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Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

mcc-berlin.net

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Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#161

Post by chgs »

eesmith wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #5

Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.

Just about all of which used to have train service, right? I mean, in the US I've been to a lot of small towns where there is no train service, but the old station is still there, with the rails all torn out and replaced with houses, or roads, or bike paths. And in the UK, the infamous Beeching cuts in the 1960s removed lines based on a profitability model which wasn't applied to roads, causing many communities to lo…

Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. You would have to change to another train to get to a station with a regular service to London, and increasing services wouldn’t be possible without significantly increasing terminal capacity.

Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station.

Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#162

Post by londons_explore »

arrosenberg wrote: post #152
londons_explore wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is also the ~80 staff manning stations at each end and along the route, and more staff in the control room, the cleaning staff, the people who manually do maintenance checks every single night, etc.

You can get rid of the cleaning staff right now. The terminals will become disgusting and people will stop using them. There is no way around this type of overhead. If you have larger numbers of people passing through, you need cleaning and maintenance. Your original point isn’t even true - in California there is constant maintenance of the road network and crews of community service workers doing their sentence clea…

Roads still have far fewer staff per mile than railways, however you measure.

In turn, that makes them cheaper.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#163

Post by aleph_minus_one »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #151
Swizec wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. Did I miss something or is this one of the situations we're we are making up new definitions for words?

> I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received.

It is rumored that the military (and perhaps three-letter agencies) has/have special contracts with OpenAI. This can definitely be called a subsidy.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#164

Post by ahartmetz »

juliangmp wrote: post #28
server_man3000 wrote: post #2

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 What? How? I have the ticket and despite that I never use any regional train because they're generally awful. (Local busses and trams on the other hand work pretty well)

Regional trains are really okay compared to long-distance trains. These are so bad that it's unlikely that you reach your destination on time now.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#165

Post by chgs »

petesergeant wrote: post #75

I really really would like to see Labour in the UK to use their sizeable majority + Parliamentary sovereignty to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure, including more train subsidies, but they seem very cautious and also terrified of raising taxes. Such a waste that the UK is one of the few places where Parliament could just ram shit through and yet building anything in the UK is so hampered by self-imposed red tape.

15 years of all major parties supporting hs2 and it couldn’t be rammed through

Want to improve things for people in the UK, ram through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#166

Post by spacebanana7 »

Swizec wrote: post #126
ccppurcell wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s important to distinguish between an operational cost and capital investment here.

If rail usage continues once the spending stops then it’s an investment. Otherwise is an operating subsidy.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#167

Post by sva_ »

consp wrote: post #43
lispm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached? That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket It influenced the idea to come up with a permanent ticket: the "Deutschlandticket". It started 1. Mai 2023. https://en.wikip…

> Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local&regional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing. We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these…

It was only valid for the state in which the university is, and not all universities offered it.

Most students now get the nationwide ticket for effectively about 30€/month.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#168

Post by moffkalast »

hankchinaski wrote: post #157

Would be interesting to see if the subsidy is covered by additional economic activity to cover the shortfall. If not it won’t last long, money doesn’t grow on trees

On the other hand the Bundeswehr burns through 50 billion a year to do fuck all, so apparently it does indeed grow on trees.

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#169

Post by sva_ »

server_man3000 wrote: post #2

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…

> 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.

Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)

Re: Germany's 49-euro ticket resulted in significant shift from road to rail

#170

Post by throawayonthe »

jdietrich wrote: post #76

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…

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