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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

#521

Post by izacus »

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…

Until 2024 the budget for German Autobahn company ("subsidy") was at 6.2bn EUR for comparison.

And this is JUST the roads. No other subsidies and incentives given to car manufacturing and car transport.

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

#522

Post by luplex »

server_man3000 wrote: post #2

Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached? I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled. Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as so…

Yep, it's not really meant for tourists. They really want everyone to stay in the subscription model, because it's heavily subsidized, so they need to hit a high enough LTV anyways.

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

#523

Post by the_gipsy »

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…

Many "other externalities" are priceless: Many poor people cannot afford a car.

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

#524

Post by The_Colonel »

ozim wrote: post #482
geysersam wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail. No business can run without access to road, most businesses can run without access to rail. There is basically no way to compare rail vs roads and making some arguments based on that.

> Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail.

Similar argument can be made about highways to which not everybody has (direct) access, they are not a matter of life and death for most businesses and are heavily subsidized.

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

#525

Post by Scarblac »

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…

But the roads and cars are used less, which means they require less maintenance. CO2 emission isn't the only pollution caused by cars either. People get cheaper transport options available to them.

All those other wins for society should be counted too, there may not even be a cost left to count towards CO2 reduction.

But most importantly, taking 3 billion in taxes and handing them out as subsidised pricing to some of the people isnt really a cost (to society as a whole), it's an income redistribution.

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

#526

Post by lispm »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #287
k__ wrote: 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.

Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net? Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?

The safety net also provides people with cheaper tickets. At least in my city, the ticket costs much less for people who depend on the social safety net.

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

#527

Post by The_Colonel »

chii wrote: post #402
smcl wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This looks like a strawman. Nobody advocates for replacing roads with rail, it's about complementing.

> Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers

Yes, so the idea is to build rail for those use cases (which is somewhat the case in Europe, but not in US).

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

#528

Post by Symbiote »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #369
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).

>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). Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area. And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for…

A law could ban those SUVs.

It's currently being discussed in Europe, since the "independent import" route to import a special vehicle has started to be exploited to import unsafe American vehicles. (The Cybertruck is one example.)

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

#529

Post by _19qg »

lagrange77 wrote: post #283

Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies? EDIT: Oh and hospitals!

Otto von Bismarck introduced much of the social safety net in Germany, incl. health insurance (in 1883). He definitely was not a communist. He once called it "practical christianity" ("praktisches Christentum").

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

#530

Post by Symbiote »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #248
clhodapp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the very patterns of development be different (and more amenable to rail) if the state didn't spend oodles of money building nice roads to make sprawl livable?

At a high level, urbanisation rates increased through the road building binge of the 20th century. Perhaps those new migrants to cities would’ve chosen to stay in the countryside without roads? Worsening the economics of rail. Or maybe they’d use their collective voting power to get more rail friendly new towns built? I don’t think the answer is obvious.

Before the road building binge there was the rail building binge, though limited to the largest cities.

As an example, see the history of the Metropolitan Line in London.

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