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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

> But they’ll stop choosing the train, and over 20 years you’ll find that everyone has moved to private vehicles or alternate transportation methods.

This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 on average in the US (€0.60 v. €0.11 per liter). This is partly justified as nudging people to use less carbon intensive transport. That nudge works a lot less well when the lower carbon alternative is painfully worse than your car.

https://brilliantmaps.com/gas-petrol-taxes-us-ca-eu/

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Car ownership is pretty expensive. But holistically speaking it's not more expensive than the Deutschland Ticket, because it gives you access to cheaper housing options that you wouldn't be able to live in if you depended solely on public transport.

Can confirm for the US too. I live in a rural county with zero public transport, but when I tell city friends what the lot cost and the property tax on it, they have to hold back tears.

There's a way to combine those, and some countries have it done well (I believe this includes Germany) - you have a rail network that is good enough that you have small stops on feeder lines in rural areas; if you want to be rural you can be a mile from a train that gets you to a moderate-sized city where you can get the fast train.

You should rather compare with rural friends with access to public transport.

So you’d pay roughly $40 in tax to fill a sedan in Germany vs $7 in America at 15 gallons?

Not sure about Germany but in Spain tax on petrol is 44%. At current prices for petrol (1.3€/l) you need to pay around 78€ to fill a sedan (assuming 60 litre deposit) of which 34.3€ will go to the government.

Damn. We're at 1.80 here and I just spent 105 eur. Now, that did go 800km in a 7 seat people mover...

Cars and minivans get very very competitive if you are running them full most of the time.

(*) certain two seater cars not included

>This is a country with a $2.68 per gallon gas tax, compared to $0.51 in the US.

Irrelevant comparison since US is a widely different animal to most European countries.

It might be expensive compared to the US, but Germany is still one of the countries with the most affordable income-to-cost ratios for car ownership in the Eurozone, so car commuting is incredibly common, especially for those not living in densely populated metro areas.

From what I can see online, two-thirds of Germans use a car to commute to work.

Well yes, not difficult to see why. Germany is quite big and quite sprawled, and given how expensive home ownership is in big metro areas people choose commute longer in exchange for affordable housing.

And also the government gives you tax rebates for your fuel expenses the further you have to commute for work which is a double edged sword.

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