221–230 of 345 posts
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I’m skeptical given that reducing your colleague’s cost from around 1000€/mo all-in (inc. parking) to 200€/mo wasn’t enough that a further reduction to 50€/mo will tip the scales.
How do you know it was 1000€? Maybe if it was closer to let’s say 500 and an extra 300 was seemed like a reasonable price to them for the additional convenience.
I can ride all the regional trains in my region in Italy for 35 euros/month (full price, before reductions for eligible categories) Italy is more complicated than Germany railroad wise, but I would also argue that beyond the region you live in, slow regional trains are much less useful. In Rome I pay 10 euros/month (the subscription is paid annually though) to use every public transport including buses, subway and tr…
through they did jump on/followed the push and it get's more international press attention, probably due to the not always correct image people have about the German train network, and because it having one of the larger train networks in the EU
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> They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives. So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule? The bus only ever needs to wait when there are no people getting on/off the bus at multiple stops in a row (e.g. at night-time), so then those stops will be skipped. As a consequence, the bus will be a few minutes ahead of time and so at some point the driver will stop and wait to make sure the bus is…
Of course they shouldn't follow a strict schedule. You either value the time or the accuracy. If you're slowing everyone down to the worst case timing, you're wasting everyone's time just to be "on schedule". The schedules were clearly artificially longer than needed, because buses were frequently waiting in stations. I'm not talking about night buses, this happened during the day and frequently. It was very obvious…
> Maybe it's just a cultural thing. You value how much the ticket costs and whether the timing is accurate. I value my personal time.
What an interesting clash of cultures. I don't fully understand your point though, if you can't be sure the bus arrives at 10:23 h, you have to come earlier to the station and wait, no?
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It all depends on circumstances, starting with the country you are in, that often determines the basic level of quality of any kind of public transport. Then, the real travel time is measured from door-to-door. That includes the traveling to stations/stops and the waiting time for connecting transport. I think this is fairly obvious. If we want to make the world a better place for people and the environment, the numb…
In most cases it is unrealistically difficult to beat the convenience and speed of private cars. If you are in a very dense urban environments, maybe. Otherwise, no. That's why making public transport very cheap or even free does not make everyone let their cars at home.
Being able to get places with cars requires a lot of things: roads, parking, traffic measures (signs, crossings, stoplights, onways, offramps, freeways, more parking at destination, etc etc etc). If you only build for public transport, bikes, and walking, the savings in both space used and money spent become ridiculous.
Basically: the world looks a lot different without every building having a huge car park. In my view: a lot better.
My wife had a daily 45km rail+2km bus trip to work which was 200€ per month. That's massive savings for many people who choose not to drive with cars. Her colleagues drive to work with cars for 2 km trips and ask her whether she does not own a car (we do). Taking the train is a) cheaper b) more relaxed (can read) c) better for the environment d) it's even faster in her case The €49 ticket could give public transporta…
I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late). So there's not much reading that can be done. Also, try reading while you're wai…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives. So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule? The bus only ever needs to wait when there are no people getting on/off the bus at multiple stops in a row (e.g. at night-time), so then those stops will be skipped. As a consequence, the bus will be a few minutes ahead of time and so at some point the driver will stop and wait to make sure the bus is…
I mean, yes? It must be infuriating to see a bus artificially stopping just to get the exact schedule. Of course the starting from the first station it should leave on time, but on intermediate stations I find it pretty ok to be a couple of minutes off.
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One limitation of the previous price experiment is that it was only a few summer months. Nobody sells their car for 3 months, especially when they include a summer holiday. Let's see what happens when you can count on this existing for years to come. The germans are generally quite conscious of right and wrong (see e.g. Linux and OSM usage: it's still minorities but it's much more present than in similar countries li…
You don’t need to mention that you are in the top 50% to make your augment stronger. You should probably even actively avoid saying it so that people don’t think you’re relying on selfless reasons, (hey everyone I’m the nice one in the room) to further your point, because others may not feel that way about themselves.l, at least not to random strangers in the bottom 10%. Anyway, making more money is just a measure of…
“ I think it might make sense to create countries or places where people in the bottom 10% live with minimal conveniences, a place like Thailand when everything is cheap.”
Like a “full service convenience place” for the part of society that doesn’t want to work and outsource that to a cheap third world country and make their population work at low cost for the unemployed of the first world?
Or collectively create a place where “the bottom 10 percent are left at their own abilities” ?
So this is a public transport ticket for urban areas. It's a good idea to make them valid across regions. If they can make it work, that is. There is still the task to distribute revenue in some adequate way, and currently politicians like to in indulge in wishful thinking and disconnect from reality in Germany, so let's wait if anyone has bothered to solve the hidden problems behind this. Could play out like the dis…
In most of Germany urban areas and metropolitan cities are just a 30-45min train ride away. At the normal ticket pricing you will pay 32 euros for the roundtrip. Now you pay 49 for the whole month. It's a game changer for a lot of people living in rural areas despite everyone without any knowledge living in those areas arguing against it but it's Germany of course everyone and their mom will argue against it with arg…
And many people doing a lot of city jumping fall into a more high income area and use IC/ICE trains not covered by the ticket (faster, and more convenient).
And that is grate! Because it part of what enabled the push for such a ticket.
Now we get a ticket which mostly is just about having a 49€ ticket for you local public transportation, while also having the convenience of not having to bother when taking some week end trips to close by lakes or similar, while being a big benefit for the people living in the "countryside" which is overdue IMHO, while also giving people more options to live outside/close by a city which can take a bit pressure from the housing market. And to top it off it makes it easier to sell it to better earning car focused people hopefully helping with a shift away from people owning/using cars all the time.
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We don't need faster trains in Germany. We need trains that are more or less on time. Punctuality is a complete disaster and probably the main reason why people hate taking the train in Germany. If you have a connection that requires changing to another train, the chance that you miss your connection is too damn high.
> We need trains that are more or less on time. i keep seeing these kinds of comments. 10 years ago i made the mistake of crossing the whole of germany by train. was a complete waste of my time. since trains are basically a solved problem (see japan, china etc), i don't get why these issues still happen in developed nations.
Germany has 0.082 billion people and 40000km rail tracks.
Japan has a very different train system on an island. Germany is in the middle of Europe with a mesh of trains, long-distance and local - connected to all of Europe. One can take an excellent French high-speed train going from Germany to Paris/France. From my home-town there are freight trains directly going to / coming from Shanghai/China, more than 10000km away. There is a sleeper train going to Sweden, trains going to Switzerland. You can literally see people boarding a train here in Hamburg travelling 1000km to Switzerland, carrying their ski equipment.
> 10 years ago i made the mistake of crossing the whole of germany by train. was a complete waste of my time.
I was crossing Germany by train from south to north just this week. No problem at all.
Don't expect German "Pünktlichkeit" on German railways, though.[0] The Austrian and especially the Swiss railroad systems are far superior. Since the "Bahnreform" of 1994 the infrastructure progressively deteriorated from the passenger's perspective. One hard fact: about 20% of the railroad network has been dismantled since 1994 (44.600km to 33.400km [1]). Way too much. Reasons for this are a confluence of excessive…
At this point Switzerland regularly makes German trains wait at the border because they are delayed and would mess up their schedules.