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Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

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Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#71

Can this have the potential of having the MoviePass type outcome? Also, wouldn’t this overcrowd public transit?

Overcrowding is the best thing that could happen, we need more public transport users as quickly as possible.

Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why can I not do that online with my ID? > Why is she even typing it at all Social function of work. If you do it yourself, what will she do? If you come up with a solution freeing hundreds of people doing some monkey jobs some in Germany will consider this evil, since people are losing their means of earning salary. This is more difficult with the officials, since they have guaranteed employment. [Edit: typo]

German speaking here. Keeping people busy with bullsh*t jobs just for the sake of keeping them busy is not a good investment, not financially nor for the sanity of the people themselves. In fact, in Germany you can see that it leads to government paralysis everywhere. In contrast, they should free "Staatsbeamte" from those stupid jobs and encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-do…

I live and work in Germany for almost two years now.

I witnessed at least two panic attacks caused by the implementation of your suggestion to "encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands".

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#73

The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things. This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g.,…

> With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.

There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#74
post #73

The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things. This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g.,…

> With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on. There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4 , but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.

By "local" transit, I mean regional commuter trains (Regionalbahn, Regionalexpress and S-Bahn), not the faster long-distance trains (Intercity and Intercity-Express, the latter being Germany's high-speed trains).

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#75
post #7

The problem is that in Germany, the city-to-city trains that can be used with this ticket do not have WIFI IIRC. Can anybody confirm this? Traveling time without WIFI is a much higher burden to me than normal traveling time, where I can work on my projects. I actually like working on the train. It is a nice environment. But without that possibility, long train rides are a chore to me. And it will be interesting to se…

Just use mobile data? That's what the trains are using anyway.

Apparently data reception in German trains is very low.

This report[0] says it's 62-78% nationwide. Of the neighbouring alps countries Austria is 78-88% and Switzerland is 93-96%.

[0]: https://www.umlaut.com/uploads/documents/Reports-Certificate...

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#76
post #7

The problem is that in Germany, the city-to-city trains that can be used with this ticket do not have WIFI IIRC. Can anybody confirm this? Traveling time without WIFI is a much higher burden to me than normal traveling time, where I can work on my projects. I actually like working on the train. It is a nice environment. But without that possibility, long train rides are a chore to me. And it will be interesting to se…

ICEs and some regional trains do have wifi, but it can be quite slow and unreliable. Good enough for the occasional git push though ;)

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#77
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres a really interesting graph showing rail usage under both public and private ownership in GB. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB... I'll let you draw your own conclusions From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail

It's certainly possible this was caused by who owned what; but I'd just add the decline on the graph begins around the UK's pyrrhic victory in WW1 which IMO marked (in tandem with Irish independence) the beginning of the decline of the British Empire; while the rise at the end is roughly congruent with the increasing wealth from exploitation of the North Sea gas deposits and (depending how much you accept the possibi…

North Sea came on-stream at the start of the 80s. The rise in rail traffic clearly starts around the time of privatization in ~95 and the huge plunge followed by decline starts around the time of nationalization.

Certainly there were other problems: the nationalization was downstream of the socialization of the British economy between the end of ww2 and Thatcher, and as can be seen rail traffic (a general proxy for economic health) is in steady decline from then until it rebounds slightly in the 80s before taking off again once put in (mostly) private hands in the 90s.

The reason the graph seems to run a few years ahead of the changes is that actually privatizing and nationalizing something on the scale of a national railway takes a few years to implement between politicians floating the idea and the final handover of power, but the effect on people's motivations and incentives begins almost immediately.

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#78
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.

> And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. To people who argue like this, I often argued in the past that if I were to contribute on an open source project for one year instead, this would do a lot more good for the public welfare.

As far as i can see it, we need muscle power, that is not well paid, as it does not scale well. Less software. Software is just fine.

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#79
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.

Public parks you don't sit in are still public goods; public litter bins are still public goods even if you never have anything to put into them; public roads are still a public good even if you don't own a vehicle. Likewise, if you want them to be, so is public transport. Though, here's a question: I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport — is that just my observations being weird, or is th…

>public parks, public litter bins, public roads These examples are permanent things, that only need to be maintained, and it's easier to just let the government handle them instead of letting the individual pay or having a subscription model or something alike. Also: all the public goods you mentioned cannot be managed by any single individual, that's why they are in the public hand, but it only goes so far as your activity is in "public range". You can't pave your own roads, you can't carry a trash can with you wherever you go and you can't play football in your house. That's why the government gives you roads, parks and trash cans. But: it is not allowed to put your house trash into a public bin. Or have a barbecue in the public park, or block the roads for a protest.

I think using the train is more like using the car. I can agree that the tracks are a public good, but actually using the train is clearly different from that. Just like the government provides me roads, but not with rides.

> I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport I guess my framework fits that, because while you may need to maintain the air and the airport, the individual flights only help the individual person.

Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres a really interesting graph showing rail usage under both public and private ownership in GB. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB... I'll let you draw your own conclusions From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail

Doesn't really cover a lot of things you'd want to know like price, satisfaction, reliability, etc. - all of which, I believe, are strongly negative compared with 30 years ago. Also doesn't tell you if it's long distance or commuter or both - which is an important distinction since many more people commute these days. In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privat…

Prices were so heavily subsidized they were ruining the government's finances, so that's not a valid metric to compare on because it wasn't sustainable. Even when being bailed out by massive amounts of tax (a regressive tax!), ridership was falling because the services sucked so hard that they couldn't compete with cars/trucks, despite the latter being a source of tax revenue, not a sink.

Dunno about satisfaction but clearly, when people were truly dissatisfied they stayed away and now the primary causes of satisfaction and reliability problems are simply that the network is so in demand it's at capacity all the time, especially London commuter routers. Some of that is driven by the huge increases in population via immigration in the last 20 years but some of it is just that privatized services are better, so people use them more.

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