Very expensive. AFAIK it's under €150/y in the neighbor Czechia (but it doesn't include inter-city trains).
Not really comparable then, is it?
Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
61–70 of 299 posts
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#62Next stop: Just make public transport free for all reasonably permanent residents (for example, you could get a free ticket for next year when you file your taxes). Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.
Tom Scott did a great video on Luxembourg's switch to free public transport. They were already covering 90% of the cost, so upping that to 100% was easy. London's network, on the other hand, gets roughly 50% of its funding from fares.
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> from long distance rail to local city trams. That's the part that makes a system like this subjectively unfair. If my daily commute is a handful of bus stops and that guy's is a train for an hour from another city, then I am basically funding his commute by overpaying for my pass... even if it's cheaper to ride my bus with a pass than to buy a ticket for every ride. Edit - I read the website as saying that this is…
I mean this is Europe, and there's much less "this is unfair" versus "we are in this together".
People living far from city centers usually live in bigger house/flats and less dense districts. That's usually what pull people to move to the suburbs. Some do this because of the cost of renting/buy a big place in inner city but it's the same argument.
The problem is, living in a large place and sparser environment has a HUGE social cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects which is a major contributor to the ongoing biodiversity collapse (which is at least as big of a threat as climate change).
"We are in this together" but not just to get people to drop private cars. We must commute much less (however clean your mode of transport) so how is it compatible with cheap transport in the long term?
Or we put hard limit on urban sprawl but that will increase the cost of living in suburban/rural places even further than having people pay for their commute distance.
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#64In Germany you can buy a Bahncard 100 for roughly 4k, which allows you to take any Deutsche Bahn train at any time. Not sure if the cost should scale with size of counrty, but I guess 4x is roughly reasonable between Austria and Germany. Austria probably is more expensive to build railroad in, since it's mostly mountains.
The Bahncard 100 doesn't include all public transport though. Austria also invests about twice as much (per capita) into rail infrastructure as Germany.
Which is a bit silly, but more a theoretical problem, right? I'd assume (I can't actually find a map of the coverage), that people for whom a BC 100 makes sense travel mostly by train, thus live near a train station with a good connection. Which will then be in one of the 130 cities that include the public transport with the City Ticket.
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#65I'm an American who studied abroad in France for a bit a decade ago and did a little traveling around Europe, including to Austria. The Austrian train system was the best by far even without Klimaticket. Specifically, you bought a ticket that entitled you to a set number of kilometers and you could use it any time in the month. Moreover, the trains actually ran on time and customer service was helpful. By comparison,…
Just as a counter-anecdote to "c'est impossible", when I was young and naive I went on a cycle tour from La Rochelle to Toulouse, thinking I could just book a train ticket with a bike from Toulouse to Paris and put my bike in the luggage carriage as you could at the time in the UK. In fact, technically, you had to take apart and box your bike before they'd allow you to put it on board. I arrived on the platform with my bike and spoke to the guard who told me what the rule was, looked up and down the mostly empty platform, and gestured towards the guard's van. Sometimes you get a Gallic shrug rather than "c'est impossible". (The difference may also be to do with Paris vs the rest of France, as tends to be the case with capital cities vs everywhere else in a country).
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to clarify : In Switzerland, one can buy a CA Travelcard (for CHF3860 a year, approximately $3850). With this card, one can travel on (nearly) all public transports in Switzerland (trains, coaches, subways, trams, etc.) free of charge. Since the public transportation system is very good, it's a good way to travel.
Ok, so the Austrian version costs less than a third of that for a considerably larger country. And the public transportation system is pretty good in Austria too...
I mean, when I was in the area in 2005-2007 pretzels cost USD 2.50 in Germany and USD 7 in Switzerland ...
There were also steep discounts for students and youth for almost everything -- I got a public transit pass for 50% off because I was under 23 at the time.
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#67As miserable as public transit is for us in the US, I could actually see this kind of deal succeeding in New York (and neighboring areas of Connecticut and New Jersey). Those in the city are constantly perplexed by the various county-run transit lines and costs, but some kind of single pass would actually make bus lines approachable to visitors (whereas they are only used by those who can't afford a car today).
Also, could this model be a response to a decline in ridership due to COVID? I don't know how these commuter lines fared in Europe, but I can only assume there were less folks traveling to a different area due to lockdown/remote work.
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#68Next stop: Just make public transport free for all reasonably permanent residents (for example, you could get a free ticket for next year when you file your taxes). Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.
Because it doesn't necessarily solve the problem of car journeys but costs a load. It might be fine for e.g. London but where I live, there is no public transport between my house and work (well, perhaps over about 3 hours compared to 30 minute drive) but even though my wife lives on a bus route, the times are less than hourly so she can't get to work for the right time, would get there an hour early or an hour and a half later!
If people still need to use their cars, it doesn't really work.
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#69Next stop: Just make public transport free for all reasonably permanent residents (for example, you could get a free ticket for next year when you file your taxes). Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.
If you go that far, why stop there? What's the reason to have all the expenses and effort of fare collection if you're only going to collect fares from the occasional users of the system and not the daily users? If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.
That would indeed cut quite a cost (monetary and environmental) due to barriers, tickets, validation machines, selling points, controllers...
Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y
#70Er... sounds good, but first they say "All public transport in Austria with a single ticket", and later "...in a specific area for a year: regional, cross-regional and nationwide". And after that, there is only one price (with various rebates) listed for the "Klimaticket Ö". Are there cheaper versions planned which are limited to e.g. one ("regional") or two ("cross-regional") states (Bundesländer)? I checked the Ger…
I spent one year (gap internship) in Vorarlberg, the yearly price was about €400.
They had a 50% discount if you were under 26
And a (cumulable) 50% first-time only discount if you already had a driver license
I ended up paying €100 for a card that allowed me to ride any train or bus in the region for one year, whenever I wanted. I ended up biking most of the time, but I did commute by train for a while. In the end I didn't use it that much, but buying it was a no-brainer.
I should also mention that some of the train lines you could take crossed the Swiss and German borders.