Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail
mcc-berlin.net
mcc-berlin.net
At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in Germany, but a bit more borderline for a tourist.
Compare with eg Toronto's monthly pass, which is $156. A single trip is $3.35, which comes out to 24 two-trip days to recoup the cost of the card. That's almost exactly the number of business days in a month. And that card's only for Toronto!
Berlin was also relatively cheap before. We already had sensible monthly passes. For people in parts of the Ruhrgebiet, the savings are even more substantial.
At least they've finally got their shit together with mobile coverage.
Of course you get to use the buses too for that, and some of those were run by DB until this year, so it's nice to have been subsiding the the nice German tickets! They sold up to private equity, because of course they did, it's Britain and everything has to be private equity.
Same playbook in the UK, where people like the NHS but certain parties don't.
Same playbook in the US, where "big government" has to be bad, so anything that does currently work well gets sabotaged.
Then, we can point and say "see? Look at how bad it is! It would only be worse if the government ran it!"
Extra points if you're able to extract public funds to waste on such private endeavors. See: private schools in America (Yes, they get public funds!)
We should also know how much more efficient buses are on roads at moving people than individual cars are. You can fit ~60 people on a bus that takes up the space of ~2 cars.
What should happen in these emergencies is there should be dedicated bus lanes and dedicates buses to evacuate people.
But beyond that, what we should learn from this is that lack of public transit (intracity and intercity) is a public safety issue. Cars simply aren't an efficient use of resources.
You can see from the comments here people will talk about "subsidies" for rail. Why does rail need to turn a profit? Roads don't. The Post Office doesn't. The Fire Department doesn't. Yet for some reason we hold public transport infrastructure to a higher standard.
Americans, in particular, love their cars. And there has been a powerful lobbying operation to associate rail with tax increases. This is so short-sighted because nobody is confiscating your car. Fewer people on the roads will improve your driving experience and travel times.
We see in the UK that it's cheaper to fly to Spain than to take intercity train journeys. As far as I'm concerned, citywide rail (eg the Tube in London, the NYC Subway) should be free and intercity rail should have a nominal cost that is cheaper than driving.
Bus and rail is likely to be unsustainable for much longer (centuries ?).
Even in European countries lauded for great public transport, people own and enjoy cars. Of course, there are benefits to public transport that the car cannot offer, such as efficiency at scale. But it's not so black-and-white. There are also benefits to car ownership that public transport cannot offer, such as independence.
One might say that Uber, car sharing companies, and shopping online are bridging the independence gap. To an extent, this is true. But not always. Particularly, not when the non-car-ownership option is much more expensive, and not when people’s needs demand a higher level of independence.
My point: much of this has more nuance than is opined online. Do not presume when speaking for “normal people”.
You need to care for the car even when you are not travelling. You need a parking space, insurance, maintenance, etc... And when you are driving, you need to be attentive, sober, and well rested, otherwise you are a danger to yourself and others. With public transport, you have none of that, no one will die if you take a nap, and once you are at your destination, you are free, you don't have a ton of metal to care for.
The same applies to taxis and ridesharing, but public transport is usually more efficient and cheaper.
In the US people are dropping like flies from obesity and disease. But even their day-to-day quality of life is awful, because naturally they don't feel good. A portion of this is directly because of a pro-car culture. When you can't walk anywhere ever that has an effect.
People in the US are still very pro-car. They can't, or maybe don't want to, connect the dots on the consequences of that. American individualism is so extreme that people are happy to kill themselves, so long as they're the one who pulls the trigger.
Their words may not be reliable. This is why we need data. How much money are average people spending? How healthy are average people? Etc etc. That should influence our decisions around public policy.
Once again, you cannot trust what so-called "normal people" say. Particularly when there's political pressure at play. I'll say it again, but plenty of people would happily shoot themselves if they got to pull the trigger.
Hyper-individualism of the US, and the rest of the West to a lesser extent, is a cancer. We work hard every single day to ignore it's plagues. The extreme cognitive dissonance our citizens are forced to produce means they're not reliable narrators.
Yes you can. That's what a democracy means.
This is also a feedback loop. People like cars, because the infrastructure of the society is built around cars. And the infrastructure is built like this because so many people use cars.
I own an old VW van, and use it to experience this freedom: roadtripping through Europe. Even short trips to a campsite near my home feel like holiday the moment I drive it out of the garage.
But I've never understood this "feeling of freedom" of all these tens of thousands of people who pull up into their daily traffic jam. Twice a day. How is that "freedom"? How do people justify this for themselves - other than "no alternative". I commute weekly by train, and it's marvelous to look out of the window at the daily traffic jams on the highway, from the inside of a train that zooms by this hell at 160km/h. I've had jobs where I had to stand in such jams daily and it's truly a soul-sucking, time eating, fun-sucking grind. Especially compared to sitting in a train and drinking a beer, watching a netflix, reading a book or working on my laptop. That, to me, is much more freedom. Not as much as roadtripping, but free, nontheless.
How i envy the Dutch and Belgian transport situation!
Yes, because the the traffic ministers allocate the spending of their resort to the Autobahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn.
I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/ghg-abatement...
Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore wouldn't be privy to them. Instead I rely almost exclusively on Germany's public transport for my daily commutes, which I find perfectly satisfactory for this purpose and significantly more convenient than parking and maintaining a car.
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[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...
Though to be fair, there are also substantial subsidies for the whole road network.
Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.
However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid
The subsidy for maintaining car infrastructure is causing _more_ co2 per euro invested, how's that fit into these calculations?
This is so useless, it sounds like propaganda.
I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies.
I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff.
That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people. Sure - there would still be occasional maintenance - but nobody always on duty driving trains (automated), nobody selling tickets (online), nobody cleaning stuff (automated cleaning of trains inside and out) etc.
I’d ignore unpriced other externalities, that is a large rabbit hole. (Do people increase consumption of other goods thanks to the savings of this ticket…)
I’d rather look at the project, subsidies again and the cost and realise that at this scale there are few individual projects. So this is a very large knob to dial down the emissions.
Secondly, the subsidies go into the German economy. The rail system is very domestic economy heavy, so at a time where the German economy is going into a recession, spending 3bn to subsidise transport and reduce people’s cost of living and pay for German workers and investments is not such a terrible idea.
So while the price tag is high, the money isn’t turned into trees or buried like in pure abatement projects and at this scale it is a nice leaver to pull.
Germany neglected or even removed their rail infrastructure, especially for the past 25 or so years, after privatization. These "subsidies" are a course correction.
These investments also make it a real pain to use the system right now, because a lot of lines are closing months at a time and the alternatives are already overloaded. I'd rather have a car for the next 5-10 years too - and I live very central with many connections.
Here's a map of disruptions for reference: https://www.zuginfo.nrw/map.html#!P|HimSearch!histId|1!histK...
E.g. during the original 9 Euro Ticket, the government also reduced taxes on gas to fight inflation, and this cost as much as the subsidies for the 9 Euro Ticket. The gas tax reduction's costs were 3 billion, and the 9 Euro Ticket costs were 2.5 billion.
So I would call it exceptional value when compared to other things.
It translates to about $1 a gallon tax on gasoline which is (a) not enough to change people’s behavior (at its peak gas was almost $2 more than it is now and I drove just the same) but (b) people in 2024 will complain bitterly about it anyway. That is, polities are hypersensitized to that sort of imposed solution right now: for a long time people in the US accepted fluctuations in the gas price because it was seen as a market price so we only had riots whenever a black person was shot by the cops; in “normal” countries (including France and Egypt) you have riots when the price of petroleum goes up because it is seen as being controlled by the state. I think the US has gotten more “normal” post COVID-19 and with GHG controls on the horizon. $1 a gallon is not quite going to make EVs beat gas but it certainly happens at a price below $500 a tonne.
Favorable CCS from industrial sources is quoted around $100 a tonne but that is (c) from a plant that runs 24-7 (e.g. if your natural gas plant runs 20% of the time the capital cost of CCS is multiplied 5x at least disregarding that the plant might not run well when it is starting up and shutting down) and (d) has few realizations.
The biggest positive externality of rail is suppressed traffic congestion, it is a big quality of life thing if you can avoid sitting in a traffic jam. (Reminds me of posters I saw in Germany that said Zukunft onhe Stau)
I find rail tourism to be luxurious compared to motortourism in that one gets to the center of town and doesn’t need to stress about parking, traffic and all that. Contrast that to the fight to refuel your rental car at the airport.
You mention that the rail industry is already substantially subsidized. What you did not mention is that the automotive industry is as well. Roads are paid by state and republic. Car purchases are often subsidized via a flat return by the republic (which primarily benefits the rich). Petrol is also subsidized.
Now all these automotive subsidiaries benefit only the people who own cars, and much more the wealthy ones. In Germany, only 43 million private households own a car. That's just roughly 50 %.
But if you get people to choose public transport over your auto, then this benefits everyone. Better air quality, less noise pollution, less streets and more space for pedestrians. Anecdotally, a close neighbourhood removed some parking spots in favour of space for local cafes and public benches with plants. Removing just two parking spots give enough places for 10 people to sit together and enjoy a sunny Sunday -- which otherwise would be dead space occupied by the cars of two or even one household.
It gets people out of their cars because it's cheaper than petrol. When train tickets (in other countries) cost more than the cost of petrol for the journey, commuters who already sank the cost of buying a car + insurance ask why they should bother paying a premium for the train ticket when the cost of petrol will be cheaper.
Only after people transition to taking the train in the morning, do they then start to ask questions like "do I get value out of paying for insurance on a car I don't drive?" and start to make decisions like selling their cars. In this case the carbon reduction is not only the carbon reduction of the trips that would have been taken by train, but the carbon reduction from the use of the car altogether, and future car maintenance and replacement.
There is a lot of “modeling” but has anyone actually proven “reducing 8000 tons of carbon reduces temperatures by n degrees?” And is it beneficial to lower temperatures? Are there benefits to higher temperatures that haven’t been quantified?
Just seems like the plan is “spend whatever it takes forever” — when whatever it takes isn’t even quantifiable. Basically investing without ever knowing the return on the investment.
Face it, trains is the better option here.
Bike and walk is best of course but troublesome long distance.
That assumes that there is still sufficient potential for additional use of these cheaper carbon abatement methods. The tricky part about fighting climate change is that we have to make change in many different places. Each partial solution has only a limited capacity for deployment.
> The air pollution-related damage attributable to driving, therefore, can be estimated at $10.7 billion to $41.6 billion per year – an average of between $93 and $360 per U.S. household per year.
Many of these can be calculated and measured.
Rail doesn’t significantly pollute more or deprecate faster on the infrastructure side empty or full.
You spelled “counterfeit carbon credit” wrong. There's no carbon sequestration technology that can fix carbon at industrial scale at that cost yet (and maybe never).
Without it this comparison is meaningless.
All those other wins for society should be counted too, there may not even be a cost left to count towards CO2 reduction.
But most importantly, taking 3 billion in taxes and handing them out as subsidised pricing to some of the people isnt really a cost (to society as a whole), it's an income redistribution.
This is something that particularly frustates me in the case of buses the UK. They're ridiculously expensive (well, except for the temporary current £2 scheme), and empty. There seems to be a political consensus that we should have them, so it would make far more sense for them to be free in all instances, except when demand is so high they're full (e.g. rush hour)
I would fully support if part of my taxes would subsidize rail industry and I get cheaper prices. Imo good use of tax dollars.
And this is JUST the roads. No other subsidies and incentives given to car manufacturing and car transport.
Modern policy in a nutshell.
I'm perplexed by the way you omitted the fact that these subsidies cover bus services, both local and regional (it's in the article's leading sentence).
From there you proceeded to use that cherry-picking to single out a specific type of service while also cherry-picking the tradeoffs.
Also, there are countries out there where the average tax payer subsidizes car drivers a lot too.
and how was this number actually calculated?
I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as some white label system, so it was very confusing to purchase (you cannot buy them at the machines).
The price hike is the wrong direction here if we are reducing that much time on the road. Kudos though for the great rail systems. The USA has a lot to learn here and it’s baffling how terrible it is here. I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient. In the USA I spend 10-15 mins trying to park any time I go anywhere
That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
It influenced the idea to come up with a permanent ticket: the "Deutschlandticket". It started 1. Mai 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket
The Deutschlandticket costs max 49 Euros (next year it will cost 58€ per month) and is valid for one month for mostly all local®ional public transport systems (plus a few selected non-regional trains) in the whole of Germany. The subscription will renew automatically.
Companies often support employees by paying some of the costs. Then it typically costs 34.30 € per month. From next year on, employees pay 40,60 € per month max.
Here in my home city already 94% of the 213000 pupils use the Deutschlandticket for 0 € per month. Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
I have the ticket in my iPhone's wallet and thus also in the Apple Watch wallet. Additionally I need an ID card. Which at some point in time will also come to the smartphone. https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/new-mob...
We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these effect is they far outgrow the attention span of polititians as they take years to come to full force.
Most students now get the nationwide ticket for effectively about 30€/month.
So for students in my region this was never free and still isn't, you are forced to pay for it and can't opt out: https://www.studentenwerk-leipzig.de/mobilitaet/semestertick...
> Studierende der sieben Leipziger Hochschulen im Zuständigkeitsbereich des Studentenwerkes Leipzig zahlen den Beitrag von 176,40 Euro verpflichtend mit der Immatrikulation bzw. Rückmeldung zum Wintersemester 2024/25.
But hey, germany could never really decide, are they living in an authoritarian, left or right utopian la-la-land or in a free country. For some time the american influence was huge, but i fear, the influence will diminish and the pendulum swings again.
So students basically never have to pay for the public transportation which is really awesome.
EDIT: by public transportation I mean whatever is included in the D-Ticket (no Intercity or similar types of trains).
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)
"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."
You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.
What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.
But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.
It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable, resilient technology!
I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget that helpful clerk.
Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.
For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.
They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!
I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
There should also be a unified system for passengers to claim their money back if their train is delayed.
While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).
No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.
There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips
That is something we can agree upon.
reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want
SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.
In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.
It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Paper based offline processes forever, please.
Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.
Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.
If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible
It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.
Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.
Sure, if you live in a larger city and you never leave… I lived in Munich for years and never needed a car, just comfortable shoes, a bike and occasionally a transport ticket.
Try to get to a smaller town or village, you are lucky if you only spend twice as much time getting there as with a car.
The trains get randomly cancelled, delay is basically guaranteed, the workers go on strikes relatively frequently, so you can never rely on trains working for anything remotely important.
I guess my frame of reference isn't average, given I live in Switzerland.
Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!
Germany’s system gets a lot of hate but it still in the top ~8 or so.
(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).
As a Swiss person you want appreciate German tax rates that subsidize that 49-euro tickets. The money has always got to come from somewhere.
Just in case this is helpful to someone, you can buy the ticket from one of those different transport organizations you mentioned and avoid that time limit to cancel. The one to use for that is https://www.mopla.solutions/, it's a simple app (alternatively web site) that worked really well for me (no affiliation).
The €9 ticket was a 3 month temporary offer, which was not originally intended to continue permanently at all.
> I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
The ticket is subsidised by the German government(beyond the amount that all rail infrastructure and most services are subsidised) for the purpose what is covered in the article - encouraging permanent modal shift of regular travellers(primarily commuters) from road to rail. If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
The idea is to push people to use the train, but a train isn't an alternative if it takes 9 hours compared to the 2 hour flight.
Tourist&foreigners can use the Deutschlandticket, too.
But: it's a monthly subscription automatically renewing every month, so one has to cancel it early enough when planning to leave the country. You'll also typically need a smartphone for the ticket.
"Downloading the Deutschlandticket.de app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store is only possible in certain countries." (ikr, it's THE problem)
You can buy for a single month when booking through the right company. "mo.pal" is a good one, for example. However, I agree that it is a bit predatory.
Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)
The subscription model is intentional - this isn't meant to help tourists or to be bought when you need it, it's meant to make sure people have already pre-paid the cost when making a decision whether to take a train or a car (by being cheap enough that people subscribe even if they don't use it all the time).
Just had to remember to cancel.
what bugs me the most is that i can only book it for a specific calendar month. that is _so_ stupid ...
No, you could never use it on IC or ICEs
with much of the population in a few denser areas, where public transport would make a lot of sense.
But yes, I do wish California did better. People are used to bad transit, and have never visited Tokyo or even NYC, so expectations are low.
Do any states have something equivalent to this?
I don't get your point.
I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.
I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.
I feel most know about Japan's shinkansen being run well.
For those who don't, the average delay is 1.1 minutes on average.
For comparison, the DB long distance trains are considered on time if they're less than 6 minutes late, and still only 64% are considered on time.
even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck.
https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2023/en/combined-management-re...
What? How? I have the ticket and despite that I never use any regional train because they're generally awful. (Local busses and trams on the other hand work pretty well)
Like, focus on public transport won't work. Because in some tiny towns of 30k people living there, there is never a bus around so why care? Like... dude. In Hamburg, we have subway stations that move more people in minutes than people live in your town. Yes, it may not work on your case. Your case is however a side note. It needs consideration, but not focus.
Or electric vehicles. There are interesting questions about electric vehicles in uncontrolled situations, emergency services and long-distance situations. As well as regions without a good charging infrastructure. Yes. These are problematic. Except, most likely, more unique cars drive past my window in an hour on a workday than exist in that tiny town. Just keep your ICE car for the trip to spain you never take by car, but we should optimize the vehicles in cities. Again, it needs consideration, but not focus.
Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?
2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.
First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months.
People loved it, and the government talked about doing a permanent 29€ ticket.
But now we pay 49€ and it's already planned to become 59€.
Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded
Depends. In my city "poor" people pay less. Just 19 € per month. Pupils don't pay at all. Students pay 29.40 €.
That's still less than an average car. A commonly quoted figure is 10'000 CHF per year. [2]
[1] https://www.sbb.ch/de/billette-angebote/abos/ga/ga-preise.ht...
[2] https://www.comparis.ch/carfinder/autofahren/auto-kosten
On the other hand, if price was set to zero, you would get weird over-usage patterns (like people using it for housing or other nonsense)
Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
Even so, cities subsidize this ticket for the “poor”, so practically their costs are even lower.
That was a different Ticket. A highly subsidized time-limited offer. It was never meant to be economical. The 49€ is the economical viable solution, after a long discussion, which still is subsidized. And the 59€ is just the rise to fine-tune the price to actual usage and inflation.
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Poor people, as also students, get a lower price. Usually around 19-29€. And many workers can get it through their company, or can get something back from taxes. The amount of people who are really paying the full price themselves is probably not that high.
Someone said in other comment that that 9 ticket was one time only
> That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
While currently even the federal government is subject to the so-called Schuldenbremse ("debt brake"), municipalities and counties are under much stronger legal obligations to balance their budgets, and in a lot of states, public transport is an entirely voluntary matter for municipalities to provide (and even where it isn't, the mandated minimum obligation probably won't entice anybody to take public transport if you don't have to), which starts mattering in a budget crunch.
Already the first major cities have threatened future service cuts. For now that may just be political posturing, but it's still not what you would want to hear in that context, and certainly doesn't serve to encourage people getting rid of their cars, either.
I had to choose between going to work 45 minutes earlier (of course, unpaid and without the possibility of leaving earlier) or risking being too late half the time. I had to travel further for my next job, but I thought it would be better because it was another connection. I was wrong. It was usually better in the mornings, but my way home usually took between 1,5 and 3 hours instead of the planned 45 minutes.
The next job I chose only because there, at least, I could take the S-Bahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn Trains, and it was a direct connection, which was way more reliable. But it was very loud, very smelly, cold in winter, and very hot in summer (I remember having a working AC twice in the four years that I traveled that line), and there were (not always empty) beer bottles rolling around the floor almost all the time. I always paid for the entire year in advance, so the 90-minute daily drive did cost a little more than 220 Euros monthly. Otherwise, it would have been even more expensive. So, the current ticket would have improved that, at least financially. Now, I barely take the train anymore.
I broke my ankle so badly in my youth that the doctors told me that they had to completely cut it open from both sides to see if they could improve it in any way. They also said that there was a strong possibility that I would wake up with a fused ankle after the operation. They recommended I only do that when the pain becomes unbearable, which I am now waiting for. So, I am permanently in pain, and walking is terrible for me. Still, when I have to go to the nearby city center, I prefer walking for 45 minutes instead of taking the 10-minute trip by train. That is what relying on German public transportation for more than ten years did to me. I tried that train connection multiple times before and stopped after it took me over an hour twice (after about five trips total).
Disclaimer: It is not that bad everywhere in Germany. That's why I wrote "in my region" in the beginning. Within Berlin, for example, I had good experiences with public transportation. Well, at least regarding its availability. There were still junkies in there. And homeless people who smelled like they were living on that train for at least a few weeks. But well, that's another topic.
Want to improve things for people in the UK, ram through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago.
New towns will just be full of commuters and have no life in them. We need to build high rises in cities, and give people living in apartments real rights - the leasehold system is feudalism.
And give Manchester and Birmingham real metro/tube systems!
New housing has to be built along transportation corridors. If you want to efficiently build housing, you have to extend transportation infrastructure into areas and then grow towns around that.
This isn't actually hard and has been done for 100 years but somehow in modern day many countries are to stupid to understand this.
The M40 didn’t have this problem.
Yes transportation goes without saying. Places like Telford and Milton Keynes and the likes. There are tons of places on the WCML that could have MK style communities.
However I don't blame the public for not knowing this fact. There was (and to some extent still is) a media lockdown on reporting who is behind the Starmer project. (Because if it had been reported on it might not have succeeded).
There is no way to fix the UK railways, because it would require expensive engineering projects and purchase of private land/properties at low prices. People would vote them out as soon as they could. So no chance of that happening anytime soon.
Some of the arguments is based on similar German research, which is cited.
I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.
Naturally, those people have never been to San Fran. They live in an ugly home in North Texas, where they commute 2 hours a day to their shitty office job and they know at least 5 people who have died in a car accident.
A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.
If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.
That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
They don't just sell fear. They sell confirmation bias too.
The man who lives in an ivory tower in the suburbs is happy to read the news about a stabbing on the subway as it makes him feel less bad for not putting his money where his mouth is and riding it himself.
God they were cheap tickets though..
I return as a visitor of Toronto every quarter for work and there are many times where I Uber instead of TTC because of these comments. Even slightly busy at 4-5 PM there's always folks who have hit the gym and skipped showering and most days there's "something" happening on the TTC.
Ride 8AM and 5PM every workday for a year and tell me that it’s safe when you roll through the bad parts of Long Island/ brooklyn/Queens or the south side of Chicago. Tell me that you don’t have to take the inconvenient early train because of nTh handicap ramp pickup or last-mile cyclist that slows down your commute. Security on transit only cares about fare collection. The US is not like Europe where there is some latent pride in your ancestors accomplishments.
I'm sure cleaner cars would help at the margins. Speed, convenience, comfortable, and cost all matter.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/11/the-b...
The real reason, rather then looking at the most basic surface level is actually the horrible land use planning and the horrible transportation and city engineering. This includes things like zoning, building regulation, environmental regulation and many other things.
If America gets to a point where that’s no longer possible and people have to live in smaller and more densely populated areas not by choice but by necessity then the country is truly in decline.
Let the Germans cram themselves into smaller homes and trains. I truly hope Americans can continue to prosper and acquire comfortable homes with more utility and private transport powered by cheap energy for all.
Trains are so heavy it doesnt really cost or save anything if there are people inside or not.
Its like restaurants throwing away food.
£80 if I have the audacity to go to greater London today without having planned ahead (3 hour journey + tube). And the same cost coming back - off peak of course. £160! Vs £55 in petrol
Travel at quieter times to benefit from cheaper off peak tickets they used to say. Hah.
Now I just arrive to a city and hop into the transport method of my choice.
If you live in a smaller town or in the countryside, then your problem really isn't the price of public transport, but the quality.
My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a lot...)
Yes there are places where cars are better in some aspects, but that is the case no matter how the ticket is structured. You can't magically extend the train network by reducing ticket price.
And if cars are the only viable option is questionable, as there are many people even in those places who don't own a car. They just have to live with subpar bus system or other local transport.
I don't understand how anybody can paint this as a bad thing. Are you also against universal health care by any chance?
Every city has public transport.
There is a large density of public transport throughout the country: trains, local trains, underground trains, busses, ferries, ...
The ticket is valid there, too.
As a counter example I live in Rome where city trains are the best public transport available and house prices are heavily linked to closeness to subway or train station, yet we still are the city with most cars per capita in Europe and probably in the whole west.
If only those living close to train stations used trains it would massively reduce the need for cars and consequently the heavy traffic we usually experience.
I live 15 minutes walking from the closest station and it's so much better to go to work by train than by car, the trip is shorter, I don't have to drive, find a parking spot, a legal one, where I can't be fined and don't have to pay for it, while on the train I can read and air conditioning actually works and train cars are usually not crazy full like subway ones.
TL:DR that's how trains work they are not supposed to solve every commuting problem but the solvable ones
Plus: your point, caller? Investing in roads only helps folks with cars. There are plenty of people for whom public transport is the only option.
I mean, in the US I've been to a lot of small towns where there is no train service, but the old station is still there, with the rails all torn out and replaced with houses, or roads, or bike paths.
And in the UK, the infamous Beeching cuts in the 1960s removed lines based on a profitability model which wasn't applied to roads, causing many communities to lose rail service and essentially require everyone there to shift to cars (replacing trains with bus service failed.)
How much of Germany is like that, where the people in the country insisted on good roads for their cars, causing the rail system to be decommissioned, and now they are stuck with that decades-old decision to prioritize the more environment destroying option?
Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get your connecting train. Or maybe you won't arrive at all, happened enough times to me that I frankly don't trust it anymore. And considering how expensive ICE tickets have gotten... yeah I'd rather take the highway, despite that I don't like driving much.
Using the rail system? Now that’s a trick and a half.
Apart from that, it's a lot more stressful (and time consuming) to go to a train station and leave at a train station instead of just driving by car.
Sadly in the US Midwest we just don’t have there population density to do this sort of thing.
Also, some textbook examples of bad incentives. For example, repairing bridges is paid by DB. If a bridge is beyond repair, then the tax payer pays. Predictable result: doing hardly any maintenance until the bridge fails. (That example is by now fixed, but shows the clear lack of planning)
Finally, the system is just over capacity. Many more trains but same infrastructure as decades ago. If you got rid of half the schedule and used a swiss-like system of stopping several minutes at every station, the trains could be on time. But the trains already are overcrowded, so then what do you do with all the passengers?
Just to give you an example of the latter: a Vietnamese-German woman (a German citizen who speaks German natively) was recently in the news because the local authorities have refused to issue her baby a birth certificate for over 6 months.[0] When she went to get a birth certificate, the authorities told her that her last name, Le Nguyen - which already appears on all of her German documents - does not meet their standards. They refuse to issue a birth certificate for her baby until she changes her last name to something the German regulations allow.
To make the situation even more absurd, the problem is that the German regulations state that double family names do not exist in Vietnamese (surprise: they do).[1] If the mother had a French double name, it would be no problem.
The problem is not even the baby's last name - it has the father's last name. The problem is that the birth certificate has to list the mother and father, and the authorities refuse to write the mother's name.
Instead of just giving the mother a bit of leeway and issuing a birth certificate, the authorities insist on inflexibly following some completely incomprehensible interpretation of the regulations. Suddenly, after thirty-something years of living in Germany, this lady has to suddenly change her last name, and until she does that, her baby - a German citizen - has no official documentation and cannot receive any government benefits.
Repeat this daily across many aspects of daily life, and you can see how it would become a problem.
0. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/berlin/rbb-keine-g...
1. https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/10/interview-berl...
Or in other words: classical underfunded, overused legacy system showing its age.
Yeah, that reason is propaganda and myth, it might have been true in the 1800s and early 1900s but now it's the same shit as everywhere else
Even Spanish trains are faster and more punctual on average than German ones, and Spaniards are world world-famous for siestas
EDIT: Oh and hospitals!
Even if you were, is that really a bad thing? Why do we demonize communism (and socialism ) so much ?
Poor implementation in Soviet Union or in PRC that is only seen through the color of propaganda with the inherent cultural and ideological biases is hardly a good basis for judging a movement that was a response to centuries of extreme worker exploitation in direct result industrialization and raise of machines.
Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
We learn and try to take to best from all economic systems not demonize any of them.
Arguably if more people are using rail it can become palatable to shift that money away from the tax benefits and subsidies for Oil which (equally) artificially lower fuel prices from real market prices (and which people seem to have no problem with).
How do you obtain car movement data if not by tracking cell phones?
[0] https://mcc-berlin-ariadne.shinyapps.io/dticket-tracker/
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4526796
The study would be flawed if the group is not chosen to represent correctly the entire population. E.g., if they called for volunteers using the app, mostly people will apply that are engaged in climate change mitigation anyway and / or are in the target market for the 49 Euro ticket.
[1] https://mcc-berlin-ariadne.shinyapps.io/dticket-tracker/