Can this have the potential of having the MoviePass type outcome? Also, wouldn’t this overcrowd public transit?
Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
41–50 of 435 posts
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#42The problem is that in Germany, the city-to-city trains that can be used with this ticket do not have WIFI IIRC. Can anybody confirm this? Traveling time without WIFI is a much higher burden to me than normal traveling time, where I can work on my projects. I actually like working on the train. It is a nice environment. But without that possibility, long train rides are a chore to me. And it will be interesting to se…
Mobile data usually works fine in German regional trains. But if you want trips longer than 2 hours, you probably want the higher speed trains anyway (which now might have less annoying poor people in them) What’s more annoying is that the price - in regions without good public transportation it’s actually too expensive, but it’s a nice gift to big city dwellers.
It's actually not half as bad for rural residents as it is usually presented by car addicts: for those amongst rural residents who would be interested in making their cumbersome trips using public transit, subscription in conventional price models were usually prohibitively expensive. They basically took distance based single ticket price, scaled by "what if it was used for the full trip five days a week?" and applied some discount. They were offered bad service at high price. In some places 10x the price a city dweller would have to pay for their short range subscription. Sure, many out there won't buy it even at the lower price, but for those who do is a much bigger improvement over the status quo than for a city dweller. For many city dwellers, it will in fact be nothing more than an upsell option to the ticket they already have, pay more (in some places twice as much) for a ticket that will also be valid for the occasional trip out of town.
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#43The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things.
This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess.
With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake.
I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be.
0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_de...
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#44Controversial opinion: Public transport should be publicly owned.
Theres a really interesting graph showing rail usage under both public and private ownership in GB. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB... I'll let you draw your own conclusions From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail
It's certainly possible this was caused by who owned what; but I'd just add the decline on the graph begins around the UK's pyrrhic victory in WW1 which IMO marked (in tandem with Irish independence) the beginning of the decline of the British Empire; while the rise at the end is roughly congruent with the increasing wealth from exploitation of the North Sea gas deposits and (depending how much you accept the possibility of noise in the data making it hard to tell exactly which year it changed direction) joining the precursor to the EU.
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even more: Public transport is a public good which should be funded by fossil fuel taxes and provided to users without cost.
Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.
Only if you assume a road network of infinite size which goods and various services can traverse without any interference from private car owners. Which a short look at any given city during peak hours should disprove and those roads are not free either.
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It technically is in many places around Germany: The national railway infrastructure is owned by a government-owned entity, as is the main railway company. Many municipal public transport systems are also owned directly by the municipalities themselves, although there are also some semi-privatized systems and the national railway company also owns shares of municipal public transport systems in many major cities. Sti…
I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
> The tax burden is already so high
It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#47Controversial opinion: Public transport should be publicly owned.
It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case. The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step…
It's hard to overemphasize just how fucked up public transport ticketing in Germany is. As a simple example, you're a tourist in Cologne for a few days, what's the best ticket if you're planning to travel around the city and take a day trip to the nearby city of Wuppertal (but across the Verkehrsbund boundary, alas) to ride the famous monorail?
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.
Public parks you don't sit in are still public goods; public litter bins are still public goods even if you never have anything to put into them; public roads are still a public good even if you don't own a vehicle. Likewise, if you want them to be, so is public transport. Though, here's a question: I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport — is that just my observations being weird, or is th…
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Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It technically is in many places around Germany: The national railway infrastructure is owned by a government-owned entity, as is the main railway company. Many municipal public transport systems are also owned directly by the municipalities themselves, although there are also some semi-privatized systems and the national railway company also owns shares of municipal public transport systems in many major cities. Sti…
I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
> And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that.
To people who argue like this, I often argued in the past that if I were to contribute on an open source project for one year instead, this would do a lot more good for the public welfare.
Re: Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
> The tax burden is already so high It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
>It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
That's blatantly false. It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
What worker productivity do you think society is loosing out on here? We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs.
The labor they provide and experience they earn in the social system is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables in a restaurant or flipping burgers at McDs instead.