241–250 of 299 posts
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.
Just remembered another consideration. When Ken Livingstone introduced free transport for school age children in order to remove cars from the school run, it simply meant a load more children who would have traditionally walked or cycled didn't need to because the bus was free. Commuters were angry as anything that they couldn't get on the buses any more that were picked with children. Societies are very different ar…
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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.
Did it come with a tax increase? Was everyone happy about that? If it didn't come with a tax increase then what funding was cut for this public transport? It's easy to look at a success when you're only looking at the beneficial side, but don't look at the cost.
Which is why part of the "funding" for such systems comes from the reduction in the cost caused by private vehicles (on the roads, on the atmosphere, on the neighborhood and more).
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 fas…
I think your car is completely flexible too? It can also leave and arrive anywhere you want. Cost may be a bit higher though. You’re liable to burn through 30ish liters of fuel at a price of around €50.
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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.
The easy way is to make it legally free for residents and charge tourists but don’t actually enforce it. Just put up ads in the airport and all over the tourist hotspots, run a few fake stories in the media of tourists being fined etc. You get your money for nothing and your travel for free
Just increase that bed tax by 2-3 eur daily and use those 2-3 eur towards the public transport budget. Then let anyone use public transport for free, locals or not.
You will miss some people who will seek out couchsurfing opportunities at their friend's home, but you will still earn a lot from all the hotels, pensions and legal AirBnBs.
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…
Because people don't value free things. It's why public restrooms are always disgusting.
Not really. It's not a question of value that causes public restrooms to be less pleasant, but simply one of cleaning frequency.
Most people clean their own private restrooms/bathrooms/toilet (or have them cleaned) reasonably frequently. Increase the usage load for a public facility and you'd expect it to need to cleaning more frequently than a private one.
And so, one does indeed find public facilities with sensible cleaning intervals that are often no worse and sometimes better than private ones.
Most humans also have a somewhat instinctive distaste for urinating or defacating in a context where they can smell another human being (even one's own family!). Without very good ventilation, it's hard for a well-used public facility to avoid this, and that adds to the sense of "eergh, it's disgusting!" This is an issue, but again not one of "valuing free things".
The worst public restrooms I can think of tend to be the most lightly used, where it's hard to justify the cost of sufficiently regular cleaning, and things just get unpleasant, again without any question of values or cost-of-use.
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I don‘t think the cost is so high here, we have covert ticket inspectors, none of those fancy electric gates.
Aren't inspectors more expensive than gates? You don't have to pay a salary to the gates.
Fun fact from history: here's a photo of former French president Jacques Chiraq jumping the metro https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904...
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That would indeed cut quite a cost (monetary and environmental) due to barriers, tickets, validation machines, selling points, controllers...
I don‘t think the cost is so high here, we have covert ticket inspectors, none of those fancy electric gates.
That is, without mentioning that controllers have to be paid without providing any service. If you additionally take into consideration the social cost of the criminalization of something as banal as using public transports when you don't have money, the benefits of doing away with these systems of control arguably are even more evident.
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> They take the car because the train is way too expensive OEBB (Austrian Federal Railways, the state train operator) does offer a family railcard ("Vorteilscard Family"), and it's hardly expensive: "The Vorteilscard Family offers you a particularly inexpensive option to travel together with children. For only €19 a year, up to 4 children under the age of 15 can accompany you for free."
It sounds cheap, and it's probably a good deal if you ride long distances or frequently. But when I recently planned a trip from Linz to Vienna for our family it would have cost around 120€ for the train (not including tickets for bus or subway to get to/from train station). Driving costs around 40€ for gas (not including parking fees).
It's 184 km one way. German tax authorities assume 30 cents per km (~110 EUR for a round trip), Austrian tax authorities use 42 (~154 EUR for a round trip). Now, the actual marginal cost may be lower if you already have the car, but it's far from obvious once those hidden costs are considered. Especially as you have to actively drive for those 4 hours instead of reading a book, watching a movie, ...
