Deutschlandticket: Germany’s €49 ticket pushes passenger numbers up 25% | Hacker News Reader

Deutschlandticket: Germany’s €49 ticket pushes passenger numbers up 25%

euronews.com

202 pointsmpweiher148 comments

Greetings from Austria!

We have a similar thing going on where you can buy an every-train-and-other-public-transport-in-Austria ticket. It is called the "climate ticket" ( https://www.klimaticket.at/ )

The price is EUR 1.095/year for regular adults (1.205 for the family ticket [=1 adult + up to 4 kids] and 825 for youth/seniors)

I'm a happy owner since it's 2 year existence and have recently been baffled by the prices DB is asking when I did a trip to Berlin by ICE...

It's a great peace of mind to just hop onto any bus/tram/train in the country and not have to worry about tickets, and i think it's a great step towards getting more traffic from the streets to the rail.

That sounds more like the BahnCard 100, which costs 4.339 Euro per year. The Deutschlandticket is only valid for slow, regional trains, not faster long distance trains.

is the Bahncard 100 popular? Asking because it seemed to me recently every 2nd passenger (#samplesize) pulled out their Klimaticket for the ticket checks.

I'd expect the 4k option for all of germany to be less popular (in % of ticket holders/population) due to pure odds (aka chances are high an average person won't regularly need to journey from hamburg to munich, but they might regularly journey somewhere inside their Bundesland. so it's less likely it's "worth it" for people?

Very few people own a Bahncard 100. It's only useful if you need it for your job/business, otherwise it probably won't pay for itself. Most people prefer the car or plane (if you frequent between big cities) anyway

Internet connectivity is surprisingly poor on German trains. In 1st class, between Basel and Hanover, most of the time my phone (with Swisscom SIM) got better connectivity than the onboard wifi. Considering that this route connects Zurich and Frankfurt, you'd think there would be a smidgen more investment in bandwidth.

The wifi on the trains comes from the cellular network, too. If you experienced cell phone working better than the on board wifi, that was almost certainly some other issue, the performances are very correlated. The problem is not so much with the trains, it's just that cellphone coverage is just terrible in Germany generally, especially compared to Switzerland.

If there's one thing Germany is uniquely terrible at, it's internet connectivity. Absolutely mindblowingly bad, speaking as someone who grew up with Telkom monopoly in South Africa in the 90s.

100% agree. I was in Frankfurt last week for the first time in many years (I live in Asia now). Roamed in Germany's largest and most expensive cell phone network, Deutsche Telekom T-Mobile.

In the city centre near Goetheplatz I had... drumm roll. EDGE. 2.5G

In July 2023.

This is the home of DE-CIX, the European continents largest internet exchange.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DE-CIX

It's Germany. There's nothing at all surprising about it.

There is also bahncard 25 and 50. It basically means how much of a percentage you get off the ticket price. Bahncard 50 first class is quite good if you travel a few times a month. Soon pays off and first class is usually not bad..

I am a BC100 owner. Work pays for it in lieu of a company car, so I only have to pay taxes on it, which comes out to about 160 euros per month. Like you say, I'm in the "it doesn't pay for itself" camp, but like the thread starter says,

> It's a great peace of mind to just hop onto any bus/tram/train in the country and not have to worry about tickets

It's like with theme parks: I prefer paying one big sum at the start and then getting to enjoy myself for the whole day over being nickle-and-dimed at every ride.

I don't do it very often, but I've more than once visited other cities in the area on a whim because the marginal cost is zero. That specialty shop in another city 400 kilometers away? Suddenly within reach, if the only cost to get there is time. And being on a train instead of driving a car means I can work while getting there and back.

And then there's the other perks of the BC100 that make travelling generally more chilled: Large stations have frequent-travelers' lounges with free drinks and working spaces. On long-distance trains, there's a section of the train (usually a quarter of a railcar) that's reserved for frequent travellers and BC100 owners, so I don't have to worry about seat reservations even when the trains are crowded. The purchase price for a 2nd-class BC100 also gives enough bonus points for 8-9 free upgrades to First Class per year; I use those when I know I'll be going for a particularly long distance.

>is the Bahncard 100 popular?

I went to uni in Cologne and a lot of banker types who would daily commute from Cologne to Frankfurt always had one. Very popular with business people doing these mid-range round trips. For regular travelers too expensive though.

In the UK, a LNER season ticket (unlimited journeys) on just one route (York to London, 2 hours) on the “fast” trains (200km/h) costs nearly 20,000 Euro per year.

Wow that's a low price in Austria. In the Netherlands it's 4200 euro per year for just the trains, you still have to pay for bus and metro on top of that.

There are alternatives though, if you don't need to travel during peak hours it drops to €1440. (https://www.ns.nl/en/nsflex/webshop#/abonnement/dal-vrij)

It's 3860chf in Switzerland, valid for any public transport, even boats. However, they are talking raising the price once again, and Switzerland is not interested in making this cheaper.

American readers may be confused by these prices: EUR 1.095 is one thousand ninety-five Euros.

For that reason I tend to skip the "." or "," until we get to over 7 digits!

In stark contrast, in the UK an annual season ticket for a single train route between 2 stations 20 miles apart, is £1400 or about 1600 euro! Rail travel here is just farcical.

Assuming "there and back" is 40 miles per day, then five days a week for 52 weeks a year (maybe the train gets used on holidays) comes to 10,400 miles per year travel.

The fuel cost for that in the UK seems to be ~ £400 more than the season ticket which indicates it's a saving for some.

Sure, it could be cheaper.

The season ticket only covering station-to-station travel means you're still left with covering the leg at either end. As an example, this is likely still going involve a car journey plus parking costs at 'local' station, and a Tube trip to the office at the other end. I think any potential cost saving quickly disappears, while still being left paying for only a single route.

Makes sense to try to remove any frictions from public transport - if not making it an enjoyable and desirable experience

I now live in Luxembourg and public transports are just totally free: buses, tramways, trains... All free, for everybody (locals and tourists alike). No pass, no nothing: you just hop in the bus/train/tramway and you're good to go.

You can also rent public bicycles and they're all e-bikes/pedelec and they're very cheap (but not free).

Has it helped with the traffic? I’ve heard that air pollution was horrible as well

Is this something new? A few years ago it wasn't the case.

Since March 2020.

This is the way to do it. Public transport is tax paid, one way or another anyway.

This completely gets rid of bullshit overhead like ticketing, ticket checking, payment processing, maintenance of payment terminals, manning of ticket counters, planning departments, billing and finance departments, third party payment fees etc etc etc

>if not making it an enjoyable and desirable experience

It will always be the worst part of my day and with more passengers and the regularly scheduled disasters that won't change any time soon.

As an German expat in the Pacific Northwest this fills me with longing. We have like one train here and it's slow and expensive..

Grüße. I wonder if there were more trains there would you take it. A reasonable observation many North Americans make is that it would just take too long to get anywhere by train, unlike in Europe. AKA 300 years is old vs. 300 miles is far.

The vast majority of Americans live either east of the Mississippi or on the West coast at densities not dissimilar to Europe.

You’ll never take HSR from NYC to LAX but Chicago or Atlanta from NYC is roughly the same distance as Paris to Berlin, and there’s a bunch of cities on the way as well.

I would think the densities are still much smaller since most people live in car dependent suburbs around the city.

Not all countries with large rail networks have great suburban public transport either; the UK comes to mind.

Even in a mostly suburban metropolitan area, most people are still quite a ways from the main airport, which is usually on the extreme of one side of a metropolitan area. You can have multiple train stations per city because of their much lower footprint and nuisance level, and generally speaking most of the time savings in rail vs air is access time to the station/airport. (Truly high speed services can just skip the suburban stations if there truly is demand for this, but generally speaking the time for an additional station is measured in single-digit minutes.)

While the UK does not have great suburban public transport it is far better than what is available in most of the US.

Ironically car dependent cities like LA were built out as streetcar suburbs so they’re not really all that different to London’s ‘metroland’ suburbs built out around tube lines. The big difference is the job centres are far more distributed. When offices as well as homes are widely distributed public transport becomes very tricky.

The metro areas are dense and tend to have decent public transport. The problem is in the smaller towns and rural areas. When I ride my bike around in the Willamette Valley I can go miles and miles without hitting even a small town. In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away.

> In Germany the next sizable town is usually minutes away.

Maybe in Germany, but France has barely populated areas and yet we have one the biggest high-speed rail network on the planet. In fact, the fact that France is the biggest European country after Russia is probably the main reason high speed rails was invested on back in the 70s: the bigger your country the more you need high speed rail.

Second biggest ... if you include overseas territories!

Right, Ukraine pre-invasion was bigger than France without French Guyana, but now they have a tough fight ahead if they want to claim that title again :/

Most Americans live in metro areas; the figure for the United States is 80% according to the census.

High speed rail is not going to do a lot of good in South Dakota, but we can serve most Americans with some type of decent rail without contorting ourselves. And the bar is on the floor since a lot of Amtrak is not even a single round trip seven days a week.

Here in the PNW there is basically one corridor that would make sense as a semi-high speed (160+ kph) rail, which is Portland-Seattle-Vancouver. They are all under 200 miles from each other and connected by one road that is often very congested.

The current Amtrak route is not frequent, fast or cheap enough to be a good alternative to driving for most people.

Hourly service between them would be a boon to the whole area, and allow for a ton of flights to not happen between the cities for connecting traffic.

Especially if that service reached PAE, SEA, PDX airports. There's a ton of SEA->PDX flights.

https://www.portseattle.org/sea-tac/flight-status?flight_dat...

shows 23 unique aircraft flying SEA->PDX today and 32 unique aircraft flying PDX->SEA

At ~$80/seat one-way and ~80 passengers/flight, that's >$100M/yr in revenue.

Existing trains take 3.5 hr for the journey. Existing flights take 1 hr for the flight + time spent in security, so trains aren't that far off.

Furthermore, there are ~30,000 cars traveling each way each day along I-5 between Seattle and Portland (https://www.chehalisbasinstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/201...) .

Speedy train service really would make a difference.

Any idea of the cost of that commute (multiplied by 30,000)?

There must be a business case in this surely, even if it’s worked out based on minimum wage as that’s a lot of commuters.

While there are distances that are certainly "too long", there are very few regions in the US where the majority of the population is so spread out that more trains wouldn't enable a lot of travel to nearby towns and cities even if it's not attractive for long distance travel.

E.g. I got in an argument with someone a while back who insisted on using Montana as an example, but while Montana is sparsely populated, Southern Montana had Amtrak passenger service until 1979 (ironically the only Amtrak service currently serving Montana goes through some of the sparsest populated Northern parts of the state as part of the Empire Builder route), and has a density and distance between the main towns comparable to places in Norway with a perfectly viable regular passenger service.

It's not like you need to have good train links everywhere to improve things, but often the point is not to connect big cities far away with each other but to serve as extra life lines which makes it viable to move further out of the big cities for those in between. That means the relationship needs to be reversed from what Americans are used to: You can't look at where there is demand for transport now. You need to look at where people might want to live or want to work, or where you want to encourage growth, and where better transport might encourage that. And then you need to take a 20+ year horizon and commit to it, because only once the links are there will it start factoring into peoples decisions about where to move, and it will take many years before demand shifts. This is less obvious with cars because as long as there's a road people can forgive a lot. It doesn't help to have rails if there are no trains running on them.

And then you need to consider that it's ok to lose money on a per passenger basis on infrastructure if it promotes economic growth or positively affects other factors (e.g. reduces the amount of car congestion and environmental effects). You should still look at the economy of course, but take all the factors into account, because it often changes the calculations drastically.

> A reasonable observation many North Americans make is that it would just take too long to get anywhere by train, unlike in Europe.

Well, China has built a shit ton of high speed rail across their country. There is nothing preventing the US from doing just the same.

NYC <-> LA is like, what, 4000km? Sounds insane at a quick glance, but a 500 km/h maglev train makes that an 8 hour ride, compared to a 6h flight plus 1h "dead" time for boarding, luggage, and security theatre. Not much of a difference. A 300 km/h "classic" high speed rail like the German ICE will take 13h, but hey even that is manageable.

And unlike Europe, y'all have the advantage that your land is barely occupied by anything but a few farms.

US is actually smart enough to avoid big infrastructure debts. According to wikipedia, China has a 900B debt from high speed rails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China.

I don't know why your comment was marked as dead, vouched it as you make a good point.

The thing is, debt isn't bad per se - having a strong rail network can actually enable far far bigger returns. The US is the perfect example actually... railroads were what enabled "going west" from the East Coast where the European settlers landed.

If you have a strong rail network, you can move a ton of goods (or people) with barely any emissions, leagues better than airplanes, cars and trucks - only ships have a better efficiency in fuel consumption/CO2 emissions per passenger/ton kilometer. And rail infrastructure can hold up insanely long... here in Germany we're still using signalling systems and rails literally built way before Hitler, before the first German democratic government, back when we still had a Kaiser. Spread the 900 billion debt over 100 years lifetime and whoops, pretty cheap, isn't it?

Thanks. I think having a few solid rails for really populars route is justified. The issue is building too many of these rails to where ridership is not even enough to produce a profit in the beginning, let alone sustain it forever. Also, cities grow and die. Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?

> The issue is building too many of these rails to where ridership is not even enough to produce a profit in the beginning, let alone sustain it forever.

There's a ton of flights each day - the FAA says something around 45.000 flights [1], of which sadly there are no statistics if they are domestic or not. But even assuming just 25% are domestic, that's about 11.000 flights that could be done on a decent HSR network, saving local populations in the inflight zone of airports from a ton of noise and a lot of fuel/CO2 emissions.

No matter what, CO2 emissions will make air travel unsustainable very fast very soon, and the US is barely prepared for this new reality.

> Can you imagine if US built out an expensive high speed rail from New York to Detroit? or Seattle to Portland?

Well, that is how the US grew so fast from East to West back in the day [2]. IIRC, a lot of the existing lines are the same routes that were built back then.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers

[2] https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...

Yes the Chinese owe themselves 900B. They're going to rue the day when they find they can't pay themselves back.

China is rue(ing?) right now. China's local governments are dealing with a monumental local debt crisis from real estate fallout, and incidentally from too many built out unused rails and highways. And the center government has already said they are not going to rescue the local and provincial governments, "prefers local or provincial governments to sort out their own debt problems, and not create a moral hazard"

As a result, the civil servants in China are seeing 25-50% paycut.

The multiple levels of governments and associated regulations is very much preventing it from happening. If any one of them in any of the jurisdictions the train might travel says no (or drags their feet) it doesn't happen.

So what. Y'all managed to raise the minimum drinking age to 21 without passing a constitutional amendment by tying federal highway funding to compliance by the states [1]. There's nothing stopping your federal government from doing just the same extortion again if your politics are too ossified for a constitutional amendment or to get rid of NIMBYs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

So it isn't nothing. It is something. If it were only the states vs the federal government, that would be great! Unfortunately it is also all of the county, city (and other??) local governments as well that have a say. And then in california in particular, things like the environmental protection laws have become weaponized as well to stop.

I suspect it would take something spectacular (like how the interstate system was created) to actually make meaningful progress. And the irony is once it's in place no one could imagine life without it.

Hmm...do you think Germany has fewer levels of government and, cough, less regulation?

And of course a lot of rail work now is inter-European, so you get different country governments and the EU as well.

> Well, China has built a shit ton of high speed rail across their country. There is nothing preventing the US from doing just the same.

It’s been discussed many times. China simply does not have to deal with with unions, labour laws, land ownership and such. I don’t think we want to live in such system.

> A 300 km/h "classic" high speed rail like the German ICE will take 13h, but hey even that is manageable.

No, it won’t. There will be scheduled stops, weather, slow sections, accidents.

I used to take Cologne to Utrecht for 3 months once a week return travel. Only once I arrived in both directions on time.

> China simply does not have to deal with with unions, labour laws, land ownership and such. I don’t think we want to live in such system.

Japan is a democracy that has all three, and yet they managed to build a HSR system. France has a very good HSR system as well.

> No, it won’t. There will be scheduled stops, weather, slow sections, accidents.

The entire point of the US being suited for HSR is that it is so sparsely settled in the center of the country that you don't need frequent stops, or you can get away with just having every 2nd/3rd train stop at a specific city - with 30min of spacing between the trains, that's still 1h/1.5h interval for "flyover states". And a single train carries up to 1.000 passengers, replacing 4-5 planes.

> I used to take Cologne to Utrecht for 3 months once a week return travel. Only once I arrived in both directions on time.

Please don't assume that the shit our politicians did with the DB network is valid for HSR in general.

> Japan is a democracy that has all three, and yet they managed to build a HSR system. France has a very good HSR system as well.

Yeah, both started in 1960s.

> The entire point of the US being suited for HSR is that it is so sparsely settled in the center of the country that you don't need frequent stops, or you can get away with just having every 2nd/3rd train stop at a specific city - with 30min of spacing between the trains, that's still 1h/1.5h interval for "flyover states". And a single train carries up to 1.000 passengers, replacing 4-5 planes.

And now you have 4000km of high speed rail tracks to keep in top notch condition. With a mountain range between the two coasts. And trains passing rather frequently.

> Please don't assume that the shit our politicians did with the DB network is valid for HSR in general.

Oh. Nothing to do with that. Weather, accidents, no staff were the most common causes.

> Oh. Nothing to do with that. Weather, accidents, no staff were the most common causes.

Actually, all three can be blamed on Deutsche Bahn. The Swiss for example have a ridiculously strong tree management program [1], which means they can keep operating even in storms because there is no danger of trees falling onto tracks which is a fairly common occurrence in Germany.

Accidents as well... a lot of tracks, everything up to 160km/h, has level crossings with roads. Only above 160 km/h you need dedicated, crossing free infrastructure. We could get rid of a lot of these level crossings if we wanted to.

And no staff? DB pays shit, that's the reason why no one wants to work for them, and the "private competitors" pay even less. And if the railroad workers go to strike, the entire fucking country shits on them for daring to fight for their rights.

[1] https://www.waldwissen.net/de/technik-und-planung/naturgefah...

> The Swiss for example have a ridiculously strong tree management program

Without even pausing I assumed this was some business speak MBA crap. I cackled when I realised.

As any British person knows, leaves on the line are no joke.

The Danish bespoke train IC4 has entered the chat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC4

Then why did I laugh out loud the first time I heard that sorry if true excuse?

> And now you have 4000km of high speed rail tracks to keep in top notch condition.

Maintaining hundreds of planes is also hard and planes are terrible for the environment and terrible to travel in. Surely we can aim higher?

The TGV averages ~280 km/h on several long-distance routes in France. For example, Paris-Strasbourg (490 km) takes 1:45.

Trains travelling from Paris to Strasbourg cover a distance of around 246 miles (396 km) during the journey.

But it is 490km by car

Sure, but the train doesn't travel by car. 396 km.

The train track is 493 km long: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris-Est%E2%80%93Strasbourg...

This is the old track, with normal train (around 130kmh). The TGV track is 406km and has just a few stops: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Est

I don't get where you're going. Your initial take is that your ICE route in Germany was slow. Indeed because Germany has not a lot of dedicated high speed train track and it has a lot of stops. That is why the TGV example is brought up, as it runs on dedicated track. 1h45min for 400km (500km by road) from city centre to city center is unbeatable, and you just need to show up 5 min before train departure. That is why there is no flights from Strasbourg to Paris anymore.

You're going to pass through at least ten other states, and by or through at twenty or so other metros, and stop and none of them? And you expect to get the land rights needed to build a rail line straight enough to hit 500 kph?

Most people in the US live in urban areas and most travel is not that far. It only takes too long to get places by train because the service is poor and public transit is lacking. You’re never going to take a train coast to coast but it’s be nice to take one from San Francisco to Sacramento, the state capital 75 miles away didn’t end up taking a nearly three hours.

Yes, there’s a new high speed train from Miami to Orlando, but you would have to rent a car when you get to either end anyway because there’s no realistic public transit in all of Florida. By the time you rent a car, you might as well drive around instead of taking the train.

I’ve not been but Miami comes in the middle of a ranking of public transit cities in the US so I could imagine the trip working well the other way around. https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/...

How practical it is will depend on the place. Yes lots of America has been built as suburban sprawl but there are lots of slightly more urban places too where modern regional rail would be a huge improvement over sitting in traffic.

The frustrating thing about living in the bay area is that they ripped up a lot of rail in the 60s and replaced them with roads. Now those roads are clogged and journeys by car take longer than journeys by rail did back then.

This is only sort of true. There are lots of population dense areas of North America that wouldn't look that different than much of Europe. E.g. NYC to Boston is shorter than Paris to Frankfurt.

The main problem is that the train infrastructure where exists is old and very slow, and typically passenger trains have lower priority than freight. The end result are slow, often grubby, expensive (e.g. more than flights), trains with inconvenient sparse schedules and poor services. Not exactly compelling.

> As an German expat in the Pacific Northwest this fills me with longing. We have like one train here and it's slow and expensive.

Same here, all of it, German expat, PNW, longing, one slow expensive train :)

I took the cascades train yesterday - no wifi for 80% of the journey, the AC was broken in one car and the train was booked beyond capacity. Amtrak brings incompetence to a whole different level.

Pacific northwest? Alaska? Canada?

Willamette Valley Oregon.

Yeah, Alaska and Canada is another whole level

Unlimited travel tickets like this open up so many opportunities.

I booked a Eurail ticket with my wife when we graduated college and still can't believe how amazing it was to travel at-will all around Europe for weeks on end. I think we paid $350 all in? They've gone up a little bit in price but they're still a steal.

We even sprang for the 1st class ticket, which turned out to be often empty and sometimes quite luxurious, since it was only something like $60 more.

I've learned that travelling on the 1st class Eurail/Interrail ticket can end up cheaper than 2nd class, as some seat reservations will be free or cheaper in 1st class. Also, there are valuable 1st class perks such as free breakfasts, luggage storage etc. that can easily add up.

I once had the pleasure of traveling from Bern Switzerland to Milan though the Alps in a business car all to myself. Attempted to get some work done for about 5 minutes and stopped when I realised the views made it impossible. It's over 10 years ago but only cost around €90 one way. Also Milan train station is a work of art in its own right.

The Deutschlandticket is not a travel ticket, it is only for local transport and slow regional trains. It is not feasible to travel through the country with it.

You’re not incorrect, the Deutschland ticket is mostly for local transports. But you can travel through Germany using only RE, it’s way slower than via ICE and requires lot of changes but that’s definitely feasible. It’s a quite nice way to explore the country if you do multiple halts.

Roughly 2x slower in my experience. The main annoyance are the many changes. Every change carries risk of missing the connecting train

This observation does not correlate with my pop culture understanding of ruthless German efficiency.

It's a thing from the past. Last year the punctuality of Deutsche Bahn long range trains dropped to 65%.

It is a pop culture thing, I really wonder when such misconceptions will end. German are striking as often and sometimes more than the French, and their train are very often late, meaning a high chance of missing your connection. When I can I take a train without connection. Even in my very limited use of German trains, I still average around 50% missing connections.

I had to take 3 trains a few weeks ago, the first one was 20min late, meaning I missed my first connection. It turned out no big deal because the train I was supposed to get into didn't leave: it was broken! I had to wait an hour at the station, then I had the chance to jump into a packed train (remember the previous train which did not come?). It was such a pleasure.

That's the typical Deutsche Bahn experience. Haven't seen anything else for the 27 years I lived there

There is no such thing. Most things in Germany generally are delayed. Wether it's construction projects, really ANY construction from an autobahn local repair to a house to large projects like BER airport or Stuttgart 21 or Zweite Stammstrecke in Munich to literally every Deutsche Bahn ride.

I've been on a Deutsche Bahn train for the first time in two decades when I visited Germany again last week. I had a short regional connection on an Regional Express train (RE) to make it to the 'high speed' ICE train. The RE train was 56 mins delayed or my generous 24 min connection. So I had to be driven by car instead to make it. The ICE 'high speed' train never hit more than 160kph and that only for minutes. A long time it was slowly creeping along at 40-50kph. My (on-time departure) 2 hour ICE train got me into Frankfurt 28 minutes late.

The air conditioning was too weak. The train (1st class) was extremely overbooked. People walked through the aisle continuously to try to grab a seat from someone. The noise level as defeaning (even with noise cancelling Bose) and the service was well... not in service. Food that was advertised couldn't be ordered. The internet connection via WiFI wasn't working either.

Hopeless. Next time I visit the country I'll rent a car again.

For a recent family/friends get-together we had some people going routes using ICE trains (where possible) while others used the 49 Euro ticket. 2x slower is pretty spot on.

Well I ordered mine through the DB app (big mistake) on the 4th of July. I have neither received the ticket nor have they deducted any money from my account (status in the portal is "open"/"unpayed"). I got an email stating there are slight delays and someone would contact me soon on the 4th. Have called the hotline a couple of times since, with stated waiting times of 10h, 8h, no lines available message and they hangup etc. Finally reached someone at the end of July and they told me there's nothing they can do, I should write an email and they gave me an address. Sent an email, haven't heard from them since.

So basically I had no ticket for the first month, don't have one as of now. From my understanding, if I'd take the train and gotten checked it would be ok in July (they stated in the delay email that the email is proof of contract and the people doing checks are instructed accordingly and to accept it until end of July). However, I've already read stories that people still had to pay the 7 Euro administrative fee for not bringing a ticket (but having one in theory, so not the full 60 euro penalty).

For my upcoming train trips in August I will simply buy a ticket and ask for a refund once my ticket is finally valid. The only other option would be to take the train and risk a nice argument about having a valid contract but no ticket.

Simply ridiculous. I could go to a train station with an office and see if I can get it sorted there but I'd need to take the train to get there (only a small station where I live). Also a stupid waste of time.

So far the most amazing business process I have experienced in my life :P Should have just bought the ticket elsewhere (locally, deutschlandticket.de etc.) but no stupid me wanted to have everything in one app and didn't really expect the official app to cause any problems.

Is the app's only payment method SEPA direct debit? The website seemed to only have SEPA last time I checked

There a bunch of different providers. Some of them allow other payment methods like credit card or PayPal.

My girlfriend has the same problem. She wasn’t able to get through on the hotline and no answer on the email. She went into a ticket office here in Berlin and they told her they can’t do anything about the payment problems and to call the hotline. Total shit show.

The 9€ ticket was amazing and could be purchased without a subscription. Why are they forcing you to have a subscription for the Deutschland ticket?

There a bunch of different providers. Some of them allow other payment methods like credit card or PayPal and don't require a subscription like DB. I use the HanseCom Deutschlandticket App and it lets me pay monthly with PayPal.

Hearing stories like this makes me glad I bought mine through the MVG app (operator of subways, buses and trams in Munich). I ordered it on April 24th, and was briefly worried that it wouldn't work out until 1st of May, but no problem. Which is not to say everything worked without a hitch, they tried to also offer (on short notice) a "flexible" ticket which wouldn't start on the 1st of the month, but that was only available in their customer care centers, of which there are 2 (two) in the whole of Munich. And sure enough, enormous queues. I wonder who thought that would be a good idea...

The most important thing is to have longterm political support for this ticket across the board, so that people can expect this ticket to exist in 5+ years, for a reasonable price (inflation adjusted). Plus you need bigger investments into public transport, and also serve routes that won't make a profit. Otherwise few people will use it instead of cars.

It's also a problem if the trains are full because of free passengers and you can't travel when you need to even if you paid extra.

What is a free passenger?

I meant those who don't pay anything per trip e.g. those who have the Deutschlandticket.

They are not freeloaders and I'm not blaming them but the more they travel the greater the burden while they aren't paying more. As with any other unmetered X/month service, the service provider has to make sure there's enough capacity.

It was said that after the 9€ ticket experiment, they wanted to analyzed the performance and outcome of such a scheme and I _assume_ that this has been somehow calculated to not over burden the system. I have a 49€ ticket (company provided) but if I wanted to pay per trip I would pay less per month. I don’t think I am alone.

They clearly mean "not paying per ride"

I wonder how much of the uptick could be explained by seasonality (if somebody knows some useful data source, please share). Also the 1.8 Mil new customers could very well be just natural flow and not really incremental due to the ticket. In any case - it's a great initiative.

My guess is a lot of it. The 25% number is meaningless because they're not comparing to the proper baseline. Anecdotally, I was in Berlin last year, and there was a similar product, and locals said not that many people were taking advantage of it.

It could also be explained by high gas prices, inflation and overall economic adversity.

They will need to invest in more rail if that is going to be sustainable. My limited experience with German trains is positive, but going Hamburg to Berlin has always been fully booked.

The Deutschland Ticket is only for local and regional transport. You can't use it with anything "bookable".

But your point still stands. Germany needs to invest a lot. Most of the money goes to the Autobahn.

According to https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/831740-831740, the planned investments for this year are 9.08 billion Euro for long distance railways and 8.4 billion Euro for highways.

Interesting. But of course there is a lot of investment bottleneck (or whatever the translation for „Investitionsstau“ is). For example take the „Neue Alpentransversale“ [1][2] which was a 40 year project for modernizing the tracks through Swiss with connections to all neighbouring countries. The Swiss are finished. Germany did not even start and will be ready around 2040, for just 190km of tracks.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA

If the German government would have sticked to the plan of building a Transrapid track between Hamburg and Berlin instead of upgrading the current tracks being able to support an ICE with only 250km/h (which took as many years as building the Transrapid track would have), then there would be much more capacity of transporting people and a functioning an future-proof track for high speed transport with over 500 km/h. Take into account the very short entrance times, compared to flying, and you save even more time. Air routes between Hamburg and Berlin would have been pointless for many years.

There were a lot of political changes at the end of the 90s, some spurious arguments were made, also saying „it would be too expensive“, despite having a huge history of building train stations and airports for much much more then the planned costs … this was just an excuse to not build it because they did not want it.

They said the passenger estimations were too high and it would not be profitable. Today this route is the most used one in Germany with 17000 passengers per day and a capacity of 8.7 million per year[1].

Transrapid (already the model TR08) would have been able to reach the destination in way under 60 minutes, including two intermediate stops. The ICE was able to do this in 90 minutes (when the reconstructed track was finished in 2004), but today the scheduled duration is 104–110 minutes. Also the track is shared with local trains.

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrecke_Berlin%E2%80%93Ham...

As much as I'd love to have the Transrapid, I think for this specific case the ~100 minutes are already pretty much making Hamburg - Berlin flights obsolete, especially with the airports not being super central. You'd need around 40 minutes just to get to Berlin HBF from BER.

I don't even think there are any direct flights between Hamburg and Berlin since it's really not worth it.

It has had effects on other projects; it would make more sense to build high speed in the Fehmarn Belt tunnel and you could be in Copenhagen and Sweden in two to three hours. Would be nice for us Swedes at least. My point is that everything over an hour is quite a long time.

Haltet euch da raus. Euer Circus geht mich nichts an. Wenn ihr mir einen Gefallen tun wollt, seid einfach ehrlich mit eurem Boss. Ich muss jetzt lernen.

So sehr ich auch dankbar dafür bin, dass ihr mich über Kevin informiert habt (wenn das denn überhaupt wahr ist), tut mir Leid, aber ihr habt euch das selber eingebrockt.

I wonder how often managers forget that you can often make more money and profit by lowering prices.

I think you mean: you can often get more users by charging less than what it currently costs to provide a service.

I doubt managers forget this. It's just that you need backers with very deep pockets (the government in this case, VCs in Uber's case) to make it work.

That’s not what I mean.

You can't imagine this could ever be profitable though?

I just mean that when you lower prices, more people will buy it, and they’ll buy more of it. That can more than offset the lower margin on a per item purchase.

If your train has 200 seats, it’s better to sell 200 tickets at $65 per ticket than it is to sell 100 at $100 per ticket.

Of course, but if operating a train costs you $10 per seat and you start charging $5 it will never break even..

And the article says:

"€49 a month ‘Deutschlandticket’ has led to a 25 per cent rise in passengers on national railway company Deutsche Bahn's regional services"

and a daily (regional) ticket costs about €20-50 depending on area.

I mean obviously it might very well be worth doing this for other reasons but somebody will have to subsidize the lost revenue for various transport companies.

Anybody that has ever taken a 101 economics class knows this is true.

Look up elasticity of demand.

> Anybody that has ever taken a 101 economics class knows this is true.

The first 20 minutes of one? i.e. before arriving at concept of 'marginal cost' also I doubt demand for public transport is necessarily that elastic, short term anyway.

As the article says traffic for regional trains only increased by 25% despite the price decreasing much more than that (e.g. a single day ticket previously cost 20-50 euros depending on area).

It can not be. Unless you think that transport agencies suddenly figured out how to make everything work for half the price. The government just subsidizes the losses. That is the explicit plan, profit is not intended to happen.

DB is not VC funded like all those food delivery shops so.

Instead its owned by the Government which can borrow an infinite amount of money and does for all kinds of reasons. Right now they spend 1.5 billion Euro each year for the Deutschland Ticket[1].

I am super happy about the ticket and think its a good thing. But lets not pretend its financing would be possible without heavy government spending.

[1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/deutschland... (German)

Just like financing road infrastructure

The article says that they are losing so much money that it's not sustainable.

Where?

The only actual claim of losing money was about the 9 euro ticket.("the ultra-cheap pass cost the state too much for it to be extended.".)

The "unsustainable" comment was a theory from May which should be trivial shown (or not) by now but definitely not a claim by the article. ("There’s a question mark over how long this year’s €49 pass will last, with transport bosses warning in May that it may be unsustainable too.")

It's a public utility, it doesn't have to be self-sustainable if it is already covered by taxes, and provides mobility in other ways, e.g. cheap transportation means more to spend on holidays locally. Furthermore, a reduction in car emissions means lower healthcare costs.

Not everything has to make money.

Well, everything needs money. You're right that some of the money here is extracted from people whether they use the service or not, but it's not great.

> Furthermore, a reduction in car emissions means lower healthcare costs.

Not necessarily - imagine a pandemic where people could only use public transport.

he says "reduction", you respond to "removal". i think that is called a strawman :)

but you are right, everything needs money. so it ends up being a political issue where ideally we democratically figure out how much tax money we give to the train operators

> he says "reduction", you respond to "removal". i think that is called a strawman :)

Good point. I misread - didn't mean to mischaracterise.

Respectfully, this mindset is myopic.

Utilities are called utilities for a reason, and PUBLIC transportation is a utility.

Better mobility means less road congestion, fewer emissions, less energy wasted needlessly, fewer healthcare costs, easier access to jobs and education which implies reduced crime, reduced crime means improved living conditions, more safety, fewer healthcare costs.

The ROI on utilities is in many ways intangible due to the sheer complexity of our society.

Measuring how much utilities make directly and using that to argue that they should be discontinued is naive at best and downright dangerous at worst.

> Measuring how much utilities make directly and using that to argue that they should be discontinued is naive at best and downright dangerous at worst.

I see this formulation so much. Almost these exact words, although the topic varies. Why is that? Thoughts are not dangerous, yet people keep saying they are.

Incidentally the formulation often has the additional characteristic yours also does, which is assuming I said something I didn't. No one mentioned discontinuing anything.

That line of thought “if it doesn’t immediately pay for itself it’s a liability and tax payer money shouldnt be used for it” keeps getting used by certain groups to diminish what the government provides back to the people.

It trivially follows that if you find a service unsustainable then you must cut it. But this makes sense only when you can show that the secondary effects also don’t cover for the costs, however those are often ignored in such discussions.

Ideas are dangerous when they are dishonest and misrepresent reality or hide the full picture.

People don’t want complicated solutions to things they don’t understand, they want simple solutions to things they believe they understand. This is the basis of populist rhetorics and populist politics.

> That line of thought “if it doesn’t immediately pay for itself it’s a liability and tax payer money shouldnt be used for it” keeps getting used by certain groups to diminish what the government provides back to the people.

You seem to be saying that when "certain groups" confront the fact I stated, they respond with a solution you don't like. That doesn't mean the fact is incorrect. That's a logical fallacy: arguing from adverse consequences[0].

> It trivially follows that if you find a service unsustainable then you must cut it. But this makes sense only when you can show that the secondary effects also don’t cover for the costs, however those are often ignored in such discussions.

That doesn't mean they're being ignored here. Mention them to enrich the discussion, rather than suppressing the discussion with fearmongering.

> Ideas are dangerous when they are dishonest and misrepresent reality or hide the full picture.

Who gets to decide the full picture? I tell my kid gravity exists, and in doing so I hide the big picture. Your definition is too vague. The solution is not to squirrel around looking for a definition that is easy to falsify. The solution is to stop calling ideas dangerous and figure out what actually is dangerous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World#Logica...

It’s a matter of attribution of consequences; if A enables B; then should A take credit for B?

This is the point of utilities; to enable people to live and thrive.

Arguing that A should be axed while ignoring, either out of ignorance or malice, that it enables B hides the full picture.

> That doesn't mean they're being ignored here. Mention them to enrich the discussion, rather than suppressing the discussion with fearmongering.

See, that’s the problem with bullshit. It takes substantially more effort to counter and clean up the bullshit than it takes to spread it. This is what is dangerous, making claims or insinuating things out of ignorance or malice.

> Who gets to decide the full picture? I tell my kid gravity exists, and in doing so I hide the big picture. Your definition is too vague.

That’s a strawman.

> The solution is to stop calling ideas dangerous and figure out what actually is dangerous.

Also a strawman as you left the qualifiers out.

Right, ideas are not dangerous, ideas ghat misrepresent reality are dangerous. Populists like to present their ideas as simple solutions and every single time they make things worse. Exhibit A: brexit.

> See, that’s the problem with bullshit. It takes substantially more effort to counter and clean up the bullshit than it takes to spread it. This is what is dangerous, making claims or insinuating things out of ignorance or malice.

You're spending effort just name calling instead, though. Countering through insinuation (you think that? That's what populists think!) or arguing from adverse consequences are just terrible alternatives. I would spend that effort finding out how to logically counter instead of using these tactics.

> That’s a strawman.

No; I think your definition was just easy to falsify. You need a better definition. If you want to demonstrate why my example was a straw man, feel free to do so, but I don't think the phrase even applies here.

> Arguing that A should be axed while ignoring, either out of ignorance or malice, that it enables B hides the full picture

This is the straw man. You're making up that I argued something should be axed, because that is an easy argument to counter than what I actually said. That is the definition of a straw man argument.

It works the same as maintaining road infra. Car/fuel taxes are not enough to cover it, so ppl taxes are used. There is no sustainable transport in this regard maybe except bike lanes since these require minimal maintenance after built and have long lifespan, but public transport is better (cheaper to maintain) compared to car infra when accounting nr of passengers transported

> but public transport is better (cheaper to maintain) compared to car infra when accounting nr of passengers transported

Is that true on a like for like basis? E.g. a car goes to my house. A bus needs the same road that cars do.

A thousand people driving to work using busses need a lot less space/lanes than a thousand people driving cars to work.

For sure, if people all live in my SimCity2000 designed cities of everyone lives over here and works over there : - )

Buses need much less lanes since in dense areas one bus line can serve thousands of ppl that live close to each other. Operating buses on all roads is not practical, it'll be expensive taxi on steroids, the scope of the bus is to collect ppl from a bigger area and drop them to a place where ppl also continue walking to their destination

It doesn't? unless you mean the unnamed "transport bosses" that used the word "might". The article linked next to it even mentions that the government covers the difference and I don't see anyone pronouncing the end of roads over that issue.

Public transport in Germany is losing money anyway. Even before the 49 Euro-Ticket, when people were paying multiple times that amount, public transport was usually receiving subsidies.

Except they are still losing money on this scheme, and what you propose works only in case of huge demand and competitor. Without competition limiting supply and rising prices makes more business sense in the short to medium term.

In this instance its not about profits, even approaching even would be a huge win to environment, labor market, local industry and infrastructure.

There are competitors to the train, buses and private cars.

It is literally kept in existence by government funding. My local transport agency (state owned) effectively charges a third of what it did before. Obviously they are taking enormous losses on this, which are financed directly by the federal government.

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