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Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

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Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#81

Post by lapetitejort »

sokoloff wrote: post #52
quadrifoliate wrote: post #30

Next stop: Just make public transport free for all reasonably permanent residents (for example, you could get a free ticket for next year when you file your taxes). Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.

If you go that far, why stop there? What's the reason to have all the expenses and effort of fare collection if you're only going to collect fares from the occasional users of the system and not the daily users? If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.

Portland, Oregon has free light rail in the downtown area. Feels great just casually stepping onto a train.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#82

Post by adrianN »

w-m wrote: post #64
adrianN wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bahncard 100 doesn't include all public transport though. Austria also invests about twice as much (per capita) into rail infrastructure as Germany.

Which is a bit silly, but more a theoretical problem, right? I'd assume (I can't actually find a map of the coverage), that people for whom a BC 100 makes sense travel mostly by train, thus live near a train station with a good connection. Which will then be in one of the 130 cities that include the public transport with the City Ticket.

Everybody I know who has a Bahncard 100 uses it for commuting. While they generally live "close" to a train station they need public transport on both ends of the journey and buy additional tickets, e.g. another ~60€/month for a Berlin ticket.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#83

Post by [deleted] »

southerntofu wrote: post #74
bluGill wrote: post #3

This should be the preferred way to ride all local transit systems. One price for the whole family, ride as much as you want for the month (I think month is better then year - easier to budget, and if you move you are not out as much). If people aren't willing to pay for the pass, your system isn't useful and you need to fix that. Because it is unlimited rides people are less likely to think about using the car for t…

> One price for the whole family Why not make it free? It's a public service after all, and it's hard to "abuse" transportation like one can use "too much" free water/electricity.

[deleted]

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#84

Post by fouric »

I see a detrimental incentive here. Let me explain, and then someone please show me what I'm not getting.

We're trying to incentivize public over private transit because the former emits less carbon (in general).

However, public transit still costs carbon, so taking less trips total seems to be better for the environment (the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" - kind of). If the marginal cost to a public transit user per trip is zero, then that incentivizes taking small, useless trips (e.g. "I could wait until the weekend to pick up a few small groceries, but transit is free, so why not go now").

Wouldn't it be better to add a *small" fee per trip, e.g. 1 EUR (much smaller than private transit), to incentivize people to make fewer trips in the first place?

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#85

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

lbriner wrote: post #71
sokoloff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go that far, why stop there? What's the reason to have all the expenses and effort of fare collection if you're only going to collect fares from the occasional users of the system and not the daily users? If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.

When I visited Germany, they had cleverly ditched most "gateline staff" like you say but then had a reasonable number of ticket inspectors who would check you had a ticket and it was stamped for the current day. Best of both worlds?

Italy does this and I've always wondered how much they must lose over it. Even as a tourist, every time I saw a ticket agent get on the bus/tram, a good number of people would instantly get off.

I do like the system better, it's faster in every way. But lost fares would definitely be a concern.

Also not sure how that has anything to do with making public transit free honestly.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#87

Post by KronisLV »

erdo wrote: post #59
KronisLV wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe introduce a gradual shift instead over 50 years or so: with each next year taking the originally expected profits of public transport and gradually add those as taxes for cars while at the same time also reducing the current public transport ticket prices? At the end of those 50 years public transportation could be free and the stubborn car owners or businesses would simply help subsidize more efficient ways of…

Except we don't have anything like 50 years!

Disagreed!

Private individuals are becoming less and less able to afford cars in the first place (not even talking about real estate). If legislation around predatory lending schemes would be tightened, the demand for cars would decrease.

If at the same time you'd invest aggressively in actually making sure that there is enough public transportation in place (as is the case in many European countries already but not the US), then it'd help with displacing them in the background as well.

Couple that with a remote working culture, a few decades of employee pushback and quitting their jobs if they're asked to return to the office in careers where that's not necessary, better postal services and ride sharing apps, food delivery apps or a push for cooking meals at home and you'd see even more significant changes. Even more so if the road networks and infrastructure cannot support rush hour traffic with most of society living in a single shift mode, rather than morning and afternoon shifts.

In contrast, if any initiative comes out today that calls for immediate and drastic change, it will get shot down. Real change takes a lot of patience and dozens if not hundreds of compounding factors over decades.

Either that or going out into the streets with guns in hand, but that has historically worked out horribly time and time again and humanity should be past that savagery. Protests could happen, of course, since that's a bit different.

Regardless, with more initiatives to limit heavy industry, global shipping of goods that could be locally manufactured and an overall push for less consumerist lifestyles, humanity might even have a few hundred years left to kick around on this rock before the long term environmental consequences actually start becoming visible!

Edit: phrasing

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#88

Post by IkmoIkmo »

Not sure I'm a fan. Certainly very interesting and I'm happy to see a significant country run the experiment, it's going to be a useful data point.

But at the end of the day, what does it solve? And what does it leave unsolved?

A single public transport marketplace is of course great, but many countries have those without the 'single ticket' system. For example, in the Netherlands I use one public transport card for bus, train, tram. I don't have a single ticket with one annual price, but I don't have different subscriptions or different cards for different transport methods (e.g. bus vs train), nor for different providers of the same transport method (e.g. two bus companies), it all happens on one card.

So what does it solve? Admissions checking? No, you still need to present your single ticket. The thing it solves is billing, from individual subscriptions or individual tickets, to a single annual payment.

But billing doesn't seem to be that big of a deal in modern systems, and it doesn't seem like it attacks the biggest issue in billing.

For example in the Netherlands I'm simply billed by use. If I go 5x as far, I pay roughly 5x as much. That's all done automatic, once a month. I don't have to load prepaid money on my card, I just use the card and it's billed after at the end of the month. Really no different to a variable-usage mobile phone subscription.

By introducing a single (e.g. average) payment amount per year, you're overcharging everyone who uses less than average, and undercharging power-users. Usage-based billing seems a much more fair approach. And the billing tech isn't all that complex.

Moreover, the fact a substantial number of people will get a single-ticket (e.g. say it's 60% of the users), doesn't change the fact you'll still need to upkeep billing infrastructure for the other 40%. It doesn't allow you to make billing/admissions infrastructure redundant.

It also doesn't allow you to differentiate at all in pricing and operators. I don't think this is a very big issue because I like public (i.e. not private) transport to be very egalitarian. But there's something to be said for allowing differences in quality/convenience etc in public, transport, too. e.g. business workers ride trains in the Netherlands in 1st class and do an hour of work on their laptops in quiet, comfy chairs, and pay extra, such that non-business users can ride cheaper in 2nd class. Having a single ticket removes any room for such differentiation, which can be useful to a point.

Very interested to see the results and I'm happy they're trying, but not convinced yet.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#89

Post by mbg721 »

lbriner wrote: post #71
sokoloff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go that far, why stop there? What's the reason to have all the expenses and effort of fare collection if you're only going to collect fares from the occasional users of the system and not the daily users? If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.

When I visited Germany, they had cleverly ditched most "gateline staff" like you say but then had a reasonable number of ticket inspectors who would check you had a ticket and it was stamped for the current day. Best of both worlds?

The downside is that visitors who are unfamiliar with the system--especially if they don't speak the local language--can end up riding illegally by mistake.

Re: Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y

#90

Post by snovv_crash »

rob74 wrote: post #22
LittleNemoInS wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify : In Switzerland, one can buy a CA Travelcard (for CHF3860 a year, approximately $3850). With this card, one can travel on (nearly) all public transports in Switzerland (trains, coaches, subways, trams, etc.) free of charge. Since the public transportation system is very good, it's a good way to travel.

Ok, so the Austrian version costs less than a third of that for a considerably larger country. And the public transportation system is pretty good in Austria too...

Is there a bus to every tiny village the way there is in Switzerland? The long distance stuff is all well and good, but I suspect the expensive part is the rural last-mile which is heavily subsidized by the denser (heavier used, cheaper to run) city transit.
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