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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

#671

Post by eru »

bratwurst3000 wrote: post #623
eru wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue. Why not? > They should be making decisions based on how to improve quality of life for residents. Residents can use money to purchase goods and services to improve their quality of life. > Parking should exist where public transport is not a viable option. And the market can provide parking at market-prices. (And, cities and councils…

> Residents can use money to purchase goods and services to improve their quality of life. i live in a city with pollution problem. where can i buy this clean air to improve the quality of my life?

You might want to look up Coasian Bargaining.

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

#672

Post by PaulHoule »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #603
finikytou wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Practically in a city like Ithaca NY there are stores like Wal-Mart that have oceans of free parking about a mile from the Ithaca Commons which is a pedestrian mall surrounded by parking meters and concrete corkscrews that cost about $1 an hour. Years ago local shops could stamp your parking ticket and give you a few hour for buying something but the city decided it couldn’t afford it.

That $1 isn’t much, but many believe the Commons can’t compete on that basis and shoppers will avoid the Commons and go to stores on the commercial strip instead, it doesn’t help that the Commons doesn’t have a diversity of shopping, instead it has some gift stores, a legal cannabis dispensary that is just about to reopen after being closed for some reason, numerous head shops, a bookstore, and numerous CBD stores that I think sell real weed in a back room.

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

#673

Post by eru »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #636
eru wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue. Why not? > They should be making decisions based on how to improve quality of life for residents. Residents can use money to purchase goods and services to improve their quality of life. > Parking should exist where public transport is not a viable option. And the market can provide parking at market-prices. (And, cities and councils…

You have a fundamentally different model of the social contract to me. We're unlikely to ever agree. However... I believe that relying on individual purchasing power ("utility"), to improve the average quality of life is an experiment (often referred to as "Reganism" or "Thatcherism"), that after 40+ years of trialling has shown to be net negative to social mobility, overall net happiness and other factors important…

What social contract? That's a convenient fiction, but no one ever agreed to any social contract anywhere.

My adopted home of Singapore goes a lot harder on private initiative than Thatcher and Reagan ever dreamed off. And thanks to that, and some other factors, they went from third world to first world (or arguably zeroth world) in less than a generation.

> The core problem with free markets being used as a mechanism to settle all societies ills is that theory ignores natural monopolies. You can't have a car parking space and a children's park in the same place: you must make a choice.

You might want to read up on how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

What you are describing here has nothing to do with a 'natural monopoly'.

Funny enough, most places in the US have outrageous mandatory minimum parking space requirements. A free market would most likely provide less street parking. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_mandates and especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

Revenue means people are willing to pay for something, something they value. So it's not the be-and-end-all for how to run your city, but it's better than many other ways political decisions are made. (And better than whatever political decision procedure leads to mandatory minimum parking requirements, IMHO.)

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

#674

Post by okr »

immibis wrote: post #542
okr wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worl…

Then let's stop subsidizing cars and fossil fuels.

Good luck!

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

#675

Post by klabb3 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #668
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…

It’s arguable that $100 per ton is a real carbon price. It translates to about $1 a gallon tax on gasoline which is (a) not enough to change people’s behavior (at its peak gas was almost $2 more than it is now and I drove just the same) but (b) people in 2024 will complain bitterly about it anyway. That is, polities are hypersensitized to that sort of imposed solution right now: for a long time people in the US accep…

Not disagreeing but it’s important to point out that the US is a different beast because of the car and roadway dependency. In Europe a large part of the population lives in places easily reachable without a car. But in the US EVs are completely central to reducing CO2 from transportation, unless you’d rather rebuild the entire country. In Europe you can make meaningful changes by simply improving, expanding, investing in existing infrastructure. Most people I know who have a car in EU region are not fully dependent, but enjoy more convenience due to overcrowded or unreliable public transit, grocery stores being further away etc. Those problems are orders of magnitude easier to solve than “let’s build rail through a giant web of sparse suburbs”.

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

#676

Post by throw4950sh06 »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #642
shankr wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although you fall sick more often in winter when using public transportation.

Is that a rigorous statistical analysis or just your impression?

Some people actually try these things... And not writing an academic paper about it doesn't make it wrong.

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

#677

Post by smrq »

zdw wrote: post #394
intellix wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been to both China and Japan I'd say railway is far ahead in China than the rest of the world. Again, according to GPT, the price per kilometre between them is €0.03-0.06 in China vs €0.15-0.26 in Japan. I know Japan has a lot of high speed rail coverage but so does China and the difference in price is absolutely insane. Rail between Beijing and Shanghai for example has an average speed of 300kmh. I…

Most of these numbers are probably due to differences in wages and the size of the respective countries.

If they aren't completely fabricated.

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

#678

Post by Nullabillity »

6510 wrote: post #550
Happily2020 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has secretly become unrealistic to have cars in a city, we still do it but more out of tradition. You wouldn't build parks (tho that would be nice) 1 parked car, the road next to it and the second side walk take about as much space as an apartment and we stack those one on top of the other. Something like this is quite hilarious if you think about it. https://www.alamy.com/parking-in-the-courtyard-of-high-rise-...…

You don't have to build it like that. Where I live now, the parking lot is effectively the basement under the apartment buildings and playground. You'd barely interact with it unless you're driving.

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

#680

Post by [deleted] »

lispm wrote: post #61
pjmlp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference between doing 1h with car, and 3h with public transport.

maybe 3 hours in the car and 1h with public transport. if you are in the rushhour and a traffic jam (not an unusual problem), then the train will be faster. Plus one can work in the train or relax. My regional train here 20km going into the city center is impossible to beat by car. 77.77% of the people live in cities. 55% live in cities with >20k people. Generally Germany is a decentralized country with a lot of regi…

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