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Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

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Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#51

Post by em-bee »

benj111 wrote: post #36
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #13

I'm somewhat surprised that they go for this model. It's 49 Euro per month with restrictions to regional services. However that ticket is available for tourists, students, pensioners, workers and regular people at the same price point. I would have assumed they make that ticket only available yearly and with discounts to students or pensioners. The way the Austrian ticket works (91 Euro per month for regulars, 68.5 E…

>because it also enables some level of competition Does it? How do railways work in Austria? In the UK companies bid to get monopolies on routes. So you don't really have competition anyway. >and it lets the rail companies charge higher prices for tourists. Is that a good thing? I assume at least one of the reasons is to get people out of cars. It's unclear to me why a tourist not using a car is worse than a local no…

In the UK companies bid to get monopolies on routes. So you don't really have competition anyway.

you have competition in the bidding process.

but no, there are no monopolies on all routes in austria or germany. on main routes like vienna to munich or vienna to prague multiple train companies offer services and compete for travellers.

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#52

Post by OJFord »

Zetobal wrote: post #35
perceptronas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conductor still needs to check the ticket itself. You would have to show your student/pensioner ID in addition to the ticket. Overhead of eligibility check is negligible in my opinion

It's not about the conductor...

Why not? You (as the seller) don't care if someone buys a ticket they're not eligible to use and has to come back for another one, or never uses it, or whatever. You'd be checking eligibility at point of use anyway.

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#53

Post by Aachen »

eastbound wrote: post #7
johndoe0815 wrote: post #2

This is outdated, currently the planned start date is May 1st. However, there seem to be still discussions about implementation details (availability only in an app vs. as a chip card or on paper, use of a subscription model). It's a horrible mess - and still too expensive for people with low incomes. In hindsight, it is amazing that the 9 Euro ticket experiment last year worked at all.

> still too expensive for people with low incomes It can be said about anything . 49€ per month for transportation in all cities is 5% of a low-income salary; Saying that this effort is not enough validates the theorem that no government is left enough for a leftist to stop saying “It’s not really left”.

Do we have to polarize this simple question of whether 50 euros for transportation is affordable for specific income groups as a leftist versus rightist theory thing?

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#54

Post by bradhe »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #13

I'm somewhat surprised that they go for this model. It's 49 Euro per month with restrictions to regional services. However that ticket is available for tourists, students, pensioners, workers and regular people at the same price point. I would have assumed they make that ticket only available yearly and with discounts to students or pensioners. The way the Austrian ticket works (91 Euro per month for regulars, 68.5 E…

There was a LOT of negotiation with the various regional providers that went into this.

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#55

Post by newaccount74 »

benj111 wrote: post #36
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #13

I'm somewhat surprised that they go for this model. It's 49 Euro per month with restrictions to regional services. However that ticket is available for tourists, students, pensioners, workers and regular people at the same price point. I would have assumed they make that ticket only available yearly and with discounts to students or pensioners. The way the Austrian ticket works (91 Euro per month for regulars, 68.5 E…

>because it also enables some level of competition Does it? How do railways work in Austria? In the UK companies bid to get monopolies on routes. So you don't really have competition anyway. >and it lets the rail companies charge higher prices for tourists. Is that a good thing? I assume at least one of the reasons is to get people out of cars. It's unclear to me why a tourist not using a car is worse than a local no…

> It's unclear to me why a tourist not using a car is worse than a local not using a car.

You need to give people an incentive to buy an annual ticket. If an annual ticket costs 365x the price of a day pass, then nobody would buy it, because it would be cheaper to buy day passes.

It's better if people have annual tickets, because then they have an incentive to take public transport every time -- otherwise they would see the price every day and would maybe take the car more often.

However, I do agree with you that public transport is too expensive for occasional users, and a lot of people might be more motivated to switch to public transport if it wasn't so expensive for occasional use. (and if there was a single ticket type instead of a dozen different types of tickets...)

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#56

Post by majewsky »

moooo99 wrote: post #30
fock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

still you can for example go from Berlin to Munich in about 10h with the latter option. (was 50€/day last time I tried for fun...)

Its also worth mentioning that there are express connections between big cities that are relatively close. For example, there is a sprinter connection between Nürnberg and Munich that takes about 90 minutes using a regional train instead of the 60 minutes it would take with an ICE.

Same for Dresden-Leipzig. I usually take the ICE since I have a Bahncard 100. In addition to the real time saved, it also feels a lot faster if you're not stopping every 5 minutes.

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#57

Post by Aachen »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #5

That's half the price of what my region of Sweden charges for a comparable ticket, and it covers the whole country, not just one region. Not bad.

Same for Germany. My region (about 30km from one end to the other) charges about twice as much currently as this nationwide ticket will cost.

And that's not to speak of the Netherlands where you'll pay a few hundred a month for this service, regional subscriptions aren't a thing, though you can buy a subscription per route (those aren't cheap per km either).

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#58

Post by OJFord »

locallost wrote: post #44
ffritz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct and to show what that means: Frankfurt to Berlin with a fast ICE: 4 hours, no changes. With regional trains only: 10-14 hours, 3-6 changes. With a car this trip is 5 hours. No one in their right mind would ever do such a trip with regionals only, it is extremely painful. In addition, the chance that one of the connections will be missed is extremely high.

You can still try that, but that's not the intention. The target audience are basically commuters. I had a colleague a couple years ago that went around 100km total both ways to work. He briefly considered switching to train but balked at the price of about 200 per month. This despite the fact that gas cost him more, his car commute was longer and he was paying for a parking spot. I guess the logic was he already pai…

Interesting logic! Even with the sunk cost of car, insurance, etc. it'd still have to be significantly cheaper or quicker for me to use it over a train, on which I can do other things. (I suppose its privacy is something, but not worth as much to me as the freedom to read or close my eyes.)

Re: Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

#60

Post by ghaff »

benj111 wrote: post #36
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #13

I'm somewhat surprised that they go for this model. It's 49 Euro per month with restrictions to regional services. However that ticket is available for tourists, students, pensioners, workers and regular people at the same price point. I would have assumed they make that ticket only available yearly and with discounts to students or pensioners. The way the Austrian ticket works (91 Euro per month for regulars, 68.5 E…

>because it also enables some level of competition Does it? How do railways work in Austria? In the UK companies bid to get monopolies on routes. So you don't really have competition anyway. >and it lets the rail companies charge higher prices for tourists. Is that a good thing? I assume at least one of the reasons is to get people out of cars. It's unclear to me why a tourist not using a car is worse than a local no…

You have discounts for locals--at least for those using a system on a day-to-day basis. But you also see various discounts for tourists--I assume to entice people to visit in the first place. (I actually expect that so many factors go into deciding to rent a car vs. taking trains/buses that transit discounts probably don't factor in that much.)
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