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The BahnCard 100 is 3000 EUR in Germany, giving you full access to all trains. Austria is 1/10th the size of Germany. By this logic, the ticket price should be 300 EUR, not 1095 EUR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Portland, Oregon has free light rail in the downtown area. Feels great just casually stepping onto a train.
With the way the MAX stops are designed, it's still very possible to just hop on without paying.
The BahnCard 100 is 3000 EUR in Germany, giving you full access to all trains. Austria is 1/10th the size of Germany. By this logic, the ticket price should be 300 EUR, not 1095 EUR.
I have the feeling they are doing this because they lost a lot of passengers during the epidemic. Maybe I'm wrong...
I see a detrimental incentive here. Let me explain, and then someone please show me what I'm not getting. We're trying to incentivize public over private transit because the former emits less carbon (in general). However, public transit still costs carbon, so taking less trips total seems to be better for the environment (the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" - kind of). If the marginal cost to a public trans…
I really want this to exist for Belgium. Right now the public transport prices are absurd here... An all year pass for just the train in all of Belgium ranges in the 10k eur/year, and there is no national metro+bus+tram access (just Brussels is 700 EUR / year for that with no access to other cities). It's absurd and caused by fragmentation of services between Flanders, wallonia and Brussels with no coordination betwe…
As an American I had always heard that public transportation was super inexpensive in essentially all of Western Europe. Is that not the case generally?
On a trip basis, i.e. no fixed costs included, no reduction; public transports are often the most expensive form of transportation (when compared to car or plane for longer distances). However, few people pay the full price, especially not those taking the train regularly, and cars have massive fixed costs. So if you can do everything with public transports and don't have a car, you can save a lot of money. If you still need a car for whatever reason but want to use public transports for some trips, then it can become the worst of both worlds (high fixed costs of the car plus high per trip cost of public transportation).
The car has one big advantage (in term of price), is that it can scale to a few people with basically no extra costs, whereas public transportation is usually linear. If you put four friends in your car and drive a few hundred kilometres to go on holidays abroad, the price of public transports will be ridiculous in comparison.
I see a detrimental incentive here. Let me explain, and then someone please show me what I'm not getting. We're trying to incentivize public over private transit because the former emits less carbon (in general). However, public transit still costs carbon, so taking less trips total seems to be better for the environment (the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" - kind of). If the marginal cost to a public trans…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One price for the whole family Why not make it free? It's a public service after all, and it's hard to "abuse" transportation like one can use "too much" free water/electricity.
Most public transit systems are already bankrupt and have to be propped up by taxes collected from other services. Making it free will most likely not increase ridership and will almost definitely make the quality of service lower.
French law already has obligation for your employer to pay (at least parts of) your travel fees. You could also have a tax on hotel rooms and airbnbs for tourists to help finance it. There's already cities across the globe practicing free public transport and so far i haven't heard any complaining or finding unexpected difficulties.
Also, specifically about quality of service, we could argue having a service orientation driven by workers and users (a sort of coop if you like) would yield better results than what David Graeber refers to as "manageurial feudalism" sucking public services dry through dehumanizing micromanagement techniques, absurd salaries for the higher-ups, and various forms of corruption such as "private-public partnerships".
The BahnCard 100 is 3000 EUR in Germany, giving you full access to all trains. Austria is 1/10th the size of Germany. By this logic, the ticket price should be 300 EUR, not 1095 EUR.
Next 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.