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9-Euro-Ticket

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Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#531

Post by cbmuser »

dorgo wrote: post #386
cbmuser wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had cities with free public transport in Germany. One example was the city of Templin in Brandenburg. The project was eventually abandoned because lots of people were just riding the busses out of boredom and busses were permanently full with costs exploding for the city. See: https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/artikel/nahverkeh...

What is the difference to normal paid tickets? Once the ticket is paid I can ride busses out of boredom the whole day.

The difference is that you have to pay for it and money is usually a limiting factor.

If you can afford buying a ticket to ride the bus for no reason every day, no one is going to stop you.

However, most people won’t spend money on things they don’t actually need.

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#532

Post by cbmuser »

johnday wrote: post #285
cbmuser wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had cities with free public transport in Germany. One example was the city of Templin in Brandenburg. The project was eventually abandoned because lots of people were just riding the busses out of boredom and busses were permanently full with costs exploding for the city. See: https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/artikel/nahverkeh...

It seems like an almost-free, unlimited-use ticket would suffer the same way.

That’s actually what’s expected to happen in Germany with the 9-Euro-Ticket.

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#533

Post by cbmuser »

potatoz2 wrote: post #405
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thing I thought of even though I never heard of this example: It's a terrible idea if you think about it with an economic mind. There are very few scenarios where making things "free" can actually provide a long term benefit for the public. The reason Communist economies don't work isn't because there's not enough wealth in society to guarantee a modest income for everyone. It's because once you take the incent…

There are many free goods people don’t seem to (usually) overconsume. Primary school is free, libraries are free, parks are free, etc. To know whether public transportation is more like free libraries or more like free parking, you have to run the experiment.

So, how exactly would you overconsume school, libraries or parks?

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#534

Post by cbmuser »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #346
Archelaos wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think the reason is that actually it wasn't meant to be germany-wide. The initial idea was 9€ per public transport network, but they quickly figured out that this will lead to many problems, as some areas have huge networks, others have many small networks and this would be one really complicated. But by then the 9€ message was out of the box and making it Germany-wide on a single ticket was the only way forward. C…

Fuel isn’t subsidized in Germany.

They are planning to reduce energy taxes on fuel for June though August, after they imposed CO2 taxes starting in 2021.

The German government tried to force people to use more renewable energies and electric cars by introducing the CO2 tax.

Since both are not adequate replacements, costs for heating, electricity and transportation exploded.

When the German government realized that was a problematic development and could push people into poverty, they hastily came up with the 9 Euro ticket and the fuel rebate (which is just reducing the energy taxes to a minimum) in the hope that the problems would resolve themselves alone sometime in the future.

However, the problems will be back in September when the rebate period is over.

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#535

Post by illiac786 »

wreath wrote: post #392
dorgo wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the difference to normal paid tickets? Once the ticket is paid I can ride busses out of boredom the whole day.

No you cant because the ticket is scoped with time and/or destination/direction

Yes you can with an annual ticket. That's why it's called "annual".

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#536

Post by MandieD »

consp wrote: post #458
IMTDb wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is assuming that your trip starts and stops exactly next to the train station and that there is a non-delayed train available precisely at the right time. In practice that's not the case and those time add up quickly . Car trip will look like: 1. Travel from start to location (3:20) 2. Find parking (0:5) 3. Walk from parking to location (0:10) Total time of 3:35 Your train trip will look like: 1. Go from start t…

You should add at least one 15 min car stop. After an hour or two you are not focused anymore.

Driving on Autobahn sections without speed restrictions, especially when I do let loose and go past 160 km/h, requires so much concentration that I usually turn the stereo off.

There’s an old joke that BMW engineers couldn’t understand why they should add a cup holder.

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#537

Post by sokoloff »

akie wrote: post #429
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To which I’m also contributing by driving myself. Those roads aren’t built for my pleasure of driving to the office. They also serve crucial role in supply chains. In fact, those buses are on exactly on those same roads. The existence of those roads facilities convenient public transportation.

These 2.5 billion euros is almost nothing for a country the size of Germany. I mean, it’s 0.1% of the total budget (€1762.4 billion last year). It’s nothing. Are you really getting all huffy & puffy about paying for a scheme that provides transportation to poorer people and helps the environment? And are you the same about all other tiny expenses, or is it just this one in particular.

€2.5B here, €2.5B there; pretty soon you’re talking about billions of Euros.

I think this is a good program, but anything that costs 1/1000th of a large country’s budget is a large expense to my mind, not “nothing”.

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#538

Post by reallydontask »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #289
yccs27 wrote: post #34

Some context is given here: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-introduces-9-ticket-to-offset-... The ticket is part of a support package signed off by the German parliament. The will pay approximately €2.5 billion for the ticket offer, as a response to rising energy prices and the resulting high costs of individual mobility.

In the meantime I just paid 200% more for heating oil than it cost me one year ago. And I cannot use this public transport offer. But I am contributing to it with my taxes.

>And I cannot use this public transport offer. But I am contributing to it with my taxes.

Not all government subsidies, benefits, etc are supposed to help everybody equally, this should not be a hard concept to grasp and yet comments like yours are so common that it makes me think that people don't really understand how taxes and government spending works.

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#539

Post by inferiorhuman »

inglor_cz wrote: post #518
inferiorhuman wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who generally prefers public transit to driving (especially in a foreign country - a lot will depend on where you're traveling. I usually travel solo but think in general it would scale pretty well. Of course if your kids are poorly behaved then it'll be more of a challenge. I think having some familiarity with the infrastructure can go a long way into making the trip easier. Knowing where platforms are, w…

I travel by train a lot here in the Czech Republic and I have racked over 1 million kilometres by rail in my lifetime. My most consistent pain point when changing trains is the uncertainty about the delay and whether the connecting train will be waiting or not, how far is it going to be (it may be on a very distant platform and platform use isn't consistent even on the same railway station, much less in different reg…

Sure. Shit happens.

With rail, as usual, it depends. Connecting between bigger cities is easier, some countries make things particularly difficult. Most of my train experiences are on metro or commuter rail, most of the longer trips I've done were direct. German (DB) stations were generally easy to navigate and staff were universally dour, but travel itself was relatively painless. Berlin (Mitte) to Amsterdam airport at night? No problem. UK? You learn to just lean back and think of England. The Tube is great and relatively easy to route around closures, GWR is an expensive fucking shit show.

I've spent more time flying than doing long-distance rail trips and yeah delays happen which is why I pick connecting cities carefully. I'd much rather be stranded in New York than Atlanta or Houston.

But cars bring all sorts of uncertainties too. Let's say it starts snowing and you don't have chains (oops) or the roads are closed. Yep you're gonna get stuck for a while.

This past Wednesday I went out to what I always thought of as a semi-remote beach (about 25 miles away from home) to catch the sunset. After that was said and done my car wouldn't start. If I walked a mile back to the beach in the dark I might've been able to find a spotty signal and text for help. I decided to sleep in the car, and when the sun came up I walked ~6 miles to the nearest state park and then another mile or so to the ranger station. About half way there I got a signal for long enough to get cat pictures someone texted me the night prior, but for some reason my carrier decided to block outbound messages "Unable to send message - Message Blocking is active." The park wasn't open so I wandered around until I found someone who offered to give me a ride into the nearest town with a tow truck. A few hours later I was in the tow truck, on a two lane road, on my way home and traffic in the other direction was at a standstill. Someone had run their car off the road and judging by the number of cars waiting they'd been waiting for a while. I took that in stride but that would've been hell with kids. If I didn't know that area was low crime I would've had to schlep all my stuff into town.

Re: 9-Euro-Ticket

#540

Post by locallost »

0x008 wrote: post #526
locallost wrote: post #473

For comparison, the federal government is dead bent on building additional 4.1km of highway through Berlin that is estimated to cost over 500 million. And the critics say it will balloon to billions since the estimate is 10 years old anyway. So basically millions of people will ride the train for three months for almost free, and the cost will be in the same ball park as 4km of one highway.

Also it is really ridiculous because it goes straight through a rather central part of the city, removing old construction and very close to where a lot of people live in an attractive part of the city. Instead they could build it a couple kilometers further out to still connect the ring, the distance in drive time would probably be less than 5 minutes. But they stick to stupid plans they made 10 years ago like they…

The city doesn't want it, the federal government is pushing for it. Probably because the person in charge is a free market theologist from FDP so he wants to spend as much tax money as possible to have as little impact as possible. Wait, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's what's happening.
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