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Comment by bahnkenner | Hacker News Reader

The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things.

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...

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Exactly.

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.

Which reminds me to give a shout-out to the Clipper card. The SF Bay Area really did the right thing here. 24 different systems, all of which use the same card: https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/where-to-use.html

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.

Yeah, not as much in the Bay Area these days, but the Clipper card is a huge improvement over the previous system. And I imagie by the time I eventually run down my Clipper balance I'll be fine with my phone.

It's been a while since I set it up, but I'm pretty sure that setting up Clipper on Google Pay (or Google Wallet or whatever it is) is using my old Clipper balance. So you might be able to swap it over now and have it ready to go for your next trip.

They not to keep too much of a balance on any one card. It's something $50 and a 2+ hour wait one the phone to transfer balances between cards IIRC.

  The SF Bay Area really did the right thing here.

No, no they really didn't. They spent millions rebranding it, there is (was?) a huge lag between adding value and posting the value depending on how you added value. The original card readers were incredibly unreliable, and because Clipper/TransLink did absolutely nothing to unify* the fare structure across the twenty-four different systems you could be set up for a nasty encounter with a pop cop because you couldn't tag on or get charged the max fare when you can't tap off. Been there, done that.

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.

It's not a perfect thing, sure. But it's a big step forward. It's hugely better than having to deal with each system separately; I've had days when I've used 4 systems, for example.

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.

Sure, I've done similar trips and the worst part was not the payment but rather the obstacles that BART puts up and the sparse service in the suburbs. BART's TVMs have historically made it difficult to pay with cash and credit cards. TransLink/Clipper didn't fix that.

  If people are interested in the history that drives some of what it
  ended up the way it did

The answer is, of course, that the Bay Area is fiercely provincial. The disparate payment methods were merely a symptom, as is evidenced by the wide array of fare policies. We didn't/don't need a single payment system we need a single hierarchy to unify all of the different transit systems and then we need that hierarchy to implement a single fare policy across the whole Bay Area.

  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.

The problem with this is that by the time TransLink rolled around the rest of the world already had the technology and did a better job. Portland's TriMet had mobile payments (QR codes and NFC) long before the Bay Area. Mifare had already been exploited, and a huge chunk of the Bay Area's buses were connected to cellular data networks.

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.

> We didn't/don't need a single payment system

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.

Funding public transit is a zero-sum game. TransLink/Clipper was a bloated giveaway to military contractors that left the Bay Area with a ridiculously flawed implementation. That's money that could've been better spent elsewhere (e.g. electrifying Caltrain). It wasn't state of the art in 2006 and it's sure as shit not in 2023. My issue is that TransLink/Clipper isn't something that should be celebrated. This isn't grade school where you're congratulated for your participation, the actual results matter. Worst of all TransLink/Clipper didn't actually solve the ticket problem. You still have Muni and BART pushing their own proprietary ticketing solutions.

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.

Apparently it’s time for a reminder that the flag/downmod button is absolutely not a disagree button. This comment definitely contributes to the conversation.

> Clipper/TransLink

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

OV-chipkaart is actually a joint venture between NS, Connexxion, GVB, HTM and RET (all various public transport operators).

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 (was?) a huge lag between adding value and posting the value depending on how you added value.

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.

Ireland is getting there, with the Leap card. It works on city rail / trams and most buses including those run by private firms, operating expenses routes to major towns. Unfortunately our major rail lines don't accept it :( but that may be due to the need to provide seat bookings.

Clipper was an awful experience for a non-American like me when I visited last year. I couldn't install the mobile app (the app listing is region locked to the US). I couldn't set it up on Google Pay either (the Google Pay offerings were also region locked).

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.

Agreed. Another much needed example would be nationwide reciprocity for concealed carry firearms. It’s too easy to be on the wrong side of the law when crossing state lines and the regulatory nuances are difficult to understand state to state.

It seems like there is a very easy way to remain on the right side of concealed carry laws, which is to simply not carry a concealed weapon. If you want to do so, familiarizing yourself with the laws as you cross state lines is the very least you can do.

Demanding reciprocity is like saying ‘I should be able to turn right on red lights in NYC because my car has Jersey plates’.

It seems like there is a very easy way to remain the right side of $SOME_LAWS, which is to simply not commit crimes in whatever region you travel. If you want to do so, familiarizing yourself with the laws as you cross state lines is the very least you can do.

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.

Probably an advantage many places would have over somewhere like the US which is quite fragmented and struggles to consistently coordinate in solving broad problems. I always remember just 2-3 years ago, driving onto a toll road in the eastern USA and there was an attendant at the booth. You paid them in notes/coins, and the attendant got the coins in their hand, leant out of their box and deposited them in a payment slot to raise the boom gate. I'm sure there was some rationale, but it was pretty bizarre.

That's not really a coordination problem, that's just a toll road that's not yet moved to all-electronic tolling.

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).

Yes, bit of a mixture. Sorry, I should've mentioned that (from memory) it was because they didn't have banknote readers or credit card payment and the US is still using dollar bills. So unless you had a bucket of very low denomination coins, you had to pay a physical person to then convert to coins and reach around to deposit them.

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.

It almost doesn't matter in the US at this point as I basically don't use cash any longer but I mostly dislike $1/$2-ish coin denominations. It's a big enough amount that I can't basically ignore their existence but I can't stick them in a wallet.

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.

That law provided neither penalties nor funding for improving ETC compatibility, so it's no wonder most states haven't bothered. California, for instance, already has statewide interop – and has for decades. In fact you can use your transponder for parking at SFO. I believe the various toll agencies out here have been issuing "6C" compatible transponders since 2019 with the goal of completely phasing out the old "Title 21" transponders by 2024. ISO/IEC 18000-63 (6C) is being used by Washington, Colorado, Utah, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana.

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.

> 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

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.

And for visitors who may not even speak the primary language, public transit is awful in most places in terms of onboarding jet lagged visitors. Apparently no one does UX trials of people who have zero familiarity with the system and don't speak the language--though at least they maybe accommodate major Western languages. But, in general, it's pretty awful and you at least should do some research in advance.

I agree that vending machines are really a mess. However I recommend the Deutsche Bahn Navigator App. If you have an account you can easily get most tickets.

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 was just in Amsterdam. One of our locals there said that, although there's an ongoing switch to just tapping contactless credit cards, he advised just getting a contactless transit chip card because even if it cost a few dollar more it would more reliably work everywhere. Things have improved in most places over time but it can still be confusing for the occasional visitor.

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.

The UK has since simplified that into one ticket, possibly also a receipt of you ask for it.

Prior to this, the ticket and seat reservation were seperate bit of paper.

Yeah, it seemed better last time I was traveling there as I recall.

The company that runs the DB system (HAFAS) provides this system for half of the European railways though. And, interestingly enough, also for BART.

https://www.hacon.de/unternehmen/

Their codebase has to be a wild ride. There are still traces from the days it ran as Windows binaries in CGI fashion (very much doubt they still do it like that, just like a large number of eBay URLs still contain the ebayISAPI.dll bit from the time the site was literally a Microsoft IIS plugin). On the DB instance it also outputs like five different generations of UIs depending on the exact parameters you hand it. You can also find several different iterations of APIs, like one search API will output actual, non-trivial JS code to fill auto-completes, another gives you JSON with a totally different format and yet another XML with everything slightly different again. From their job postings it follows their backend is C++.

The previous system came from the 80s and ran on multiple Tandem/Nonstop clusters.

It remembers X.25 networks.

As far as I am aware, although the system is very capable it started as someone's PhD thesis in the mid 80s and has been developed since then.

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!

<off-topic> I couldn't stop giggling for 5 minutes straight after hearing the name of this system. Brilliant!

> I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.

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.

Doesn’t work in Rotterdam last I tried(October last year)

In my experience the TVMs in Berlin were fine, but it was easier to just get the app because I don't make a habit of carrying around a ton of cash. The biggest problem I had was the TVMs at the Frankfurt airport, half of which were broken, and none had a clear explanation of what the different ticket types were.

Every transit system should have a “tourist day pass” that is moderately expensive but allows you to use anything for 24 hours or so.

Integrate it into my visa (stamp).

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.

Depending on what I'm doing I often don't want to pay a lot for public transit because I won't use it much. And often don't even get a stamp, e.g. going to the UK from the US.

Very impractical on some routes, no one is even going to look at your passport in Schengen area flights.

Most visitors don't need visa stamps in their passport.

Depends where you go and where you're coming from. Just a matter of time before it's all RFID'd into the passport or access is granted to to the central db to random transit cops.

City passes are mostly a lousy deal unless you're zipping here and there all day every day. Pay per use is almost always a better deal but you need to know the particulars and get the right card/amount.

True, but I often find them worth it to not have to worry about buying appropriate tickets for every journey when I'm a tourist in an unfamiliar city. And on many transit systems, the options seem to be, "Be a local and get an affordable pass or reloadable card, buy individual tickets for every journey, or be a visitor and buy a moderately more expensive tourist day pass."

This is extra true if you're traveling with a family including kids, as I often am.

That’s the whole point. Tourists won’t really care if they spend more than they have to, and they don’t have to worry about it at all. Regulars and the price conscious will go the cheaper route.

Tourists will often just take taxis. Why fool around with figuring out the particulars of the local mass transit for a few trips over a short time.

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.

It depends on the city and where you're staying. Heathrow to much of central London can literally be about $100 cheaper on the tube and just as fast if you just have carryon luggage during normal times of the day. (Don't remember the situation last time I was in Copenhagen.)

I agree that tourists in an unfamiliar city will often just take a taxi by default though.

Yes like in london.

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.

In London, aren't you pushed towards using a contactless credit or debit card?

(They expire at 4am, though the point remains.)

Oyster cards still seem to be pretty common though I think you can use contactless credit cards in a lot of situations these these days.

Commuters with monthly or longer tickets will need to use an Oyster card, but anyone with only weekly, daily or individual tickets is fine with a contactless credit card.

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.

I'm sure tourists are aware of all this tricks in the first 30 minutes that they are in london /s

> but anyone with only weekly […] tickets is fine with a contactless credit 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.

In Rome, you can now just tap contactless payment cards (/ smartphones, I assume) to readers in buses/ at underground stations. Huge step up from the previous system, which was based on buying paper tickets from newsagents.

But now Italian newsagents don’t get to laugh at us pronouncing the ‘g’ in biglietti. Makes me feel a bit nostalgic/sad for some reason.

The "g" is pronounced (in a sense). In Italian, the digraph "gl" represents a single sound /ʎ/, which is distinct from the sound represented by "l" alone (/l/)

I think having tickets at all is antiquated. In the Netherlands, there are terminals at the stations you tap your bank card against to "check in". When you get off, you tap it again at that station and your card gets charged. Sometimes the conductor comes around with a device to make sure people have checked in.

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.

I have about half a dozen different ways to get from one train station to another, some with first and second class options. Just tapping in and out would not be sufficient to find out how much I have to pay or in some cases which company to reimburse.

For that reason before tapping in, you can select the correct class and discount in the app.

So you don't just need a card. You also need an app. Which I seemed unable to setup when I was last in the Netherlands.

So after a quick google it seems that the only thing is does is "automatically" calculate the price based on start and end of your trip. I put automatically in quotes because you have to stamp in/out every time you switch trains and it pre fines you for not doing it correctly the moment you use it. I think I prefer just being able to select the correct ticket ahead of time.

Systems where you have to checkout are always problematic in my view. Huge queue because one terminal is broken etc. lead to maxed out fares and unhappy customers.

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 will given Berlin credit here — after checking in to our accommodations (took a taxi from the airport), I poked a ticket machine, quickly saw the Union Jack flag and got the machine into English. Couple minutes later we had our 1 week passes in hand. In general I found the system very approachable, using google maps for route planning.

Oh, as long as you stay within a transportation region you are fine (mostly). Problems start when you want to travel across transportation regions...

It is ok, but still a far cry from London for example, where you simply hold your card while entering and it automatically gives you the best price for your account. So if you drive around a lot as a tourist you just cap at the weekly price once you reach it.

If you tried that in Germany there would be a legal challenge on the grounds that a system which knows where the user travelled infringes on privacy :D

With the caveat that the cap is always a fixed Monday to Sunday period, so if your stay doesn't align with that, you'll get to pay an additional capping period.

Can confirm.

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.

The same thing happened to me and my buddy in February.

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 :)

Like the SFO airport that uses the internationally recognized train symbol for the tram to the garage, and the not-recognized-anywhere BART logo for the train to the region's principal city.

What language should they accomodate? Internationally the "standard" is just local language + English. Should they choose Spanish? If they wanted to choose the language with the most speakers they would rightfully choose a dialect of Chinese.

A good example of this complexity is Berlin. Many people have monthly passes for just A and B zones, which comprise the bulk of central Berlin. However, the new airport is just over the border in zone C, which requires an additional ticket. The transit authority knows this and will catch and fine people who neglected or forgot to buy a B to C ticket.

What is complex about the B/C border? That Hönow is B? Because else, it is literary the federal state border. A/B is the S-Bahn-Ring. Sure, three zones are not super simple and where zone C ends is somewhat arbitrary. But aside from that, it's the most logical and simple solution possible.

Generally, I agree, it isn't very complicated to understand. But, it's very easy to forget to buy a C ticket if you're used to hopping on the U-bahn with your monthly AB ticket.

The announcement mentions you do need it when announcing the stop. By then it is prob too late, though.

If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that.

> The announcement mentions you do need it when announcing the stop. By then it is prob too late, though.

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.

It is pretty good, but on time here means to leave the wagon to buy a ticket and take the next train (unless you buy it on the app).

>If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that.

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.

That would be great, I agree.

An airport being outside of city limits has its historical reason (the Allies have agreed that the entire area of Berlin could only be served by airlines operated by one of the four occupational forces, so East Germany simply built an airport just beyond city limits so that they could serve Berlin with its domestic airline). But an airport being just outside of the "regular" fare zone is something that's unfortunately not unusual.

It's also high noise and air pollution, so you'd want it to be far from the city.

That said, look up Tempelhofer Flughafen, which was right in the city center of Berlin and served passengers until 2008. Now it is just a huge empty field where people do sports and barbecue.

I don't think an airport being outside of the city limits is that unusual, either.

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, …

Do you mean that the airport is outside of Germany? Or what else is "federal state border"? And what is a S-Bahn ring anyways?

I visit Germany often and yet this makes no sense to me. Don't assume it's so simple for everyone.

Germany is federation of 16 or so states

The airport is located in Schönefeld, a municipality in Brandenburg, just outside of Berlin, which is also a state.

S-Bahn ring, usually called ring for short, refers to a prominent circular route around the city center of Berlin.

Berlin is one of the 16 federal states of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Federal in the American sense is a bit of a false friend for Germans: It means basically the same, but Americans use it to signify the unity of the states, while Germans talk about the states of the Union. So if we say federal borders we actually mean state borders and would otherwise say national or country borders.

If you think that Berlin's zone system is complex, you haven't seen the public transport in many other cities like Munich which has 6 zones or Japanese cities where trains are operated by different companies.

Berlin's system is rather simple and comparably cheap.

Yeah but these days Japanese trains can all use the suica (and similar) cards to tap in and out, right? You don't actually need to understand the different rail companies or zones or whatever, you just get your one card and put money on it and then tap.

For regional, yes, a Passmo, Suica, or whatever card works pretty much everywhere. For Shinkansen service, you still have to buy tickets.

This is an improvement over how Berlin used to handle people who crossed arbitrary borders within the city, though.

Your comment is a fascinating take on perspective. To you it's a fractured, difficult system. To this American, it has been absolutely futuristic every time I've been there. Wish we could get such an awful system anywhere near where I live.

Yup. As an American, I found it quite easy to navigate transit systems every time I visited Germany; most recently Berlin. Especially these days with things like Google/Apple maps transit directions that work more-or-less flawlessly. But maybe it's because I'm used to systems like Caltrain that don't even have a functioning app, and which just randomly cancel trains for huge chunks of the day, or BART, which has an even-more-insane pay-per-distance system than anything I've seen elsewhere.

If you go from the US to Europe, you'll think European public transit is great. If you go from Europe to East Asia, your perspective will change again.

For regular commuters the price is a big deal. Not only where tickets crossing multiple zones complicated to get but also unreasonably expensive (~200Eur/Month). In contrast the 49 Euros is less expensive than (almost?) any single zone monthly ticket out there.

Monthly train pass on New Jersey Transit, LIRR and Metro North can get to above $300 once you are 20 miles from NYC.

About 40 miles outside of Boston I'd be around $500/month to have commuter rail plus subway per month.

They're essentially actively trying to dissuade talking public transit regionally. Curious choice.

Driving and parking would cost even more. Pretty typical of commuting into major cities.

Commuting into a city, especially without free parking, on a daily basis costs a lot.

I mean, you don't have to figure it out. You can just punch in start and end of your journey into one of several apps that work nationwide, and pay whatever it says.

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.

You're out of luck, if none of the route segments is served by Deutsche Bahn (which is often the case for regional routes), because then you'll be unable to buy your ticket using the most common nation-wide app DB Navigator.

Or worse, you can still buy the ticket, but it's not valid for any trains actually in service. This stuff is really non-obvious. For example, train operators can license certain Deutsche Bahn trademarks without accepting Deutsche Bahn tickets.

Where? As far as I know, all the Deutsche Bahn Tickets for regional traffic use the Deutschlandtarif, which is accepted in all "normal" (excluding heritage trains and the likes) regional trains in all of Germany.

Is the Metronom (Hamburg-Bremen) covered by the 49€ ticket, too?

A quick Google seems to suggest that that's the case, and their website is advertising ways to buy the Deutschlandticket pretty clearly.

The example I had in mind was for an S-Bahn in Karlsruhe (operated by AVG, using the S-Bahn trademark under license, but otherwise unaffiliated with Deutsche Bahn) which was considered a tram, not a regular regional train while it traveled within city limits. This meant that DB tickets weren't necessarily valid, and AVG claimed as much. I expect AVG recognizes the bw tarif under which DB sells train tickets, so this probably is no longer an issue.

That's not true, they sell tickets for many regional transport associations.

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.

There are regions where the DB app will only sell you tickets that cross the region's borders, but not tickets that are wholly inside the region. There's even at least one region I know of that straight up does not do online ticketing. You have to buy physical tickets, in person, at a machine.

DB Navigator for regional transport is hit-and-miss. I've been using it a lot around the southwest, but it's fickle and sometimes fails to offer me tickets for no clear reasons (seemingly at random; the same connections by the same companies work on other days). And don't forget that a lot of the German hinterlands has very spotty to no mobile data.

That can be much more expensive as it won't automatically find the cheapest option for day passes or multi-day passes. And it's not very convenient to look up and pay separately for every ride if you visit a city and travel a lot.

This is typical in most countries that aren't very small. I'm struggling to think of a moderately-sized country that doesn't work have regional transit authorities with their own ticketing systems. I haven't been everywhere in the world so I bet they do exist, but I've yet to see one.

While Japan has regional ticketing systems and companies, they did standardize nationally on supporting 3 major prepaid transit cards (pasmo, suica, icoca) so most rapid transit and regional transit are low friction enough to just tap in and tap out. China has done the same with T-Union.

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.

If only NY/NJ could figure this out. I often take a longer route to work as it's much cheaper than buying the three separate tickets I'd need.

> 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.

There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.

By "local" transit, I mean regional commuter trains (Regionalbahn, Regionalexpress and S-Bahn), not the faster long-distance trains (Intercity and Intercity-Express, the latter being Germany's high-speed trains).

Thanks!

You are so right! I was just in Munich and had some of the most confusing experience in any public transport system I’ve ever used. And I’ve seen many! It was so shocking. The UIs of the ticket machines are horrendously slow and confusing. Stop names are always in German even when switching languages. This, of course, doesn’t align with Google Maps half the time, as my GM is set to English.

What stop names are translated?

I suppose Hbf<->Central Station, but apart from that yeah, can't think of other examples

In cities outside of germany, when you arrive at a new city you buy a transit ticket, you swipe that at the entrance and the exit, and anything related to zones or whatever works automatically, you don't have to think about it.

I read your comment as suggesting that this is the norm outside Germany. While systems like this exist (e.g. in London) in my experience they aren't as common as I wish they were.

What did it used to be.It’s always been this way in the last 3+ decades since privatization.

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