and even the ones who kept it start at 18. Is the Austrian civil service conscription an equally desperate move? Or an attempt to raise a "working generation" from as young an age as possible while giving those kids the alternatives "this or the military"?
> and for many it's the camaraderie and opportunity to meet other young people from other parts of the country/city and make life long friends or meet future spouses.
Sure, except literally not because they'd get the very same by going to school or university. They don't need to be forced into a job they don't want because the country will fail otherwise unless it's the only way they'd do it. The only incontestable reason is because it's mandatory, everything else is rationalizing and looking for a silver lining.
Most neutral European countries like Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Austria have maintained it to one degree or another. I don't think it's generally viewed as 'an act of desperation' by most people in those countries or even that unpopular.
For these countries mandatory military service is very much an act of desperation. Maybe the word doesn't ring the right note in people's heads but it's accurate. If avoiding scenarios like in Ukraine doesn't call for desperate decisions I don't know what does.
But discussing the popularity is moot. The people of those countries understand the necessity driven by external factors. They chose neutrality, not their neighbors, so they have to compromise somewhere out of practical need and the desperation of the alternative. This being said you can only assess the popularity of something when it becomes a free choice rather than obligation.
Democratic elections and referendums have assessed this and the majority of the population has voted in favor of this system. For better or worse, that's democracy for ya'.
> the population has voted
But as you said earlier, it's the same population and elected leaders who let critical systems and services degrade to the point where they would stop working without forcing children to work. Even agreeing this doesn't put the people in a bad light decision-wise, in this position it's no longer a choice but a necessity. Hence my incessant question whether the government's statement that "services will fail without child work" is supported by some study or it's just a scare tactic to get people to vote a certain way.
Yes, democracy is about getting the people's vote of confidence. How you earn that confidence is outside the democratic process and could be as simple as "feed them BS".
> Yes, democracy is about getting the people's vote of confidence. How you earn that confidence is outside the democratic process and could be as simple as "feed them BS".
In Switzerland getting people vote is about much more then confidence as we vote regularly on actual issues, not just on people or parties. And because its Concordance system all parties share a certain amount of confidence form the population.
The political discussion about mandatory military services are certainly happening and have been for a very long time. Generally, in a conservative society you need to have a really convincing reason to change something, and in Switzerland at least nobody has come up with a great alternative that convinces many people so the system stays as it it.
I am not supporting this, I only said it's how it works here.
>Right? Who could be more qualified to operate a critical emergency vehicle or bring someone back to life than a person who until yesterday wasn't allowed even to vote.
And yet at their age they seem qualified enough for the US to send them to war in the Middle East or give them access to TOP-SECRET military intelligence[1] before they're even allowed to drink beer. You're needlessly discrediting youths for a cheap shot at an argument. Those people who barely got to vote, as you call them, are functioning members of society, who were vetted beforehand and given 3+ months of full time training and supervision by licensed and more experienced personnel before they get to perform CPR. Also, CPR isn't that difficult or risky, especially when you don't live in a society of ambulance chasing lawyers where everyone sues everyone for the slightest inconvenience.
> What a thing to say...
I'm not saying this, the facts are. Austrian healthcare and social system, with all its flaws, does a far better job serving the majority of the population, especially the poor and the vulnerable, than the American one does. But let's not get into that right now.
>Sure, except literally not because they'd get the very same by going to school or university.
They go to school and university anyway except with social work there's no grades or exams you need to study for making the time served there less stressful and more focused on the social and practical experience. Plus it's a more diverse setting than university where you mostly meet people with shared domains and interests as you.
>Mandatory military conscription is an act of desperation in the face of potential national annihilation.
You're false again. I don't support mandatory conscription but it's how neutral non-NATO EU nations get to defend their neutrality and provide a detergent against aggressors. The military also has plenty of uses even in peace times, such as natural disasters and what not.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/27/politics/jack-teixeira-de...
Ugh, "in support" of the veracity of the statement. You wrote that "the healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function" without the work of teenagers. I just wanted to know if you have any solid evidence of this. I will assume not, suspect that this is the usual political bamboozle people fall for when an explanation is needed, and move on.
> And yet at their age they seem qualified enough for the US
I'm not sure why you'd bring this into the discussion. It's devoid of value as far as whataboutism goes but indeed, I agree that it's very wrong in that case too. How about this: some of the US also considers child marriage and subsequent sexual relations, or hard agricultural work legal starting the age of 12. Hitching your wagon to the "others do it too" argument can backfire.
I'm sure those teenagers are functioning members of society but their function isn't to be forced into adult jobs at that age. If they want to pursue a career in this have them watch and learn, like any other teenager is expected in school or university.
> I'm not saying this, the facts are.
Just follow what I'm quoting. You are saying that "You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR". You're being dismissive of an entire profession as "a child can do it with a bit of training". It's not helping your argument. You actually need more than a bit of experience before driving any car safely, let alone an emergency vehicle in a critical situation. A teenager shouldn't be pushed in this kind of job. They have 40-50 years to do exactly that once they're just a bit older.
> Austrian healthcare and social system [...] does a far better job [...] than the American one does.
That's great. And again I have to say, how does this comparison help? When is it ever useful to compare to someone not doing a good job? This just says you can do worse. Focus on how to do better.
> You're false again.
And yet you go on to confirm that it's how they defend against aggressors, an indisputably desperate situation. That's exactly what desperation means, doing something to prevent/mitigate one of the worst situations a country can be in.
Now I sense that you made some assumptions about me, given the repeated US references. I'm European, my opinion about what the US is doing on internal social aspects, or external military/political aspects could be better. And I lived and worked in Austria for years many eons ago. I hope that helps you put in context what I said. Let me boil it down: let children be children; at the edge of adulthood let them choose where they go and guide them, don't force them, unless there is a desperate situation; use your critical thinking and don't believe (or worse, promote) the vagaries your government sells you when they want something their way.
Anyway, enlightening talk.
Nobody is being dismissive of anything. I'm just showing you proof that 17 year olds can also be professionals in that field because what is a professional, but someone who received professional levels of training and got certified. Guess what? So are those 17-19 year old boys and girls to the same standards of much older people.
In fact you're the one being dismissive and ageist because you think young people can't be trained to do a job just because of their age.
> A teenager shouldn't be pushed in this kind of job.
And yet they seem to be doing it just fine. And they are not pushed, they can choose for which service they volunteer. They can work in kindergartens, but many choose emergency services because of the practical life skills learned there, camaraderie, and other personal reasons.
> don't force them, unless there is a desperate situation; use your critical thinking and don't believe (or worse, promote) the vagaries your government sells you when they want something their way.
Nobody is forcing them, and it's not my government as I'm not Austrian, and the government doesn't benefit from this as the kids don't do work for the government but they provide work for their own citizens, neighbors, etc.
It seems strange to outsiders like you and me, but this is the path that the Austrian society has democratically chosen for its kids and it seems to be working for them. Why judge someone else because they're different? School kids in Japan also clean their classrooms instead of janitors.
The system was abolished because compulsory military service was not a great fit for the kind of army the politicians wanted anymore and cost a lot of money. The health care and social sector has faced some struggles as a result. While some of the vacancies have been filled by a new voluntary service scheme, overall it has contributed to a lack of service workers and it has increased costs.
I have done civil service and must say it was a fantastic time. Basically anyone I know who did it looks back at the civil service fondly, as it is much like university in terms of the social opportunities, but you get some money on the side. Military service on the other hand was reportedly much more of mixed bag (as you'd expect, I guess).
What? I did civil service in Switzerland and while there are some jobs that require CPR courses to be done before hand, in non is it actually expected that you need it regularly. And for absolutely sure will they not let 18 year old drive ambulances, that's utterly insane.
Can you show me prove that in Austria they let 18 year old civil service people drive ambulances? Because I know for a fact this is not happening in Switzerland.
It's not: Do we get a million teenagers or not?
There is a third option:
Let those teenagers join the workforce, use the revenue from the increased societal productivity to hire more professional workers in the health care system.
In case anyone is curious, this appears to refer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst_in_Austria which is an alternative to conscription in the Austrian Armed Forces. Conscription applies to men (but not women), and this alternative civil service option is chosen by ~40% of these young men.
https://www.ch.ch/en/safety-and-justice/military-service-and...
If you want to see open positions for the system you can see here (not in English):
https://www.ezivi.admin.ch/ivy/faces/instances/eZIVI/PublikB...
You can search for different keywords to find open positions. For me personally I worked in:
- Hospital as a Programmer (they made position for me)
- In another hospital as Technician (hanging up stuff, changing light-bulls, assessing damage, configuring doors and so on)
- Old people home, I worked for in technical service, including garden work.
- Old people home, I also worked as a cleaner, mostly windows, floors and so on.
In the hospital you can also work as a bed mover for example. You can work directly in old people care and things.
In general there are 100s of position, some position are even going with international aid organization to other countries. A friend of mine did his in archeology departments digging up old stuff. Another friends simply did farm work with a mountain farmer, that's the easiest to get (he in fact simply was to lazy to get a job so they assigned him to a farmer).
But these people are starting university one year later, which means they graduate a year later, which means these badly needed, highly qualified workers become available to the job market a year later, because they have to spend their time doing some menial job that most of them have no interest in doing. We used to have this nonsense in Germany. Most of the people I know were just goofing off, were drunk or high on the job, or were deliberately destroying equipment, because nobody wanted to be there.
Simply paying normal people to do that work would be perfectly reasonable.
> is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables
Yeah but most people don't actually work minimum wage jobs. Me as a Software Developer spend 6 month cleaning windows. While this was reasonable fun and low stress not sure my window cleaning experience has this great benefit for society.
> not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs
You start your job one year later and therefore spend 1 year less doing it before retirement, not sure how this is difficult to figure out.
To people who argue like this, I often argued in the past that if I were to contribute on an open source project for one year instead, this would do a lot more good for the public welfare.
Why not just spend a year's worth of taxes on it?
Much more efficient than training a million teenagers to drive the bus every year...
Should people that live in urban spaces massively subsidize people that choose to live in rural areas for no economically useful reason? Like, some tech bros decide they don't want neighbors and want to live 20 km from everything. Should the city folk subsidize their preferences? Maybe it should be recouped in local taxes? Should that be covered by agricultural tax breaks?
Mostly I think public transit should be a public service. But I don't think it's a given that rich people's preferences should be subsidized just because they want to live in remote or suburban areas.
I also have a version of this from a doctor friend that lives on a "farm" that doesn't grow anything. Who should pay for the roads / public transit to their place? Everyone else? Again, I don't have a good answer. But I'm open to the idea that people that simply want to live in rural areas as a personal luxury should shoulder some of the costs to making those places accessible.
You’re just stringing words together to look smart; physical reality calls the shots. Your attempt to conjure some immutable truth in Anglo gibberish is banal
You happen to be misconstruing the two definitions of "public good":
> a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization.
> the benefit or well-being of the public.
As such, something can be a "public good" without being "a benefit".
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=public+goods&si=AMnBZoHHbOut...
Likewise, if you want them to be, so is public transport.
Though, here's a question: I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport — is that just my observations being weird, or is that a true distinction? And if genuine, why?
The fact that long-distance highways tend to be free speaks more to politics than logic, and there are a few notable exceptions (eg Japan) where all expressways are tolled.
And in Switzerland for example you just pay a really high gas tax that funds the highway, plus you have to pay a one time fee and get a sticker, otherwise you are not allowed to drive on the highway.
I think using the train is more like using the car. I can agree that the tracks are a public good, but actually using the train is clearly different from that. Just like the government provides me roads, but not with rides.
> I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport I guess my framework fits that, because while you may need to maintain the air and the airport, the individual flights only help the individual person.
In remote parts of the world, planes absolutely should be classified as public transport. Remote towns in Alaska, for example, are essentially inaccessible without bush planes.
However, planes are expensive to operate on a per-passenger basis, and in most places there are cheaper ways to facilitate helping people move around, especially since most trips from most people are short-distance.
Public transit gets consumers to the mall and other shopping areas where they can circulate their hard-earned cash in a capitalist economic system.
Public transit gets individual cars off the road, increases safety of those roads, and makes everybody's transportation more efficient.
If there were no fountain, then many people would get water bottles and that's too big of a hassle.
Defining a public good is quite hard, and any definition will most likely other controversial terms like "reasonably" or "foreseeable" in them. However, I think a public good is something that can be shared by many people in reasonable amounts, and that cannot reasonably be attained by the average individual. It is usually characterized by its scale.
So for example, you can't build your own park, but you can use the public park without blasting your music on max volume.
Right, and if there was no public transit, then many more people would need to buy and drive cars, and that's not great for the public's interest either.
I think there is a difference between providing the opportunity and giving things out for free.
[1] Both because there are higher safety expectations for railways than for roads and because one of the inherent working principles of railways is to bundle individual demand into larger units (a.k.a. trains) that can be moved across the network en bloc. If everybody tried to operate their own individual little train across the network the way you do with driving your car, things wouldn't work out.
My house has never been on fire (knock on wood), but I'm perfectly happy that my taxes pay for a fire department. I don't often use the park up the street that's currently undergoing a massive renovation/rebuild, but I'm happy that my taxes are paying for the renovation. I don't drive on every single road in the city, but I'm glad my tax dollars make it possible for people to get around even in places where I don't need to go. I don't have kids (and don't plan to), but I'm happy that the taxes I pay go toward educating the kids who live here.
Many public transit agencies are run at a loss; I'm absolutely fine with my tax dollars making up the difference. From there it's just a matter of degree: is it fully funded by taxes, or still partially funded by fare revenue? I'd be fine with the former, too.
A lot of public transport runs on fossil fuels. Especially, since Germany was so »smart« to shutdown all nuclear reactors so that coal has become the most important source of electricity again.
They’re about to double the amount of carbon taxes levied on large trucks. That tax used to be used for building new roads but it’s now all being given over to new rail infrastructure.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB...
I'll let you draw your own conclusions
From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
Do these matter if ridership is falling?
If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes.
But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)
Dunno about satisfaction but clearly, when people were truly dissatisfied they stayed away and now the primary causes of satisfaction and reliability problems are simply that the network is so in demand it's at capacity all the time, especially London commuter routers. Some of that is driven by the huge increases in population via immigration in the last 20 years but some of it is just that privatized services are better, so people use them more.
Albeit with the minimum service levels always specified (and consequently paid for in the case of unprofitable services) by the government.
Certainly there were other problems: the nationalization was downstream of the socialization of the British economy between the end of ww2 and Thatcher, and as can be seen rail traffic (a general proxy for economic health) is in steady decline from then until it rebounds slightly in the 80s before taking off again once put in (mostly) private hands in the 90s.
The reason the graph seems to run a few years ahead of the changes is that actually privatizing and nationalizing something on the scale of a national railway takes a few years to implement between politicians floating the idea and the final handover of power, but the effect on people's motivations and incentives begins almost immediately.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous.
Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.
It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" .
In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free. A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too.
Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.
But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye".
Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for?
When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement.
And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
Social function of work. If you do it yourself, what will she do?
If you come up with a solution freeing hundreds of people doing some monkey jobs some in Germany will consider this evil, since people are losing their means of earning salary. This is more difficult with the officials, since they have guaranteed employment.
[Edit: typo]
In fact, in Germany you can see that it leads to government paralysis everywhere. In contrast, they should free "Staatsbeamte" from those stupid jobs and encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands. No jobs lost, but talent attracted. This eventually leads to operational excellence. The current state of affairs is overly defensive and reactionary.
I witnessed at least two panic attacks caused by the implementation of your suggestion to "encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands".
Learning something new every day. How does it work. When and how does one get signed up for this lovely tax
It has very little to do with bureaucracy. It's about supporting the large churches.
In some regions there is a lot of additional (social) pressure to prevent people from leaving the church.
The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.
Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis.
The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits.
The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.
It's not a matter of private vs. public.
Japanese punctuality numbers are inflated because their high punctuality of their high speed trains that run on dedicated separated infrastructure. In fact, large reason that punctuality in Switzerland suffers is because international trains that mess up the schedule (looking at you Germany).
And unlike Japan Switzerland is also world leading in using railway cargo transport, that also has to share the same infrastructure.
But in general, its not just about public and private, that a simplified vision. Its something for politicians to talk about rather then talking about the actual details of the system.
While Japan is privately operated, its certainty still under public control.
In fact in Switzerland there are quite a few railway companies for both cargo and people using the same infrastructure. Some of them are semi-private or owned by local governments or a mix of other organizations. The Semi-Private Post office runs its own trains for example.
It should have no issue at all to align German wide but they never did it.
The Munich MVG for example is doing an experiment were you can pay by an app from some us company were you just start and stop your journey with a button and the app gives you the best price.
They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
It's ridiculousl that modern problems are often not technical problems:-(
I completely agree that it is a mess, but it is not really easy to solve with so many stakeholders and so many (sometimes conflicting but valid) different priorities at stake.
But that already works with the »DB Navigator« app by Deutsche Bahn.
You can buy tickets for many local public transport companies. No need to download a custom app.
Errm, you do see the contradiction here, no?
The 49 Euro ticket is actually heavily subsidized which means more tax payer money is wasted that could be invested into the infrastructure of public transport.
Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point.
To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all.
Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.
Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.
Of course actually running a public transport system cannot be free, much like paving roads is not free. Pay for those with taxes.
Can I use an ICE/IC train with the Deutschland-Ticket if I know I will reach the destination with a considerable delay?
Yes, you have the right to do so according to statutory passenger rights if the local train has an expected delay of at least 20 minutes. To travel by long-distance train, you must first buy a ticket. The travel costs will then be reimbursed subsequently upon request by the railway company with which you travel, e.g. by the passenger rights service centre of Deutsche Bahn.
I'm not all that worried that this will cause overcrowding since I'd wager many people who bought the first round of tickets are just transferring over their current local subscription to the national one. Both my wife and I did that for example.
It is worth noting that this ticket is 10€ cheaper than our prior subscription, which I expect will result in a solid bit less revenue for the regional transit authorities. With a system that's already straining from under-investment, hopefully this doesn't compound already existing problems.
Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
Unless the capacity of public transport grows as well, no.
> Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
Roads aren't just for cars but also trucks which are the backbone of German logistics.
You may agree or not with this point but answering beside the point is not helpful.
There actually was a lot of overcrowding in the local and regional trains.
Everybody I know complained about it. The 9€ ticket didn’t cover the ICE trains and instead put more strain on those lines that are already needed by lower- to median income commuters. Regional train lines have rush hours too and during those 9€ Tickets months some wild videos went viral, where things got heated between old and „new“ users
Local and regional mainline railway services are being paid for by the state governments, who however in turn are to a large extent relying on federal grants paid for that purpose [1].
The new ticketing scheme was instigated at the behest of the federal government, which has the biggest financing power, but has only pledged a limited (technically unlimited this year, but since the new ticketing scheme only became effective in May, it's very unlikely that the original fixed amount will be exceeded this year) amount for covering any revenue shortfalls up to 2025 (and strong-armed the states into pledging the same amount of money for that period, too).
So if it turns out that the combination of cheaper tickets, still present after-effects of the pandemic (i.e. loss of ridership and revenue) and current inflation means that losses are higher than expected, there's plenty of scope for finger-pointing and pushing the blame around, and at least localised service cuts in more cash-strapped cities and counties (respectively states, in the case of mainline railways) remain a possibility.
[1] Historically, local/regional services were operated and paid for by the then Federal Railways. When, in preparation for privatisation of the railways, the responsibility for contracting for/tendering of those services was transferred to the state governments, they also received a corresponding financial grant in return for taking on that responsibility. It might or might not have been the original intention, but in practice those federal grants are the main source of financing for local/regional mainline services to this day.
The US is pretty split up and doesn't use trains outside the NE corridor, so it's not as useful, but it'd be nice if congress would start work on unifying transit payments across the country over the next decade. Also unifying car toll payments. These balkanized systems are just silly.
It feels like the only way we will ever get there as a country is one state at a time, and even then you see projects like California's high-speed rail that's massively over-budget and overdue. At least the blue states seem to _get_ it, meanwhile those who live in red or purple states will just be left behind as always because of how intensely politics has carved a divide between people and led to so many unfounded lies being propagated to their citizens.
All that to say, good on Germany. Now U.S., get your shit together.
The issue seems to be people don't like the idea of only keeping 50% (or less) of their income + making 50% less to begin with. Most people that work at big tech get their big salaries because the companies profit in data-mining ways that would be more regulated in Europe.
The thing is though, it's not even most higher-salaried tech workers that we need to tax heavier. We need to tax the rich. When I say the rich I don't mean people making 300k/yr. I mean people making a million or more per year. We need to massively increase the marginal tax rate at around $3 million to around 90%. This was how it was as recently as the 80's, and repealing those taxes has led to an increase in wealth inequality this country has never seen.
To get the US towards building much more transit (and other infrastructure) there are many hurdles, but one of the main ones is building useful things for non-obscene amounts of money.
Consider the CA high speed rail a PoC for the nation. Would you endorse copying that model? Is Chicago increasing its ridership/coverage (honest question).
It's obvious that the real cost of things like highspeed rail come from environmental regulation and cost of land purchases from existing land owners. European & Asian countries have obviously figured out a way to streamline this process. They have more lax environmental restrictions and acquire land either through force or by never allowing people to purchase land outright (in the case of China I believe). I don't know if we want to go that far, but at a certain point we have to do something because riding around on congested aging highways everywhere is not the answer.
Also, tying in gun control or enforced Medicare-for-all is a good way of convincing people who are on the edge of public transit to not support you politically if they are a package deal, which right now it appears to be.
Yet, for some reason, it can only be taken advantage of by people who can afford to pay the ticket.
Nevermind the fact having the ticket system in the first place does cost money.
1) Systems and equipment to issue and collect fares -- boxes, kiosks, scanners, currency handling, staff to collect and deposit currency, arrangements with payment providers, educational materials about paying fares, websites with instructions on how to pay fares (often in multiple languages)
2) Systems to enforce fare payment -- humans, typically, to police the fares
3) Systems to analyze fare rates -- are fares too low, too high, are they being paid at the correct rates, do we need to publish new content on how much fares are changing this year
4) Queues to pay fares -- entering a bus or train requires a turnstile, tap, or other impediment that slows access
5) Systems to ensure everyone has access -- either fares price out the poorest, or we provide means for the poor to get reduced and free fares. Provide systems for workers to get fares subsidized through their workplaces.
These systems are really inefficient. I mean, they might be run efficiently, but their existence is itself an inefficiency. If we believe transit is useful and valuable, we could simply pay for it once in taxes. Cutting out all the fare maintenance systems would save a huge amount of money, which could be spent on maintenance, comfort, cleaning, additional routes, etc. and the experience would be much nicer (hop on/hop off whenever you need).
In Hamburg, where I live, there is nothing like that.
In Seattle, we tap our cards on something that looks like this: https://seattletransitblog.com/2011/06/28/dont-tap-orca-here...
It's pretty quick, but on the busiest bus routes it slows things down.
Edit: Reading up, it looks like they don't really have those things, and rely on a combination of very infrequent inspectors (which do slow things and cost money) and the honor system.
You just enter the bus/train/tram vehicle. Maybe a ticket controllant comes, maybe not (most often they dont come and check)
EDIT: To get a ticket you simple open the app and "check in". When you leave the transport you open the app and "check out". At the end of the day the system calculated the cheapest ticket for you based on that 24h period. This works across the entire country. From local buses to high speed intercity rail
That's messed up.
The Berlin F24, on the other hand...
The inspectors don't slow things down. (They do cause other more serious issues, but still far less than anywhere in the US.)
Making us buy a ticket to use transport, while the poor uses it for free would be on another level.
Public transport is already funded through taxes. We already paid for it.
In Germany the local public transport is only partially funded by taxes. Tickets / Taxes is roughly 50 / 50.
The Autobahn is mostly funded by taxes.
Still, it's rare for me to go further away and it wouldn't make sense to pay 50 bucks a month for that. And if I go to another major city I would use a high speed train which wouldn't be included anyway.
So 20 a month for all city travel is pretty ideal here, especially with Spain's low wages.
Likewise, there's a country-wide public transit planner, 9292.nl. It works across all public transit companies. Seeing how fractured other countries' public transit are, it's amazing how 9292 came to be. I have no idea why Dutch public transit companies decided to work together to make it possible.
Now before you mention it, yes I know employers have to pay for transportation to and from work, but that doesn't solve the problem for self employed people or visitors/tourists or occasional travelers.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I wanted to go to Den Bosch to see some friends. It was cheaper and faster to drive from the edge of Limburg to Den Bosch & pay for fuel/parking than it was to take the train from our local station (for 2 people). I can live with the extra time required, but the cost was too much.
If the government wants to incentivize more train travel, I shouldn't need to pay for than the cost of a many eurozone plane tickets to travel from Eindhoven to Amsterdam by train.
a) 49 >> 9
b) the 9 Euro ticket was a one-time novelty
The Uber experience on transit would make lots never riders and occasional riders use transit more often.
The mental load is a lot of some people at the end of the day, driving is just easier.
Google Maps does offer "Buy Ticket" buttons for a number of agencies that have opened up their systems. They're far from universal coverage. But a new Uber for Transit would snap up the APIs Google has worked to open up and then be in the same position.
You use either Google Maps, Apple Maps, or the Transit app to tell you what to get on. You either buy a local nfc card or have an app on your phone you tap on the sensor to pay.
Having to use more than one app isn't an significant burden compared to the fact that that trains and busses don't come to the places I want at the times I want reliably.
* in Denver, CO - there is a custom app that works fairly well until your phone is dead. Couldn't find a place to purchase tap cards, but the paper ticket vending machines worked well enough.
* Seattle, WA - still working on mobile NFC tickets, and the current mobile ticketing system seems to only allow existing (> 1 year ago) customers to pay using a credit card. All new customers seem to only be allowed to use the app by filling up their balance using cash at a convenience store. Tap cards were an extremely rare find last summer. Only a select few buses seem to send their tracking data to Apple/Google maps, the OneBusAway app was really the only one that was close to accurate.
* Dallas, TX - yet another custom app implementation
* Austin, TX - _another_ custom app
* Portland, OR - can only buy tap cards at some retailers, BUT they accept contactless credit cards and have an app that integrates with mobile NFC
While I haven't been to NYC and a number of other cities with large transit systems, Portland OR and Washington DC had the best implementations, largely because they simply integrated with the native mobile NFC wallet. DC even lets you provision your card straight from the iOS Wallet app, though you can't use a standard contactless credit card.
IMO the solution isn't an app, but rather simplifying fares and accepting contactless credit cards for fares. In Portland you "earn" your passes by riding rather than needing to purchase in advance - once you have paid $100 in a month you're automatically exempted from fares for the rest of a month.
It would be kinda neat if we standardized across the country on one app, but it's nowhere near the top of the list of things to address. Most people mostly use one or a small number of public transit systems. You can just have more than one app. Municipalities are also increasingly opening up the payment system such that apps like Google Maps and Transit are able to offer buy ticket buttons.
There are 90 million Germans. Even if they all stopped doing all non-work-related travels immediately, it wouldn't push the needle thanks to China and India.
People in India and China hate pollution just as much as the rest of us, they've just been forced by their governments to endure it for the sake of growth. India last year banned single-use plastics. Few other countries have made those sorts of sweeping regulations.
Traveling time without WIFI is a much higher burden to me than normal traveling time, where I can work on my projects. I actually like working on the train. It is a nice environment. But without that possibility, long train rides are a chore to me.
And it will be interesting to see how crowded the trains will be.
Durig the 9-Euro ticket times, city-to-city trains were uncomfortably densely packed.
I would think the train can have a much more powerful antenna to talk to mobile towers and then relay that to the passangers. So that WIFI is better than mobile data.
This report[0] says it's 62-78% nationwide. Of the neighbouring alps countries Austria is 78-88% and Switzerland is 93-96%.
[0]: https://www.umlaut.com/uploads/documents/Reports-Certificate...
O2 Unlimited:
- 32,99€/month for 4G/5G capped at 3mbit with unlimited data
- 42,99€/month for 4G/5G capped at 15mbit with unlimited data
- 62,99€/month for 4G/5G up to 500mbit with with unlimited data
Vodafone:
- 79,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimted data
Telekom:
- 84,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimited data
1und1:
- 49,99€/month with 4G/5G capped at 10mbit with unlimited data
- 69,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimited data
Not sure what you'd call "very remote rural areas", but when on the main rail lines through Bavaria (Munich-Rosenheim-Salzburg-Vienna and -Rosenheim-Innsbruck-Verona) if you're in the countryside you'll often experience patchy or zero mobile coverage, never mind 4G/5G.
* Usually the first 50gb is max speed and then it drops to 25/25 etc - which is still really fast.
Of course train wifi on intercities has the same issues since it relies on the same infrastructure. Even when it works, it tends to be a pretty poor experience and the network is low speed, over subscribed, etc.
YMMV I guess. But I just wanted to say that I don't think this is completely accurate.
https://www.nperf.com/en/map/DE/-/187893.O2-Mobile/signal/?l...
The track between Berlin, Hannover, Osnabruck is particularly bad. You get some connectivity near those cities but most of the way my phone is useless.
Telekom is better but they too have issues in the country side. I also encounter this issue professionally with our customers as we sell a SAAS app that our customers have to use on site and a disturbingly large number of our customers have either very poor or no connectivity as they tend to be on the edges of cities or in the middle of nowhere. Which in Germany means forget about 5G and hope for the best with a 3G/4G connection with one or two bars if you are standing next to a window. It's a specifically German problem, other countries in the EU have more modern infrastructure.
Why is that? Would a VPN not make it safe against most threat models? I mean assuming you are not working at a place where government actors are trying to target you specifically.
Or can they inject something to force the VPN to disable and hope non-encrypted data gets transmitted?
> annoying is that the price ... too expensive
>.>
The big improvement is that the ticket you buy for your home town now also works in cities you visit, no more figuring out a different byzantine price model each time you book a hotel.
Imagine vehicle tax would only permit to drive on the roads of your home town and going elsewhere would require you to register locally. Until yesterday, that was exactly how public transit worked.