The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things.
This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess.
With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake.
I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be.
The new ticket is an excellent example of when national government can be superior to more local government: when the national government forces coordination to solve fragmentation problems, where local agencies lacked the...motivation to solve things on their own.
On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level. A complex system per locality can still work okay for local residents; and if it's painful for visitors, well, visitors don't vote, and it's not the kind of thing that's likely to kill tourism.
> On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level
In Germany that did happen, for sure. I used to live in the area between Mainz and Frankfurt and the multiple public transport authorities (RMV, MVB, RNN etc.) worked together to better support the transitional zones.
Probably an advantage many places would have over somewhere like the US which is quite fragmented and struggles to consistently coordinate in solving broad problems. I always remember just 2-3 years ago, driving onto a toll road in the eastern USA and there was an attendant at the booth. You paid them in notes/coins, and the attendant got the coins in their hand, leant out of their box and deposited them in a payment slot to raise the boom gate. I'm sure there was some rationale, but it was pretty bizarre.
Agreed. Another much needed example would be nationwide reciprocity for concealed carry firearms. It’s too easy to be on the wrong side of the law when crossing state lines and the regulatory nuances are difficult to understand state to state.
And for visitors who may not even speak the primary language, public transit is awful in most places in terms of onboarding jet lagged visitors. Apparently no one does UX trials of people who have zero familiarity with the system and don't speak the language--though at least they maybe accommodate major Western languages. But, in general, it's pretty awful and you at least should do some research in advance.
I usually do a decent amount of research about public transport in our travel destinations, so I more or less know what type of tickets or passes I'll be buying ahead of time.
But, last fall a flight cancellation left us with an unexpected day in Amsterdam.
I guided our family through immigration and customs after an overnight flight from Canada, and then purchased what I thought were the correct tickets for our train ride from the airport to downtown.
When we went past a card reader, it didn't seem to work, but there were no turnstiles and we were able to board our train.
There were however turnstiles when we got off at the station downtown, and they wouldn't let us through.
I walked over to an attendant at a podium, who looked at our (incorrect) tickets, our obviously sleep deprived selves and children and just laughed, told us we'd bought the wrong tickets, and let us through.
I always imagined the world of high-stakes metro-related international criminality would come with more consequences than being good-naturedly laughed at by a Nederlandse Spoorwegen employee.
I agree that vending machines are really a mess. However I recommend the Deutsche Bahn Navigator App. If you have an account you can easily get most tickets.
Also states like Baden-Württemberg got their act together recently and made it possible to book tickets all way through.
I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.
I will given Berlin credit here — after checking in to our accommodations (took a taxi from the airport), I poked a ticket machine, quickly saw the Union Jack flag and got the machine into English. Couple minutes later we had our 1 week passes in hand. In general I found the system very approachable, using google maps for route planning.
Like the SFO airport that uses the internationally recognized train symbol for the tram to the garage, and the not-recognized-anywhere BART logo for the train to the region's principal city.
What language should they accomodate? Internationally the "standard" is just local language + English. Should they choose Spanish? If they wanted to choose the language with the most speakers they would rightfully choose a dialect of Chinese.
A good example of this complexity is Berlin. Many people have monthly passes for just A and B zones, which comprise the bulk of central Berlin. However, the new airport is just over the border in zone C, which requires an additional ticket. The transit authority knows this and will catch and fine people who neglected or forgot to buy a B to C ticket.
What is complex about the B/C border? That Hönow is B? Because else, it is literary the federal state border. A/B is the S-Bahn-Ring. Sure, three zones are not super simple and where zone C ends is somewhat arbitrary. But aside from that, it's the most logical and simple solution possible.
If you think that Berlin's zone system is complex, you haven't seen the public transport in many other cities like Munich which has 6 zones or Japanese cities where trains are operated by different companies.
Berlin's system is rather simple and comparably cheap.
Your comment is a fascinating take on perspective. To you it's a fractured, difficult system. To this American, it has been absolutely futuristic every time I've been there. Wish we could get such an awful system anywhere near where I live.
Yup. As an American, I found it quite easy to navigate transit systems every time I visited Germany; most recently Berlin. Especially these days with things like Google/Apple maps transit directions that work more-or-less flawlessly. But maybe it's because I'm used to systems like Caltrain that don't even have a functioning app, and which just randomly cancel trains for huge chunks of the day, or BART, which has an even-more-insane pay-per-distance system than anything I've seen elsewhere.
If you go from the US to Europe, you'll think European public transit is great. If you go from Europe to East Asia, your perspective will change again.
For regular commuters the price is a big deal. Not only where tickets crossing multiple zones complicated to get but also unreasonably expensive (~200Eur/Month). In contrast the 49 Euros is less expensive than (almost?) any single zone monthly ticket out there.
I mean, you don't have to figure it out. You can just punch in start and end of your journey into one of several apps that work nationwide, and pay whatever it says.
Of course, many people don't have any of the apps, particularly people who rarely use public transport, which are also the people most easily confuse by the complicated fee structure.
Unfortunately, the new monthly ticket does little to help them. 49 EUR isn't a value proposition for them, and so they are still stuck with the awful status quo.
You're out of luck, if none of the route segments is served by Deutsche Bahn (which is often the case for regional routes), because then you'll be unable to buy your ticket using the most common nation-wide app DB Navigator.
That can be much more expensive as it won't automatically find the cheapest option for day passes or multi-day passes. And it's not very convenient to look up and pay separately for every ride if you visit a city and travel a lot.
This is typical in most countries that aren't very small. I'm struggling to think of a moderately-sized country that doesn't work have regional transit authorities with their own ticketing systems. I haven't been everywhere in the world so I bet they do exist, but I've yet to see one.
While Japan has regional ticketing systems and companies, they did standardize nationally on supporting 3 major prepaid transit cards (pasmo, suica, icoca) so most rapid transit and regional transit are low friction enough to just tap in and tap out. China has done the same with T-Union.
I suppose with NFC contactless payment, a plausible future state is just supporting credit card payments everywhere, though of course this doesn't solve the monthly pass problem.
> With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.
By "local" transit, I mean regional commuter trains (Regionalbahn, Regionalexpress and S-Bahn), not the faster long-distance trains (Intercity and Intercity-Express, the latter being Germany's high-speed trains).
You are so right! I was just in Munich and had some of the most confusing experience in any public transport system I’ve ever used. And I’ve seen many! It was so shocking. The UIs of the ticket machines are horrendously slow and confusing. Stop names are always in German even when switching languages. This, of course, doesn’t align with Google Maps half the time, as my GM is set to English.
In cities outside of germany, when you arrive at a new city you buy a transit ticket, you swipe that at the entrance and the exit, and anything related to zones or whatever works automatically, you don't have to think about it.
I read your comment as suggesting that this is the norm outside Germany. While systems like this exist (e.g. in London) in my experience they aren't as common as I wish they were.
As some comments here mention uncomfortable means of buying tickets across German transportation systems: I’ve been working on multiple software projects that tried to solve it and I can tell you that the reason is not sinister but rather that each system is funded locally. Which means it is subsidized locally and the need to cross those boundaries was always a luxury issue (by people like us - the E-Mail caste).
Even the juggernaut Deutsche Bahn (they handle public transport in almost every municipality) couldn’t break through these structures (eg the city of Munich just couldn’t be pressured to comply with their ticketing schemes).
In the end mandating it by the federal government was the only way. Although I’m curious who’s really benefiting from it: yes we solved the annoyances for the E-Mail caste, but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure.
Its kind of ridiculous to call it a luxury issue. Its a luxury issue if you make it one. In Switzerland 85 year old grandmothers travel between cities to go for light walks. 15 year olds go to football tournaments in other cities.
Claiming that only some elite cast of digital nomads profits from it is utterly ridiculous. In Switzerland city to city travel is more common with trains then with cars, and a huge part of the population does it.
> but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure
If the government actually correctly invests in it then it doesn't actually, specially not long term. If anything it leads to more regular more frequent service on many routes.
Switzerland is barely a ninth of Germany‘s size in square meters and population. Plus, the whole German Intercity Rail System‘s north south axis goes through 2 choke points: Frankfurt and northern Bavaria.
Is that really true? The only people who need/want to regularly travel across local transit boundaries are tech people? That seems unlikely, especially nowadays.
Welcome to UK, where 40-55mins trains from neighbouring cities to London costs 50-110£ for a return journey and 6k+ for a yearly ticket. We apologize for a delay in your journey, this is due to staff shortage.
Imagine my surprise coming from Italy, where our trains are famously dirty and late, and taking my first train in the UK.
Trains are cleaner and somewhat less delayed, but bloody hell, they are not worth the price. For £110 I reckon you can go Milan–Naples (800 km, 4h30) in high speed 1st class train, which do not even exist in Britain.
Many rail services in the UK are effectively not private now, and they're even worse, because when a right-wing government that hates public transport takes control, all hell breaks loose.
We have a very complicated rail network which is bad for many reasons other than "private" or "public"
When I was in HH, I loved the monthly pass offered by my employer (65€/month); the ability to travel longer distances over S-Bahn and taking +1 with you was killer/super-smart feature IMO. Miss those in states sorely.
I wish most, if not all, of the world adopts the german style public transport system.
It technically is in many places around Germany: The national railway infrastructure is owned by a government-owned entity, as is the main railway company. Many municipal public transport systems are also owned directly by the municipalities themselves, although there are also some semi-privatized systems and the national railway company also owns shares of municipal public transport systems in many major cities.
Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid.
In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.
My inclination to agree that public transit should mostly be a nationalized utility. But some experience in rural areas leads me to a counterargument that I don't have a good answer for:
Should people that live in urban spaces massively subsidize people that choose to live in rural areas for no economically useful reason? Like, some tech bros decide they don't want neighbors and want to live 20 km from everything. Should the city folk subsidize their preferences? Maybe it should be recouped in local taxes? Should that be covered by agricultural tax breaks?
Mostly I think public transit should be a public service. But I don't think it's a given that rich people's preferences should be subsidized just because they want to live in remote or suburban areas.
I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case.
The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.
> It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case.
Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis.
The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits.
The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.
It's hard to overemphasize just how fucked up public transport ticketing in Germany is. As a simple example, you're a tourist in Cologne for a few days, what's the best ticket if you're planning to travel around the city and take a day trip to the nearby city of Wuppertal (but across the Verkehrsbund boundary, alas) to ride the famous monorail?
It should have no issue at all to align German wide but they never did it.
The Munich MVG for example is doing an experiment were you can pay by an app from some us company were you just start and stop your journey with a button and the app gives you the best price.
They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
It's ridiculousl that modern problems are often not technical problems:-(
> One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused.
> The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, ...
Errm, you do see the contradiction here, no?
The 49 Euro ticket is actually heavily subsidized which means more tax payer money is wasted that could be invested into the infrastructure of public transport.
In Europe, ownership of public transport is a pretty wild mix, and corporations that are publicly owned (or indirectly so) do not seem to work substantially better than private corporations that won public contracts.
Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous.
Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.
> Even more: Public transport is a public good which should be funded by fossil fuel taxes and provided to users without cost.
A lot of public transport runs on fossil fuels. Especially, since Germany was so »smart« to shutdown all nuclear reactors so that coal has become the most important source of electricity again.
They’re about to double the amount of carbon taxes levied on large trucks. That tax used to be used for building new roads but it’s now all being given over to new rail infrastructure.
Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.
Not controversial in the handful of countries where public transportation is efficient and ubiquitous. Americans are fed constant propaganda about how publicly owned anything isn’t possible, sold to them by the very people whose profits rely on this being true.
Doesn't really cover a lot of things you'd want to know like price, satisfaction, reliability, etc. - all of which, I believe, are strongly negative compared with 30 years ago. Also doesn't tell you if it's long distance or commuter or both - which is an important distinction since many more people commute these days.
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
It's certainly possible this was caused by who owned what; but I'd just add the decline on the graph begins around the UK's pyrrhic victory in WW1 which IMO marked (in tandem with Irish independence) the beginning of the decline of the British Empire; while the rise at the end is roughly congruent with the increasing wealth from exploitation of the North Sea gas deposits and (depending how much you accept the possibility of noise in the data making it hard to tell exactly which year it changed direction) joining the precursor to the EU.
The infrastructure (railways and stations) is still publicly owned under Network Rail. Only the trains themselves are privately owned (often by foreign state-owned enterprises, funnily enough)
There is a big problem with this graph. Its highly misleading.
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
Nobody should be drawing any conclusions from a graph like that, since it provides no useful information allowing anyone to draw any conclusion about anything.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
That's one of those grand standing issues that many people like to focus on. The reality is the is a wild mix of private, public and everything in between out there in the world. And some system that are increasingly good have combinations of everything.
Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point.
To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all.
Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.
Ownership is no more than a collection of rights on what to do with the owned asset that is recognized by society. Regulate more and there won’t be much difference between private and public property, so ownership is less relevant than financial and incentive framework around public transportation system.
It's very plausible to have public transit systems be publicly owned by a mix of local, regional, and national bodies. Each of which might have their own local goals to incentivize with no regard for what a system on the other side of the country wants.
Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.
People love making this remark still in the UK despite the Government having much more direct control of more rail services than compared to pre-COVID, and the rail network being in an absolutely dire state. Public != good, public != bad, private != good, private != bad
Well, the problem is, especially in Germany. If someone is a "Beamter" which can't be fired, has low income, there's no motivation to make a good job.
It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" .
In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free.
A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too.
Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.
By this point, there can't be too many "Beamte" left in Germany's railway and public transit systems. After all, nobody there has received that status since the 90s.
I won't dispute that there is corruption and that there are still Nazis and right wing forces around - especially if you look in certain german states.
But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye".
Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for?
When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement.
And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
Berlin reporting: this is huge for anyone taking public transport.
Monthly ticket for the AB area alone was way above 80/€/month for the city only.
This is 49 for everything anywhere in Germany except for high speed long distance trains, flixbuses and flixtrains (the latter are private entities)
That's for AB (66,90). But you have to compare it to the ABC yearly "Abo", as you will have access to all areas. That's 88€ per month if you pay the 1056 lump sum for the yearly version. Over 100€ if you pay monthly.
I am spending 2 months in Germany starting in August, if I'm not mistaken this will also cover local S-Bahn/U-Bahn trains and DB routes, but will not cover ICE trains. Is this correct?
Yes, everything but ICE, unless your train is 20 minutes delayed, otherwise you can split things up via regional routes.
Can I use an ICE/IC train with the Deutschland-Ticket if I know I will reach the destination with a considerable delay?
Yes, you have the right to do so according to statutory passenger rights if the local train has an expected delay of at least 20 minutes. To travel by long-distance train, you must first buy a ticket. The travel costs will then be reimbursed subsequently upon request by the railway company with which you travel, e.g. by the passenger rights service centre of Deutsche Bahn.
Overcrowding is the best thing that could happen, we need more public transport users as quickly as possible.
Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
> Overcrowding is the best thing that could happen, we need more public transport users as quickly as possible.
Unless the capacity of public transport grows as well, no.
> Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
Roads aren't just for cars but also trucks which are the backbone of German logistics.
Certainly that's a risk, but I'd hope they've done some projections on it.
I'm not all that worried that this will cause overcrowding since I'd wager many people who bought the first round of tickets are just transferring over their current local subscription to the national one. Both my wife and I did that for example.
It is worth noting that this ticket is 10€ cheaper than our prior subscription, which I expect will result in a solid bit less revenue for the regional transit authorities. With a system that's already straining from under-investment, hopefully this doesn't compound already existing problems.
Local public transport is mainly being paid for by the local county and city councils, who in turn are often relatively cash-strapped and cannot cover large revenue shortfalls on their own.
Local and regional mainline railway services are being paid for by the state governments, who however in turn are to a large extent relying on federal grants paid for that purpose [1].
The new ticketing scheme was instigated at the behest of the federal government, which has the biggest financing power, but has only pledged a limited (technically unlimited this year, but since the new ticketing scheme only became effective in May, it's very unlikely that the original fixed amount will be exceeded this year) amount for covering any revenue shortfalls up to 2025 (and strong-armed the states into pledging the same amount of money for that period, too).
So if it turns out that the combination of cheaper tickets, still present after-effects of the pandemic (i.e. loss of ridership and revenue) and current inflation means that losses are higher than expected, there's plenty of scope for finger-pointing and pushing the blame around, and at least localised service cuts in more cash-strapped cities and counties (respectively states, in the case of mainline railways) remain a possibility.
[1] Historically, local/regional services were operated and paid for by the then Federal Railways. When, in preparation for privatisation of the railways, the responsibility for contracting for/tendering of those services was transferred to the state governments, they also received a corresponding financial grant in return for taking on that responsibility. It might or might not have been the original intention, but in practice those federal grants are the main source of financing for local/regional mainline services to this day.
There was already a 9€ ticket last year, while I wansnt in Germany at that time I didn't read a lot about overcrowding.
With a more expensive ticket the effect will probably be even smaller today, though in the long run all trains will probably get more filled up.
Everybody I know complained about it. The 9€ ticket didn’t cover the ICE trains and instead put more strain on those lines that are already needed by lower- to median income commuters. Regional train lines have rush hours too and during those 9€ Tickets months some wild videos went viral, where things got heated between old and „new“ users
Readit News
This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess.
With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake.
I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be.
0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_de...
The new ticket is an excellent example of when national government can be superior to more local government: when the national government forces coordination to solve fragmentation problems, where local agencies lacked the...motivation to solve things on their own.
On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level. A complex system per locality can still work okay for local residents; and if it's painful for visitors, well, visitors don't vote, and it's not the kind of thing that's likely to kill tourism.
And they have now expanded that card-based system to include a mobile app, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, so now I just tap my phone and I'm all set.
In Germany that did happen, for sure. I used to live in the area between Mainz and Frankfurt and the multiple public transport authorities (RMV, MVB, RNN etc.) worked together to better support the transitional zones.
I usually do a decent amount of research about public transport in our travel destinations, so I more or less know what type of tickets or passes I'll be buying ahead of time.
But, last fall a flight cancellation left us with an unexpected day in Amsterdam.
I guided our family through immigration and customs after an overnight flight from Canada, and then purchased what I thought were the correct tickets for our train ride from the airport to downtown.
When we went past a card reader, it didn't seem to work, but there were no turnstiles and we were able to board our train.
There were however turnstiles when we got off at the station downtown, and they wouldn't let us through.
I walked over to an attendant at a podium, who looked at our (incorrect) tickets, our obviously sleep deprived selves and children and just laughed, told us we'd bought the wrong tickets, and let us through.
I always imagined the world of high-stakes metro-related international criminality would come with more consequences than being good-naturedly laughed at by a Nederlandse Spoorwegen employee.
Also states like Baden-Württemberg got their act together recently and made it possible to book tickets all way through.
I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.
but the new ticket is really nice wrt booking.
Berlin's system is rather simple and comparably cheap.
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Of course, many people don't have any of the apps, particularly people who rarely use public transport, which are also the people most easily confuse by the complicated fee structure.
Unfortunately, the new monthly ticket does little to help them. 49 EUR isn't a value proposition for them, and so they are still stuck with the awful status quo.
I suppose with NFC contactless payment, a plausible future state is just supporting credit card payments everywhere, though of course this doesn't solve the monthly pass problem.
There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.
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Even the juggernaut Deutsche Bahn (they handle public transport in almost every municipality) couldn’t break through these structures (eg the city of Munich just couldn’t be pressured to comply with their ticketing schemes).
In the end mandating it by the federal government was the only way. Although I’m curious who’s really benefiting from it: yes we solved the annoyances for the E-Mail caste, but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure.
Claiming that only some elite cast of digital nomads profits from it is utterly ridiculous. In Switzerland city to city travel is more common with trains then with cars, and a huge part of the population does it.
> but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure
If the government actually correctly invests in it then it doesn't actually, specially not long term. If anything it leads to more regular more frequent service on many routes.
Although a great thing of Swiss trains used to be being able to switch trains quite easily between destinations, regardless of the train type.
No idea if that is still a thing nowadays.
Trains are cleaner and somewhat less delayed, but bloody hell, they are not worth the price. For £110 I reckon you can go Milan–Naples (800 km, 4h30) in high speed 1st class train, which do not even exist in Britain.
The wonders of privatisation, innit?
Many rail services in the UK are effectively not private now, and they're even worse, because when a right-wing government that hates public transport takes control, all hell breaks loose.
We have a very complicated rail network which is bad for many reasons other than "private" or "public"
It is so bad, that there are excuse generator websites with what the DB usually uses, or people that collect them.
http://privatundfun.siteboard.org/t78f2005-Ausreden-Katalog-...
But also managed decline of the railway by the Government
Subscription tickets for Hamburg which cost more than 49€ are now automatically reduced to 49€ and are changed to a Deutschlandticket.
Employer subsidized Deutschlandtickets can be reduced upto 50% for the employee.
Kids from low-income families get the Deutschlandticket for free.
Students can upgrade their public transport ticket for monthly 18 Euros...
School children pay 19 Euros monthly for the Deutschlandticket.
:-)
I wish most, if not all, of the world adopts the german style public transport system.
People with low-income (incl. seniors with low income) have a reduced price.
Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid.
In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.
Should people that live in urban spaces massively subsidize people that choose to live in rural areas for no economically useful reason? Like, some tech bros decide they don't want neighbors and want to live 20 km from everything. Should the city folk subsidize their preferences? Maybe it should be recouped in local taxes? Should that be covered by agricultural tax breaks?
Mostly I think public transit should be a public service. But I don't think it's a given that rich people's preferences should be subsidized just because they want to live in remote or suburban areas.
The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.
Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis.
The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits.
The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.
It should have no issue at all to align German wide but they never did it.
The Munich MVG for example is doing an experiment were you can pay by an app from some us company were you just start and stop your journey with a button and the app gives you the best price.
They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
It's ridiculousl that modern problems are often not technical problems:-(
Errm, you do see the contradiction here, no?
The 49 Euro ticket is actually heavily subsidized which means more tax payer money is wasted that could be invested into the infrastructure of public transport.
Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous.
Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.
A lot of public transport runs on fossil fuels. Especially, since Germany was so »smart« to shutdown all nuclear reactors so that coal has become the most important source of electricity again.
They’re about to double the amount of carbon taxes levied on large trucks. That tax used to be used for building new roads but it’s now all being given over to new rail infrastructure.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB...
I'll let you draw your own conclusions
From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
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Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point.
To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all.
Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.
Of course actually running a public transport system cannot be free, much like paving roads is not free. Pay for those with taxes.
Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.
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It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" .
In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free. A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too.
Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.
But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye".
Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for?
When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement.
And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
Can I use an ICE/IC train with the Deutschland-Ticket if I know I will reach the destination with a considerable delay?
Yes, you have the right to do so according to statutory passenger rights if the local train has an expected delay of at least 20 minutes. To travel by long-distance train, you must first buy a ticket. The travel costs will then be reimbursed subsequently upon request by the railway company with which you travel, e.g. by the passenger rights service centre of Deutsche Bahn.
Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
Unless the capacity of public transport grows as well, no.
> Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
Roads aren't just for cars but also trucks which are the backbone of German logistics.
I'm not all that worried that this will cause overcrowding since I'd wager many people who bought the first round of tickets are just transferring over their current local subscription to the national one. Both my wife and I did that for example.
It is worth noting that this ticket is 10€ cheaper than our prior subscription, which I expect will result in a solid bit less revenue for the regional transit authorities. With a system that's already straining from under-investment, hopefully this doesn't compound already existing problems.
Local and regional mainline railway services are being paid for by the state governments, who however in turn are to a large extent relying on federal grants paid for that purpose [1].
The new ticketing scheme was instigated at the behest of the federal government, which has the biggest financing power, but has only pledged a limited (technically unlimited this year, but since the new ticketing scheme only became effective in May, it's very unlikely that the original fixed amount will be exceeded this year) amount for covering any revenue shortfalls up to 2025 (and strong-armed the states into pledging the same amount of money for that period, too).
So if it turns out that the combination of cheaper tickets, still present after-effects of the pandemic (i.e. loss of ridership and revenue) and current inflation means that losses are higher than expected, there's plenty of scope for finger-pointing and pushing the blame around, and at least localised service cuts in more cash-strapped cities and counties (respectively states, in the case of mainline railways) remain a possibility.
[1] Historically, local/regional services were operated and paid for by the then Federal Railways. When, in preparation for privatisation of the railways, the responsibility for contracting for/tendering of those services was transferred to the state governments, they also received a corresponding financial grant in return for taking on that responsibility. It might or might not have been the original intention, but in practice those federal grants are the main source of financing for local/regional mainline services to this day.
There actually was a lot of overcrowding in the local and regional trains.
Everybody I know complained about it. The 9€ ticket didn’t cover the ICE trains and instead put more strain on those lines that are already needed by lower- to median income commuters. Regional train lines have rush hours too and during those 9€ Tickets months some wild videos went viral, where things got heated between old and „new“ users