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

mcc-berlin.net

221–230 of 910 posts

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

#221

The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.

I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does.

A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.

If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.

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

#222
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.

Remember that it cost a small rent to get this subscription until the 9€ experiment. Flat fee national transport, I don't remember the exact price but it's multiple hundreds a month in both the Netherlands (NS altijd/trein vrij) and Germany (Bahnkarte 100). Even my local subscription to go ~10km between two cities in Germany (NRW) cost 90€ a month until that experiment

A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded

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

#223

The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.

I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does. A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through. If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increas…

80% of homelessness in the USA is transitional, i.e. someone lost a job or had an injury and needs time to get back on their feet.

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

#224
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

lol you know websites exist right. what a luddite approach. Paper is expensive, wasteful, environmentally harmful, and time consuming.

Paper is fine for the environment. Paper takes an absolutely tiny portion of a tree (and burning the pulp waste tends to result in a net energy surplus from the pulp mill!), whereas the amount of energy to create one computer (even a phone) is massive.

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

#225
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.

It seems the problem might be that pricing is judged independent from externalities. Same with cars and roads.

On the other hand, if price was set to zero, you would get weird over-usage patterns (like people using it for housing or other nonsense)

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does. A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through. If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increas…

80% of homelessness in the USA is transitional, i.e. someone lost a job or had an injury and needs time to get back on their feet.

Transient: a person who is staying or working in a place for only a short time.

I don't think most people mean someone is only temporarily homeless when they call them transients.

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

#227

The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.

> The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.

Remember folks, if someone says they don't want to ride transit with a hobo smoking meth, they're lying and they're a bad person. Even if they've previously experienced it firsthand.

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

#228
post #68
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vegans? Veg[a..z1..9A..Z]ns? Are there any vegyns out there who object to being put on the meat/no-meat spectrum? Are you afraid HN will censure you if you spell out the complete word?

Really now. It's obviously veg.+ns: vegans and vegetarians.

I didn't get that either; not that obvious after all! I thought they were making a joke about vegan being a swear/taboo word, given the context of saying people don't want to hear of it because it allegedly threatens their morality

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

#229

The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.

I was in San Francisco recently, and, okay, maybe San Francisco is special or something, but the public transport seemed basically fine? Insofar as it existed; coverage wasn’t great, but it didn’t seem particularly threatening where it existed.

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

#230
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Walking is good for you.

Doesn't that depend on one's weight? Or was that jogging/running
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