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Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

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Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#141

Post by throwaway894345 »

frereubu wrote: post #65
throwaway894345 wrote: post #44

I'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…

Thanks for the counter-anecdote. I certainly don't think that all French employees are difficult, but the distribution of difficult employees certainly seems to vary from country to country. FWIW, I was studying in Rennes, not Paris, although I had bad customer service experiences in both locations.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#142

Post by jermaustin1 »

fouric wrote: post #84

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…

But the public transit lines would already be running, you are just hopping on a bus that is already going to be spewing some climate change gasses. Adding a car for a small trip would be detrimental because that car isn't already on the road spewing.

NOW you are correct though, better for all would be for people to walk to their local shops and stuff and only grab transit when they need to go beyond the 2-4 mile radius that is considered walkable, and that would pull some of the public transit off the road/rails.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#143

Post by pedrocr »

eptcyka wrote: post #115
fnordsensei wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to charge tourists for the use of public transport, you could perhaps find ways of charging that at the border of the country. A daily tariff, either on entry, or on exit.

This isn't tenable in the EU due to the freedom of movement across borders.

This is already done today. A lot of touristy cities already charge a daily fee per night you stay there. Hotels bill you for it so compliance is complete too. Between that and taxes for residents there's really no point to charging separately for public transport.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#144

Post by joshuaissac »

cletus wrote: post #140

Why should public transport cost anything at all? I mean, what's the point? You might say the service costs money. It does. The ticket prices never cover that so you're already running at a loss. You spend money on enforcement, payment and ticket machines and you reduce usage of the service. But here's the more important point: cars are already subsidized to a huge degree pretty much everywhere through roads, parking…

> The ticket prices never cover that so you're already running at a loss.

London Underground usually runs at a profit. Not entirely from tickets, but also including other sources like advertisement. But ticket revenue is an important part of the income.

Public transport also includes privately-owned transport that is run for profit, like private buses and trains, which also make a profit (or go bust).

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#145

Post by Archelaos »

In Germany the "Bahncard 100" has been available for years. It costs 4,027 Euro/yr (2. class) or 6,812 Euro/yr (1. class) for infinte train rides with Deutsche Bahn and a lot of local transport associations.[1] Since Germany is about four times as big as Austria the price is comparable to the Klimaticket, if one is really travelling a lot of long distances.

For smaller areas the situation is very complicated. Almost all local transportation associations have yearly tarifs of their own. Sometimes they are valid in adjacent destinations, sometimes not or only for a limited time (such as during the summer school holidays). More consistency would be desirable here.

[1] For a list see: https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/vorteile/verbuende (in German)

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#146

Post by _Wintermute »

frereubu wrote: post #65
throwaway894345 wrote: post #44

I'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 experience from living in Paris is that "non, c'est pas possible" isn't "no, that's against the rules", it's more of a "that sounds like it requires effort on my part, please go away".

One of my first experiences when moving there was before I got my travel card and was using the paper tickets, but all the ticket accepting machines on a metro entrance where closed. I asked a staff member what to do, he looked up and down the barriers and just shrugged and said "jump".

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#147

Post by nmeofthestate »

mongol wrote: post #118
southerntofu wrote: post #74

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.

Every passenger wears on the system. It is fair that you pay a part of things you use.

Re the other reply: this'll vary by country, but the UK effectively charges a road-usage tax (fuel duty) that nets about twice as much (20Bn) as the annual spending on roads (warning - source = two minutes of googling)

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#148

Post by bmicraft »

adventured wrote: post #31
scrollaway wrote: post #16

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?

It may not be much cheaper in absolute terms, but the service you get for that is usually much better (more lines shorter intervals and such)

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#149

Post by msla »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #30

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.

The simplest way is to do what my city (Missoula) did years ago and make the public transportation zero fare for everyone. No more tickets, no more swiping cards, no more concern over who "doesn't deserve" to ride a public resource. This succeeded so well they've even upgraded a number of their buses to be zero-emission as well.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#150

Post by GuuD »

djrogers wrote: post #130
bckygldstn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived in a place with a system like this. The people who jump off were mostly students and people for whom tickets represented a significant expense. The lax rules and clearly uniformed agents were seen partly as progressive price discrimination, giving free access to public transport to those who really need it.

That sounds like the worst possible outcome - you're literally teaching that poor people either don't have to be honest or are expected to be dishonest. I would hate to live in a society formed by that ethos...

In a more broad way — it’s also a tax on conscience. Bonkers.
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