Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

klimaticket.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 299 posts

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

#151

Post by pedrocr »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #55
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.

Here in Berlin the idea floating around is to make yearly tickets very cheap (365€), while keeping prices for single travel (2.80€) or daily tickets (9.50€) more expensive. That's probably the easiest, least bureaucratic route to go. For poorer households, the yearly ticket will still be subsidized, but the public transport companies (fully owned by the state) will still have direct income to maintain a corporate-lik…

It would be much easier and less bureaucratic to just make it free and adjust taxes for residents and overnight fees for turists accordingly. Just the savings on all the ticketing and compliance systems and staff should be significant.

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

#152

Post by cannabis_sam »

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.

Good luck with that as long as our society is based around subsidizing the fuel cost of those polluting cars (not to mention the externalized cost of pollution), and any politicians that tries to change that will lose their next election..

Our economic system ensures that we keep the gas pedal to the floor both figuratively and literally.

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

#153

Post by bmicraft »

anchpop wrote: post #112
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…

The enlightened big brain politically impossible is to internalize as much as possible. For example, everyone could have a device on their car that records how much carbon they emit and reports it to the government so they can be taxed. The amount they should be taxed is not trivial to determine, but an upper bound would be the cost of offsetting or capturing the same amount of carbon they emitted. (you don’t actuall…

The amount of carbon emitted by a car is directly proportional to the amount of fuel used, so what you really are talking about are fuel taxes which are very common already

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

#154

Post by antoinealb »

rob74 wrote: post #22
LittleNemoInS wrote: post #8

Earlier 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...

The rail network appears to be only 20% larger in Austria than Switzerland (5000 vs 6000 km Google tells me). Then the salaries of the people operating those transports are also higher in Switzerland. The GA is a pretty good deal already.

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

#155

Post by wazoox »

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.

From what I've read about similar experiments in various cities, in fact it's not an unmitigated good thing. Most augmentation in public transport usage comes not people switching from driving, but people that used to walk or bike.

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

#156

Post by logifail »

This weekend I'll be travelling from Innsbruck to Vienna, a good chunk of the entire length of Austria.

I'm not here enough (and not travelling around enough) to be interested in the Klimaticket, but here's how public transport vs car stacks up:

Innsbruck to Vienna is 476km (~300mi) by road.

It takes about 5 hours to drive, assuming no delays. The way the world is right now, there will certainly be delays.

On the fastest route you exit Austria just after Kufstein and enter Germany at Kiefersfelden, drive through Germany on the A93, then on the A8 towards Salzburg, then cross back into Austria.

Pre-2015 you'd typically have crossed both those international borders at standard motorway speed(!), but since the refugee crisis, and even more since Covid, it's checkpoints (=delays) galore.

By train the journey is scheduled at ~4h15m. The train also enters Germany but doesn't stop there, so no border checks.

A standard ("2nd class"/economy) walk-up train fare is €74 ($85), but if you buy an annual railcard for €66 ($76) that's halved, so €37 ($43). This is a completely flexible ticket valid on any service that day, so if you are late (or early) you just get on the next train, and there's basically one every hour pretty much throughout the day. The railcard pays for itself in the first return trip.

Maybe it's just me, but €37 for a 300mi journey, with a completely flexible ticket, just seems like amazing value.

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

#157

Post by pjerem »

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,…

I'm sorry for your experience in France. French people are not really friendly to strangers (not in a racist way, more in a "i don't even know what language this stranger is talking"). I'm 50% sure the locker staff didn't even understand what you wanted from them and just reacted with stress.

But Paris have the reputation to be pretty hostile, even to the rest of french population. Our other cities are much more open and friendly. Our countryside is also pretty friendly but don't expect anyone there to understand you but at least they'll friendly try to fake that they can.

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

#158

Post by mellavora »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #114
ortusdux wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCQPD9DSOA

The area of Luxemburg is 2500km2 and the estimated population is 633k. For comparison: the area of London is ~1500km2 with population of 8m+. Do you think that Luxemburg’s system can be scaled up?

Luxembourg resident here. Free public transport is a game-changer. You don't have to think about it, you just step on the bus, or tram.

This also means the bus driver doesn't have to worry about checking tickets. There aren't guards to check if people are jumping over turnstiles, etc. Moving to 'totally free' eliminates all kinds of overhead.

There is no reason it couldn't scale.

And the question of scaling hides an interesting assumption: what is the purpose of charging fares?

If it is to reduce usage (to thus ensure that the system isn't used past capacity), then why do you want to limit the usage of public transport? If people don't take public, they will take private transport (cars, etc) which have much higher social cost (you can move many more people by bus than by car).

If it is to 'raise revenue to pay for the system', does the same argument apply to use of roads? What is a fair road tax, given that this method of transport has such high social costs?

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

#159

Post by throwaway894345 »

_Wintermute wrote: post #146
frereubu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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".

This captures my experience as well.

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

#160

Post by mellavora »

KronisLV wrote: post #49
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.

Maybe introduce a gradual shift instead over 50 years or so: with each next year taking the originally expected profits of public transport and gradually add those as taxes for cars while at the same time also reducing the current public transport ticket prices? At the end of those 50 years public transportation could be free and the stubborn car owners or businesses would simply help subsidize more efficient ways of…

I like this, but let's make it 50 days instead of 50 years. Or maybe weeks. I could see 52 weeks.
Post reply on HN