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

mcc-berlin.net

261–270 of 910 posts

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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol, that depends heavily what you consider staff. E.g. look at freight, if you move cargo by trucks you need 1 staff member (sometimes called drivers) per truck. Train on the other hand needs only 2 people per hundreds of meters of train...

Even worse for individual car transport. You need one staff (driver) per vehicle...

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself. The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized. It’s important to call these out whenever they are be…

>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, w…

The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roads are much more efficient with fewer cars.

This was phrased poorly if I understand the meaning. "If there is limited use, roads are more efficient than rail" That's probably true as roads tend to cost less per mile than rail and you don't have transfer problems. When heavily utilized the opposite is true: rail is more efficient than roads.

I dont know how things are in germany but in the netherlands a lot more people own cars which slows down traffic.

All over the world they keep rebuilding congestion points only for traffic to increase.

If making public transport cheaper attracts more travelers there will be fewer cars on the road. The money spend on public transport will aso make car travel more efficiënt. Roads will last longer. Fewer upgrades are needed. Cars will last longer. etc

It is hard to picture how many cars it takes to move a train full of people.

> 7.6 percent fewer kilometres travelled by car.

> German cars were recorded to have travelled 582.4 billion kilometers.

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

#264
post #165

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.

HS2 was an ongoing project, it was threw. It was simply cancled by a fucking asshat person who tried to appeal to the far right in a series of stunts to save his sorry ass.

New housing has to be built along transportation corridors. If you want to efficiently build housing, you have to extend transportation infrastructure into areas and then grow towns around that.

This isn't actually hard and has been done for 100 years but somehow in modern day many countries are to stupid to understand this.

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

#265
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> already substantial subsidies for the rail industry Though to be fair, there are also substantial subsidies for the whole road network.

Roads are much more efficient with fewer cars.

That's why motorists should always vote for more public transport, instead of increasing road lanes - road per user is improved if you reduce the number of other cars

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

#266
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked. Paper based offline processes forever, please.

I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.

Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.

Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.

If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.

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

#267
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible. > For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution. I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with…

"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF." I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train) "The DB App has train ser…

I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.

But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.

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

#268

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…

Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.

Doesn't having a car do this too?

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

#269
post #83
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay before. That's how the transport systems generally work in Germany. In many trains you need to have a ticket BEFORE entering the train and also BEFORE entering the platform in the train station. > Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. I can do that in the DB app.

The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that. Granted, we are europeans, not Germans living in Germany. Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.

If you don't pay before, and the train doesn't have a ticket machine on it (most don't, but some e.g. trams in Berlin do) you are riding illegally. That's how it works in Germany.

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

#270
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays. bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sit…

The EU should create a standardised system for tickets in Europe, similar to the New Distribution Capability for flights or SEPA for payments. There should also be a unified system for passengers to claim their money back if their train is delayed.

EU has asked the rail companies to do so or else they will force their hand if they don’t.
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