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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

#601

Post by ido »

nsokolsky wrote: post #410
Aeolun wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Both my kids were born in Berlin (now 6 & 8 years old) and we never owned a car. In some ways transit is even easier with a stroller as you can just roll into the subway/train instead of having the disassemble the stroller and put it into the trunk. Buses require a bit more effort to board with a stroller but newer busses allow the driver to lower them near the curb to make boarding with stroller easier. We’ve done that for the entire time our kids used strollers.

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

#602

Post by pjmlp »

lispm wrote: post #520
pjmlp wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, it suffices to live 80 km away from workplace, and not being lucky to live in places with direct connections, where at least three changes are required, with local connection bus, two train changes, plus additional bus/metro/tram on destination.

You don't need to be lucky to live in places with good connections. There are many such places. That car traffic has generally less problems than the train system is a myth. Check the ADAC traffic event overview on a random workday.

And yet Bahn manages to outdo the Autobahn chaos without much effort, and better not lose those hourly regional bus connections.

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

#603

Post by PaulRobinson »

finikytou wrote: post #592
andrepd wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Next time you see a free parking spot mentally calculate the rent of ~10m² on that part of the city to understand how much of a subsidy that is. Then multiply by 50 parking spots in a street. Then think how many thousands there are all over the city...

do you have free parking? cities are making money out of parking spots. a lot of money. so much than one would say they have an incentive to reduce parking space to increase price and reduce expenses

Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue.

They should be making decisions based on how to improve quality of life for residents.

Parking should exist where public transport is not a viable option. Ideally the work to make public transport an option should be prioritised over the work to making parking exist.

Cities and councils can make money from public transport too, it'll work out OK revenue-wise, and quality of life improvements can be considerable.

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

#604

Post by pfdietz »

zdragnar wrote: post #395
nerdbert wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is rail treated so differently? Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on. Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else…

There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer. These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.

And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.

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

#605

Post by bowsamic »

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…

> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?

No, you could never use it on IC or ICEs

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

#606

Post by [deleted] »

jojobas wrote: post #584
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…

Even if you don't drive a car yourself you depend a lot on things delivered by road. Most of the road wear is done by trucks bringing you food, construction materials and whatever else. You can't exactly replenish your local grocery store by rail or cargo bike.

[deleted]

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

#607

Post by eru »

Happily2020 wrote: post #443
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.

Not to mention subsidised parking spaces. Free and even paid street parking is highly subsidised by the city and by other tax payers. There's also the environmental cost of not having that land be a park or nature and instead have it contribute to being an urban heat island with all its asphalt.

Yes, though all of that is more of an argument in favour of dropping car subsidies, than an argument in favour of more rail subsidies.

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

#608

Post by eru »

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…

Thanks for doing the math!

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

#609

Post by rtpg »

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…

I.... I really don't feel like driving in a traffic jam is better than being in a train in anything except the most extreme cases of train crowding. I haven't experienced massive commuter driving but even the cases I've just been stuck in stop and go traffic for 30 minutes it felt worse than any train ride I've taken except for the few times I was in "I feel like I'm going to get crushed" levels of crowded.

And like... generally speaking, the crowded train is still going to get you where you need to go. I don't know how you walk away from the 30 minute trip that took 2+ hours with any happy feelings. To each their own of course

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

#610

Post by pfdietz »

The_Colonel wrote: post #527
chii wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

In the US, we see many places where rail has been abandoned. In the place I live (upstate NY, Finger Lakes) there are multiple walking trails that were previously locations of rail lines, which shut down more than half a century ago. The rails themselves are long gone. In some places you can see where earth was moved and concrete structures were installed to allow drainage. Maintaining these lines made no sense with the existence of a road network carrying motor vehicles. There are also abandoned canals from an even earlier time.
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