Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
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...
Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.
Gp said they know about these other factors but doesn't know how to price them. Do you know a way?
Doesn't having a car do this too?
I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but there's a strong danger of comparing apples and oranges if these things aren't spelled out imo.
Don’t forget too that the cost of proving roads is also ‘subsidised’ in most countries, but we’re tend to be a bit blind to that.
(This is not an argument against rail - I just find that subsidies are often mentioned with respect to rail but not with roads).
I’m not sure if it’s the case here with Germany, but typically we refer to transit spending like this as “subsidies” but for some reason we forget that building and maintaining roads and highways and such are subsidies too.
In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.
Here’s another way to think about it: Germany invested N billion into shifting behavior to rail.
How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?
It saves the commuters the cost of buying a car, insurance, gas and maintenance. it saves building new roads and lifecycle costs of maintaining a road. Trains allow dense developments with a little bit of walking. Walking is healthy, a bit of exercise saves a ton on healthcare costs. Density makes everything cheaper. Carbon emissions are just a bonus.
> already substantial subsidies for the rail industry
Though to be fair, there are also substantial subsidies for the whole road network.
Road vehicles are heavily taxed in European countries. I don't have the figures for Germany, but the UK spends £12bn per year on roads, while it collects £25bn in road fuel duty and £7bn in vehicle excise duty.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...
Roads are much more efficient with fewer cars.
What’s the subsidy to road and oil companies right now? Might be nice to just shift it over.
The only carbon capture/sequestration method I’m aware of without significant tradeoffs outside of price is direct air capture, and last I saw, that clocked in at $600-1200/ton (Climeworks). So maybe not such a terrible deal?
Wetlands do a better job of carbon sequestration than trees.
Globally, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s.
Maybe we should restore them.
The sheer amount of additional benefit means this is a gallingly reductive view of it all.
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.
The cost of carbon capture is not equal to the value it provides to humanity. In fact, not emitting CO2 that you could have, is even more valuable than CO2 you remove later from the atmosphere.
Roads, highways and gas are massively subsidized, much more per kilometer travelled than rail. I think if you factor in spared road maintenance alone, from travellers using the train instead of their cars, you might see the operation is actually saving public money.
> requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn
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.
In Japan, rail companies also own the land around the station. There is often a mall or office right on top of the station. So they capture a more of the value of having public transport.
In western countries land lords benefit a lot from nearby public transport for free and maybe only contribute in taxes.
Opening the railways to competition has utterly ruined the UK's rail network. Ticket price has skyrocketed while service quality has fallen.
In the 30s, French rail companies begged and lobbied the government to nationalize them, so they could exit the burden that was maintaining a rail network.
Rail just isn't profitable, but is vital to society, and will become even more so as gas becomes increasingly expensive/lacking. Some things should just never be opened to competition.
When installed and kept up properly with good policymaking railways are always a positive for the economy. They cause a huge amount of cheap movement that increases business activity. Little towns that become railway stops develop much faster. The bigger stations are great for shops and food. The access to education and high-value driving extracurricular activities increase for younger people too. They overall make the economy resilient against all sorts of crisis (energy, markets)
The more railways are used for commuting, the less people are on the road. So it increases the road efficiency too and reduces degradation. Railways are great drivers of innovation and the technology they generate can be backported to cars, they are initial investment drivers.
However, the first if/when is a big one. You can half ass roads. You pay compensation for a pothole every now and then and make small improvement to get votes. You cannot half ass railways. They require constant maintenance and a whole mindset built around them.
Japan does railways correctly. China is getting there. The Netherlands is nearly a paradise of bike and railways. Germany isn't. The countries with almost the same culture, Austria and Switzerland, care much more about their railways and invest them properly however their government aligns. Germans keep electing the right wing party with their ministers of ~BMW~ transport and then complain about 50% of the non-cancelled trains are late and the maintenance cost of the falling apart rail system is quadrupled.
> That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people
Simplest redesign is running longer trains - they still need just 1 driver.
Britain’s trains are sometimes comically small (3 carriages) and overcrowded. French trains are 2-3x longer, Russia/China even more so.
Second is standardisation - all of Uks train companies run different stock and it’s ovsoleye
I doubt that moves the needle a lot unless you're making _everything_ fully automatic, i.e. including the infrastructure creation & maintenance and streamline that extremely well.
If you take a ride from Hamburg to Berlin with the ICE, there's maybe 8 staff on board, 200-300 passengers, it takes ~2 hours and the average ticket price is 77€ according to some travel app.
Even if you get rid of all 8 of them, the price per ticket isn't going to be lowered significantly.
Yeah, it seems that "self-driving trains" are a much, much more tractable problem than self-driving cars. On the other hand, the cost of the driver is amortized over many passengers, and much of the labor isn't driving but rather serving as conductor, etc, so it may not even matter too much.
> automated cleaning of trains inside and out)
For the outside, you can imagine a carwash.
For the inside, my brain goes to scary dystopian places. Like, "what if we make the inside out of chemically-inert glass-based materials, and clean it by immersion in pirhana solution?" One would just need to recycle the solution, and recharge it with hydrogen peroxide. This would rule out the use of plastics in the interior, however.
Maybe something more like a dishwasher could also work, but I'm not sure it'd be Strong Enough for Tough Stains. It could even just make a mess. I've heard stories of Roombas that encounter dog poop; they say it goes badly...
This analysis is too simple. Roads need to be maintained, road accidents are a burden on the national health service and air pollution has a long term negative impact on people's health
Cars also have a huge subsidy in the form of roads
There are generally taxes (e.g., car or gas taxes) that cover the costs. I don't know about Germany's situation, but it is not impossible to make that net zero.
You're not pricing in the primary impact of the subsidy - the value of the travel itself. Those tickets subsidize travel and reduce carbon emissions.
Show me an effective carbon abatement method well under $100.
A big externality is time-savings, and can be calculated.
Secret plan of car driving politicians to decrease the traffic for themselves
Well it's not just a carbon credit, it also provides subsidized public transport to everyone, reduces congestion, improves city air and likely cuts road deaths. Arguably tax dollars extremely well spent.
Except that due to this cheaper ticket congestion on trains is horrible and since the infrastructure is poorly maintained it’s quite common to be late by 1-2 hours while being packed in a sardine tin.
When you say “carbon abatement” do you mean carbon credits/cleanup or other ways of emitting less of it in the first place?
Why do you need to price them?
Also, there are countries out there where the average tax payer subsidizes car drivers a lot too.
Disturbingly, your link includes Carbon capture and storage from a fossil power plant, which has never been demonstrated practically and is basically a scam at this point, pushed by oil companies.
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
Who said rail industry should be profitable in the first place?
I would fully support if part of my taxes would subsidize rail industry and I get cheaper prices. Imo good use of tax dollars.
Yes, lets subsidize the aviation and car industry more instead!!
Face it, trains is the better option here.
Bike and walk is best of course but troublesome long distance.
> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn
and how was this number actually calculated?
How much does it cost to keep up the motor roads in Germany? Likewise, how much do the externalities of it (like pollution, and massive numbers of deaths and injuries) cost?
Without it this comparison is meaningless.
The system simply doesn't have more capacity right now.
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...
Me and my wife are certainly considering getting a car. Cars are a pain in cities, but it would save literally hundreds of hours over the course of even a single year due to just how poor the infra is.
Maybe but it’s also subsidizing travel for people, possibly increasing revenue for tourist spots and restaurants, it could keep people from buying a new ICE vehicle etc. It seems like one of those things that has a lot of benefits outside the immediate situation.
Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
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
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
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...
> Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
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.
I only pay 20 EUR a month because a 25 EUR subsidy by my employer. It is a total nobrainer although, I often even use it less, just because I can jump on any local train, tram, bus without worrying about a ticket (particularly as we don't have NFC payment). Actually the 9 EUR will effectively mean a 50% raise for me, so I am not sure if the raise even makes sense economically because people like me just would cancel.
It sounds amazing. All these prices seem crazy low. A significantly zone limited monthly commuter ticket here in Denmark costs over 500€
And if I am not mistaken, as a university student you get also that ticket for free and you just need to show your student card.
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 LOVE the German transit system"
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.
> 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.
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 don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays.
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.
One fun experience, arriving in München and trying to buy ticket for the airport train online. The app requires your birthdate. The date selector starts from present and only allows to go back one month at a time. So if you're 40 years old, you would need to click 480 times... We bought paper tickets from a machine . Machines work well compared to other countries though.
I can't tell for other countries, but SNCF digital solutions have been a great example of everything you should not do for as long as I can remember. Actually bahn.de used to be a far better interface to consult french train hours than whatever fancy new name SNCF would come every few months or so.
I couldn't disagree more. You can say a lot of bad things about Deutsche Bahn, but of all the travel apps I have used, DB Navigator and bahn.de were the best.
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.
The DB navigator app is actually decent. The one downside is it kicks you out to a website to book many international tickets, but you can still plan and track your journey delays etc. in the app.
I just used the DB Navigator for extensive travel in Germany without any problems. It doesn't provide quite as much information about how to deal with connections for a delayed train, but that is minor compared to the very transparent function for buying and displaying tickets.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
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.
As a tourist I agree, and the Deutschland Ticket App is Region locked, so you are bound to the complexity of the system, which seems unnecessary and way too expensive as opposed to the ticket locals get.
> 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.
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.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes,
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.
>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes
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.
> 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.
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)
It started with 9€, is 49€ now, and will be 58€ starting 2025.
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.
Surprised how positive you're writivg about the German public transport. The Deutsche Bahn doesn't have a good reputation in central Europe.
I guess my frame of reference isn't average, given I live in Switzerland.
Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!
As a UK citizen living in Berlin, I assure you that for all the cancellations and repair works, there's many places which look up to the German system.
(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
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.
Airtravel is also subsidised by the German tax payer. Much more than the 49 EUR ticket. No matter if you are a tourist or not. (Arguably mostly for tourists actually.)
> If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
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.
> I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient
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.
> If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
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).
Germany is smaller than California. The United States is very, very large place, mostly unpopulated. It’s hard to apply whatever Germany, a small, densely populated country does to the US, which is largely empty land.
Why do we have to pretend that routes between Montana and South Dakota have to come up when discussing ways of improving rail usage in the US? We could treat routes between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis like Germany. We could treat high speed rail in California or the Northeast like Japan. Choosing to live in an extremely rural area shouldn't just be a "well it doesn't help" me trump card to defeat things that will help most of the population.
And how many people regularly commute across the United States? The absolute majority of the journeys people make regularly is still quite short, so why not start by optimizing for them? Then continue with building high speed intercity connections between the urban areas with <500 km distance to create valuable alternatives to being stuck in the highway traffic and dealing with the airport security nonsense.
Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?
Look, nobody is talking about Nebraska. the density of the east coast is easily high enough to support high speed high quality rail.
1. CA is the 3rd largest state in the USA. Do any of the 47 smaller states have something like this?
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.
True, significant only because offered for 9 EUR initially.
Not only — when I visit friends in the UK, I've had single rail tickets cost more than the increased next years' cost of a monthly nationwide ticket here in Germany.
I'm a big fan of public transit, but it's not entirely "baffling" why the US lags European countries (and Japan) - the US is a MUCH larger country.
> the US is a MUCH larger country
with much of the population in a few denser areas, where public transport would make a lot of sense.
The size "excuse" is often brought up, I don't think that's valid though, e.g. Sweden with a significantly lower density has much better public transport. Or if we talk absolute size I think even Russia has a better rail transport system than the US for example. Like usual I think it can largely be attributed politics and to the strength of the car lobby in the US (as well as a weird desire to "stick it to poor people"), which caused a complete focus on individual travel.
The EU is only about half the land area of the USA; Germany is roughly equivalent of the fourth largest US state, Montana, and only CA, TX, and AK are bigger.
Do any states have something equivalent to this?
There’s a happy medium somewhere though and the US doesn’t meet it at all. I can’t even take a bus from my neighborhood in a California city to the grocery store in a timely manner and it’s often cancelled
Somehow that wasn't as much of an obstacle in 1920!
But the DC to Boston line isn't
I don't have the details, but every single time I have heard the mention of Deutsche Bahn in the last few years it has been accompanied by comments of how broken it has become, with constant delays and cancellations, to the point where for many people it is no longer a viable option for commute or for anything where you cannot risk to be up to several hours late.
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.
Long distance trains are getting more unreliable (ICE, IC) due to repair works on the tracks - regional / local trains are mostly fine (at least in my place here) and I can't remember the last time there was an delay longer than 10 minutes here. However lately I've saw that trains are cancelled due to manpower shortages and due to the nature the local trains are organized (there is a tender and a railway company wins that tender for 5 years with the same rolling stock) peaks in capacity like on the weekend are not dealt with.
There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
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.
It was broken long before the offer though so the reduction in driving being moderate probably reflects fewer shifts in daily commute and mostly more leisure usage.
>I LOVE the German transit system
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)
Regional trains are really okay compared to long-distance trains. These are so bad that it's unlikely that you reach your destination on time now.
> is a bit predatory
what bugs me the most is that i can only book it for a specific calendar month. that is _so_ stupid ...
It's pretty awesome, but it gets more expensive all the time.
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.
For a developed country, 59 EUR is not all that expensive if it helps you get to a job. Having it be too cheap would probably degrade the quality of service for busier routes and make it harder for future projects to pay themselves off.
Remember that it cost a small rent to get this subscription until the 9€ experiment. Flat fee national transport, I don't remember the exact price but it's multiple hundreds a month in both the Netherlands (NS altijd/trein vrij) and Germany (Bahnkarte 100). Even my local subscription to go ~10km between two cities in Germany (NRW) cost 90€ a month until that experiment
A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded
Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
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?
Well you'll usally have 563€/month as a single or 506€/month if living with a partner. State pays health insurance and rent (up to a certain limit in size of the flat). In most cities it's further subsidized (25-29€ for the 49€ ticket).
If that's enough depends a lot where you live, if you have family or not and your livestyle.
You have to pay your energy bills (40-70€/month) and internet / cell-phone (40-50€/month) for yourself.
If you are a healthy single it's perfectly fine if you life a simple life. But you can't really put aside any savings.
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Depends. In my city "poor" people pay less. Just 19 € per month. Pupils don't pay at all. Students pay 29.40 €.
It seems the problem might be that pricing is judged independent from externalities. Same with cars and roads.
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)
It's still super affordable for the average worker using these tickets to commute.
It's meant to be an alternative to car drivers which are still gonna save over driving even with multiple hikes ahead.
The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people.
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.
Hundreds of thousands of people use public transit daily in America. Long headways, poor coverage, and lackluster maintenance budgets are a much more important problem than what you're describing.
I take your point but the reality is millions use it daily. Also where it is better more use it. Which is the important point lost to many.
I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does.
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.
80% of homelessness in the USA is transitional, i.e. someone lost a job or had an injury and needs time to get back on their feet.
I was in San Francisco recently, and, okay, maybe San Francisco is special or something, but the public transport seemed basically fine? Insofar as it existed; coverage wasn’t great, but it didn’t seem particularly threatening where it existed.
> The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous 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.
I used to live in Toronto in 2019 to 2020 and used the transit exclusively.
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.
Remember folks, if someone says they don't want to ride transit with a hobo smoking meth, they're lying and they're a bad person. Even if they've previously experienced it firsthand.
I spent years riding public transit in Portland, NYC, Seattle, SF, San Diego, Chicago, and other US cities. I can tell you anecdotally that public transit in the US is dangerous and meant for the poors who don’t have their shit together to level up and commute via car.
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 think this is one reason why it is rarely expanded, people associate the stops as a way for criminals to get around; but I think usage is not great largely because it hasn't expanded...it's a self-feeding cycle.
This is just false. In the US, when public transport is good by the same measures as other countries use, such as frequency, coverage and so on, Americans use public transport just fine.
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.
The real puzzle imho is to get people to use public transport for the mostly empty route and time combinations. There are many of those for different reasons.
Trains are so heavy it doesnt really cost or save anything if there are people inside or not.
Its like restaurants throwing away food.
I made an argument for making my local public transportation free: https://boehs.org/node/free-the-t
Some of the arguments is based on similar German research, which is cited.
Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.
Germany is a dense country with a developed rail network, you are never far from a train station. Bear in mind that this includes also city transportation, which makes it a great deal.
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...)
The density is not that great, its not good enough if you don't have a car.
Yeah, but doesn't make the Bahn more punctual, or reduce those comute times from 3h down to the 1h that is possible by car, not having to jump across four connections, with related delays and dropped connections.
> Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs
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.
There is a big difference between doing 1h with car, and 3h with public transport.
This helped those people too. There is considerably less traffic cutting commute time significantly.
What's your definition of 'big train station hubs'? There are plenty of places that have small train station that connect to bigger hubs. The claim that its only useful for people close to 'big hubs' is simply false.
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.
Well, no, it's primarily about regional travel, so it clearly helps folks near to smaller stations.
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.
1h car, 3h public transport, that is the point.
True, but that's how trains work.
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
It helped anybody and everybody that wanted to travel for any reason. It meant I could go to the nearest big city to catch a movie at an IMAX theatre, something that was significantly more expensive before. You don't need a big train station hub to have trains, and you only need a few trains or buses to make up for the cost and make it worth it. Since, you know, it applies to buses as well. I live in a small shithole town, and it's extremely convenient to have the Deutschlandticket because it means I can take the bus to anywhere in the area, including the nearest train station, and I can take a train to anywhere I want from nearby towns to cities hours away. Even though I own a car again, I still have the ticket because of how useful it is and how much money it saves.
I don't understand how anybody can paint this as a bad thing. Are you also against universal health care by any chance?
Just about all of which used to have train service, right?
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?
Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. You would have to change to another train to get to a station with a regular service to London, and increasing services wouldn’t be possible without significantly increasing terminal capacity.
Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station.
Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.
People talk a lot of nonsense about 'Beeching cuts' without really understanding the history. 'Beeching' has simply become a political buzzword anybody who knows even a little about rail likes to bandy about.
Lines started closing around the 1930s and after WW2 this continued. Beeching was only working on this topic a short time and produced a report that suggested lots of things. Some of those things were done, others weren't. Cuts happened before Beeching and after him. And they happened during various different railroads organization schemes.
That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost. They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities. At that time bus services were often government run.
And Beeching was actually correct in many cases. The British rail system was simply not rationally build. It was basically built by partly speculation driven rush. While this is not a bad and certainly gave Britain a great rail system, once you have centralized control it does actually make sense to reevaluate. Lots of lines didn't make rational sense to continue.
Now of course I agree that to many lines were closed that shouldn't have been closed. But that is only a small part of the issue with the rail system. Britain still has a pretty high rail density.
Well, of course, if we didn't have traffic ministers again and again, who do everything they can to make rail less attractive and road more attractive, then we could probably have a great system. But automobile lobby is so strong, they buy all the politicians in that role, probably even before they land in that role, so I guess normal people will have to keep suffering, so that those politicians can have a life of luxury. Thank you.
I have to admit the ‘all access’ ticket system was pretty awesome when I visited. Note that this did not include trains going into Austria (even if you road them only in Germany). Nearly every city is joined by rail and it’s incredible.
Sadly in the US Midwest we just don’t have there population density to do this sort of thing.
Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies?
EDIT: Oh and hospitals!
> Am i a communist
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.
> Even if you were, is that really a bad thing?
I noticed, that it sounded like that after i submitted the comment. Was not intended.
> 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.
I totally agree.
No. That's not even socialist.
Would be interesting to see if the subsidy is covered by additional economic activity to cover the shortfall. If not it won’t last long, money doesn’t grow on trees
It does when maintaining roads, apparently.
On the other hand the Bundeswehr burns through 50 billion a year to do fuck all, so apparently it does indeed grow on trees.
Military spending is a bit of an odd one. It's basically expensive by design and ideally doesn't have any real effect.
It's not far off from a proof-of-work system. Especially given how there are many cheaper options to get rid of an enemy, but those have been outlawed such that the only options remaining are costly in people, money and goods.
This last week we would've probably all seen the photos of the gridlock on I-75 as Tampa Bay residents fled Hurricane Milton. If you followed the story you know it eventually became almost impossible to evacuate.
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.
I really really would like to see Labour in the UK to use their sizeable majority + Parliamentary sovereignty to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure, including more train subsidies, but they seem very cautious and also terrified of raising taxes. Such a waste that the UK is one of the few places where Parliament could just ram shit through and yet building anything in the UK is so hampered by self-imposed red tape.
15 years of all major parties supporting hs2 and it couldn’t be rammed through
Want to improve things for people in the UK, ram through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago.
> 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!
HS2 was an ongoing project, it was threw. It was simply cancled by a fucking asshat person who tried to appeal to the far right in a series of stunts to save his sorry ass.
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.
Lots of people seem surprised that the new government apparently have no desire to improve the dire state of the UK. But that was never on the cards and the idea that they might have done so is pure projection. The current leadership of the Labour party are from the right-wing Labour First faction who have always been very clear that their aims are not to improve the country but to keep the left out of power. They will govern in the same business-as-usual nothing-can-ever-get-better vein as the Tories and their Blairite predecessors.
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).
As someone that avoids the german rail at all costs I applaud this move, the freer the roads and airports are for me, the better.
Exactly. I don't understand why most car owners are so opposed to public transport.
the same reason omnivores are sometimes highly critical of veg*ns: there's a moral claim going on, so their identity/ moral standing is threatened.
It takes forever compared to driving in most cases, catching the transit often involves a walk, and a lot of public transit is kind of grungy. This doesn't apply or matter as much in some cases (e.g. the NY subway) but in general it's not great, at least not in the USA.
Personally I'm not opposed to public transport, in fact I want to like the railway. I tried. But the German railway is in such a poor state that I never use it. Not for small trips (with regional trains that are covered by my 49€ ticket) and especially not for longer trips (long distance trains like ICEs).
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.
A old friend used to make the same argument for doubling the price of gasoline (in Germany)… something like “it will keep the rabble off the road”.
As someone who uses the German rail any time I can, I also applaud this move.
Why do you avoid the rail system?
Because waiting im Stau (traffic jam) is so much better.
Not exactly hard to nowadays in Germany
Using the rail system? Now that’s a trick and a half.
Only 62,7% of the trains were in time (and by in time they use a rigged system to count what is in time and what is not). So it's basically a 50% chance if you will be delayed at your destination or in time. Also note, that if you have to change trains mid travel you have that chance again. That means you will be late very very often. If you travel as an individual and you don't value your time at all this is a great deal, if you travel for business purposes good luck to you.
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.
I can fully relate. No one wants to travel in these unreliable, piss-stinking trains full of drunken criminals and islamists.
Congrats, now you just need to be on board when tax money is used for that infra. I bet that latest there your opposition starts.
Look who is putting out this propaganda and who is funding them and then you will understand why they MUST sell this ticket as a success… With the high amount of tax money Germany collects from their slaves (almost 50%) we should have mobile phone coverage everywhere. Truth is there is no network on most high traffic railway tracks. You can’t have a phone call without interruption of signal loss when traveling with Deutsche Bahn. They also have no WiFi on the trains, toilets are broken and rarely anything is on time. They wanted to become more reliable but they postponed this goal to 2070!!!
Which I as a German simply fail to fathom. The quality of our Deutsche Bahn is so bad I would never drive by train. The worst thing is that they are incapable to have their trains be on time. Whenever you travel there is an extremely high chance you will not arrive at your destination in time.
Not every trip is time sensitive, most trains do run on time, and not all trains are operated by your nemesis. If you still refuse to "ever" take a train anywhere, that's on you rather than the system
Because it is a regional problem and some areas work mostly fine. I also fail to fanthom why people drive in rush hour, queuing every day for hours. Yet people do that. And people love to complain, especially those that only take trains on public holidays. But hey, here in Sweden the trains are worse than in Germany, but people complain far less and trains are full anyways.