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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

#811

Post by jamil7 »

greyw wrote: post #760
jamil7 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people less familiar. Germany privatised its national rail company in the 90s but the federal government is the only shareholder. It’s a weird model that doesn’t make much sense. DB is a monopoly so the rules of competition don’t apply (and don’t work with railways anyway) it’s led to perverse cost cutting incentives and fat bonus programs for C level employees. Combine that with a conservative government’s auste…

So it is still a state enterprise in all but in name. The swiss federal railyway has the exact same model (a company fully owned by the federal government) and it works very well. Blaming the ownership model for the DB's woes is just wrong in my opinion. German railways have been chronically underfunded, overburdening the company with below cost ticket and the company has some perverse incentives with respect to rail…

> German railways have been chronically underfunded

I already mentioned that in my comment.

The ownership model intensives cost cutting and share bonus programs.

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

#812

Post by fennecfoxy »

grues-dinner wrote: post #739
cdrini wrote: post #561

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…

A London monthly travel card is £235 from zone 4 and £300 from zone 6. That's 420 to 540 CAD, and you get the pleasure of sweating in the tunnels, freezing on the overground platforms waiting for the next train 30 minutes and cancellations left right and centre. At least they've finally got their shit together with mobile coverage. Of course you get to use the buses too for that, and some of those were run by DB unti…

FWIW TFL is more reliable than DB AFAIK. But yeah...highest price per passenger mile is in the UK, it's ridiculous.

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

#813

Post by blitzar »

PaulHoule wrote: post #672
PaulRobinson wrote: post #603

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…

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 be…

Free parking sounds like government over-reach, communism even. We should leave it to the market to take care of.

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

#814

Post by fennecfoxy »

ipaddr wrote: post #748
ciceryadam wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you are an American, without telling me you are an American. You can reach a children's park on foot or by taking public transportation, so ideally there's no need for a parking lot right next to it.

You can visit your local park hopefully you live in an area with one. You can invest time using transit to get to another park. Traveling during rush hour would be difficult. Traveling with many children or younger children adds a difficulty. Being disabled or older or worse disabled with children more difficult. For the young, childless, plenty of time on their hands or live next to a park of course walking a few st…

Disabled etc spots are different imo. But most sane places have a mixture of parks/shops/other facilities within the bounds of a small neighbourhood that are easily walkable for most.

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

#815

Post by fennecfoxy »

eru wrote: post #809
rstuart4133 wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Do you chew gum when you are at home in Singapore? No, you don't, because it's illegal. Did you agree to that, were even you given a choice? No, of course not. Singapore is more authoritarian than mo…

> Do you chew gum when you are at home in Singapore? No, you don't, because it's illegal. Did you agree to that, were even you given a choice? No, of course not. It's more like a license than a contract. > Singapore is more authoritarian than most liberal democracies. The Singaporean government is a smaller part of life than in most other places. Much less red tape to fill out before you are allowed to do anything an…

Well I'm not going back to Singapore until they treat gay men like myself better. I've been there; Singapore is a private money pit/playground for Western and Asian high business, much like Dubai.

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

#816

Post by ivan_gammel »

The_Colonel wrote: post #514
ivan_gammel wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy Looking at most German cities, the effect of this is negligible.

I actually observe reduction of parking spaces in public spaces. Although I don't think it could be an effect of Deutschlandticket, too little time to have an effect IMHO.

German cities have much less parking lots than American ones because of the way they were built. There may be a few that you can replace with a building, but not a lot.

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

#817

Post by aconst »

retinaros wrote: post #754
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Paris metro is amongst the most frequented in the world and operates near peak capacity. You absolutely can’t compare it to anything in Germany. Germany doesn’t really have a city which can be compared to Paris. Berlin has the most populated urban area and it has less than half the population of the Paris one. The only similar city in Europe is London. Plus there is no bed bugs and pickpockets are an oddity outsi…

pickpockets an oddity? brother I took all the suburban trains you can think of, the paris subway on a regular basis ive seen people injecting their arms on the wagon, antisemitic attacks, stabbings, punching, people shit on the floor, drunks and pickpockets are a daily thing in paris in EVERY public transportation. some bus lines in non-touristic areas are even so infamous that everyday legions of comments tell stori…

Living since almost 15 years near Paris, in a few different places, regularly taking line B, C, D, M6, M7, M13, M1, some buses, as part of my regular commute, and have never encountered the shit you are talking about. I do know that some places are more problematic than others, by example M6 drivers regularly warn of pickpockets on saturdays (it's a touristic line, the only one I regularly take that have such announcements), sure not everything is perfect, but you are either biased (where did you live when you were in Paris?) or actually purposely actively trying to spread fud to insist like you are.

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

#818

Post by lm28469 »

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…

Not having to have to own a car is a phenomenal increase in quality of life and disposable income for the average joe though

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

#819

Post by lm28469 »

dunefox wrote: post #664
alwayslikethis wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a developed country, 59 EUR is not all that expensive if it helps you get to a job. Having it be too cheap would probably degrade the quality of service for busier routes and make it harder for future projects to pay themselves off.

In a highly developed and wealthy country it should be free.

> highly developed and wealthy

That's not Germany

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

#820

Post by lm28469 »

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?

> I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason

Yeah, that reason is propaganda and myth, it might have been true in the 1800s and early 1900s but now it's the same shit as everywhere else

Even Spanish trains are faster and more punctual on average than German ones, and Spaniards are world world-famous for siestas

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