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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

#281

Post by soco »

barbazoo wrote: post #193
yarcob wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it should be cheaper. The rail card thing is just a scheme to overcharge casual riders and tourists. It's reasonable for people who regularly go by train, but for people like me who do just one or two trips a year it feels like a rip-off. Especially if I want to take my kids, I need to get a different rail card for families, and when you add it all up it's a lot more expensive than taking my car. For so…

> For some reason, public transport is always priced in a way that makes it really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value. At €1.32/l for gas in Vienna and 10l/100km this trip would cost you €63 in gas alone with an ICE car. This doesn't account for wear and wasted time so it's actually not that unreasonable at all and actually pretty cheap if you're going by yourself.…

I (used to) do commuting by train, one hour door to door, and 45 minutes out of that was pure work time - reading emails and newsletters and doing documentation and such. If I did that ride by car, I would have to stay at work 1.5 hours more. How should I quantify this?

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

#282

Post by soco »

aidenn0 wrote: post #197
yarcob wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it should be cheaper. The rail card thing is just a scheme to overcharge casual riders and tourists. It's reasonable for people who regularly go by train, but for people like me who do just one or two trips a year it feels like a rip-off. Especially if I want to take my kids, I need to get a different rail card for families, and when you add it all up it's a lot more expensive than taking my car. For so…

I have a family of 6, and with that it's almost always going to be cheaper to drive than to take any other form of transportation. Before kids, the math was very different.

Do you actually live in Austria? Because I've seen comments about family tickets. I only know Switzerland - where your kids under 6yo will travel with you for free and your under 16yo half price.

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

#283

Post by yarcob »

soco wrote: post #282
aidenn0 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a family of 6, and with that it's almost always going to be cheaper to drive than to take any other form of transportation. Before kids, the math was very different.

Do you actually live in Austria? Because I've seen comments about family tickets. I only know Switzerland - where your kids under 6yo will travel with you for free and your under 16yo half price.

Kids under 6 are free on almost all public transport in Austria.

For older kids there are a lot of discounts, but many of them are only cheap if you use public transport regularly. (eg. rail card family from the ÖBB for 19€ a year, or upper austria regional tickets for school children for 77€ a year, etc.)

One problem is that it's not just train tickets, but you also need tickets for bus/tram/subway, and every city/region has different systems, so for every trip I spend about 15min trying to figure out which tickets to buy.

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

#284

Post by soco »

yarcob wrote: post #283
soco wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually live in Austria? Because I've seen comments about family tickets. I only know Switzerland - where your kids under 6yo will travel with you for free and your under 16yo half price.

Kids under 6 are free on almost all public transport in Austria. For older kids there are a lot of discounts, but many of them are only cheap if you use public transport regularly. (eg. rail card family from the ÖBB for 19€ a year, or upper austria regional tickets for school children for 77€ a year, etc.) One problem is that it's not just train tickets, but you also need tickets for bus/tram/subway, and every city/r…

Well at least in CH you only have one ticket for everything (yes including regional rail providers, buses, ships, even many cable cars), so maybe AT could follow the idea. Plus you have that nice little feat called "EasyRide" (initially from a startup) where you enter that you start the ride and who accompanies you, and it will compute your final ticket costs only when you say "checkout". 90% of the cases it comes cheaper than I would have thought when buying the tickets by myself (the rest 10% of time the price is the same as estimated)

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

#285

Post by scrollaway »

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?

You're getting lots of different answers but as someone who's lived and traveled in several different countries in Europe, i can tell you that it simply depends.

In Belgium, it's obscenely expensive. In some others, it's super cheap. It depends how much the country cares about making their public transport accessible. Either way it's very inconsistent across Europe but yes there are countries where public transport is highly subsidized and truly cheap and accessible. Which IMO saves a lot of costs elsewhere, it's the right way to do it.

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

#286

Post by junga »

korantu wrote: post #271
junga wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prices for travelling by car should contain way more stuff than just gas. There's taxes, insurance, repair and all that nasty stuff that really makes very high costs per mile or kilometer if you do the math.

Though if one already have a car, then it might make sense to use it to get better value from tax and insurance

I'm not sure if I'd agree. This might as well be another mutation of sunk cost fallacy. Anyway, the sooner you sell your car, the higher the price. (ignoring really old and valuable cars here)

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

#287

Post by southerntofu »

rory wrote: post #255
southerntofu wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we disagree on the "many". I would say "some" instead. Most people i know don't have a choice: they're employed in a shop somewhere or work from specific offices. Of course, the HN crowd may be more exposed to work-from-home, but that's still alien to a great part of the population, especially those who work the most precarious jobs.

I'm not sure how it is in Austria, but here in the US, people on the more "precarious" end of the spectrum (non-management retail and hospitality workers) have a quit rate of (very roughly) ~50% per year. So generally they do seem to be aware that they can choose a different place to work. Do you live somewhere very rural?

Yes i reside in a less populous area (south France) where you can be happy to find a job at all, if that's what you're looking for in life. But from my understanding of bigger agglomerations: there's a high turnover rate in precarious jobs, but just because you can afford to find another precarious job elsewhere doesn't mean you get the privilege to choose where precisely. I hear in suburbs of capitals like Berlin or Paris it's not uncommon for people to travel 2-4h daily to work and back. Chances are if you switch jobs, you might have the same travel times, but to a different location.

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

#288

Post by southerntofu »

bluGill wrote: post #191
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.

Because then politicians will rob the budget for whatever their pet project is. Fares should at least cover all operating costs (including maintenance), so that politicians can't slowly kill the system via neglect (they will kill it by others means, but at least budget won't be one)

How is that so? Politicians have a way to destroy/privatize public service whether it's self-funded or not, just like they destroy/ban private associations doing too much of a job for social justice (such as armed bands expropriating the bourgeoisie to feed popular districts, which was common throughout the 60-80s).

Famously, french social security (healthcare), unemployment and pensions are more or less self-funded (they all have their own line/column on taxes papers), yet the previous 3-5 governments have been relentlessly reforming those essential public services in order to render them useless. It's also important to note that in most instances of such reforms, the government will point out some money is missing to fund the service, which :

- is only partially true, as insane amounts are spent for their disserving bureaucracies, managerial class, and control apparatus, all of which we would do better without

- is still partially true, but benefits fraud represents in all cases less than 1% of participation fraud, where the biggest companies are the ones evading to pay their dues... so if law enforcement were to crack down on big corporations fraud instead of political dissent, the problem would be solved very easily

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

#289

Post by iggldiggl »

bmicraft wrote: post #94
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italy does this and I've always wondered how much they must lose over it. Even as a tourist, every time I saw a ticket agent get on the bus/tram, a good number of people would instantly get off. I do like the system better, it's faster in every way. But lost fares would definitely be a concern. Also not sure how that has anything to do with making public transit free honestly.

The ticket usually covers only a fraction of the true price while the rest is subsidized anyways, so it shouldn't matter much

As far as I remember, in the bigger cities in Germany farebox recovery ratios are usually somewhere in the 30 to 80 % range, in some cases even higher. (According to https://www.vdv.de/vdv-statistik-2019.pdfx#page=35, the average might actually be around 75 %, it seems.)

So completely abolishing fares would mean a considerable, definitively non-trivial increase in spending requirements on public transport for cities – and if you're seriously prepared to spend that much money (or create some sort of additional tax to raise that money, or whatever), I'd rather prioritise spending it on service improvements first, because even in big cities there are enough examples of service offerings that are only borderline attractive.

They actually did some (admittedly smaller-scale) experiments in that direction recently, and as I understood it, the takeaway was that service improvements were indeed somewhat more effective in generating additional passengers than lower fares.

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

#290

Post by raxxorrax »

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...

Switzerland has a very strong currency which is a factor here. If the ticket alone doesn't make you poor, the coffee might.
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