271–280 of 598 posts
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Actually, the Hamburg-Berlin IRE should be covered by this ticket as well, which requires no changes at all.
There is a RE from Hamburg to Berlin?
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> I would argue making it free and keeping it free would have been a cool move. Here in Germany, there were many voices in favour of making the ticket completely free. What I heard about the reason for not doing so is that the government wanted to easily measure the actual demand in different regions for such a "free" ticket. So the price is low enough that anybody who wants to ride practically "for free" is buying i…
Do you have any kind of source for this? I heard of complaints regarding this ticket already, I do not see this coming back, let alone for free.
"We now have a one-time promotion that represents a field trial. At the end, we can analyse the data and know exactly what we need to improve in order to get people to switch to public transport."[1]
[1] Original: "Wir haben jetzt eine einmalige Aktion, die einen Feldversuch darstellt. Wir können dann am Ende auch die Daten analysieren und wissen genau, was müssen wir verbessern, um Menschen auf den ÖPNV umsteigen zu lassen." -- https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/verkehrsminister-zum-neun-eur... (in German)
Very important caveat for all of you who are thinking, “woo hoo, no need to buy that EuRail pass! Or to buy an expensive ICE ticket!” These tickets are good for all “Nah- und Regionalverkehr,” explicitly excluding ICE, IC, EC (international) and long-distance busses (like the one between Munich and Zürich) If the train number begins with RE or RB, you’re good, but of course, those are the slow ones that stop in every…
My main worry is whether they'll have the resources to put up with the increased demand. Guess I'll see soon...
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Our Dutch Scouts of age 15-17 also plan their own camps and do so on a shoestring budget, and it turns out that yes you can get from the Netherlands to the Czech Republic with all your camping gear using only like fifteen different German regional trains :-)
Especially for traveling across Germany, this ticket isn't quite useful, however I feel like it is marketed as "free traveling across Germany for a month" which isn't really the case. Am wondering how everything will play out next couple of months.
Even if you really want to get to B, it’s more adventurous and cheaper than taking a direct train.
I can easily see teenagers or pensioners use this to backpack through Germany for a month. Even if you don’t know whether you’ll like it, it’s cheap enough to give it a try.
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Not illegal as far as I know. These are almost certainly subsidized tickets, financed with taxpayer money, it is common to restrict the sales to those who pay taxes in the covered area. And I don't see how it could be illegal, it is like forcing Germany to provide health care for the French and vice versa.
> it is like forcing Germany to provide health care for the French and vice versa That's literally how it works [1]. EU citizens are treated the same as local citizens in every country. [1]: https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/europe-travel-insurance/ehi...
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> Credit cards aren't regular in Europe. Pretty sure it's just Germany being pig-headed about it for some reason. Everywhere else in Europe is perfectly happy to accept a credit card. I do 99.999% of all my spending on a credit card, like most millennial people or younger, and the only people in the developed world who this is a problem for is the Germans.
Come on that’s not fair. Don’t the Dutch hate credit cards too?
Paying with a credit card in shops? That's just not done excepting American tourists, same as in a number of European countries. It's contactless debit cards mostly. Building a credit rating by using a credit card is not part of the system.
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Now you know why so many still use the car in the Netherlands. "Dutch public transport is the most expensive in Europe": https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/dutch-expat-news/dutch-pu...
> Dutch public transport is the most expensive in Europe Only because the UK is no longer in the EU.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/01/dutch-transport-servic...
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Yeah, UKs train tickets are ridiculous if you compare it to rest of Europe. And that's not even case of UK just being generally more expensive, e.g. cheapest StAlbans - London (~25 km) yearly pass costs around £4k. About a 1000 pounds more than Switzerland GA travelcard which covers basically any form of public transport in Switzerland.
As a Swiss GA holder - UK public transport is all privately owned, right? The joys of free market efficiency in "public" transportation - maximum efficiency for the owners/shareholders, minimum efficiency for the people. The Swiss SBB is also again and again under assault to be fully privatized, luckily so far this hasn't happened yet, and I hope it never will...
* Buses (outside London): yes. Private and (mostly) deregulated.
* Buses (inside London): kinda. Private, but heavily regulated (fares, routes, everything)
* Trains (outside London): both. The infrastructure is now public, after the company it was sold to became insolvent and got essentially renationalised by stealth. The companies running the trains are mostly heavily regulated private (some fares, routes, and other things are fixed by their franchise contracts, some fares are flexible). A few companies are 'open access' (private without franchise) and only their routes/timetables are fixed, they can do their own thing with fares and rolling stock. A few places (such as long-distance trains on the East Coast mainline) are run by a subsidiary of the state directly.
* Trains (inside London, including the Tube): Infrastructure also public (some run by Network Rail, the national organisation, some by Transport for London). Some services (e.g. the Tube) run directly by TfL, some franchised as nationally.
* [Edit: Eurostar runs (lightly regulated) services to France and Belgium via the Channel Tunnel and sets its own fares]
The main difference from other countries (except for the insane web of contracts and inter-organisational dependencies) is that the policy of the UK Government is to put the cost of public transport as much as possible on its users rather than subsidising from general taxation. We've had above-inflation rises in the regulated fares nearly every year since privatisation in 1994, for example.
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Somewhat off topic, but still: > long-distance busses (like the one between Munich and Zürich) Zurich is too deep in Switzerland to be covered anyways. (Salzburg, Kufstein, Basel Bad Bf, etc. however are in Austria/Switzerland but part of German rail rates and included in 9€ tickets) And that DB bus doesn't exist anymore since the new electrified railway line to Lindau was opened two years ago, as Munucih-Zurich got…
From Zürich to Munich by direct train is now 221 minutes instead of 245 minutes. It'z faster, but I wouldn't call it way faster. By bus it's 225 minutes, but the bus is often up to 30 minutes late.
I can see why you said the train takes 221 minutes.
However, "225 minutes" for bus? I know y'all are known for punctuality, but are buses in Switzerland/Germany that precise?!
Also, is it customary to tell such durations in minutes, as opposed to something like "4 hour 45 minutes" or "4 and 3-quarter hours"?
Where I'm at, nothing runs on time unfortunately. Over here I sometimes feel arrival times of trains should just say "morning" instead of showing an actual time like 8:20 am.