The 49 euro ticket is a phenomenally good deal. Normal transit tickets vary per city, but for example in Berlin it's 3.50 per trip. So if you take transit twice a day for 7 days, you already recoup the cost of the Deutschland ticket, which lasts the entire month! This makes it good even for tourists who stay for ~a week.
At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in Germany, but a bit more borderline for a tourist.
Compare with eg Toronto's monthly pass, which is $156. A single trip is $3.35, which comes out to 24 two-trip days to recoup the cost of the card. That's almost exactly the number of business days in a month. And that card's only for Toronto!
One thing worth considering is that the 49€ ticket also lets you travel outside of your usual transit zone. We took so many “Deutschland Ticket trips” to towns that wouldn’t be worth a full-priced ticket. We just board the train with lunch and a beer, have a little day trip, then be home in the evening.
Berlin was also relatively cheap before. We already had sensible monthly passes. For people in parts of the Ruhrgebiet, the savings are even more substantial.
A London monthly travel card is £235 from zone 4 and £300 from zone 6. That's 420 to 540 CAD, and you get the pleasure of sweating in the tunnels, freezing on the overground platforms waiting for the next train 30 minutes and cancellations left right and centre.
At least they've finally got their shit together with mobile coverage.
Of course you get to use the buses too for that, and some of those were run by DB until this year, so it's nice to have been subsiding the the nice German tickets! They sold up to private equity, because of course they did, it's Britain and everything has to be private equity.
It is somewhat popular, so I doubt they will kill it outright. Rather I would guess they "reform" it: lots of variants, much higher price, beaurocratic hoops... and then when people stop using it, say "see, it wasn't so great after all".
Same playbook in the UK, where people like the NHS but certain parties don't.
Same playbook in the US, where "big government" has to be bad, so anything that does currently work well gets sabotaged.
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.
Kind of a tidbit with those photos but I was expecting to see congestion and was monitoring google maps traffic layers for the central florida area two days and a day before milton (I forgot to check on the actual day it hit) and the highways were surprisingly bright green with a little tiny backup where the florida turnpike interchanges with the interstate. I guess if you wait till the last minute no matter what method you use to evacuate its going to get ugly.
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.
Quite many "normal people" also enjoy the freedom of the automobile. It has contributed significantly to the culture of autonomy, unity on large scales (beyond one's local town), and cosmopolitanism. Online, it is acceptable to be cynical about cars, but in the real world, among common people, this mindset is not that prevalent.
Even in European countries lauded for great public transport, people own and enjoy cars. Of course, there are benefits to public transport that the car cannot offer, such as efficiency at scale. But it's not so black-and-white. There are also benefits to car ownership that public transport cannot offer, such as independence.
One might say that Uber, car sharing companies, and shopping online are bridging the independence gap. To an extent, this is true. But not always. Particularly, not when the non-car-ownership option is much more expensive, and not when people’s needs demand a higher level of independence.
My point: much of this has more nuance than is opined online. Do not presume when speaking for “normal people”.
Personal opinion but I see personal cars as more of a burden than freedom, compared to public transport.
You need to care for the car even when you are not travelling. You need a parking space, insurance, maintenance, etc... And when you are driving, you need to be attentive, sober, and well rested, otherwise you are a danger to yourself and others. With public transport, you have none of that, no one will die if you take a nap, and once you are at your destination, you are free, you don't have a ton of metal to care for.
The same applies to taxis and ridesharing, but public transport is usually more efficient and cheaper.
"Normal people" are often short-sighted. They only know what they know. They're heavily advertised to, and they lack imagination.
In the US people are dropping like flies from obesity and disease. But even their day-to-day quality of life is awful, because naturally they don't feel good. A portion of this is directly because of a pro-car culture. When you can't walk anywhere ever that has an effect.
People in the US are still very pro-car. They can't, or maybe don't want to, connect the dots on the consequences of that. American individualism is so extreme that people are happy to kill themselves, so long as they're the one who pulls the trigger.
Their words may not be reliable. This is why we need data. How much money are average people spending? How healthy are average people? Etc etc. That should influence our decisions around public policy.
This is also a feedback loop. People like cars, because the infrastructure of the society is built around cars. And the infrastructure is built like this because so many people use cars.
I own an old VW van, and use it to experience this freedom: roadtripping through Europe. Even short trips to a campsite near my home feel like holiday the moment I drive it out of the garage.
But I've never understood this "feeling of freedom" of all these tens of thousands of people who pull up into their daily traffic jam. Twice a day. How is that "freedom"? How do people justify this for themselves - other than "no alternative". I commute weekly by train, and it's marvelous to look out of the window at the daily traffic jams on the highway, from the inside of a train that zooms by this hell at 160km/h. I've had jobs where I had to stand in such jams daily and it's truly a soul-sucking, time eating, fun-sucking grind. Especially compared to sitting in a train and drinking a beer, watching a netflix, reading a book or working on my laptop. That, to me, is much more freedom. Not as much as roadtripping, but free, nontheless.
Automobile lobby? That's BS. The German rail system has been cost-saved to death, it now barely handles the increased passenger volume as a result of the D-Ticket. Overcrowded trains, even more delays and train cancellations (b/c of insufficient staff coverage, malfunctioning doors, etc.) even with S-Bahn trains are getting out of hand. "Transitwende" my ass! Same with the "Energiewende".
How i envy the Dutch and Belgian transport situation!
I don't get why you would write your first two sentences.
It is very obvious how the automobile lobby has a direct influence here.
Here is an excellent documentary (in German) that analyzes the issues with the DB.
https://youtu.be/-dmtNToFwuI?si=3ydA_QOjzOvTke2_&t=480
At the linked time stamp, they mention that every minister of transport in the very influential period from 2009-2021 came from Bavaria, with heavy influence from companies like Audi, MAN, and BMW.
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.
Funding road repairs, construction, and expansion from general tax revenues is similarly subsidizing a different mode of transit, and it's likely a much higher value than the 3b€ you mention (and likely more than overall railway sector subsidizing, tho I'm not familiar with Germany's budget). Also recognizing that other positive externalities exist, but pricing them at $0, seems silly.
Not to mention subsidised parking spaces. Free and even paid street parking is highly subsidised by the city and by other tax payers. There's also the environmental cost of not having that land be a park or nature and instead have it contribute to being an urban heat island with all its asphalt.
Road wear scales with the fourth power of weight over the axle so, even with personal cars getting heavier, I’m not sure that moving people from cars to trains makes much of a difference – I think most wear typically comes from heavy vehicles or weathering – so it mightn’t make much difference to repair costs.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t other advantages. Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy, and time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.
Aren’t roads necessary from a “last mile” perspective for like, all sorts of things a functioning country needs? Last time I checked trains don’t run directly from farms to grocery stores and so we need trucks and therefore roads in order to get food to consumers, among other things.
I do not know about Germany, but most countries have taxes on car ownership and fuel, so you need to offset those against the expenditure on roads. Road construction and maintenance also benefits other road users - transport vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians and emergency vehicles etc.
German chancellor plans to put road repairs into 2% mandatory defense budget to meet NATO requirements, so not that much of a load to overall german budget.
Not trying to detract discussion, just finding it hilarious that when facing a potentially existential threat from russians who repeatedly claim they will wipe them out, they will do just about anything rather than making their military into something a bit better than an chronically underfunded joke its now.
Germany spends some 70 billion euros maintaining the road system, only about a third of which is offset by taxes on drivers [1]. If we accept that investments in roads reduce carbon emissions by 0 million tonnes per year, then that works out to NaN € per tonne -- much worse than other carbon abatement methods!
Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore wouldn't be privy to them. Instead I rely almost exclusively on Germany's public transport for my daily commutes, which I find perfectly satisfactory for this purpose and significantly more convenient than parking and maintaining a car.
A third can't be right. 15 billion from petrol and 18.2 billion from diesel alone make up almost half of that. 48.76 million vehicles times €100 (back of the envelope calculation) for vehicle tax puts that number above half.
Even if you don't drive a car yourself you depend a lot on things delivered by road. Most of the road wear is done by trucks bringing you food, construction materials and whatever else. You can't exactly replenish your local grocery store by rail or cargo bike.
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.
How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The startups in this space were targeting $100/ton before the recent inflation hit.
It turns out if you divide the $/ton by 100, you get $/gallon of gas equivalent.
Burning a gallon of gas emits 20 lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is in the oxygen), and a ton is 2000 lbs.
Anyway, at $6-12 dollars per gallon of gasoline, direct air capture is clearly much worse than just not burning oil. At $1-2, it’s less than the current gasoline taxes in the US.
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
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.
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 is so the wrong approach. If I’m very reductive, I could say that if we automate everything there would be no one to commute left. Staffing is good for people: for safety, information, help for the vulnerable, expertise, robustness of the system, etc.
Perhaps some public services can’t turn a profit but are still necessary. Perhaps they can turn a profit if even more people use them. Perhaps other economic models are needed for these companies, see for example Singapore and Hong Kong where the rail company owns the land at stations and are allowed to develop there which funds the network and incentivizes buildout.
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
Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.
I’d ignore unpriced other externalities, that is a large rabbit hole. (Do people increase consumption of other goods thanks to the savings of this ticket…)
I’d rather look at the project, subsidies again and the cost and realise that at this scale there are few individual projects. So this is a very large knob to dial down the emissions.
Secondly, the subsidies go into the German economy. The rail system is very domestic economy heavy, so at a time where the German economy is going into a recession, spending 3bn to subsidise transport and reduce people’s cost of living and pay for German workers and investments is not such a terrible idea.
So while the price tag is high, the money isn’t turned into trees or buried like in pure abatement projects and at this scale it is a nice leaver to pull.
A more fitting complaint about cats would be the Pendlerpauschale, which is paid out to people driving to and from work in their car. It's a much larger sum than the €3b spent on the train ticket subsidy.
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.
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.
For people less familiar. Germany privatised its national rail company in the 90s but the federal government is the only shareholder. It’s a weird model that doesn’t make much sense. DB is a monopoly so the rules of competition don’t apply (and don’t work with railways anyway) it’s led to perverse cost cutting incentives and fat bonus programs for C level employees. Combine that with a conservative government’s austerity politics since the GFC and the whole system is at breaking point at the moment. Reforms and work is happening but the amount of work is staggering and means frequent line closures. DB estimates its trains to be running reliably in 2070.
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.
It's head and shoulders above all the subsidies to the car industry that just increase emissions. In terms of value it can't even be compared, one is positive and the other negative.
E.g. during the original 9 Euro Ticket, the government also reduced taxes on gas to fight inflation, and this cost as much as the subsidies for the 9 Euro Ticket. The gas tax reduction's costs were 3 billion, and the 9 Euro Ticket costs were 2.5 billion.
So I would call it exceptional value when compared to other things.
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.
It’s arguable that $100 per ton is a real carbon price.
It translates to about $1 a gallon tax on gasoline which is (a) not enough to change people’s behavior (at its peak gas was almost $2 more than it is now and I drove just the same) but (b) people in 2024 will complain bitterly about it anyway. That is, polities are hypersensitized to that sort of imposed solution right now: for a long time people in the US accepted fluctuations in the gas price because it was seen as a market price so we only had riots whenever a black person was shot by the cops; in “normal” countries (including France and Egypt) you have riots when the price of petroleum goes up because it is seen as being controlled by the state. I think the US has gotten more “normal” post COVID-19 and with GHG controls on the horizon. $1 a gallon is not quite going to make EVs beat gas but it certainly happens at a price below $500 a tonne.
Favorable CCS from industrial sources is quoted around $100 a tonne but that is (c) from a plant that runs 24-7 (e.g. if your natural gas plant runs 20% of the time the capital cost of CCS is multiplied 5x at least disregarding that the plant might not run well when it is starting up and shutting down) and (d) has few realizations.
The biggest positive externality of rail is suppressed traffic congestion, it is a big quality of life thing if you can avoid sitting in a traffic jam. (Reminds me of posters I saw in Germany that said Zukunft onhe Stau)
I find rail tourism to be luxurious compared to motortourism in that one gets to the center of town and doesn’t need to stress about parking, traffic and all that. Contrast that to the fight to refuel your rental car at the airport.
Not disagreeing but it’s important to point out that the US is a different beast because of the car and roadway dependency. In Europe a large part of the population lives in places easily reachable without a car. But in the US EVs are completely central to reducing CO2 from transportation, unless you’d rather rebuild the entire country. In Europe you can make meaningful changes by simply improving, expanding, investing in existing infrastructure. Most people I know who have a car in EU region are not fully dependent, but enjoy more convenience due to overcrowded or unreliable public transit, grocery stores being further away etc. Those problems are orders of magnitude easier to solve than “let’s build rail through a giant web of sparse suburbs”.
If we look past carbon emission, we can see that the value is much bigger.
You mention that the rail industry is already substantially subsidized. What you did not mention is that the automotive industry is as well. Roads are paid by state and republic. Car purchases are often subsidized via a flat return by the republic (which primarily benefits the rich). Petrol is also subsidized.
Now all these automotive subsidiaries benefit only the people who own cars, and much more the wealthy ones. In Germany, only 43 million private households own a car. That's just roughly 50 %.
But if you get people to choose public transport over your auto, then this benefits everyone. Better air quality, less noise pollution, less streets and more space for pedestrians. Anecdotally, a close neighbourhood removed some parking spots in favour of space for local cafes and public benches with plants. Removing just two parking spots give enough places for 10 people to sit together and enjoy a sunny Sunday -- which otherwise would be dead space occupied by the cars of two or even one household.
I'm not sure you've fully accounted for the full carbon reduction here, which is not just the replacement of cars from the road but also the transition to a car-free lifestyle.
It gets people out of their cars because it's cheaper than petrol. When train tickets (in other countries) cost more than the cost of petrol for the journey, commuters who already sank the cost of buying a car + insurance ask why they should bother paying a premium for the train ticket when the cost of petrol will be cheaper.
Only after people transition to taking the train in the morning, do they then start to ask questions like "do I get value out of paying for insurance on a car I don't drive?" and start to make decisions like selling their cars. In this case the carbon reduction is not only the carbon reduction of the trips that would have been taken by train, but the carbon reduction from the use of the car altogether, and future car maintenance and replacement.
How many tons of CO2 are in 1 degree of global temperature? This idea that removing “a lot” is somehow “helping” just seems hand-wavy to me. If the goal is “reduce temperatures,” then what precisely is the goal number? And then, how much CO2 equals that? And how much is the cost per degree to reduce and what is the cost per degree to not reduce?
There is a lot of “modeling” but has anyone actually proven “reducing 8000 tons of carbon reduces temperatures by n degrees?” And is it beneficial to lower temperatures? Are there benefits to higher temperatures that haven’t been quantified?
Just seems like the plan is “spend whatever it takes forever” — when whatever it takes isn’t even quantifiable. Basically investing without ever knowing the return on the investment.
Fewer people in cars means fewer road deaths, safer streets for walking and cycling, quieter cities, less nimby obstructionism due to parking complaints, and less inhaled tyre participates, among other benefits.
If you recognise that there are other positive impacts that you haven't allowed for, then why stating that your incomplete assessment shows that it isn't good value? Does that show bias?
> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
That assumes that there is still sufficient potential for additional use of these cheaper carbon abatement methods. The tricky part about fighting climate change is that we have to make change in many different places. Each partial solution has only a limited capacity for deployment.
"social cost of driving" and "vehicle mile travelled" are two key phrases that will lead you to research on various costs of car travel e.g.
> The air pollution-related damage attributable to driving, therefore, can be estimated at $10.7 billion to $41.6 billion per year – an average of between $93 and $360 per U.S. household per year.
- Air Pollution and related deaths / morbidities
- Road tear and wear
- Congestion related loss of business and time
- Can actually work on train or rest
Many of these can be calculated and measured.
Rail doesn’t significantly pollute more or deprecate faster on the infrastructure side empty or full.
> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
You spelled “counterfeit carbon credit” wrong. There's no carbon sequestration technology that can fix carbon at industrial scale at that cost yet (and maybe never).
They are certainly very big. Rail is extremely safe so you reduce deaths and injuries from accidents. You reduce other types of pollution. You make towns and cities a lot pleasanter. You save individuals a lot of money.
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?
But the roads and cars are used less, which means they require less maintenance. CO2 emission isn't the only pollution caused by cars either. People get cheaper transport options available to them.
All those other wins for society should be counted too, there may not even be a cost left to count towards CO2 reduction.
But most importantly, taking 3 billion in taxes and handing them out as subsidised pricing to some of the people isnt really a cost (to society as a whole), it's an income redistribution.
In the short run, the trains are running anyway, so you might as well fill them up.
This is something that particularly frustates me in the case of buses the UK. They're ridiculously expensive (well, except for the temporary current £2 scheme), and empty. There seems to be a political consensus that we should have them, so it would make far more sense for them to be free in all instances, except when demand is so high they're full (e.g. rush hour)
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.
One other positive externality could be this: The health effects of tire abrasion in cars are not clear yet, not least because tire manufacturers don’t disclose their ingredients. For all we know these fine particulates could be as bad as PFAS.
> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry.
I'm perplexed by the way you omitted the fact that these subsidies cover bus services, both local and regional (it's in the article's leading sentence).
From there you proceeded to use that cherry-picking to single out a specific type of service while also cherry-picking the tradeoffs.
This is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin, my head is spinning. Luckily HN came to the rescue for once. But sadly this is the kind of reasoning that actually works in politics and finance.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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 agree with the part about complicated tariffs/tickets but not much else. Although not sure how many countries make it simple, the only one I am aware of is Switzerland which conveniently solves the problem by making everything expensive.
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.
I 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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
> 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).
> 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.
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.
> 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)
All of these tickets are only for local/regional trains, not the faster/long-distance trains. You can get from one end of the country to another by changing trains a few time, but e.g. getting from Munich to Berlin would be 6h (direct) with fast trains and 10+ h (changing 3 times) with the regional ones.
The subscription model is intentional - this isn't meant to help tourists or to be bought when you need it, it's meant to make sure people have already pre-paid the cost when making a decision whether to take a train or a car (by being cheap enough that people subscribe even if they don't use it all the time).
As a tourist, the cost was well worth it. Used buses and rail to get everywhere, booked one DB train from Berlin to Bamberg but otherwise travelled all over Germany during my time there.
It’s not really made for tourists from outside the country, you already have special tickets for people who visit for a short time. It’s for the local population. The price hike is from 49€/month to 58€/month next year. It’s the opposite of predatory IMHO, you have it on your mobile app in a few tap and can cancel easily
Yep, it's not really meant for tourists.
They really want everyone to stay in the subscription model, because it's heavily subsidized, so they need to hit a high enough LTV anyways.
Cancellation terms vary by vendor. With some better ones, you can cancel 24 hours before the end of the month to avoid being billed for the next month.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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
Except for people who simply don't have 60€ a month easily, so they're left out. Also, it will absolutely not stay at 60€, it will become more expensive each year until the local tickets are cheaper again - defeating the whole purpose (if it won't be reverted outright after the next election, which the conservatives will win).
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.
I find the comparis estimate an overestimate. Take their VW Polo example. You would definitely not insure it for 1207 Fr a year and an annual service is not 3000 Fr a year. You take their estimate for VW Polo, put numbers a layman folk pays for, and you will get a number around 5000 a year. If you buy a second hand car, then you get a very competitive price to the GA, but also get more flexibility.
I am not saying anyone should by a car, quite the contrary, just stating the fact that 4000 Fr/yr is not competitive enough to car.
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.
> Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
Yes, but people will still be greedy and complain about every little thing.
> 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?
Germany can actually be quite cheap on the basic goods. I mean, it's the country who invented the concept of discount-market and is now spreading Aldi&Lidl to the world. There are also many shops and programs for supporting poor people, selling stuff for lower prices or second hand, and such things. And of course this includes offering a lower price for the ticket.
The safety net also provides people with cheaper tickets. At least in my city, the ticket costs much less for people who depend on the social safety net.
€59 is a steal. The goal is to move people to public transport and strengthen economy, not to be a charity to folks that want unlimited (!) transportation but don’t have € 60/month to show for it.
Even so, cities subsidize this ticket for the “poor”, so practically their costs are even lower.
That was a different Ticket. A highly subsidized time-limited offer. It was never meant to be economical. The 49€ is the economical viable solution, after a long discussion, which still is subsidized. And the 59€ is just the rise to fine-tune the price to actual usage and inflation.
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Poor people, as also students, get a lower price. Usually around 19-29€. And many workers can get it through their company, or can get something back from taxes. The amount of people who are really paying the full price themselves is probably not that high.
Someone said in other comment that that 9 ticket was one time only
> That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
It was one of the most intelligent ( and rare) decision the government took.
Off course, there are parties loosing money like car manufacturers and oil producers.
It's also a decision where the federal government tries to take the credit, but in case of any financial shortfalls, for now municipalities and counties (and as far as regional railways services are concerned, the states, too, to some extent) will be left holding the short end of the stick, because the federal and state revenue support for the reduced fare comes with a hard cap.
While currently even the federal government is subject to the so-called Schuldenbremse ("debt brake"), municipalities and counties are under much stronger legal obligations to balance their budgets, and in a lot of states, public transport is an entirely voluntary matter for municipalities to provide (and even where it isn't, the mandated minimum obligation probably won't entice anybody to take public transport if you don't have to), which starts mattering in a budget crunch.
Already the first major cities have threatened future service cuts. For now that may just be political posturing, but it's still not what you would want to hear in that context, and certainly doesn't serve to encourage people getting rid of their cars, either.
I agree.
I still have to rely on my car for basically everything because the same government also fucked up the rail system so severely that it barely works in my region.
When I moved from a small village to the city, I sold my car and wanted to use public transportation for everything.
I'm not fond of driving, especially in cities, so this looked like a no-brainer.
I had my first bad experiences quickly when I learned that public transportation wasn't anywhere as reliable as I previously thought.
I had to choose between going to work 45 minutes earlier (of course, unpaid and without the possibility of leaving earlier) or risking being too late half the time.
I had to travel further for my next job, but I thought it would be better because it was another connection.
I was wrong.
It was usually better in the mornings, but my way home usually took between 1,5 and 3 hours instead of the planned 45 minutes.
The next job I chose only because there, at least, I could take the S-Bahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn Trains, and it was a direct connection, which was way more reliable.
But it was very loud, very smelly, cold in winter, and very hot in summer (I remember having a working AC twice in the four years that I traveled that line), and there were (not always empty) beer bottles rolling around the floor almost all the time.
I always paid for the entire year in advance, so the 90-minute daily drive did cost a little more than 220 Euros monthly.
Otherwise, it would have been even more expensive.
So, the current ticket would have improved that, at least financially.
Now, I barely take the train anymore.
I broke my ankle so badly in my youth that the doctors told me that they had to completely cut it open from both sides to see if they could improve it in any way. They also said that there was a strong possibility that I would wake up with a fused ankle after the operation.
They recommended I only do that when the pain becomes unbearable, which I am now waiting for.
So, I am permanently in pain, and walking is terrible for me.
Still, when I have to go to the nearby city center, I prefer walking for 45 minutes instead of taking the 10-minute trip by train.
That is what relying on German public transportation for more than ten years did to me.
I tried that train connection multiple times before and stopped after it took me over an hour twice (after about five trips total).
Disclaimer: It is not that bad everywhere in Germany. That's why I wrote "in my region" in the beginning.
Within Berlin, for example, I had good experiences with public transportation.
Well, at least regarding its availability.
There were still junkies in there.
And homeless people who smelled like they were living on that train for at least a few weeks.
But well, that's another topic.
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.
> 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).
Terrified of raising taxes? I dunno, they are planning to raise taxes and introduce new ones. Cautious? Not in the least. Walking into one PR disaster after another.
There is no way to fix the UK railways, because it would require expensive engineering projects and purchase of private land/properties at low prices. People would vote them out as soon as they could. So no chance of that happening anytime soon.
Readit News
At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in Germany, but a bit more borderline for a tourist.
Compare with eg Toronto's monthly pass, which is $156. A single trip is $3.35, which comes out to 24 two-trip days to recoup the cost of the card. That's almost exactly the number of business days in a month. And that card's only for Toronto!
Berlin was also relatively cheap before. We already had sensible monthly passes. For people in parts of the Ruhrgebiet, the savings are even more substantial.
At least they've finally got their shit together with mobile coverage.
Of course you get to use the buses too for that, and some of those were run by DB until this year, so it's nice to have been subsiding the the nice German tickets! They sold up to private equity, because of course they did, it's Britain and everything has to be private equity.
Same playbook in the UK, where people like the NHS but certain parties don't.
Same playbook in the US, where "big government" has to be bad, so anything that does currently work well gets sabotaged.
We should also know how much more efficient buses are on roads at moving people than individual cars are. You can fit ~60 people on a bus that takes up the space of ~2 cars.
What should happen in these emergencies is there should be dedicated bus lanes and dedicates buses to evacuate people.
But beyond that, what we should learn from this is that lack of public transit (intracity and intercity) is a public safety issue. Cars simply aren't an efficient use of resources.
You can see from the comments here people will talk about "subsidies" for rail. Why does rail need to turn a profit? Roads don't. The Post Office doesn't. The Fire Department doesn't. Yet for some reason we hold public transport infrastructure to a higher standard.
Americans, in particular, love their cars. And there has been a powerful lobbying operation to associate rail with tax increases. This is so short-sighted because nobody is confiscating your car. Fewer people on the roads will improve your driving experience and travel times.
We see in the UK that it's cheaper to fly to Spain than to take intercity train journeys. As far as I'm concerned, citywide rail (eg the Tube in London, the NYC Subway) should be free and intercity rail should have a nominal cost that is cheaper than driving.
Bus and rail is likely to be unsustainable for much longer (centuries ?).
Even in European countries lauded for great public transport, people own and enjoy cars. Of course, there are benefits to public transport that the car cannot offer, such as efficiency at scale. But it's not so black-and-white. There are also benefits to car ownership that public transport cannot offer, such as independence.
One might say that Uber, car sharing companies, and shopping online are bridging the independence gap. To an extent, this is true. But not always. Particularly, not when the non-car-ownership option is much more expensive, and not when people’s needs demand a higher level of independence.
My point: much of this has more nuance than is opined online. Do not presume when speaking for “normal people”.
You need to care for the car even when you are not travelling. You need a parking space, insurance, maintenance, etc... And when you are driving, you need to be attentive, sober, and well rested, otherwise you are a danger to yourself and others. With public transport, you have none of that, no one will die if you take a nap, and once you are at your destination, you are free, you don't have a ton of metal to care for.
The same applies to taxis and ridesharing, but public transport is usually more efficient and cheaper.
In the US people are dropping like flies from obesity and disease. But even their day-to-day quality of life is awful, because naturally they don't feel good. A portion of this is directly because of a pro-car culture. When you can't walk anywhere ever that has an effect.
People in the US are still very pro-car. They can't, or maybe don't want to, connect the dots on the consequences of that. American individualism is so extreme that people are happy to kill themselves, so long as they're the one who pulls the trigger.
Their words may not be reliable. This is why we need data. How much money are average people spending? How healthy are average people? Etc etc. That should influence our decisions around public policy.
This is also a feedback loop. People like cars, because the infrastructure of the society is built around cars. And the infrastructure is built like this because so many people use cars.
I own an old VW van, and use it to experience this freedom: roadtripping through Europe. Even short trips to a campsite near my home feel like holiday the moment I drive it out of the garage.
But I've never understood this "feeling of freedom" of all these tens of thousands of people who pull up into their daily traffic jam. Twice a day. How is that "freedom"? How do people justify this for themselves - other than "no alternative". I commute weekly by train, and it's marvelous to look out of the window at the daily traffic jams on the highway, from the inside of a train that zooms by this hell at 160km/h. I've had jobs where I had to stand in such jams daily and it's truly a soul-sucking, time eating, fun-sucking grind. Especially compared to sitting in a train and drinking a beer, watching a netflix, reading a book or working on my laptop. That, to me, is much more freedom. Not as much as roadtripping, but free, nontheless.
How i envy the Dutch and Belgian transport situation!
Yes, because the the traffic ministers allocate the spending of their resort to the Autobahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn.
I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/ghg-abatement...
That doesn’t mean there aren’t other advantages. Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy, and time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.
Not trying to detract discussion, just finding it hilarious that when facing a potentially existential threat from russians who repeatedly claim they will wipe them out, they will do just about anything rather than making their military into something a bit better than an chronically underfunded joke its now.
Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore wouldn't be privy to them. Instead I rely almost exclusively on Germany's public transport for my daily commutes, which I find perfectly satisfactory for this purpose and significantly more convenient than parking and maintaining a car.
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[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Taxes/Excise-Du...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/810662/passenger-cars-st...
https://www.zoll.de/DE/Unternehmen/Kraftfahrzeugsteuer/Steue...
(This is not an argument against rail - I just find that subsidies are often mentioned with respect to rail but not with roads).
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.
How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?
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.
Though to be fair, there are also substantial subsidies for the whole road network.
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/...
Globally, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s.
Maybe we should restore them.
It turns out if you divide the $/ton by 100, you get $/gallon of gas equivalent.
Burning a gallon of gas emits 20 lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is in the oxygen), and a ton is 2000 lbs.
Anyway, at $6-12 dollars per gallon of gasoline, direct air capture is clearly much worse than just not burning oil. At $1-2, it’s less than the current gasoline taxes in the US.
Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.
However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid
The subsidy for maintaining car infrastructure is causing _more_ co2 per euro invested, how's that fit into these calculations?
This is so useless, it sounds like propaganda.
I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies.
I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff.
That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people. Sure - there would still be occasional maintenance - but nobody always on duty driving trains (automated), nobody selling tickets (online), nobody cleaning stuff (automated cleaning of trains inside and out) etc.
In western countries land lords benefit a lot from nearby public transport for free and maybe only contribute in taxes.
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.
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.
Perhaps some public services can’t turn a profit but are still necessary. Perhaps they can turn a profit if even more people use them. Perhaps other economic models are needed for these companies, see for example Singapore and Hong Kong where the rail company owns the land at stations and are allowed to develop there which funds the network and incentivizes buildout.
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.
> 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...
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’d ignore unpriced other externalities, that is a large rabbit hole. (Do people increase consumption of other goods thanks to the savings of this ticket…)
I’d rather look at the project, subsidies again and the cost and realise that at this scale there are few individual projects. So this is a very large knob to dial down the emissions.
Secondly, the subsidies go into the German economy. The rail system is very domestic economy heavy, so at a time where the German economy is going into a recession, spending 3bn to subsidise transport and reduce people’s cost of living and pay for German workers and investments is not such a terrible idea.
So while the price tag is high, the money isn’t turned into trees or buried like in pure abatement projects and at this scale it is a nice leaver to pull.
Germany neglected or even removed their rail infrastructure, especially for the past 25 or so years, after privatization. These "subsidies" are a course correction.
These investments also make it a real pain to use the system right now, because a lot of lines are closing months at a time and the alternatives are already overloaded. I'd rather have a car for the next 5-10 years too - and I live very central with many connections.
Here's a map of disruptions for reference: https://www.zuginfo.nrw/map.html#!P|HimSearch!histId|1!histK...
E.g. during the original 9 Euro Ticket, the government also reduced taxes on gas to fight inflation, and this cost as much as the subsidies for the 9 Euro Ticket. The gas tax reduction's costs were 3 billion, and the 9 Euro Ticket costs were 2.5 billion.
So I would call it exceptional value when compared to other things.
It translates to about $1 a gallon tax on gasoline which is (a) not enough to change people’s behavior (at its peak gas was almost $2 more than it is now and I drove just the same) but (b) people in 2024 will complain bitterly about it anyway. That is, polities are hypersensitized to that sort of imposed solution right now: for a long time people in the US accepted fluctuations in the gas price because it was seen as a market price so we only had riots whenever a black person was shot by the cops; in “normal” countries (including France and Egypt) you have riots when the price of petroleum goes up because it is seen as being controlled by the state. I think the US has gotten more “normal” post COVID-19 and with GHG controls on the horizon. $1 a gallon is not quite going to make EVs beat gas but it certainly happens at a price below $500 a tonne.
Favorable CCS from industrial sources is quoted around $100 a tonne but that is (c) from a plant that runs 24-7 (e.g. if your natural gas plant runs 20% of the time the capital cost of CCS is multiplied 5x at least disregarding that the plant might not run well when it is starting up and shutting down) and (d) has few realizations.
The biggest positive externality of rail is suppressed traffic congestion, it is a big quality of life thing if you can avoid sitting in a traffic jam. (Reminds me of posters I saw in Germany that said Zukunft onhe Stau)
I find rail tourism to be luxurious compared to motortourism in that one gets to the center of town and doesn’t need to stress about parking, traffic and all that. Contrast that to the fight to refuel your rental car at the airport.
You mention that the rail industry is already substantially subsidized. What you did not mention is that the automotive industry is as well. Roads are paid by state and republic. Car purchases are often subsidized via a flat return by the republic (which primarily benefits the rich). Petrol is also subsidized.
Now all these automotive subsidiaries benefit only the people who own cars, and much more the wealthy ones. In Germany, only 43 million private households own a car. That's just roughly 50 %.
But if you get people to choose public transport over your auto, then this benefits everyone. Better air quality, less noise pollution, less streets and more space for pedestrians. Anecdotally, a close neighbourhood removed some parking spots in favour of space for local cafes and public benches with plants. Removing just two parking spots give enough places for 10 people to sit together and enjoy a sunny Sunday -- which otherwise would be dead space occupied by the cars of two or even one household.
It gets people out of their cars because it's cheaper than petrol. When train tickets (in other countries) cost more than the cost of petrol for the journey, commuters who already sank the cost of buying a car + insurance ask why they should bother paying a premium for the train ticket when the cost of petrol will be cheaper.
Only after people transition to taking the train in the morning, do they then start to ask questions like "do I get value out of paying for insurance on a car I don't drive?" and start to make decisions like selling their cars. In this case the carbon reduction is not only the carbon reduction of the trips that would have been taken by train, but the carbon reduction from the use of the car altogether, and future car maintenance and replacement.
There is a lot of “modeling” but has anyone actually proven “reducing 8000 tons of carbon reduces temperatures by n degrees?” And is it beneficial to lower temperatures? Are there benefits to higher temperatures that haven’t been quantified?
Just seems like the plan is “spend whatever it takes forever” — when whatever it takes isn’t even quantifiable. Basically investing without ever knowing the return on the investment.
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Face it, trains is the better option here.
Bike and walk is best of course but troublesome long distance.
That assumes that there is still sufficient potential for additional use of these cheaper carbon abatement methods. The tricky part about fighting climate change is that we have to make change in many different places. Each partial solution has only a limited capacity for deployment.
> The air pollution-related damage attributable to driving, therefore, can be estimated at $10.7 billion to $41.6 billion per year – an average of between $93 and $360 per U.S. household per year.
Many of these can be calculated and measured.
Rail doesn’t significantly pollute more or deprecate faster on the infrastructure side empty or full.
You spelled “counterfeit carbon credit” wrong. There's no carbon sequestration technology that can fix carbon at industrial scale at that cost yet (and maybe never).
Without it this comparison is meaningless.
All those other wins for society should be counted too, there may not even be a cost left to count towards CO2 reduction.
But most importantly, taking 3 billion in taxes and handing them out as subsidised pricing to some of the people isnt really a cost (to society as a whole), it's an income redistribution.
This is something that particularly frustates me in the case of buses the UK. They're ridiculously expensive (well, except for the temporary current £2 scheme), and empty. There seems to be a political consensus that we should have them, so it would make far more sense for them to be free in all instances, except when demand is so high they're full (e.g. rush hour)
I would fully support if part of my taxes would subsidize rail industry and I get cheaper prices. Imo good use of tax dollars.
And this is JUST the roads. No other subsidies and incentives given to car manufacturing and car transport.
Modern policy in a nutshell.
I'm perplexed by the way you omitted the fact that these subsidies cover bus services, both local and regional (it's in the article's leading sentence).
From there you proceeded to use that cherry-picking to single out a specific type of service while also cherry-picking the tradeoffs.
Also, there are countries out there where the average tax payer subsidizes car drivers a lot too.
and how was this number actually calculated?
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I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as some white label system, so it was very confusing to purchase (you cannot buy them at the machines).
The price hike is the wrong direction here if we are reducing that much time on the road. Kudos though for the great rail systems. The USA has a lot to learn here and it’s baffling how terrible it is here. I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient. In the USA I spend 10-15 mins trying to park any time I go anywhere
That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
It influenced the idea to come up with a permanent ticket: the "Deutschlandticket". It started 1. Mai 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket
The Deutschlandticket costs max 49 Euros (next year it will cost 58€ per month) and is valid for one month for mostly all local®ional public transport systems (plus a few selected non-regional trains) in the whole of Germany. The subscription will renew automatically.
Companies often support employees by paying some of the costs. Then it typically costs 34.30 € per month. From next year on, employees pay 40,60 € per month max.
Here in my home city already 94% of the 213000 pupils use the Deutschlandticket for 0 € per month. Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
I have the ticket in my iPhone's wallet and thus also in the Apple Watch wallet. Additionally I need an ID card. Which at some point in time will also come to the smartphone. https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/new-mob...
We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these effect is they far outgrow the attention span of polititians as they take years to come to full force.
So students basically never have to pay for the public transportation which is really awesome.
EDIT: by public transportation I mean whatever is included in the D-Ticket (no Intercity or similar types of trains).
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Paper based offline processes forever, please.
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.
Sure, if you live in a larger city and you never leave… I lived in Munich for years and never needed a car, just comfortable shoes, a bike and occasionally a transport ticket.
Try to get to a smaller town or village, you are lucky if you only spend twice as much time getting there as with a car.
The trains get randomly cancelled, delay is basically guaranteed, the workers go on strikes relatively frequently, so you can never rely on trains working for anything remotely important.
I guess my frame of reference isn't average, given I live in Switzerland.
Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!
Germany’s system gets a lot of hate but it still in the top ~8 or so.
(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).
As a Swiss person you want appreciate German tax rates that subsidize that 49-euro tickets. The money has always got to come from somewhere.
Just in case this is helpful to someone, you can buy the ticket from one of those different transport organizations you mentioned and avoid that time limit to cancel. The one to use for that is https://www.mopla.solutions/, it's a simple app (alternatively web site) that worked really well for me (no affiliation).
The €9 ticket was a 3 month temporary offer, which was not originally intended to continue permanently at all.
> I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
The ticket is subsidised by the German government(beyond the amount that all rail infrastructure and most services are subsidised) for the purpose what is covered in the article - encouraging permanent modal shift of regular travellers(primarily commuters) from road to rail. If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
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.
You can buy for a single month when booking through the right company. "mo.pal" is a good one, for example. However, I agree that it is a bit predatory.
Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)
The subscription model is intentional - this isn't meant to help tourists or to be bought when you need it, it's meant to make sure people have already pre-paid the cost when making a decision whether to take a train or a car (by being cheap enough that people subscribe even if they don't use it all the time).
Just had to remember to cancel.
what bugs me the most is that i can only book it for a specific calendar month. that is _so_ stupid ...
No, you could never use it on IC or ICEs
with much of the population in a few denser areas, where public transport would make a lot of sense.
Do any states have something equivalent to this?
I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.
I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.
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)
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Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?
2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.
First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months.
People loved it, and the government talked about doing a permanent 29€ ticket.
But now we pay 49€ and it's already planned to become 59€.
Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded
Depends. In my city "poor" people pay less. Just 19 € per month. Pupils don't pay at all. Students pay 29.40 €.
That's still less than an average car. A commonly quoted figure is 10'000 CHF per year. [2]
[1] https://www.sbb.ch/de/billette-angebote/abos/ga/ga-preise.ht...
[2] https://www.comparis.ch/carfinder/autofahren/auto-kosten
I am not saying anyone should by a car, quite the contrary, just stating the fact that 4000 Fr/yr is not competitive enough to car.
https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/bahncard100
Quite comparable. The ticket discussed in the article in contrast only includes local transportation but no high speed rail.
On the other hand, if price was set to zero, you would get weird over-usage patterns (like people using it for housing or other nonsense)
Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
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.
Yes, but people will still be greedy and complain about every little thing.
> 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?
Germany can actually be quite cheap on the basic goods. I mean, it's the country who invented the concept of discount-market and is now spreading Aldi&Lidl to the world. There are also many shops and programs for supporting poor people, selling stuff for lower prices or second hand, and such things. And of course this includes offering a lower price for the ticket.
Even so, cities subsidize this ticket for the “poor”, so practically their costs are even lower.
That was a different Ticket. A highly subsidized time-limited offer. It was never meant to be economical. The 49€ is the economical viable solution, after a long discussion, which still is subsidized. And the 59€ is just the rise to fine-tune the price to actual usage and inflation.
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Poor people, as also students, get a lower price. Usually around 19-29€. And many workers can get it through their company, or can get something back from taxes. The amount of people who are really paying the full price themselves is probably not that high.
Someone said in other comment that that 9 ticket was one time only
> That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
While currently even the federal government is subject to the so-called Schuldenbremse ("debt brake"), municipalities and counties are under much stronger legal obligations to balance their budgets, and in a lot of states, public transport is an entirely voluntary matter for municipalities to provide (and even where it isn't, the mandated minimum obligation probably won't entice anybody to take public transport if you don't have to), which starts mattering in a budget crunch.
Already the first major cities have threatened future service cuts. For now that may just be political posturing, but it's still not what you would want to hear in that context, and certainly doesn't serve to encourage people getting rid of their cars, either.
I had to choose between going to work 45 minutes earlier (of course, unpaid and without the possibility of leaving earlier) or risking being too late half the time. I had to travel further for my next job, but I thought it would be better because it was another connection. I was wrong. It was usually better in the mornings, but my way home usually took between 1,5 and 3 hours instead of the planned 45 minutes.
The next job I chose only because there, at least, I could take the S-Bahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn Trains, and it was a direct connection, which was way more reliable. But it was very loud, very smelly, cold in winter, and very hot in summer (I remember having a working AC twice in the four years that I traveled that line), and there were (not always empty) beer bottles rolling around the floor almost all the time. I always paid for the entire year in advance, so the 90-minute daily drive did cost a little more than 220 Euros monthly. Otherwise, it would have been even more expensive. So, the current ticket would have improved that, at least financially. Now, I barely take the train anymore.
I broke my ankle so badly in my youth that the doctors told me that they had to completely cut it open from both sides to see if they could improve it in any way. They also said that there was a strong possibility that I would wake up with a fused ankle after the operation. They recommended I only do that when the pain becomes unbearable, which I am now waiting for. So, I am permanently in pain, and walking is terrible for me. Still, when I have to go to the nearby city center, I prefer walking for 45 minutes instead of taking the 10-minute trip by train. That is what relying on German public transportation for more than ten years did to me. I tried that train connection multiple times before and stopped after it took me over an hour twice (after about five trips total).
Disclaimer: It is not that bad everywhere in Germany. That's why I wrote "in my region" in the beginning. Within Berlin, for example, I had good experiences with public transportation. Well, at least regarding its availability. There were still junkies in there. And homeless people who smelled like they were living on that train for at least a few weeks. But well, that's another topic.
Want to improve things for people in the UK, ram through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago.
New towns will just be full of commuters and have no life in them. We need to build high rises in cities, and give people living in apartments real rights - the leasehold system is feudalism.
And give Manchester and Birmingham real metro/tube systems!
New housing has to be built along transportation corridors. If you want to efficiently build housing, you have to extend transportation infrastructure into areas and then grow towns around that.
This isn't actually hard and has been done for 100 years but somehow in modern day many countries are to stupid to understand this.
However I don't blame the public for not knowing this fact. There was (and to some extent still is) a media lockdown on reporting who is behind the Starmer project. (Because if it had been reported on it might not have succeeded).
There is no way to fix the UK railways, because it would require expensive engineering projects and purchase of private land/properties at low prices. People would vote them out as soon as they could. So no chance of that happening anytime soon.