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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

#401

Post by chii »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #166
Swizec wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s another way to think about it: Germany invested N billion into shifting behavior to rail. How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?

It’s important to distinguish between an operational cost and capital investment here. If rail usage continues once the spending stops then it’s an investment. Otherwise is an operating subsidy.

paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment. An investment must have some sort of residual value, which over time, is recouped and perhaps even makes a return (hopefully).

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

#402

Post by chii »

smcl wrote: post #305
kortilla wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself. The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized. It’s important to call these out whenever they are be…

> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguab…

> why is rail treated so differently?

roads are much cheaper per mile than rail, so you can have more roads than you can have rail.

you can also have lower grade roads, which is once again, cheaper (so you can have more of it). You cannot have lower-grade rail - the train will crash.

Therefore, to provide a massive network of transport, roads are the only option. Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers, and therefore, you can expect to make back the cost of the rail from this dense usage.

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

#403

Post by sadcherry »

currymj wrote: post #70
sadcherry wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like. I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.

among intercity trains run by Deutsche Bahn, the on-time rate hovers around 2/3. it's technically true that "most were on time", but one third being late is really terrible, especially since you often need to make a tight connection. even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck. https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2023/en/combined-management-re...

I wouldn't call a 7 minutes delay "terrible".

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

#404

Post by mayneack »

ggernov wrote: post #203

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.

This is a vast oversimplification. Lots Angles Metro keeps posting month over month increases in ridership despite the perceive danger and unsavory experience.

I'm sure cleaner cars would help at the margins. Speed, convenience, comfortable, and cost all matter.

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

#405

Post by eesmith »

panick21_ wrote: post #255
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…

People talk a lot of nonsense about 'Beeching cuts' without really understanding the history. 'Beeching' has simply become a political buzzword anybody who knows even a little about rail likes to bandy about. Lines started closing around the 1930s and after WW2 this continued. Beeching was only working on this topic a short time and produced a report that suggested lots of things. Some of those things were done, othe…

> Beeching

The Beeching report of course cut no lines. It was just a report. By "Beeching cut" I mean the systemic policy of the time of prioritizing roads over rail, using the report as synecdoche.

> They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities.

That belief is the core of my comment, not the specific details of which lines were cut.

Once the lines are torn up, and the land not banked for future possible reuse, it's very hard for a car-centric area to switch away from cars.

How much should the sore feelings of those consigned to live in a car-only area affect the decision to promote rail service in order to reduce CO2 emissions?

In my opinion, zero.

> That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost.

When I wrote 'profitability model' I wasn't saying it was strictly about profitability. The report clearly uses profitability as one of the driving factors, but not the only factor.

My point is that the model which lead to statements like "As soon as the required procedure permits, it is desired to withdraw those passenger train services which are clearly uneconomic" was not applied to roads. Outside of a few toll roads and bridges, the direct earnings of a road is zero, resulting in an expected loss in total gross revenue.

The environment impact to the cuts clearly wasn't included, but neither was the implied increased demand for new roads, nor the higher road maintenance costs, much less concepts of induced demand that Leeming was just then formulating.

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

#406

Post by hedora »

ericd wrote: post #119
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…

The only carbon capture/sequestration method I’m aware of without significant tradeoffs outside of price is direct air capture, and last I saw, that clocked in at $600-1200/ton (Climeworks). So maybe not such a terrible deal?

The startups in this space were targeting $100/ton before the recent inflation hit.

It turns out if you divide the $/ton by 100, you get $/gallon of gas equivalent.

Burning a gallon of gas emits 20 lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is in the oxygen), and a ton is 2000 lbs.

Anyway, at $6-12 dollars per gallon of gasoline, direct air capture is clearly much worse than just not burning oil. At $1-2, it’s less than the current gasoline taxes in the US.

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

#407

Post by hilux »

ben_w wrote: post #128
hilux wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan of public transit, but it's not entirely "baffling" why the US lags European countries (and Japan) - the US is a MUCH larger country.

The EU is only about half the land area of the USA; Germany is roughly equivalent of the fourth largest US state, Montana, and only CA, TX, and AK are bigger. Do any states have something equivalent to this?

And Germany has a population of 83 million. Montana has a population of 1.1 million.

I don't get your point.

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

#408

Post by geysersam »

SoftTalker wrote: post #288
throwaway48476 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you think that covers the cost of building and maintaining the road network infrastructure?

Do you think that it covers the cost of excess death caused by particle emissions and road fatalities?

We don't have the option to completely replace car infrastructure, but we shouldn't act like it isn't heavily subsidized.

That said, the positive externalities are also significant, but so are the positive externalities from rail traffic.

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

#409

Post by im3w1l »

chii wrote: post #397
jordanb wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

so how do you propose the limited public money ought to be spent on which project? Perhaps just feel good vibes?

I agree with you that it's important to avoid using such a bad strategy as feel good vibes, which could easily happen if one is careless.

However it might suffice to find a strong justification, rather than a pure quantification. One way to build such a justification is to consider rail transport as a part of a coherent whole, as part of a broader vision.

Indeed I think such a strategy can result in a better outcome than the one arising from optimizing everything in isolation; the latter risks leading to a local optimum.

However it is key that the vision is feasible and correctly evaluated. If one were to bet everything on one vision and that vision failed, if say one important factor was forgotten and not accounted for, the result might be rather unfortunate.

So concretely, making local public transport cheaps could fit into a vision of "where will people live, where will they work, and how will they commute from the first place to the second". Whereas including intercity rail and bus is harder to understand maybe it would fit into a vision of "how people will keep in contact with old friends and relatives after moving cities". Maybe "how people will spend their vaction, or go on business trips"?

Let's focus on the former one. It could then go hand in hand with zoning regulation, public-private partnership of building housing+utilities etc. Trying to encourage certain industries to provide jobs.

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

#410

Post by nsokolsky »

Aeolun wrote: post #337
nsokolsky wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child. Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experie…

> Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not

I'm talking about ages 0 to 3 when parents need to use a stroller. It's a huge pain to do this in public transit. It's easier when the kids are older but if you have more than one child the car still wins.

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