131–140 of 910 posts
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Exactly. I don't understand why most car owners are so opposed to public transport.
It takes forever compared to driving in most cases, catching the transit often involves a walk, and a lot of public transit is kind of grungy. This doesn't apply or matter as much in some cases (e.g. the NY subway) but in general it's not great, at least not in the USA.
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> requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies. I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff. That means you need to redesign everything that c…
I doubt that moves the needle a lot unless you're making _everything_ fully automatic, i.e. including the infrastructure creation & maintenance and streamline that extremely well. If you take a ride from Hamburg to Berlin with the ICE, there's maybe 8 staff on board, 200-300 passengers, it takes ~2 hours and the average ticket price is 77€ according to some travel app. Even if you get rid of all 8 of them, the price…
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Why do you avoid the rail system?
Because waiting im Stau (traffic jam) is so much better.
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I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I…
Here’s another way to think about it: Germany invested N billion into shifting behavior to rail. How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?
Is software and transportation really a good example?
Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached? I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled. Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as so…
"I LOVE the German transit system" I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization. The DB Navi…
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached? I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled. Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as so…
Germany is smaller than California. The United States is very, very large place, mostly unpopulated. It’s hard to apply whatever Germany, a small, densely populated country does to the US, which is largely empty land.
2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.
Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne. I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externa…
I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I…
In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
Trains are so heavy it doesnt really cost or save anything if there are people inside or not.
Its like restaurants throwing away food.
As someone that avoids the german rail at all costs I applaud this move, the freer the roads and airports are for me, the better.