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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

#371

Post by akoboldfrying »

bastawhiz wrote: post #359
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said that. But if you're gonna spend the public money, you need some way of determining "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing".

We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.

If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with.

Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even try to put a value on how we spend public money will not be a reasonable stance until public money is infinite.

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

#372

Post by intellix »

wkat4242 wrote: post #257
tourmalinetaco wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that due to this cheaper ticket congestion on trains is horrible and since the infrastructure is poorly maintained it’s quite common to be late by 1-2 hours while being packed in a sardine tin.

That's a matter of train infrastructure and frequency keeping up with demand. There's a big lag there. You don't just buy 100 new trains overnight. It's a symptom of ramping up. Not of high usage. I live in Barcelona and here the metro comes every 2-3 minutes. Even during the night it might be 7 minutes. This helps so much with congestion but also trip planning: no need to check train times before you go. Id imagine…

€21.35 for a T-Usual card which allows unlimited travel on all public transport for 30 days, yet you still have people in here kicking and screaming to use their car and roads

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

#374

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Don't forget to factor in the reduced costs of road maintenance, accidents, non-CO2 pollution, and traffic delays.

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

#375

Post by fsh »

jordanb wrote: post #327
resonious wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gp said they know about these other factors but doesn't know how to price them. Do you know a way?

"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.

I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.

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

#376

Post by komali2 »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #371
bastawhiz wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.

If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with. Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even t…

The park to park comparison is the opposite of what's being discussed. That's comparing the value of apple to another from the same tree - there are many subjective elements to compare but given that they're both nearly identical it's quite easy. Still doesn't fit on a spreadsheet e.g. bitterness, likelihood of having a worm inside, prettiness, whatever.

What is being suggested is comparing a train subsidy to... Unknown. Other modes of transportation? The money being spent on other carbon reduction efforts?

I don't understand why carbon reduction is the primary topic for discussion when trying to put a dollar value on the thing. Two apples are still a little difficult to compare but you at least can agree that the bigger tastier one is probably better value (unless the smaller is cheaper and you need to do gram for dollar value, idk, good luck). A train vs other things though is imo essentially impossible to compare, a genuine apples to oranges comparison.

For carbon reduction, I challenge the OP estimate. It assumes everyone drives if no train, as I understand it. So that's the carbon reduction comparison - wow great so many people not driving. But it's not just that. Less parking lots need to be constructed. Less concrete, less carbon. Less roads need re paving every 10 years or whatever - let's compare the carbon of rail maintenance to an asphalt road. Less car accidents, less cars needing to be recycled at plants. Maybe city designs start accommodating the train subsidy, less car centric design, more vertical and dense, less car travel that wouldn't have been served by the train but is now served by walking. On and on and on.

You can't compare these two on carbon alone, and that's not even considering the fact that I find it kinda ridiculous to focus on just carbon as a measure of worth-to-humans. There's so many other factors at play that I genuinely think it's impossible to put a dollar value on. Reduction in road noise for people near the highway. Reduction in smog and thus a reduction in lung cancer and related medical costs. Reduction in human deaths from car accidents. Increase in psychological happiness in commuters not exposed to daily road rage and also suddenly having more time to read or play games. Endless, endless comparisons.

Dollars are a bad way to measure value. We either need a new way to describe value-for-dollars or a new way to describe actual value. Conflating the two was capitalism's ultimate coup and this thread is a great example of why.

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

#377

Post by komali2 »

nsokolsky wrote: post #326
lotsofpulp wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions). There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.

True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc. All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).

As someone who grew up in suburban sprawl, maybe it makes parenting easier, maybe. But they also had to drive me to and from school every day, and band practice, and every single game, and whenever I wanted to hang out with my friends. I would argue my parents basically were moonlighting as my Uber driver for about 16 years until I got my own car.

Big yards are great, but empty. Mom, can you drive me to my friend's bigger backyard? That times the 5 other friends that want to go to the friend's house that has the biggest backyard. Comically the 5 cars all waiting at the same stop light before the final turn, taking up the entire residential street as we all get dropped off and later picked up.

Eh, going to my friend's house is tedious. I'll just fully immerse myself in world of Warcraft, get fat, get socially maladjusted by spending all my time on the internet and 4chan, and enter college as a practically sociopathic asshole with no social skills.

Could just be me. But if I have kids, I'm raising them somewhere where they can just get on a train to get to band practice.

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

#378

Post by bigstrat2003 »

jordanb wrote: post #341
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said that. But if you're gonna spend the public money, you need some way of determining "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing".

Who's "we"? The public is mostly not made up of consultants and do not appreciate consultant logic being applied to everything. People would prefer to define values and then act on those values.

That isn't "consultant logic", that's the way the world works. Resources are finite. We can't do everything everyone wants to do, so we need some means of prioritizing which things we are to do. You can call names all you want, but this is an unavoidable reality of existence.

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

#379

Post by komali2 »

usefulcat wrote: post #331
SoftTalker wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the point is that if they had to do those things every time they used a road it would be more obvious (like buying a train ticket).

They do have to do it every time, through the fuel tax. Driving costs fuel. I guess people just don't think of it though.

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

#380

Post by WuxiFingerHold »

How many people used the tracking app for how long? How were they chosen?

The study would be flawed if the group is not chosen to represent correctly the entire population. E.g., if they called for volunteers using the app, mostly people will apply that are engaged in climate change mitigation anyway and / or are in the target market for the 49 Euro ticket.

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