Deutschlandticket for regional bus and rail services to be offered for €49/month

It's not consistent across the entire country, sure, but my wife had difficulty on trips to Munich and Graz in the last few weeks, my nephew on his trip from Berlin to Hamburg last weekend and don't get me started on trying to get to Brussels or even the local closures in Hamburg of the S-Bahn U-Bahn. The issue is as much comms as it Engineering work.

They know they're doing engineering work, but do they allow for it? No. The bus goes, oh I can't go any further, all passengers get out and continue on the S-Bahn. Walk into S-Bahn, platforms all closed.

Arrive at HBF, 15 minute delay. Keeps changing. Keeps going up. No reasons given.

Journey to X, shortly before arrival, oh, the station is shut we're going to stop early. No notice in order to help friends and relatives reorganize.

Fuck me, the UK is bad at a lot of things with public transport, but it is better coordinated than this. The roads are the same, random closures, no diversions set up, no planning with other closures to check they're not trapping people inside loops.

It's the focus on cost rather than correctness that is frustrating.

If you choose to live in a remote place, you'll also have to bear the costs.

It’s a very confusingly written sentence, but I believe the “it” is meant to refer to “German Rail” and not the Deutschlandticket.

> 9k out of 36k students may enroll without any academic intention.

but this isn't just because of the "semester ticket" students get, at least where I live the ticket is the least relevant reason of multiple ones why someone might sign up for university.

Other reasons include:

- healthy insurance/tax, especially until you are 25(??) you can be health insured through your parents, even afterwards the health insurance flat rate can be nice in some situations. And the tax model of student side jobs is nice too, through with some long term drawbacks people tend to overlook

- not being officially unemployed, when spending a year for yourself e.g. traveling the world

- having an excuse for your family and similar when you have absolutely no idea what you want from live

- forcing parents in broken families to pay child support longer

- using healthy insurance and tax of students to (pre-) bootstrap a one man self employment company and try out various side jobs to find yourself

- starting with the intend to study but then losing that intent due to you realizing that is not what you want to do and not finding a way forward for year or more

- abusing BAföG

- officially studing one topic "for fun, taxes, health, etc." while waiting for a spot in the study track you care for to open up, (that was a thing I have seen quite often)

- study for fun for people which don't need to work and a bored (thats how sometimes 60+ year old people appear in as students).

As a side note, in my experience most, nearly all times, when people sign up for a study track without the intention to get a Bachelor/Master they sign up for tracks which always have free "left over" spots each semester. On one hand because this makes it nearly guaranteed they get in, on the other hand because it would be pretty shitty if you prevent people which want to study from getting a spot when you have no intent to study.

I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late). So there's not much reading that can be done. Also, try reading while you're waiting in the cold for a bus that keeps on getting more and more delayed because of weather. My personal record so far was nearly an hour with busses promised but then suddenly vanishing from the app.

Compared to this, the corresponding car trip takes about 10 minutes. I never sat in heavy traffic because you can easily circumvent that in a car. However, I have been stuck in a bus sitting in a traffic jam for more than 30 minutes on many occasions. The bus can't change it's course and the bus drivers don't like letting you exit anywhere that isn't a bus stop. But at least you can read while your colleagues have already been home for a while.

Most people overlook that travel to and from stops and waiting for a connecting bus can add up significantly. And then there are all those things that time tables won't tell you.