Travel across Germany with the 49 Euro ticket
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49travel.vercel.app
On the other hand, if you are planning to use the 49 euro ticket... well, you either can't make it for the time slot you want, or you'll spend 4h-5h (best case scenario) with multiple changes in between. Also, regional trains are not like the ones one see in the movies: they are usually crowded, noisy, not that clean, and they are not always on time... which is rather critical if you are changing trains many times (ICE trains are more like the ones you see in the movies).
Regional trains are as clean as any other trains. ICE really aren't that nice (and I find it hard to accept the price difference on that basis - the only reason why I'd ever take ICE is because I don't feel like taking 5 hours to travel from Cologne to Berlin).
They can be crowded around the times people are commuting, but otherwise they're not that crowded and it's easy to find a place to sit. If you're using the 49 Euro ticket to check out places nearby, there's no reason to believe you'll end up in a crowded train. Just make a tiny bit of effort not to take a train at peak times.
They're only particularly noisy if, I don't know, there's a big game locally and people are drinking on the trains. Even in a full train when everybody's going to or coming from work, people are really fucking quiet.
I'm not sure what your angle is, but I'm not sure why you're misrepresenting the state of German regional trains.
I'm not saying regional ones are crap, just that in my experience ICE trains have been always cleaner than regional ones.
> They can be crowded around the times people are commuting, but otherwise they're not that crowded and it's easy to find a place to sit. If you're using the 49 Euro ticket to check out places nearby, there's no reason to believe you'll end up in a crowded train. Just make a tiny bit of effort not to take a train at peak times.
That's what I wanted to say. But again, compared to ICE, regional trains are "more" crowded (e.g., in peak times you see people standing and you can't barely move. I hardly see that on ICE)
> They're only particularly noisy if, I don't know, there's a big game locally and people are drinking on the trains. Even in a full train when everybody's going to or coming from work, people are really fucking quiet.
The more people, the more noise. Nothing particular about Germans/Germany. This is a human thing. So, taking into account the peak times, I think this is just pure common sense.
> I'm not sure what your angle is, but I'm not sure why you're misrepresenting the state of German regional trains.
My main point was that with the 49 euro ticket, one cannot travel as comfortably as one may think across Germany: mainly in terms of time.
You'd think so, but they actually are really fucking quiet. Do I have to make a recording for you? People generally don't talk that much on trains, at least in Germany. Do you even live here? MOST people are on their phones, listening to music, just waiting for their next stop, or trying their best not to interact with anybody around them.
> My main point was that with the 49 euro ticket, one cannot travel as comfortably as one may think across Germany: mainly in terms of time.
If your point was about time, you would've said so and I would've agreed. Instead you went on an unnecessary and inaccurate rant because you seem to have a bug about regional trains that I don't get.
Regional trains are fairly comfortable much of the time, and the vast majority of the non-peak regional trains I take are great and the only complaints I would have are all the delays (due to flagging investment in rail infrastructure over the past 30 years), not the trains themselves. I'm not sure what else you want for 49 Euros per month for access to the entire country. Before, we got to pay 10, 20+ Euros per ticket. It's an amazing step of progress.
Some local networks have modern, nice trains. Others still operate designs that are from the late 60s and sound like a circular saw (e.g. the old S-Bahn trains or the Metro system in Munich). Some have nice seats and toilets in their S-Bahns, others have no toilets and super hard seats. Some have modern, high platforms with barrier-free access, others still use very low platforms and small diesel-powered carriages from the early 80s. Some operators clean the trash inside the train regularly during the day, others... don't. Some networks / lines are at (or even severely over) capacity, some are not.
There is no universal "german public transport experience", IMO. Maybe GP just lives in a region with old and neglected rolling stock. :)
Long-distance trains are (almost) all operated by DB Fernverkehr and thus there aren't such extreme differences.
Can confirm, buskers on my previous commute, somewhere on the Ringbahn near Landsberger Allee.
When someone is rude, others will call them to attention. Big exception is bar wagon when there is some soccer match, nevertheless that is only on that part. Elsewhere you'd find silence being respected.
Go to München around Oktoberfest. (or other regional fair in Bavaria).
I can attest that I had a few trips where I could not sit anywhere for at least 75% of the trip.
Some were on RE ... but not all. It can happen also on ICE, albeit is less probable.
Our local public transportation communter card costs twice that lol
In comparision, in neighboring Austria, the same would only cost 91.25 Euros / month for the "Klimaticket Ö". Yes yes, Germanys rail network is bigger, still hurts a tiny bit. :')
It's not cheap, but I have an acquaintance who got a Bahncard 100 with 1st class access because she works at the Bahn and it sounds quite life changing. ICEs on major routes are somewhat frequent and you can just get on the train without reservations or anything. Wanna go from Hamburg to Berlin for the day? You pretty much just walk to the train station and 2-2.5 hours later are in Berlin. You can do stuff on the train. Read a book, watch a movie, start work on your new startup's app or get a currywurst from the restaurant car. I am quite jealous of this.
Ah, true, I calculated with the (cheaper) yearly price. It is indeed more expensive if you don't pay the whole 4,339 Euros / year at once.
Deutsche Bahn employees can buy for 1 euro a 24 hours ticket to travel any train in German (ICE included) and bring someone else with them for free. That is the ticket for personal reasons.
If the travel is business related, then you always travel on first class to the destination. Among employees is very common/confortable to travel several times per week betwen locations.
The free day tickets for private use that every employee gets are limited to 16 a year (but only one a month is tax free) and don't allow to take someone with you.
By the way, not every employee can use first class for business related travel (many can).
From Düsseldorf to Frankfurt, using regional trains, you have to change once in Koblenz (RE 5 to RE 2). This is a connection which takes 3 hours and 50 minutes and runs every 2 hours (with numerous other options in between).
https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
IC and ICE ratio of being on time within 15 minutes of schedule: 82% in May 2023
RB/RE ratio of being on time within 15 minutes of schedule: 98% in May 2023
Or in other words, ICEs are late roughly 10 times as often as RB/REs are.
As for losing your connecting train, it's definitely a danger if you arrive with 15 minutes delay, yes. That's also why if you reclaim parts of your ticket price, they consider the whole journey and not just the delay of some individual train. So a 15 minutes delay can in the end mean you arrived 1:30 hour late.
Or maybe it was the plague...
To go to Russia, you needed special trains as they don't use European gauge, electricity or train control standards there. We have a few in Helsinki but now they would be useful only if donated to Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_(train)
That said, we are hoping to take a 10 day trip to Germany in November. For a short tourist hop, it probably doesn't make sense for us to use this ticket given that time is of the essence (IE: take the ICE). We might buy the Bahn card though to lock in some discounts.
I understand a lot of the criticism of the transit system in this thread, but when I compare the options and flexibility there compared to Washington / Oregon (where I live, and comparable in geographic size to Germany) it becomes readily apparent how superior any European nation's transit options are to our own.
It’s a bit more sparse on the 100 mile stretch between Vancouver WA and Olympia but it’s not really that far, two thirds of Hamburg-Berlin which is less densely populated than western parts of Germany. But just look at France or Spain to see high speed rail working well in more sparsely populated countries.
I think the bigger problem is how much you need a car within American cities which tend to be much more spread out than their European equivalents, though Seattle, Portland and Vancouver Canada aren’t terrible in that respect.
It probably makes sense to prioritise regional rail before HSR, but then if you have to build new railways to get separation from freight traffic, electrify and remove crossings so you can run 100 mph European regional rail speeds and frequencies I guess you may as well build HSR.
Also you can get the Probe BahnCard for 17,99€ for 3 months (i.e. cancel it after at most 6 weeks).
Was a bit weird at first with the local Munich provider time restricting it to before the month, vs DB which allowed for the current month, but whose system was overwhelmed. This actually forced me to get an unnecessary local week pass until DB sorted out their issues and allowed for purchase. Seems as the local Munich provider MVGO also corrected their system and allow for the current month as well with no waiting period.
Honestly wish every state would implement something like this, would encourage more travel, adventures, and quality of life improvement overall.
Or did you mean that I should refer to the code while describing each step?
Maybe it's silly, but I guess, relevant - I also find it just exciting to read a post filled with syntax-coloured monospace boxes strewn through it. Maybe others feel the same? Possibly it's like the code equivalence to diagrams and illustrations.
Yes, the code is pretty straightforward. It was mostly going down rabbit holes, or finding API's that was the hard part.
> I also find it just exciting to read a post filled with syntax-coloured monospace boxes strewn through it.
Haha, I like it too!
This is exactly the kind of thing that made me want to build this.
I think that your example is a good one for this: It is taking advantage of subsidies for 'luxury' by someone who can obviously afford to pay for his leisure activities.
And that's fine as long as there is nothing else left to spend public money on.
The whole train infrastructure is very self sufficient in Germany and they indeed export trains and tracks and all associated technology all over the place too, hence the term "oversufficient".
I don't know what the right balance is, but I do know it's not necessarily as simple as asking if all transport costs are met at the point of travel.
Even if it does provide more travel options, does that provide more value than it costs? I think that this is straightforward to answer.
I ask the same questions every time the topic pops up because all the praises in the comment tend to boils down to "it's good because it's cheaper". Sure everyone likes cheaper but that is not really a convincing argument.
At 99€ it would have massively lower user numbers. It's already to a large degree a commuter ticket at 49€ - at 99€ alternative tickets would be the better choice for many.
In any case, the point is that it is not clear to me what actual need this fulfills.
On regional trains you can travel Germany from north to south in less than 14 hours with 5 changes as opposed 8 hours with 2 changes for 125 EUR one-way on long-distance trains.
With the 49 EUR/month ticket you can hop off the train anytime you are tired of the journey. Can't do that with the 125 EUR one-time, one-way long-distance train ticket.
I totally see young and elderly people do this on regional trains.
People being able to move around easily would bring commerce to more areas. If 50 euros gets more people moving around and shopping at various places compared to 100 euro cutting that down by a lot.
I'd like to read arguments beyond "great, tickets are cheaper!".
Last week I was on vacation. We missed a train because the previous was delayed. We then had to take a taxi because the last bus departed at 17:00 (sic) and we arrived at 17:30.
I rural Germany, you need a car to get anywhere. Especially at night (aka after 17:00).
What the...?
We have the same issue and these people gravitate towards nationalist circles because it gives them a sense of belonging in a world that largely doesn't care about them.
Doesn't make them activists of any kind though - just hooligans looking for meaning.
Aber dennoch, sehr cool :)
Thanks for the comment.
BTW: You have Heligoland[1] as a reachable destination. I don't think that's actually true, those are real high sea ferries for which, AFAIK, the 49 Euro ticket is not valid. :)
Nice catch on Heligoland. Thanks. The final journey is via Schiff and I had not filtered that out. However, I don't know if DB categorizes Schiff that are included or excluded from the 49 Euro ticket.
Rest asured, that won't happen.
I sure hope those poor UX software developers didn't have to face the same over-the-top bureacracy and change control committee nonsense we did.
This post doesn't seem to be an official press release, but this confusion seems notable.
In other words: You cannot get a plain old paper ticket without personal information, the ticket is like a cookie which identifies you as a user and thus allows you to be tracked.
Disclaimer: Not a resident of Germany.
While true, something to note is that german train and metro stations, in general, have no ticket barriers. Tickets are only checked by staff on trains, on a (very) random basis for local / metro trains.
I've had months in which my ticket wasn't checked at all while using it every single day.
I don't think I have been checked a single time in the last 2 years.
My experience differs a lot: I go by train (in Germany) rather often and would say that it was more common to be checked than not (i.e. for me the probability of being checked was more than 1/2).
in regional trains you get checked more often (longer distances, less passenger exchange and per-train personal have this as a side effect), but already it's somewhat tricky to have a regional train ticket which is not linked to your name
in public "city" transportation it's semi-random but also there are times & stations where statistically it's most likely to find someone without an ticket and in turn this places/times get checked very frequent and if you are there every day at the specific time-frames you are unlucky and also get checked very frequent. But most times and place combinations do not have this issue and some are close to guaranteed that you don't get checked.
they check the place/time combo they are most likely to find a person without ticket most often
local trains, underground trains, busses and ferries here in Hamburg has no regular ticket checks whatsoever. No checks -> they can't track people via the ticket.
In London meanwhile, you can a weekly PDF statement showing exactly where you were and when! :)
The different providers can differ in what payments they accept and how they send you the ticket. Some also include extra benefits.
According to their website, Mainz, for example seems to sell them in their app and accepts credit card, as well as PayPal payments.
* the default payment method used by 99% of the sellers requires a German bank account
* most sellers request a German credit score (Schufa)
* many apps are not available in the app stores outside of Germany and of course none is available in a FOSS store
Haven't followed it recently, but I have still to see a success story that someone not residing in Germany has actually bought it successfully.
I think the background is:
* Paypal is not very common/popular in Germany so most local transport agencies don't bother
* with SEPA direct debit which is the common payment in Germany you can easily initiate a chargeback after you have already used the ticket. Of course that's fraud, but if you live abroad, the effort to sue you would be tremendous
So in Germany, can you pay your Paypal bills any other way than by credit card? Honest question, when I lived in Germany the last time, Paypal did not exist yet.
I assume you are talking about https://www.bundesbank.de/de/publikationen/berichte/studien/...
> But the same publication says that only a bit over 50% of the population even own a credit card
Because many cashless transactions are done with girocards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard
Germans are usually very aware of hidden costs and credit cards are usually more expensive per transaction.
Germans also usually are much less in debt than for example many US citizens - for example the University education costs much much less. Young adults have 1400 Euros (plus!) on their giro account and it is typical to pay from that account.
I don't know if they do that anymore?
The closest is now the "Quer-durchs-Land" (~"across the country") ticket which is available for any day of the week and currently costs 44€ for the first person and 7€ each for up to 4 more people travelling on it.
no SEPA compatible bank account AFIK, that means most EU bank accounts would work
As usual a complete technical disaster.
The 49€ ticket is to be precise not a ticket.
But a regulations stating that transport providers have to provide tickets for the cost of 49€ valid all across Germany (very strongly oversimplified).
This means there are many places selling this ticket which only are the same in where it's valid, how much it costs, and how it can be validate by any arbitrary public train service.
So some providers sell chip plastic cards with a NFC chip in them and some ID+Name+Date printed on it which get shipped to you.
Other provider only sell it through the App using your phones NFC chip or (I think, not sure) QR as fallback.
Similar some might only accept SEPA payment mandates (i.e. implicitly require and EU bank account) and require you to have an German address to ship the card to. Other require SEPA and hand it to you personally not caring about an address in Germany and others might accept Google Pay, Apple Pay or Paypal and are online only.
While this sounds bad, for most German people this is a complete non issue as they just buy it form the same transportation provider they used before using the same payment method they where using before. (The reason this works technically is because there already was a system for validating tickets valid in the transport net of one provider issued by another, most commonly DB long distance tickets also covering public transportation around the time of arrival/departure).
I believe there are taxes in Germany that are zweckgebunden (legally bound to be used for a particular purpose), but the Soli isn't one: there were political justifications for its introduction, but it goes into the general fund and the government doesn't have to use it for those purposes.
As a random example here is a tax for sparkling wines. No, not import custom fees. A tax.
Taxes and public subsidies for infrastructures are especially powerful on networks because the output service is spread in many cross dimensional layers of the nation.
No train system in the world has all of that, which in turn means they need more money and so free riders harm the system's ability to get people where they want to go.
By everywhere I include farms in the middle of nowhere as that farmer has a relative somewhere who wants to visit and the lack of great transit pushes that person to a car and then opposing transit subsidies. By getting some money from riders there is at least some inventive to make good compromises.
So why bother with the overhead in the first place? Make it free for everyone to use to hop/on/off as they please, like Luxembourg has done.
Like e.g. TOS of public transportation providers only allowing usage for transit (and having some other restrictions).
It's loud.
It's bright.
No showers.
No easy way to store food clothes or similar.
The risk of being stolen from.
Generally there are most times better options even if you don't have much money.
And I mean so what if some people try to use it like that it's in practice a combo of inconvenient enough and restricted enough to not be widely abused and in turn to not lead to much cost for the train provider or inconvenience for other passengers to matter much. (Assuming you mean something like looping round and round in some public transportation network.)
Also if you mean you take a extra long one direction trip and sleep during that time then there isn't even abuse involved, you just basically used a regional train like a night train. Nothing bad. I mean why not.
In practice, you just enter start and destination into DB Navigator app, select regional-only, and choose your pick.
Who is doing this?
Can you explain why instead of just making my comments invisible?
I'd like to learn.
I believe when people 'vouch' for your dead comments, the issue will go away eventually.
Strange that this one didn't get flagged.
EDIT: here's what appears to be the intended comment, it's about surveillance and is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36245520
So some people have voiced concerns about that being used to profile the movement of Germany's citizens.
IIRC the tracking is being justified by the government "to gather statistics so we can improve the service", or something like that.
Disclaimer: I don't live there, I don't know the details.
you can always just board the train without anyone checking your ticket, you are _trusted_ to have a valid ticket
then because people can not always be trusted from time to time some personal will check tickets for validity, potentially
but in practice most people get checked like once a month or so at most, it's semi-random so some are probably unlucky
Furthermore any statistic data collected from this checks is anonymized they don't remember that _you_ where checked there (if you ticked was valid).
Additionally checking costs money (personal cost) so the less likely you are to find a trespasser the less checking is done, i.e. with the 49€ ticket probably less checking will be done long term.
For longer reginal trips you are more like to be checked, but in practice this new tickets will give _less_ information to the DB and similar organziations. Because before for most regional ticket you brought either had already been explicit person bound or implicit throught he payment system with a specific start or end place listed on them. The ability to buy regional tickets with cash has been becoming increasingly more limited (e.g. because of nonsense like people trying to steal that cash by blowing up the ticket automata, creating a huge cost for a minimal profit).
Movement on the other hand is a mandatory thing for many people unless you want to sit at home all day...
What‘s your point exactly? Your concerns seem to be of very theoretical nature tbh.
Many people who are skeptical of tracking don't own a smartphone. Those who nevertheless own one (say, because otherwise their job would become more complicated) often only very selectively switch it on.
The point is that the ticket has a unique ID which is tied to the owner.
Normal non-digital paper train tickets just indicate "someone paid this" but aren't tied to a unique personal identifier.
How would you do that? For example my local traffic system here in Hamburg for roughly 4 million people has almost no ticket checks: there are no barriers and no other regular ticket checks. One just boards the train/bus/ferry and travel.
For example I was going from Hamburg to Stade and back, using my 49€ ticket. There was no ticket check.
If that was an evil plan to track German citizens's travel behavior, that plan was not well thought out.
Those concerns simply don't add up: if it was a ploy by a surveillance operation hidden in the train org, they'd have just spent billions on blinding themselves. There so much less data now than there was before.
exactly
it's digital available in a app _or chip card_
in both cases it's not tracking where you go, you don't check-in/out when you enter leafe a train, their are no "gates" in (most?all?) of Germans public transportation systems. Instead it's a trust based system where sporadically randomly personal will check if passengers have valid tickets. At which point you have to show your ID and card, but that's it. And that you where checked also doesn't get recorded. But even if they would this checks tend to be somewhat rare to a point that some people decided it (was) cheaper to not buy a ticket but pay the fine from time to time.