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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

#871

Post by dreadlordbone »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #795
15155 wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really too bad: your lifestyle does not support maximal economic output of the land you are using and tax dollars you're paying. HOA? Hah!- those shouldn't be allowed, neither should home ownership generally. You really need to live and raise your family in an apartment.. taxes should be raised enough that we can phase out private home ownership. Your children will attend a public school and understand and imp…

More like “That's really too bad: your lifestyle is only possible by indebting future generations for your luxury today.” That’s great for those who have ridden the economic momentum from high fertility rates before the 1970s, but not so fun for those being born now.

Wouldn't low fertility rates make land less valuable? I don't get how my lifestyle indebts the future generations.

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

#872

Post by hagbard_c »

weinzierl wrote: post #845
hagbard_c wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever. The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated. > SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (wi…

"The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated." For the last compensation I tried to get it took Deutsche Bahn 15 days to send an automated acknowledgement that they had received my request. I took another 20 days until they processed it. I would not call that quick, bu…

That description of the process is quite concise I'd say? Here's how it goes for me:

1: I'm delayed by more than 20 minutes somewhere along the trip upon which a new section 'request compensation' appears in the travel schedule.

2: If upon arrival I'm delayed by more than 60/120 minutes I select that option or log in to bahn.de where I select the option from the relevant itinerary.

3: it asks me when I arrived, if this ends up being more than 60/120 minutes later than the intended arrival time it asks me if I was able to use the booking for the whole trip or whether I needed to arrange alternative transport. It also asks me whether I had extra expenses like a hotel, in the latter case it tells you to submit proof of payment - a hotel bill, a taxi bill - so they can reimburse those costs. I have never done this but my daughter has had 4 hotel stays paid by DB by now. Proof can be submitted digitally, i.e. a photo of the receipts.

4: I need to fill in the details on how I want to be reimbursed - voucher or bank transaction. I always select bank transaction and fill in my bank details (IBAN - a single bank account number which works in most of Europe).

5: I confirm the submission, get a receipt via mail and one via snail mail a few days later. It usually takes about a week or two for the money to appear in my bank account, the quickest it has ever been was 5 days.

I don't consider this to be a bad process, it works and can be completed in a few minutes at most. Yes, you can send in paper as well - this is Germany we're talking about, they love paperwork - but I've never bothered with that. I do get all those confirmations via snail mail but those don't bother me, I can watch my bank account to see when the reimbursement has been completed. I have never had any problems getting reimbursed, they always paid.

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

#873

Post by ckdarby »

consteval wrote: post #851
ckdarby wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noted, while I appreciate the citation it isn't entirely correct. How many of those are Uber specifically with passengers? Why this specific? Because Uber has a ranking system and my gut feels says anything with a ranking system that has tons of feedback weeds out bad drivers. The other portions of my comments is psychological safety, how many times do individuals get in an Uber and feel unsafe vs being in the TTC? H…

I mean... this is a huge stretch. Car accidents are, more or less, completely out of your control as a driver. You can be an amazingly defensive driver and die. And you can drive like an ass and get lucky. In fact, I'm sure a lot of those Uber drivers are rated well because they get there fast. Well, you have to drive like a maniac for that. In the city you need to drive bold if you want to get there with limited BS.…

Noted, the TTC website did not appear to cover all incidents and injuries related to all vehicle incident as compared with the motorists stats.

It looks to just focus on homicide safety stats.

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

#874

Post by cromka »

bluGill wrote: post #783
cromka wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. The Induced Demand observed in car traffic, also known as Downs–Thomson paradox.

Induced Demand needs to DIE as a concept. It is a GOOD thing - if you build any infrastructure and people change their behavior because of it, that means your city wasn't meeting the needs of the people. The whole point of a city is all the things people can do in them - if you just want to stay you get out of the city: you can find cheap houses in Montana with nothing around that will meet your needs just was well.…

I don’t think you understand how this concept works. Because commuting by car after increasing the road capacity gets easy again, and because it’s also the most co convenient and (for a brief moment) fastest way to commute from point A to B, people switch over from using other means and the roads get saturated again soon after. You cannot increase the capacity to accommodate everyone driving, and everyone absolutely would want to drive if possible. It has nothing to do with the city’s ability to deliver, it’s about human condition and our innate need to make lowest effort possible.

Also, this is such a wildly American take, from a European perspective. No one expects city to somehow make driving cars easy here, not anymore. Would also be wild from NYC or Chicago perspective. Having lived in NYC I would not replace Subway with a car in that large of a place. Even without traffic it would take too long to move about.

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

#875

Post by jjav »

consteval wrote: post #868
jjav wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible. What you call "not possible" is where I live, so clearly it is possible. Trying to shoehorn all solutions into one and only one way of doing things turns people off and hinders progress. Sure you can have dense urban areas that are walkable/cycleable. You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable.…

> You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density. If you have a store and you have to service, say, 1,000 people to make it profitable you might have a store every .5 miles in the city. Maybe that then translates to 5 miles in the suburb. Well... it's not very easy to walk 5 miles. It's trivial to walk .5 miles. Stores are…

> You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.

Agreed, but you don't actually need the same amount for the suburban demographic.

For example where my friend lived in Manhattan (and I spent most weekends) we could walk to tons and tons of bars, multiple clubs, music venues and such, in addition to stores for food/medicine/etc. The sheer volume of that can't be replicated in a suburb.

But.. it is also not needed. Ones moves to the suburb when being a bit older, less single and more parent. So I don't need to be able to walk to dozens of bars anymore.

> That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever.

Sure it's possible. Like I said in original comment, that's where I live, a walkable suburb. I can walk/bike to the office, two supermarkets, theater, daycare, middle school, movies, at least 3 banks, library, pharmacies, clothing stores, restaurants and many other specialty stores I'm not listing. Also a couple city parks and a state park. The only thing in short supply are bars (one brewery within walking distance) and music venues (one bar/restaurant/live music hall within walking distance). But given the older married parent demographic, that's plenty for me.

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

#876

Post by hilux »

ben_w wrote: post #481
hilux wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Germany has a population of 83 million. Montana has a population of 1.1 million. I don't get your point.

You said the USA was big. Now you're saying population is the important thing. Combined that's population density, so does Maryland have this? Connecticut? etc. On the density front, NYC is famously high density, and yet so far as I can tell a monthly pass for just there is double the raised price this ticket will be next year: https://new.mta.info/document/118601

Most adults should be able to figure out that IN THIS CONTEXT "big" refers to land mass relative to population.

Yes, NYC has a dense population, and yes, it also has the best public transit in the country.

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

#877

Post by CuriousCosmic »

throw0101c wrote: post #600
nine_k wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycling at 110F ambient temperature can be outright hazardous (speaking of Texas). Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.) Also, cycling in a city, when you cycle for 2-3, maybe 5 miles, is fine. Cycling for 20 miles is pretty taxing and time-consuming, but in a low-density, car-oriented environment 20 miles correctly qualifies as "nearby".

> Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.) 1. Shower at home. 2. Have a change of clothes. In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work five days a week and never showered there (even though available). (And believe me: people I worked with would have told me if it was a problem. ) Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that caus…

> Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.

As much as I agree with your general point, this isn't strictly true.

For a sizable chunk of the population, sweat doesn't contain high concentration of compounds that when digested by bacteria produce body odor.

However, despite being a sizable population, people lucky enough to have this trait are in the minority. I don't know the actual percentage but among European populations it's as low as 2% and among east Asian populations it's as high as 50%. Either way less than half the population.

The rest of the population has variations of that trait and their sweat produces moderate to extreme amounts of amino acid based compounds that when digested by bacteria produces the VOCs that make up the infamous body odor smell.

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

#878

Post by greyw »

_cenw wrote: post #835
greyw wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the state had any control over DB, they wouldn't have been invested in Arriva (a bus company) until a few months ago, and they wouldn't make most of their cargo revenue with trucks (DB Schenker).

The state is the owner of the DB company. If they didn't like where the company is going they could just fire the CEO and board and pick other people and then define any goal they want. To me it looks that the bund is not active enough in their oversight (as 100% owners) of the DB. I assume no one wants to take the blame because it is such a shitshow.

I can't answer why DB is doing certain things which Arriva and their cargo division.

The DB is losing more than EUR2 billions per year[1] so the managment is probably trying hard to get this trainwreck under control. Kinda ironic that their truck business is actually doing the heavy lifting. It's one of the only divisions besides energy that actually makes money subsdizing the other failing parts of the railway. Withouth those you would be looking at EUR2.6 billion losses per year[2]. Great thing they have DB Schenker going for them! I don't undestand the complaints about that.

Also I don't think it is possible to fix the DB without more government subsidies. It looks like they barely get any (sometimes discounts on power but thats it)[2].

If you check the SBB (a very well run operation) you can see from the public finances that about half of the operating income is from public-sector funding (aka government subsidies) without that it would be in deep red[3].

[1] https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/consolidated-interim-f...

[2] https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/fileadmin/pdf/dbk_zb24_e_...

[3] https://reporting.sbb.ch/en/finance?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scroll...

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

#879

Post by SECProto »

jmb99 wrote: post #797
Zamiel_Snawley wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles. Think of how often dedicated walking and cycling routes need to be repaved—almost never. Car owners only pay about half of the cost of road maintenance in the US[1]. [1] https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/

> The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles. This should read: The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by heavy trucks. Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight. A fully loaded cement truck or transport truck is doing way more damage than a fully loaded box truck, which is doing much more damage than a Hummer EV, which is doing much more damage th…

Once you get into those larger vehicles, vehicle weight doesn't matter so much (for regulations and for road wear). What matters is axle weight, which stays fairly consistent as you increase overall vehicle weight. eg for delivering bulk construction materials, dump trucks have either one, two, or three load axles (along with the steering axle, which is calculated separately), and the load it can carry scales pretty closely with that (gross around 10t per axle (22k lbs), net around 7t per load axle). Anything over the standard limit pays significant fees for a permit (at least where I am)

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

#880

Post by ben_w »

hilux wrote: post #876
ben_w wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said the USA was big. Now you're saying population is the important thing. Combined that's population density, so does Maryland have this? Connecticut? etc. On the density front, NYC is famously high density, and yet so far as I can tell a monthly pass for just there is double the raised price this ticket will be next year: https://new.mta.info/document/118601

Most adults should be able to figure out that IN THIS CONTEXT "big" refers to land mass relative to population. Yes, NYC has a dense population, and yes, it also has the best public transit in the country.

And your best is twice the price for something strictly worse. (I've used NY public transport, it's much worse than anything I've seen in Germany).

One thing adults often also do, and which you just did by continuing to ignore the point, is treat arguments as soldiers.

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