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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

#531

Post by willyt »

lucumo wrote: post #518
dan-robertson wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Road wear scales with the fourth power of weight over the axle so, even with personal cars getting heavier, I’m not sure that moving people from cars to trains makes much of a difference – I think most wear typically comes from heavy vehicles or weathering – so it mightn’t make much difference to repair costs. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other advantages. Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to inc…

> time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives. This is not really true on busy trains. I've commuted both on trains and in cars, and when comparing transportation methods near the saturation point, cars win when it comes to personal comfort. A traffic jam is no fun, but you can still sit, aren't jos…

But if the train is that busy it likely couldn’t be replaced by people travelling in personal cars anyway as they would take up to much road space and cause a huge traffic jam and there would be nowhere to park at the end of the journey in a presumably dense city centre.

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

#532

Post by okr »

nerdbert wrote: post #346
okr wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please, far-right? It is leftists, that sees everything beside them as far-right. I would call it conservative. Something the 'left' forgets, that there are also some real people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld. Yuck.

> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper. Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness. Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please. Facilitating act…

The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.

Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.

I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.

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

#533

Post by The_Colonel »

Glawen wrote: post #13
pjmlp wrote: post #5

Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.

Germany is a dense country with a developed rail network, you are never far from a train station. Bear in mind that this includes also city transportation, which makes it a great deal. My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a l…

> you are never far from a train station

What exactly do you mean by that? "never far" as in "always within walking distance"? That would be very wrong.

The other factor is that frequency of service is low outside of major cities. At the need to change and a small-distance trip can take a couple of hours.

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

#534

Post by Symbiote »

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…

You have invented this.

Rail can absolutely be made to different standards. High speed rail vs a tramway, and everything in between.

Exactly as with roads, the more you pay the faster the vehicles can go. Except with close to zero accidents.

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

#536

Post by graphenus »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #519
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.

The Swiss ride anywhere ticket is 4000 CHF annually [1]. (330 CHF/month -> 350 EUR/month) That's still less than an average car. A commonly quoted figure is 10'000 CHF per year. [2] [1] https://www.sbb.ch/de/billette-angebote/abos/ga/ga-preise.ht... [2] https://www.comparis.ch/carfinder/autofahren/auto-kosten

I find the comparis estimate an overestimate. Take their VW Polo example. You would definitely not insure it for 1207 Fr a year and an annual service is not 3000 Fr a year. You take their estimate for VW Polo, put numbers a layman folk pays for, and you will get a number around 5000 a year. If you buy a second hand car, then you get a very competitive price to the GA, but also get more flexibility.

I am not saying anyone should by a car, quite the contrary, just stating the fact that 4000 Fr/yr is not competitive enough to car.

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

#537

Post by okr »

fsh wrote: post #375
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.

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…

If Germany wants to be a militarized state again, the infrastructure will be fixed again. You have to transport things around.

Tbh, i think, germany has too much not needed but costly infrastructure maintained only for a few people.

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

#538

Post by softveda »

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.

The current government in Queensland Australia announced 50c fares for 6 months trial. There is an election this month, the gov declared it will be made permanent, the opposition which is tipped to win has so far maintained they will also keep it. It has boosted PT travel significantly.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/11/the-b...

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

#539

Post by Iulioh »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #336
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.

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".

The concept is called "measurability bias"

These incentive is not permanent or has to be.

You try it, if thing gets better you keep it or you stop it.

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

#540

Post by cinntaile »

panda-giddiness wrote: post #463
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…

Germany spends some 70 billion euros maintaining the road system, only about a third of which is offset by taxes on drivers [1]. If we accept that investments in roads reduce carbon emissions by 0 million tonnes per year, then that works out to NaN € per tonne -- much worse than other carbon abatement methods! Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore w…

A third can't be right. 15 billion from petrol and 18.2 billion from diesel alone make up almost half of that. 48.76 million vehicles times €100 (back of the envelope calculation) for vehicle tax puts that number above half.

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Taxes/Excise-Du...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/810662/passenger-cars-st...

https://www.zoll.de/DE/Unternehmen/Kraftfahrzeugsteuer/Steue...

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