691–700 of 910 posts
I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason, why DBahn can’t get the trains to run on time. This isn’t Italy after all. The Swiss and Japanese manage to do it. Can someone explain?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately right wing parties throughout the West have been taken over by grifters, and anything like traditional conservatism has been tossed by the wayside.
You're absolutely right that some political parties wrongly use a term like "conservative" in their party name, or otherwise incorrectly portray themselves as being "right wing". Ultimately, though, they're still left-wing parties in practice, pushing left-wing ideologies, regardless of the facade they might try to put up. A party doesn't just become "right wing" because they claim to be, especially when their action…
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…
After the next elections, I fully expect it (and cannabis) to be reversed by the CDU, who will win without a doubt.
Same playbook in the UK, where people like the NHS but certain parties don't.
Same playbook in the US, where "big government" has to be bad, so anything that does currently work well gets sabotaged.
I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason, why DBahn can’t get the trains to run on time. This isn’t Italy after all. The Swiss and Japanese manage to do it. Can someone explain?
Mismanagement. Years of cutting maintenance and personell to make profits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mechanis…
I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason, why DBahn can’t get the trains to run on time. This isn’t Italy after all. The Swiss and Japanese manage to do it. Can someone explain?
Also, some textbook examples of bad incentives. For example, repairing bridges is paid by DB. If a bridge is beyond repair, then the tax payer pays. Predictable result: doing hardly any maintenance until the bridge fails. (That example is by now fixed, but shows the clear lack of planning)
Finally, the system is just over capacity. Many more trains but same infrastructure as decades ago. If you got rid of half the schedule and used a swiss-like system of stopping several minutes at every station, the trains could be on time. But the trains already are overcrowded, so then what do you do with all the passengers?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I'm not opposed to public transport, in fact I want to like the railway. I tried. But the German railway is in such a poor state that I never use it. Not for small trips (with regional trains that are covered by my 49€ ticket) and especially not for longer trips (long distance trains like ICEs). Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get you…
I don't know where you drive for long car trips, but going south from e.g. Hamburg on the A1, or through the Ruhrgebiet by car is a much bigger coin flip with respect to arrival times (while always being significantly slower even on good days). So why the complains about punctionality for trains, but somehow it's fine for car travel?
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
https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/bahncard100
Quite comparable. The ticket discussed in the article in contrast only includes local transportation but no high speed rail.
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...
Not all petrol or diesel is consumed by motor vehicles that (primarily) drive on the road.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue. ... although if they were, the price of parking would be way higher. The optimal price for parking is a time-and-day-dependent price set high enough that around 10% of spots everywhere in the city are free at any given time, so that people who need parking can generally find it conveniently nearby to where they're going.
OTOH, if there is always that much space available (and presumably there didn't used to be before the price hikes) then it is evidence that a lot of people have chosen to go elsewhere because parking became too expensive.
Can the location compete with that "elsewhere"? If it is a unique location with unique reasons to visit, probably yes. But if it is the typical old downtown with stores competing with the strip mall with similar stores but free parking, probably not.
I've seen the depressing cycle of multiple vibrant downtown cores become abandoned after parking meters came in. I very much prefer a strong active downtown core even if finding parking is a pain, to one that is mostly all boarded up and abandoned but there's plenty of paid parking.