651–660 of 910 posts
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!
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Surprised how positive you're writivg about the German public transport. The Deutsche Bahn doesn't have a good reputation in central Europe. I guess my frame of reference isn't average, given I live in Switzerland. Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!
Of course your frame of reference is biased because you have the best railway system out of ~30 European countries. Germany’s system gets a lot of hate but it still in the top ~8 or so.
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> 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. Note that if you're at the saturation point of both modes, you're moving a lot more people with (light/heavy) rail: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity Also worth considering that while…
That is like saying that with pig factory farming (aka intensive pig farming) you can produce far more meat per square foot than with organic pig farming and therefore it must be better.
The 49 euro ticket is a phenomenally good deal. Normal transit tickets vary per city, but for example in Berlin it's 3.50 per trip. So if you take transit twice a day for 7 days, you already recoup the cost of the Deutschland ticket, which lasts the entire month! This makes it good even for tourists who stay for ~a week. At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in G…
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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 li…
I'm a bit baffled why Germany's numbers are so bad here. In the UK the government takes far more in revenue from drivers than it spends on the roads.
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I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right". Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies. An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project. If a right-of-centre government happened…
Destroying "degenerate" cultural institutions is very much right wing; so is giving taxpayer money to cronies; so is overloading the government with debt.
Taxation is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there would not be any taxpayer money to give "cronies" because such funds never would be collected from taxpayers in the first place.
Public debt is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there wouldn't even be any government entity capable of incurring debt.
"Cultural institutions" involving the government are inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, the government simply wouldn't have the resources to create "cultural institutions" and any such entities that did exist would be created, funded, and operated by the private sector alone.
If you're truly upset about the things you just described, then it's because you dislike left-wing ideologies, even if you don't recognize it.
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This is an aside, but I’d never seen that “Beyond 2000” show before. Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing. Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”
Yeah - as someone born in 1979, I find repetitions of the idea that global warming / climate change only came into public awareness 'in the last 15 to 20 years' on TV news and in documentaries deeply troubling. Global warming was constantly discussed on (British) television during my childhood. At least as much as the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. Perhaps this wasn't the case in America?
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…
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That's really not my point. Okay, now the village has no train service, so they are required to use cars or buses to get around. Then the UK introduces a "UK ticket", £50/month for local train service anywhere in the UK. If those villagers protest against the ticket, because it's funded by their taxes while they can't use it, how should we understand that complaint? One way is to use their anger to justify shutting d…
My village - which is far larger nowadays - never had a station. Subsidising buses like the £2 fare makes far more sense for most people than subsidising trains. Not that we get a bus which goes anywhere useful like a train station there’s 6 a day but you then need to change to another bus to get to the station. Offering free parking at stations would help with a “living close to station” lot. I went to Birmingham a…
From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station.
Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buse... and you'll see why you need to bribe people with cheap parking to use the trains:
> The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.
You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?
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…
"I LOVE the German transit system" I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization. The DB Navi…
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.