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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

#571

Post by BlueTemplar »

weinzierl wrote: post #252
lispm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now. > The DB Navigator is so terrible It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.

> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now. I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.

Was there really not even a pdf and/or matrix code option ?

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

#572

Post by aleph_minus_one »

punchmesan wrote: post #195
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. It is rumored that the military (and perhaps three-letter agencies) has/have special contracts with OpenAI. This can definitely be called a subsidy.

A contract isn't a subsidy... A subsidy would be giving them dollars without any particular strings attached except perhaps to use those funds to develop the product. If the contract is to provide money in exchange for services, that's called a transaction.

I see it differently: for example the fact that the US government spends a lot of money on military can in my opinion clearly be called a subsidy for the military-industrial complex.

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

#573

Post by fransje26 »

jajko wrote: post #491
SECProto wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding road repairs, construction, and expansion from general tax revenues is similarly subsidizing a different mode of transit, and it's likely a much higher value than the 3b€ you mention (and likely more than overall railway sector subsidizing, tho I'm not familiar with Germany's budget). Also recognizing that other positive externalities exist, but pricing them at $0, seems silly.

German chancellor plans to put road repairs into 2% mandatory defense budget to meet NATO requirements, so not that much of a load to overall german budget. Not trying to detract discussion, just finding it hilarious that when facing a potentially existential threat from russians who repeatedly claim they will wipe them out, they will do just about anything rather than making their military into something a bit bette…

Actually, it makes quite a bit of sense to plan ahead to make sure that your infrastructure can efficiently transport the weapon systems you already have, or you are planning to have.

What's the use of tanks if you can't get them to the battlefield? [1]

Although some infrastructure was already built taking logistics into account [2], concrete structures have a life expectancy of about 50 years, and many bridges are past that age and need urgent replacement. And that costs a lot of money.

A small reminder on the importance of bridges: [3]

[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/what-can-stop-nato-...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64664944

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

#574

Post by cromka »

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 cost of the road deaths is also significant and I think it's safe to say it dropped as people switched to using rail.

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

#575

Post by alhadrad »

lispm wrote: post #178
eptcyka wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, cool, I understand, it is how it is done. I am not arguing that, and I already conceded that. Why are you bringing the same argument back up again? Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And…

> Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why? The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too. > All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals? You can buy wi…

The DB app is absolute hot garbage. God forbid you don't have internet or it randomally updates logging you out. All of his previous arguments are valid.

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

#576

Post by BlueTemplar »

BirAdam wrote: post #99
Larrikin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we have to pretend that routes between Montana and South Dakota have to come up when discussing ways of improving rail usage in the US? We could treat routes between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis like Germany. We could treat high speed rail in California or the Northeast like Japan. Choosing to live in an extremely rural area shouldn't just be a "well it doesn't help" me trump card to defeat things that…

Another significant issue is that the USA wasn’t built for rail, and to do so now requires sign off by land owners, municipalities, and so on. The amount NIMBY-oriented policies in California, for example, is a serious impediment. Oddly, people cite rural areas as an issue, but rural areas aren’t typically an issue. It would be comparably inexpensive to run high speed rail over undeveloped land, while tearing up buil…

Rail was famously first in the USA, and you can still see politics focused around rail as the main long distance transportation merely a century ago.

But yes, there was a lot of car-centric buildup (and maybe even some new cities??) since then.

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

#577

Post by cromka »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #282
dreadlordbone wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't having a car do this too?

No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better. So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to ci…

> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes.

The Induced Demand observed in car traffic, also known as Downs–Thomson paradox.

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

#578

Post by panda-giddiness »

cinntaile wrote: post #540
panda-giddiness wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

From the article (sorry for the bad link before; fixed below [1]):

> The revenue from taxes and levies on road traffic amounts to around 50 billion euros annually. Around half of this is earmarked by law via the mineral oil tax, i.e. around 25 billion euros. This means that just over a third (36%) of the earmarked revenue from road traffic covers the costs of roads and other facilities such as parking lots and the like. It is therefore clear that the public sector is heavily subsidizing road traffic.

My understanding is that these two forms of taxes add to more than 50%, but then almost half of those taxes must be reinvested elsewhere by law (i.e., not into roads), hence the 1/3 figure. But even if you ignore this reallocation of taxes, you still have a deficit of around 20 billion euros.

---

[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...

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

#579

Post by pimeys »

My favorite part of this deal is how you can use the same ticket in every city in Germany. Before you had to learn which app to install and then go through the (usually) broken registration setup. And you needed to learn the zones too.

Now I just arrive to a city and hop into the transport method of my choice.

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

#580

Post by BlueTemplar »

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…

I wonder, would a foldable bike be a solution ?
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