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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

#281

Post by bjelkeman-again »

Arainach wrote: post #202
treflop wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sprawl happens when there is available undeveloped land. Roads are just a symptom. People build outwards first and then upwards.

There is plenty of undeveloped land that people don't move to because there are no roads to get to. We have more than a century of data showing that roads are subject to induced demand. If you build more roads, people move and sprawl (and take more trips in general) until traffic is once again unbearably bad. If you build more lanes, more people move further out. Roads create sprawl.

And active urban planning avoids sprawl.

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

#282

Post by CuriousCosmic »

dreadlordbone wrote: post #268
postpawl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.

So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.

And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.

So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.

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

#283

Post by lagrange77 »

Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies?

EDIT: Oh and hospitals!

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

#284

Post by okr »

threeseed wrote: post #201
jdietrich wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Road vehicles are heavily taxed in European countries. I don't have the figures for Germany, but the UK spends £12bn per year on roads, while it collects £25bn in road fuel duty and £7bn in vehicle excise duty. https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk... https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/... https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...

There are also deaths caused by road accidents and health issues caused by pollution. Those have real economic impacts which aren’t being reflected in the true cost of cars.

[flagged]

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

#285

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

Disturbingly, your link includes Carbon capture and storage from a fossil power plant, which has never been demonstrated practically and is basically a scam at this point, pushed by oil companies.

Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.

However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid

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

#286

Post by ClumsyPilot »

chgs wrote: post #161
eesmith wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. S…

> But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels

Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down

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

#287

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

k__ wrote: post #120

It's pretty awesome, but it gets more expensive all the time. First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months. People loved it, and the government talked about doing a permanent 29€ ticket. But now we pay 49€ and it's already planned to become 59€. Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.

Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?

Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?

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

#288

Post by SoftTalker »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #192
PlunderBunny wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget too that the cost of proving roads is also ‘subsidised’ in most countries, but we’re tend to be a bit blind to that. (This is not an argument against rail - I just find that subsidies are often mentioned with respect to rail but not with roads).

People don't think of it as a subsidy because they are not charged per use a la toll road.

People also pay fuel tax, registration tax, and other taxes that fund the roads

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

#289

Post by layer8 »

dietr1ch wrote: post #72
lispm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry. Tourist&foreigners can use the Deutschlandticket, too. But: it's a monthly subscription automatically renewing every month, so one has to cancel it early enough when planning to leave the country. You'll also typically need a smartphone for the ticket.

Well, on mobile they make you think you need the app, but it's region locked. I happened to email them about how this is annoying for tourists yesterday and got a very German response, "Downloading the Deutschlandticket.de app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store is only possible in certain countries." (ikr, it's THE problem)

The problem may be that if they offer the app in foreign regions, they are liable to the jurisdiction of those foreign regions.

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

#290

Post by weinzierl »

DominikPeters wrote: post #267
weinzierl wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 mor…

This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.

In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.

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