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

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

#701

Post by bratwurst3000 »

BlackLotus89 wrote: post #621
rtpg wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> I don't know how you walk away from the 30 minute trip You never drove with the DB before I take it (die Bahn - German trains). You routinely have that a 30min trip takes multiple times of what it should. * train coming in late * no replacement * suddenly from another track * people taking their life * missing the follow train * having to wait because an ICE gets priority You don't know how many trips I had to canc…

i also live in germany and its crazy. we are one to of the most developed country in the world and our train suck that hard that beeing stuck in traffic is way more pleasant and faster then beeing stuck somewhere for hours because of die bahn.

and that’s frequent. i did have to take the train for 6 months with 1 change of train and it was completely full all the time and late half the time so a missed the other train. its not all trains but some are freaking late all the time. especially those between frankfort and stuttgart.

there is a talk from daniel kriesel on youtube called bahn mining. very worth it

edit:// i use the 49 ticket because it is nice to use trams and buses in towns.

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

#702

Post by occz »

nemo44x wrote: post #324
ggernov wrote: post #203

The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people. I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.

The main reason is because Americans are unbelievably wealthy and can afford large homes that require multiple cars for the family to get around. It’s a positive sign of American prosperity and the envy of the world hence the massive immigration demand and relative lack of expatriatism. If America gets to a point where that’s no longer possible and people have to live in smaller and more densely populated areas not b…

This reads like satire, but I'm not sure that it is and it's frightening me a bit.

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

#703

Post by Aachen »

dunefox wrote: post #662
Aachen wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that it cost a small rent to get this subscription until the 9€ experiment. Flat fee national transport, I don't remember the exact price but it's multiple hundreds a month in both the Netherlands (NS altijd/trein vrij) and Germany (Bahnkarte 100). Even my local subscription to go ~10km between two cities in Germany (NRW) cost 90€ a month until that experiment A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a stea…

Except for people who simply don't have 60€ a month easily, so they're left out. Also, it will absolutely not stay at 60€, it will become more expensive each year until the local tickets are cheaper again - defeating the whole purpose (if it won't be reverted outright after the next election, which the conservatives will win).

I'm not saying it shouldn't be free like in Luxembourg, just made the comparison with how it has been for decades until the recent 9€ experiment and now ~60€ subscription. It's already a lot better than it used to be, even if it's not perfect

Do you know how it works, actually, if you need to get to work but can't because of the cost? If you can't afford 60€ then you also won't be able to afford a car that costs probably >3x times as much for a barebones old model when you include the necessary insurance, road tax, and fuel. Bürgergeld pays your rent afaik but do they front e.g. costs when you get a job to actually get there until your first paycheck? Can one apply for a public transport subscription in low income situations?

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

#704

Post by jjav »

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. Rail scales way better.

Before scaling people moving up so much, I'd question why encourage so much movement.

Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need. By eliminating the need for 95% of high-speed people moving (whether by car, train, bus, no matter), that problem becomes automatically solved. And we get a nicer life walking/biking to most places and when we need/want to drive farther, there's no congestion.

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

#705

Post by iggldiggl »

dingaling wrote: post #570
thrance wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opening the railways to competition has utterly ruined the UK's rail network. Ticket price has skyrocketed while service quality has fallen. In the 30s, French rail companies begged and lobbied the government to nationalize them, so they could exit the burden that was maintaining a rail network. Rail just isn't profitable, but is vital to society, and will become even more so as gas becomes increasingly expensive/lac…

There is very little true competition on UK railways. Most services are run on Government-granted franchises which give a monopoly or at best a duopoly on specific routes. There are a handful of open-access train operators who operate outside the franchises, but they can't just decide to compete on a route if that route is already covered by a franchise. To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations wou…

> To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.

The problem with that is that on a mixed-traffic railway it's very easy to run out of capacity once you have a mixture of trains with differing stopping patterns (and perhaps some freight on top) running along the same line. Once you reach that point, competition stops being directly about passengers and starts being about train paths, which can have rather annoying side effects for passengers.

Plus connections don't really work well with competition, either, because a) that'd require coordination between possibly differing operators, which is anathema to unfettered competition, and b) where a regional feeder route might only run hourly or half-hourly, it's impossible to have good connections with more than one or at most two sets of connecting trains anyway.

(Also c) through-ticketing with sufficient passenger rights in case you miss a connection enroute – at least the UK kept a national ticketing system even throughout privatisation and including all open-access operators, whereas in Germany it's an incompatible free-for-all, despite a legal obligation for railway companies to ostensibly offer through-tickets.)

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

#706

Post by jjav »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #369
nsokolsky wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc. All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).

>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law). Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area. And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for…

> And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down.

At least here (California) those intersections have stoplights and pedestrian crossings, so the width and moving speed of the road are not relevant. The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.

I don't remember exact age but certainly before kindergarden age my child (and all the neighborhood friends in that age range) knew how to operate the pedestrian walk buttons and cross safely.

I fully agree it can be nicer walk when you don't have to cross a larger road. But at the same time, the difficulty of doing it is often greatly overstated. Press button, wait a bit, cross. Done. This is not in the top-100 things I'd like to see improved in society.

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

#707

Post by slightwinder »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #685

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?

It's the classical combo of poor budget and conflicting budgeting with aging infrastructure and bad management. DB was privatized 20, 30 years ago, but parts of the infrastructure is public property and managed by the state. So DB willingly let rot them until the state will start renewing, which does take ages of course. At the same time, DB also started saving significant money, because that's what private companies are doing, so they removed parts of the infrastructure, which later started harming the planing on a nationwide level. And on top of this, there are parts of the infrastructure which are literally up to 150 years old, but still in use for whatever reason.

Or in other words: classical underfunded, overused legacy system showing its age.

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

#708

Post by thehappypm »

geysersam wrote: post #628
thehappypm wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200B/year spent on roads in the USA (federal, state, and local) for passenger vehicle miles driven in the trillions, plus truck miles. $4B/year spent on Amtrak for passenger miles in the billions. Roads are an order of magnitude cheaper

You can't just compare the entire multi purpose road network of the US to a single rail company. That's just not a serious comparison. Besides, you didn't include the cost of the vehicles or the cost of fuel for the cars. I presume the number for Amtrak include all operating costs. The truth is that different modes of transport have different strengths and weaknesses. In densely urbanized areas trains and trams are t…

There are definitely places where rail is awesome, a great example is New York to DC. Better than driving or flying by a mile.

But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive. It just more expensive for the government to build an operate rail than it is for them to build and operate roads. You’re right that part of it is because some of the cost is shouldered by the car owner. But, even in Europe, car ownership is very common outside of city centers. You can’t really expect there to be a rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub.

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

#709

Post by BirAdam »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #576
BirAdam wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For places like NYC, Chicago, Boston, yeah. And we see rail in those locations. We do not see rail in towns and suburbs around those areas. In Atlanta, for example, MARTA exists, but NIMBY policies in Northern suburban counties keep it from expanding. This is especially bad considering more people live in those counties than in the city proper. Further, even if one could get sign-off, the cost to acquire the property required would be incredibly costly. Land prices are historically high, and after acquisition would need to be cleared and then rail would need to be laid. Unless the USA wants to get rid of compensation for imminent domain seizure, I don’t know how this kind of rail development would ever be done.

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

#710

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

kortilla wrote: post #629
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. More or less all non-toll roads (and a few toll roads too). Which makes "applies" seems a bit pointless.

I don’t think you know what the word “applies” means.

If I tell you that the air is clear, and you respond "That applies to all air on earth", you've provided no additional information.

If I tell you that humans are generally between zero and 120 years of age, and you respond "That applies to most humans", you've provided no additional information.

If I tell you "most comments on HN are well-written and thoughtfully constructed" and you respond "That doesn't apply to yours", you've provided some additional information.

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