The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things.
This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess.
With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake.
I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be.
The new ticket is an excellent example of when national government can be superior to more local government: when the national government forces coordination to solve fragmentation problems, where local agencies lacked the...motivation to solve things on their own.
On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level. A complex system per locality can still work okay for local residents; and if it's painful for visitors, well, visitors don't vote, and it's not the kind of thing that's likely to kill tourism.
No, no they really didn't. They spent millions rebranding it, there is (was?) a huge lag between adding value and posting the value depending on how you added value. The original card readers were incredibly unreliable, and because Clipper/TransLink did absolutely nothing to unify* the fare structure across the twenty-four different systems you could be set up for a nasty encounter with a pop cop because you couldn't tag on or get charged the max fare when you can't tap off. Been there, done that.
BART did their best to make a fantastic mess too and, at least according to their web site, they still only sell paper tickets at SFO. For whatever reason the three other vendors at SFO do sell plastic cards. Because three additional vendors isn't confusing at all.
* Some systems are flat rate (Muni, Golden Gate Ferry, VTA), some are zone based (Caltrain, Golden Gate Transit, Marin Transit), and some are distance based (BART), SamTrans has a flat rate depending on the type of bus you're on. Some systems are proof of payment (Muni), some use turnstiles (BART), some are partially proof-of-payment (AC Transit). And some (AC Transit, Muni) still maintain their own proprietary mobile payment systems. It's still a fucking mess.
It's not a perfect thing, sure. But it's a big step forward. It's hugely better than having to deal with each system separately; I've had days when I've used 4 systems, for example.
As you note with the pricing complexity, there is just a wide divergence of views and interests on how to run a transit system. And I get it; I think there are legitimate reasons people picked those different pricing systems. But they figured out how to overcome that so I can have one card for all of that. And even better, one card that is now my phone.
For younger developers who are used to everything being connected, it's really worth thinking about how you'd build a reasonably robust, hard-to-exploit system when many of the important terminals, as on busses, were usually out of contact.
I've had days when I've used 4 systems, for example.
Sure, I've done similar trips and the worst part was not the payment but rather the obstacles that BART puts up and the sparse service in the suburbs. BART's TVMs have historically made it difficult to pay with cash and credit cards. TransLink/Clipper didn't fix that.
If people are interested in the history that drives some of what it
ended up the way it did
The answer is, of course, that the Bay Area is fiercely provincial. The disparate payment methods were merely a symptom, as is evidenced by the wide array of fare policies. We didn't/don't need a single payment system we need a single hierarchy to unify all of the different transit systems and then we need that hierarchy to implement a single fare policy across the whole Bay Area.
For younger developers who are used to everything being connected, it's
really worth thinking about how you'd build a reasonably robust, hard-to-exploit
system when many of the important terminals, as on busses, were usually out of contact.
The problem with this is that by the time TransLink rolled around the rest of the world already had the technology and did a better job. Portland's TriMet had mobile payments (QR codes and NFC) long before the Bay Area. Mifare had already been exploited, and a huge chunk of the Bay Area's buses were connected to cellular data networks.
Even in 2010 having to wait up to 72 hours for your transit card payment to post was insane. Having to do so in 2023 ought to be criminal. Let's not forget that Clipper basically absolves the transit agencies of any responsibility – so when your card is stolen you generally cannot cancel it immediately. Let's also not forget that TransLink/Clipper's had a variety of payment problems from spurious charges to autoload failing en masse to simply not charging people as required.
I disagree. I did need a single payment system. I am glad I have it. I do not need a single unified fare policy.
I understand that you want different things. Which is fine! But it's frustrating to me that you are trying to negate my complimenting some people who worked hard and made things better just because they didn't also do the things you want. Things, I'm sure, many of them also wanted.
But it's frustrating to me that you are trying to negate my complimenting some
people who worked hard and made things better just because they didn't also do
the things you want.
Funding public transit is a zero-sum game. TransLink/Clipper was a bloated giveaway to military contractors that left the Bay Area with a ridiculously flawed implementation. That's money that could've been better spent elsewhere (e.g. electrifying Caltrain). It wasn't state of the art in 2006 and it's sure as shit not in 2023. My issue is that TransLink/Clipper isn't something that should be celebrated. This isn't grade school where you're congratulated for your participation, the actual results matter. Worst of all TransLink/Clipper didn't actually solve the ticket problem. You still have Muni and BART pushing their own proprietary ticketing solutions.
Honestly I don't particularly care about a single fare system as the last time I did a big multi county trip was around the time TransLink was being rolled out. Yeah it was neat to be able to use an RFID card on some of the systems, but that didn't make up for huge gaps in service.
TransLink/Clipper merely put a few drops of CA glue on a gaping wound.
Edit: To be fair I think that electronic ticketing is a good idea, but it needs to be part of an overall simplification of Bay Area transit. On its own (the way it is now) it's a marginal benefit – and now that transit agencies have absolved themselves of any responsibility Cubic's customer support sucks.
Apparently it’s time for a reminder that the flag/downmod button is absolutely not a disagree button. This comment definitely contributes to the conversation.
I wonder if this company is related to the TransLink which is the one running the OV Chipkaart in the Netherlands? https://www.translink.nl/
This is also a really poor system, it took years to implement and the various services never integrated properly. They all have to have their own portals and if you forget to scan one you're screwed and have to physically go back. The card can't be put on a phone and can't even be scanned for the credit level in the app (you can view it online but it's 24 hours old which is totally useless).
Also it was cracked 3 months after being rolled out because they used older mifare cards with known flaws, which had been on the market for 10 years.
They are working on some new thing now using credit cards which will probably also suck :P
OV-chipkaart is actually a joint venture between NS, Connexxion, GVB, HTM and RET (all various public transport operators).
The system I like is the London Oyster-derived one, which New York MTA is now also using. It has the advantage of supporting contactless and NFC payments out of the box.
> there is (was?) a huge lag between adding value and posting the value depending on how you added value.
There is months worth of "pending" passes on my clipper card and neither some Clipper support number I called nor the poor guy in the booth at the local BART station could tell me how to activate them (and also not some people on Reddit and my public transit using friends, of course). It's obviously not done by using either BART or buses or SF Muni, or tagging the card against the insert-coin machines at the station, because, you know, I've done all of that a bunch of times since this started being an issue. Most of the pending passes expired by now. I'd be more upset about this if I had paid for them with actual money and not some employer based commute benefit since I haven't exactly commuted regularly since the pandemic started.
Clipper was an awful experience for a non-American like me when I visited last year. I couldn't install the mobile app (the app listing is region locked to the US). I couldn't set it up on Google Pay either (the Google Pay offerings were also region locked).
I then spent half an hour trying to purchase a physical card from a machine which refused to accept 4 different cards I tried (credit and debit both). In the end, I could only purchase it with an American card that I borrowed from someone.
Compare that to modern public transport systems in many parts of the world, where you can simply check in and out with a bank card. No separate purchase needed.
Ireland is getting there, with the Leap card. It works on city rail / trams and most buses including those run by private firms, operating expenses routes to major towns. Unfortunately our major rail lines don't accept it :( but that may be due to the need to provide seat bookings.
Yeah, not as much in the Bay Area these days, but the Clipper card is a huge improvement over the previous system. And I imagie by the time I eventually run down my Clipper balance I'll be fine with my phone.
It's been a while since I set it up, but I'm pretty sure that setting up Clipper on Google Pay (or Google Wallet or whatever it is) is using my old Clipper balance. So you might be able to swap it over now and have it ready to go for your next trip.
> On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level
In Germany that did happen, for sure. I used to live in the area between Mainz and Frankfurt and the multiple public transport authorities (RMV, MVB, RNN etc.) worked together to better support the transitional zones.
Probably an advantage many places would have over somewhere like the US which is quite fragmented and struggles to consistently coordinate in solving broad problems. I always remember just 2-3 years ago, driving onto a toll road in the eastern USA and there was an attendant at the booth. You paid them in notes/coins, and the attendant got the coins in their hand, leant out of their box and deposited them in a payment slot to raise the boom gate. I'm sure there was some rationale, but it was pretty bizarre.
That's not really a coordination problem, that's just a toll road that's not yet moved to all-electronic tolling.
Of course, toll roads in the US do provide a coordination problem, and that's in the existence of noncompatible electronic toll systems. You have essentially three islands of interoperability in the US: the Northeast and Midwest are all using E-ZPass, the Southeast has some interoperability, and Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas all have a compatible system, with several other states having systems interoperable with no one else. There actually was a law passed in 2012 that required all the toll systems to be compatible by 2016, but obviously, we're 7 years past that deadline and all that happened was Minnesota, North Carolina, and Florida joined E-ZPass as well (and Georgia is coming soon™ for a few years now).
That law provided neither penalties nor funding for improving ETC compatibility, so it's no wonder most states haven't bothered. California, for instance, already has statewide interop – and has for decades. In fact you can use your transponder for parking at SFO. I believe the various toll agencies out here have been issuing "6C" compatible transponders since 2019 with the goal of completely phasing out the old "Title 21" transponders by 2024. ISO/IEC 18000-63 (6C) is being used by Washington, Colorado, Utah, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
For someone doing a lot of interstate driving NationalPass already offers transponders that are compatible with a bunch of different systems (E-ZPass, TxTag, Title 21, and EZ-TAG), supposedly also including 6C so there's that.
Yes, bit of a mixture. Sorry, I should've mentioned that (from memory) it was because they didn't have banknote readers or credit card payment and the US is still using dollar bills. So unless you had a bucket of very low denomination coins, you had to pay a physical person to then convert to coins and reach around to deposit them.
I once used a toll bridge in the Eastern US that had no indication of payment options (outside of a pass like the one you mentioned), no lane to escape once it was clear you had no alternatives, and then no method of paying the toll online after the fact. The only option I had was to wait to be issued a charge via the rental agency ($30+) and pay that once back in Australia.
It almost doesn't matter in the US at this point as I basically don't use cash any longer but I mostly dislike $1/$2-ish coin denominations. It's a big enough amount that I can't basically ignore their existence but I can't stick them in a wallet.
Like the penny silliness--or really the fact that the US basically collectively decided that the currency denominations in widespread use in 1950 would be fine forever--it's essentially a self-correcting situation in that a lot of people don't use cash any longer.
Agreed. Another much needed example would be nationwide reciprocity for concealed carry firearms. It’s too easy to be on the wrong side of the law when crossing state lines and the regulatory nuances are difficult to understand state to state.
It seems like there is a very easy way to remain on the right side of concealed carry laws, which is to simply not carry a concealed weapon. If you want to do so, familiarizing yourself with the laws as you cross state lines is the very least you can do.
Demanding reciprocity is like saying ‘I should be able to turn right on red lights in NYC because my car has Jersey plates’.
It seems like there is a very easy way to remain the right side of $SOME_LAWS, which is to simply not commit crimes in whatever region you travel. If you want to do so, familiarizing yourself with the laws as you cross state lines is the very least you can do.
Demanding reciprocity is like saying ‘I should be able to do $SOMETHING_WHICH_VARIES_IN_ILLEGALITY_BY_REGION.’
Now insert any other topic: abortion, weed use, transgenderism, human rights, etc.
Just because it’s not your pet issue, doesn’t mean it’s not utterly asinine to accidentally end up on the wrong side of the law due to sheer happenstance — all within the same country.
I would rather be deported and barred from entering a certain state in which I carry out something perfectly legal in my home state, but is illegal in the former state — rather than suffering at the hands of a heavy-handed and unempathetic justice system.
And for visitors who may not even speak the primary language, public transit is awful in most places in terms of onboarding jet lagged visitors. Apparently no one does UX trials of people who have zero familiarity with the system and don't speak the language--though at least they maybe accommodate major Western languages. But, in general, it's pretty awful and you at least should do some research in advance.
I usually do a decent amount of research about public transport in our travel destinations, so I more or less know what type of tickets or passes I'll be buying ahead of time.
But, last fall a flight cancellation left us with an unexpected day in Amsterdam.
I guided our family through immigration and customs after an overnight flight from Canada, and then purchased what I thought were the correct tickets for our train ride from the airport to downtown.
When we went past a card reader, it didn't seem to work, but there were no turnstiles and we were able to board our train.
There were however turnstiles when we got off at the station downtown, and they wouldn't let us through.
I walked over to an attendant at a podium, who looked at our (incorrect) tickets, our obviously sleep deprived selves and children and just laughed, told us we'd bought the wrong tickets, and let us through.
I always imagined the world of high-stakes metro-related international criminality would come with more consequences than being good-naturedly laughed at by a Nederlandse Spoorwegen employee.
I agree that vending machines are really a mess. However I recommend the Deutsche Bahn Navigator App. If you have an account you can easily get most tickets.
Also states like Baden-Württemberg got their act together recently and made it possible to book tickets all way through.
I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.
I was just in Amsterdam. One of our locals there said that, although there's an ongoing switch to just tapping contactless credit cards, he advised just getting a contactless transit chip card because even if it cost a few dollar more it would more reliably work everywhere. Things have improved in most places over time but it can still be confusing for the occasional visitor.
I remember at some point pre-pandemic I was in the UK with a friend and we had all these these different tickets/receipts were trying to use to go through a turnstile and doubtless really pissing off the people lined up behind us but it was super-unintuitive what we needed to stick into the machine.
> I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing.
You can just swipe your phone (Apple Pay / Google Wallet) or credit/debit card to check in and out (do not forget to check out!) and you're done. Works for all public transport in the Netherlands.
Of course there are also more traditional ways to pay for your ticket, but it does not get much simpler than this imo.
Their codebase has to be a wild ride. There are still traces from the days it ran as Windows binaries in CGI fashion (very much doubt they still do it like that, just like a large number of eBay URLs still contain the ebayISAPI.dll bit from the time the site was literally a Microsoft IIS plugin). On the DB instance it also outputs like five different generations of UIs depending on the exact parameters you hand it. You can also find several different iterations of APIs, like one search API will output actual, non-trivial JS code to fill auto-completes, another gives you JSON with a totally different format and yet another XML with everything slightly different again. From their job postings it follows their backend is C++.
The previous system came from the 80s and ran on multiple Tandem/Nonstop clusters.
As far as I am aware, although the system is very capable it started as someone's PhD thesis in the mid 80s and has been developed since then.
I worked on the data prepartion for a small HAFAS installation at one point and the specification was an absolute mess of fixed with text, delimited text and XML, sometimes all in the same file!
In my experience the TVMs in Berlin were fine, but it was easier to just get the app because I don't make a habit of carrying around a ton of cash. The biggest problem I had was the TVMs at the Frankfurt airport, half of which were broken, and none had a clear explanation of what the different ticket types were.
I will given Berlin credit here — after checking in to our accommodations (took a taxi from the airport), I poked a ticket machine, quickly saw the Union Jack flag and got the machine into English. Couple minutes later we had our 1 week passes in hand. In general I found the system very approachable, using google maps for route planning.
It is ok, but still a far cry from London for example, where you simply hold your card while entering and it automatically gives you the best price for your account. So if you drive around a lot as a tourist you just cap at the weekly price once you reach it.
If you tried that in Germany there would be a legal challenge on the grounds that a system which knows where the user travelled infringes on privacy :D
With the caveat that the cap is always a fixed Monday to Sunday period, so if your stay doesn't align with that, you'll get to pay an additional capping period.
I think having tickets at all is antiquated. In the Netherlands, there are terminals at the stations you tap your bank card against to "check in". When you get off, you tap it again at that station and your card gets charged. Sometimes the conductor comes around with a device to make sure people have checked in.
If you don't want your travel to be associated with your bank account, you can get a chip card which can be topped up using cash.
Systems where you have to checkout are always problematic in my view. Huge queue because one terminal is broken etc. lead to maxed out fares and unhappy customers.
Germany had it for a while (TouchPoint) but they gave it up thankfully — although I don't know the exact reason it was given up.
I have about half a dozen different ways to get from one train station to another, some with first and second class options. Just tapping in and out would not be sufficient to find out how much I have to pay or in some cases which company to reimburse.
So after a quick google it seems that the only thing is does is "automatically" calculate the price based on start and end of your trip. I put automatically in quotes because you have to stamp in/out every time you switch trains and it pre fines you for not doing it correctly the moment you use it. I think I prefer just being able to select the correct ticket ahead of time.
Commuters with monthly or longer tickets will need to use an Oyster card, but anyone with only weekly, daily or individual tickets is fine with a contactless credit card.
I think only foreign tourists who don't have a credit/debit card, or whose banks levy a high, fixed charge per card transaction, or who are eligible for some other discount (foreign children age 5-17) should buy an Oyster card.
> but anyone with only weekly […] tickets is fine with a contactless credit card
1. The weekly capping always runs Monday to Sunday, so if your stay doesn't align with that, you'll get to pay an additional capping period, in which case buying a weekly travelcard aligned with your stay will likely be cheaper (as long as you know which zones you'll mainly require).
2. Having a travelcard gives you the ability to buy slightly cheaper rail tickets for destinations outside of the TfL zones. Pay-as-you-go doesn't, unless you physically get off the train in order to touch in/out at the boundary.
3. Transit nerds only: Pay-as-you-go is subject to certain maximum journey times. If you'll exceed those by staying to long within the system, you'll be presumed to have forgotten to touch out and will be charged a maximum fare. A travelcard avoids that issue.
In Rome, you can now just tap contactless payment cards (/ smartphones, I assume) to readers in buses/ at underground stations. Huge step up from the previous system, which was based on buying paper tickets from newsagents.
The "g" is pronounced (in a sense). In Italian, the digraph "gl" represents a single sound /ʎ/, which is distinct from the sound represented by "l" alone (/l/)
City passes are mostly a lousy deal unless you're zipping here and there all day every day. Pay per use is almost always a better deal but you need to know the particulars and get the right card/amount.
That’s the whole point. Tourists won’t really care if they spend more than they have to, and they don’t have to worry about it at all. Regulars and the price conscious will go the cheaper route.
Tourists will often just take taxis. Why fool around with figuring out the particulars of the local mass transit for a few trips over a short time.
Last time I was in Copenhagen I asked at the hotel desk how to get to the airport on public transit and the guy said just take a taxi it will be faster and much easier for you.
It depends on the city and where you're staying. Heathrow to much of central London can literally be about $100 cheaper on the tube and just as fast if you just have carryon luggage during normal times of the day. (Don't remember the situation last time I was in Copenhagen.)
I agree that tourists in an unfamiliar city will often just take a taxi by default though.
True, but I often find them worth it to not have to worry about buying appropriate tickets for every journey when I'm a tourist in an unfamiliar city. And on many transit systems, the options seem to be, "Be a local and get an affordable pass or reloadable card, buy individual tickets for every journey, or be a visitor and buy a moderately more expensive tourist day pass."
This is extra true if you're traveling with a family including kids, as I often am.
I’m also surprised airports don’t integrate it into their passenger fees and boarding passes. But maybe that’s getting a little too multi-modal to handle.
Depending on what I'm doing I often don't want to pay a lot for public transit because I won't use it much. And often don't even get a stamp, e.g. going to the UK from the US.
Depends where you go and where you're coming from. Just a matter of time before it's all RFID'd into the passport or access is granted to to the central db to random transit cops.
Like the SFO airport that uses the internationally recognized train symbol for the tram to the garage, and the not-recognized-anywhere BART logo for the train to the region's principal city.
What language should they accomodate? Internationally the "standard" is just local language + English. Should they choose Spanish? If they wanted to choose the language with the most speakers they would rightfully choose a dialect of Chinese.
A good example of this complexity is Berlin. Many people have monthly passes for just A and B zones, which comprise the bulk of central Berlin. However, the new airport is just over the border in zone C, which requires an additional ticket. The transit authority knows this and will catch and fine people who neglected or forgot to buy a B to C ticket.
What is complex about the B/C border? That Hönow is B? Because else, it is literary the federal state border. A/B is the S-Bahn-Ring. Sure, three zones are not super simple and where zone C ends is somewhat arbitrary. But aside from that, it's the most logical and simple solution possible.
Generally, I agree, it isn't very complicated to understand. But, it's very easy to forget to buy a C ticket if you're used to hopping on the U-bahn with your monthly AB ticket.
>If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that.
I don't know the BVG app, but if you're not regularly in some city installing an app, finding out how it works, adding your payment info is a huge hassle.
We need a single app for all German transit, that is well designed. Instead of hundreds or thousands of apps for every city and village.
What I also really liked is the chargeable chip cards in Taiwan. You could enter and exit anywhere.
Your card is charged with exactly the distance traveled.
No thinking needed. Short distances are always cheap. E.g. if you travel from zone B-C but start just one stop before B ends, you wouldn't pay for the whole of B. You just pay what you use, which is fair.
> The announcement mentions you do need it when announcing the stop. By then it is prob too late, though.
Not on all lines. If I remember correctly, I have only heard it on the new announcements for the BER airport. And, they actually tell you on time so you have a chance to buy an extension ticket.
An airport being outside of city limits has its historical reason (the Allies have agreed that the entire area of Berlin could only be served by airlines operated by one of the four occupational forces, so East Germany simply built an airport just beyond city limits so that they could serve Berlin with its domestic airline). But an airport being just outside of the "regular" fare zone is something that's unfortunately not unusual.
I don't think an airport being outside of the city limits is that unusual, either.
E.g. the "new" Munich airport, all Paris airports (though you could argue that it's Paris which has unusually small city limits), Glasgow, London Gatwick, Stansted and Luton, San Francisco, …
That said, look up Tempelhofer Flughafen, which was right in the city center of Berlin and served passengers until 2008. Now it is just a huge empty field where people do sports and barbecue.
Federal in the American sense is a bit of a false friend for Germans: It means basically the same, but Americans use it to signify the unity of the states, while Germans talk about the states of the Union. So if we say federal borders we actually mean state borders and would otherwise say national or country borders.
If you think that Berlin's zone system is complex, you haven't seen the public transport in many other cities like Munich which has 6 zones or Japanese cities where trains are operated by different companies.
Berlin's system is rather simple and comparably cheap.
Yeah but these days Japanese trains can all use the suica (and similar) cards to tap in and out, right? You don't actually need to understand the different rail companies or zones or whatever, you just get your one card and put money on it and then tap.
Your comment is a fascinating take on perspective. To you it's a fractured, difficult system. To this American, it has been absolutely futuristic every time I've been there. Wish we could get such an awful system anywhere near where I live.
Yup. As an American, I found it quite easy to navigate transit systems every time I visited Germany; most recently Berlin. Especially these days with things like Google/Apple maps transit directions that work more-or-less flawlessly. But maybe it's because I'm used to systems like Caltrain that don't even have a functioning app, and which just randomly cancel trains for huge chunks of the day, or BART, which has an even-more-insane pay-per-distance system than anything I've seen elsewhere.
If you go from the US to Europe, you'll think European public transit is great. If you go from Europe to East Asia, your perspective will change again.
For regular commuters the price is a big deal. Not only where tickets crossing multiple zones complicated to get but also unreasonably expensive (~200Eur/Month). In contrast the 49 Euros is less expensive than (almost?) any single zone monthly ticket out there.
I mean, you don't have to figure it out. You can just punch in start and end of your journey into one of several apps that work nationwide, and pay whatever it says.
Of course, many people don't have any of the apps, particularly people who rarely use public transport, which are also the people most easily confuse by the complicated fee structure.
Unfortunately, the new monthly ticket does little to help them. 49 EUR isn't a value proposition for them, and so they are still stuck with the awful status quo.
You're out of luck, if none of the route segments is served by Deutsche Bahn (which is often the case for regional routes), because then you'll be unable to buy your ticket using the most common nation-wide app DB Navigator.
Not all of them, I'm sure, but all of the major ones seem to be covered.
I'm using it every day, because it's better than using the association's own app, which is not saying much. Or I used to, anyway, now I'm doing the 49 EUR thing.
DB Navigator for regional transport is hit-and-miss. I've been using it a lot around the southwest, but it's fickle and sometimes fails to offer me tickets for no clear reasons (seemingly at random; the same connections by the same companies work on other days). And don't forget that a lot of the German hinterlands has very spotty to no mobile data.
There are regions where the DB app will only sell you tickets that cross the region's borders, but not tickets that are wholly inside the region. There's even at least one region I know of that straight up does not do online ticketing. You have to buy physical tickets, in person, at a machine.
Or worse, you can still buy the ticket, but it's not valid for any trains actually in service. This stuff is really non-obvious. For example, train operators can license certain Deutsche Bahn trademarks without accepting Deutsche Bahn tickets.
Where? As far as I know, all the Deutsche Bahn Tickets for regional traffic use the Deutschlandtarif, which is accepted in all "normal" (excluding heritage trains and the likes) regional trains in all of Germany.
The example I had in mind was for an S-Bahn in Karlsruhe (operated by AVG, using the S-Bahn trademark under license, but otherwise unaffiliated with Deutsche Bahn) which was considered a tram, not a regular regional train while it traveled within city limits. This meant that DB tickets weren't necessarily valid, and AVG claimed as much. I expect AVG recognizes the bw tarif under which DB sells train tickets, so this probably is no longer an issue.
That can be much more expensive as it won't automatically find the cheapest option for day passes or multi-day passes. And it's not very convenient to look up and pay separately for every ride if you visit a city and travel a lot.
This is typical in most countries that aren't very small. I'm struggling to think of a moderately-sized country that doesn't work have regional transit authorities with their own ticketing systems. I haven't been everywhere in the world so I bet they do exist, but I've yet to see one.
While Japan has regional ticketing systems and companies, they did standardize nationally on supporting 3 major prepaid transit cards (pasmo, suica, icoca) so most rapid transit and regional transit are low friction enough to just tap in and tap out. China has done the same with T-Union.
I suppose with NFC contactless payment, a plausible future state is just supporting credit card payments everywhere, though of course this doesn't solve the monthly pass problem.
> With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.
By "local" transit, I mean regional commuter trains (Regionalbahn, Regionalexpress and S-Bahn), not the faster long-distance trains (Intercity and Intercity-Express, the latter being Germany's high-speed trains).
You are so right! I was just in Munich and had some of the most confusing experience in any public transport system I’ve ever used. And I’ve seen many! It was so shocking. The UIs of the ticket machines are horrendously slow and confusing. Stop names are always in German even when switching languages. This, of course, doesn’t align with Google Maps half the time, as my GM is set to English.
In cities outside of germany, when you arrive at a new city you buy a transit ticket, you swipe that at the entrance and the exit, and anything related to zones or whatever works automatically, you don't have to think about it.
I read your comment as suggesting that this is the norm outside Germany. While systems like this exist (e.g. in London) in my experience they aren't as common as I wish they were.
As some comments here mention uncomfortable means of buying tickets across German transportation systems: I’ve been working on multiple software projects that tried to solve it and I can tell you that the reason is not sinister but rather that each system is funded locally. Which means it is subsidized locally and the need to cross those boundaries was always a luxury issue (by people like us - the E-Mail caste).
Even the juggernaut Deutsche Bahn (they handle public transport in almost every municipality) couldn’t break through these structures (eg the city of Munich just couldn’t be pressured to comply with their ticketing schemes).
In the end mandating it by the federal government was the only way. Although I’m curious who’s really benefiting from it: yes we solved the annoyances for the E-Mail caste, but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure.
Its kind of ridiculous to call it a luxury issue. Its a luxury issue if you make it one. In Switzerland 85 year old grandmothers travel between cities to go for light walks. 15 year olds go to football tournaments in other cities.
Claiming that only some elite cast of digital nomads profits from it is utterly ridiculous. In Switzerland city to city travel is more common with trains then with cars, and a huge part of the population does it.
> but the service quality itself will surely deteriorate by this measure
If the government actually correctly invests in it then it doesn't actually, specially not long term. If anything it leads to more regular more frequent service on many routes.
Switzerland is barely a ninth of Germany‘s size in square meters and population. Plus, the whole German Intercity Rail System‘s north south axis goes through 2 choke points: Frankfurt and northern Bavaria.
> Switzerland is barely a ninth of Germany‘s size in square meters and population.
So its basically scales linearly. More land, more population. With the same tax spending there is no reason that Switzerland should be able to do anything that Germany is not able to do.
Nothing you said changes the fact that between cities you used to have different tariff systems and that people regularly travel between them.
The distance from Genf to Zürich is the same distance as many cities in Germany. Again, claiming its a luxury to go the the city 200-300km away is nonsense.
Just saying 'Germany is larger' isn't an argument, it doesn't change anything.
> goes through 2 choke points
So your excuse is that Germany is bad at planning and building their rail systems?
Switzerland has and had chock points to and yet that isn't actually a problem.
The reality is Germany has much better geography for rail compared to Switzerland.
The Fairtiq system is so freaking cool: check-in the app when you board any train/tram/boat/bus, do any kind of ride, of any length, duration and connection count across the country, check-out when done. Do this any number of times in a day. Get billed the best price (excluding one-off deals) at the end of the day.
This is almost as simple as beeping your credit card when boarding. I've been so spoiled by that simplicity, I can't stand using needlessly complicated ticketing systems these days.
Is that really true? The only people who need/want to regularly travel across local transit boundaries are tech people? That seems unlikely, especially nowadays.
Basically everyone uses email, and you said "people like us", so the poor communication here is on your end. Please elaborate if you want to be understood.
Fair point, I thought this term is more known, but then myself had a hard time to Google it In response to the criticism. But I think this might be a good start:
> Many “unicorn” tech startups began with a few engineers and a product they wanted to sell, but over the past decade-plus, they have accrued a bloated bureaucracy of “equity”-minded h.r. activists, ESG-savvy consultants, affinity-group mavens, climate-change specialists, and many other email-caste hangers-on. Now that times are turning bad, tech companies can no longer afford to sustain a massive “court” of professional-class nobility, paying sinecures to sons and daughters of the good and the great who don’t know how to code or crunch numbers, but know how to write emails, hold useless meetings, and talk about diversity and inclusion.
I'm not trying to self-aggrandize here, but I'm bad at emails and good at code. I'm sure you can find a portion of HN users that fit the description but I don't think "people like us - the E-Mail caste" is the way to say it.
How about „people getting paid handsomely for writing things on computers for other people to read“?
(This includes mails, but also code or marketing etc. - eg people that didn’t have the slightest inconvenience during lockdowns compared to „essential workers“)
I feel like you're not allowed to make up phrases like "E-Mail-Caste", not explain what it means, then get mad when others don't perfectly understand it...
Welcome to UK, where 40-55mins trains from neighbouring cities to London costs 50-110£ for a return journey and 6k+ for a yearly ticket. We apologize for a delay in your journey, this is due to staff shortage.
Imagine my surprise coming from Italy, where our trains are famously dirty and late, and taking my first train in the UK.
Trains are cleaner and somewhat less delayed, but bloody hell, they are not worth the price. For £110 I reckon you can go Milan–Naples (800 km, 4h30) in high speed 1st class train, which do not even exist in Britain.
Many rail services in the UK are effectively not private now, and they're even worse, because when a right-wing government that hates public transport takes control, all hell breaks loose.
We have a very complicated rail network which is bad for many reasons other than "private" or "public"
When I was in HH, I loved the monthly pass offered by my employer (65€/month); the ability to travel longer distances over S-Bahn and taking +1 with you was killer/super-smart feature IMO. Miss those in states sorely.
I wish most, if not all, of the world adopts the german style public transport system.
I've been confused in the last couple of threads related to this topic how responses like yours exist. Trying to be constructive, I'm going to float a theory: you live in Silicon Valley and that doesn't seem like much money?
For a German pensioner, in many cases, this would represent more than 5% of post-rent living costs. For my girlfriend, a manager of a team of 16 people (in non-tech in Germany) it's more than 5% of her post-taxes, post-rent income.
€49/month is not trivial for a lot of working or retired Germans. GDP per capita in Germany is €46k/year, and after taxes and insurance (and rent! and that more than half of Germans that make less than that), €49/month is not a pittance.
These tickets are generally aimed at working class Germans, which often make 10-20% of a normal Silicon Valley salary.
> What's the percentage of overall income? Half of that? So low that your argument holds very little water.
Yeah, about that. Do you think most working class people are flippant about costs that take 2.5% of their pre-tax income?
I'm in favor of the €49/month ticket. It's a step forward. But I genuinely don't understand how (and it feels like some sort of cultural or social class disconnect) that seems trivial to people, and wonder if it's not being acclimatized to German non-tech incomes.
If people take buy this ticket, it either alleviates previous commuting costs or is merely a purchase of convenience. Either way it's a positive at its current price
Absolutely. I'm entirely responding to the "does it even matter" part of things. It's possible to simultaneously be an across the board improvement and still not reach the level of trivially inexpensive.
It technically is in many places around Germany: The national railway infrastructure is owned by a government-owned entity, as is the main railway company. Many municipal public transport systems are also owned directly by the municipalities themselves, although there are also some semi-privatized systems and the national railway company also owns shares of municipal public transport systems in many major cities.
Still, public ownership itself is not really sufficient to guarantee great public transport. In Germany, prevailing opinion is that public transport should break even or cost the public purse as little as possible. The effect is that many communities especially in rural and urban marginalized places are underserved by public transport and many smaller cities have been disconnected from the railway grid.
In my view public transport should be both owned by the public and viewed as a true public good: similarly to basic education, healthcare, electricity and clean water, every citizen should have access to a decent level of service, no matter how cost efficient it would be.
My inclination to agree that public transit should mostly be a nationalized utility. But some experience in rural areas leads me to a counterargument that I don't have a good answer for:
Should people that live in urban spaces massively subsidize people that choose to live in rural areas for no economically useful reason? Like, some tech bros decide they don't want neighbors and want to live 20 km from everything. Should the city folk subsidize their preferences? Maybe it should be recouped in local taxes? Should that be covered by agricultural tax breaks?
Mostly I think public transit should be a public service. But I don't think it's a given that rich people's preferences should be subsidized just because they want to live in remote or suburban areas.
I think this is a good question, but I'm assuming that this is happening anyways: Few constitutions have provisions forcing tech bros to live in the city. If they move to the burbs without public transit, they are being subsidized via roads and car traffic, which is arguably worse.
I think you're also right. The framing for this is I spend some time in a village that has a part that's now been inaccessible because of a landslide. About 10 people live on the road that's now impassable. Digging a safe tunnel through the mountain would cost millions. Should the state shoulder the cost for the mostly wealthy retirees that live on the other side? I don't have a good answer.
I also have a version of this from a doctor friend that lives on a "farm" that doesn't grow anything. Who should pay for the roads / public transit to their place? Everyone else? Again, I don't have a good answer. But I'm open to the idea that people that simply want to live in rural areas as a personal luxury should shoulder some of the costs to making those places accessible.
I agree. And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that. So it does not look like, that we want public goods, but someone else but not me has to do the work. The tax burden is already so high.
>It will only get higher if we try to intentionally decrease worker productivity by forcing them to 'serve a year of their life for public services'.
That's blatantly false. It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
What worker productivity do you think society is loosing out on here? We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs.
The labor they provide and experience they earn in the social system is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables in a restaurant or flipping burgers at McDs instead.
> The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
Interesting take. Is there any supporting official position on this or just personal opinion?
If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social services systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribute. How do these systems handle the rest of the 9 months every year when the teenagers are unavailable on account of being in school. Why would a healthy society operate at the very limit of crashing down because the natality dropped or parents/teenagers start refusing to provide this service?
Now I've dealt with a lot of trainees in my life. All university graduates, including with PhDs. They all take weeks to months full time on the job until they're ready to do anything productive in the simplest of jobs. I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year (with 9 month breaks) to support a country's healthcare system from collapsing. And that's not even touching on the topic that you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
> Is there any supporting official position on this or just personal opinion?
The government figures and claims are supporting this opinion. In fact, it's been the government's opinion, not mine. I'm just quoting it.
>If true I find it very scary that a country's health and social service systems would crumble were it not for the 3 months per year the teenagers of the country contribut
9 months not 3, and yes, that's socialized care for you and an aging population when you have too many people in need of care, and too little contributions into the system since the economy has stagnated post 2008 and taxes are already high enough and no more money can be obtained this way. And it's not just healthcare work, but all social services like kindergartens, retirement homes, refugees homes, etc. that make use of 9 months of teenage labor.
> I can't imagine teenagers being or becoming anywhere near productive enough in 3 months per year
You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR. At least not here. Teenagers are quite smart and quick learners if you treat them well.
>you're forcing children to give up what's probably the last carefree time of their lives to do a job they may not want and are definitely not prepared to do.
The military service is forced nation-wide (a system kept through democratic vote), while doing social public civil work is the alternative choice if you feel the military is not for you.
And the children get paid for it, and for many it's the camaraderie and opportunity to meet other young people from other parts of the country/city and make life long friends or meet future spouses while learning useful social and
life skills and feeling a sense of self worth for contributing to society, especially in the context of the west having a loneliness and depression epidemic among teens. It's also an opportunity for silver spoon kids of privilege families to get to interact with the lower classes of society and soo how others live, through this kind of work.
You're making it sounds like they're prisoners for life, but they're still free to go binge drinking and care free sex in the south of Spain after.
> The government figures and claims are supporting this opinion. In fact, it's been the government's opinion, not mine. I'm just quoting it.
I believe you but since you're passing this on then you/they must also have more than some words in support. When critical systems would collapse were it not for teenagers being asked to work a job it calls into question both the competence of the leadership to lead and of the people to choose them. There's a reason most countries don't do this beyond basic apprenticeships on limited scale. What happens if this year teenagers start looking more towards the military following events like the war in Ukraine, do those civil services come tumbling down? You and the government make this sound like a country being driven at the edge of collapse.
> You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR.
Right? Who could be more qualified to operate a critical emergency vehicle or bring someone back to life than a person who until yesterday wasn't allowed even to vote. What a thing to say...
> The military service is forced nation-wide
Mandatory military conscription is an act of desperation in the face of potential national annihilation. Most countries abolished it and even the ones who kept it start at 18. Is the Austrian civil service conscription an equally desperate move? Or an attempt to raise a "working generation" from as young an age as possible while giving those kids the alternatives "this or the military"?
> and for many it's the camaraderie and opportunity to meet other young people from other parts of the country/city and make life long friends or meet future spouses.
Sure, except literally not because they'd get the very same by going to school or university. They don't need to be forced into a job they don't want because the country will fail otherwise unless it's the only way they'd do it. The only incontestable reason is because it's mandatory, everything else is rationalizing and looking for a silver lining.
> Mandatory military conscription is an act of desperation in the face of potential national annihilation
Most neutral European countries like Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Austria have maintained it to one degree or another. I don't think it's generally viewed as 'an act of desperation' by most people in those countries or even that unpopular.
Agreed but but that's exactly the point. Sweden and Finland have Russia even pushing them out of neutrality and towards NATO. Switzerland is a big repository of mostly illegal fortunes from all over the world and has to stay neutral to maintain this status, so it makes sense to extend its own defensive capabilities as much as it can. In Norway it's debatable, the obligativity is not enforced. You also have Greece where the conflict with Turkey drives mandatory conscription.
For these countries mandatory military service is very much an act of desperation. Maybe the word doesn't ring the right note in people's heads but it's accurate. If avoiding scenarios like in Ukraine doesn't call for desperate decisions I don't know what does.
But discussing the popularity is moot. The people of those countries understand the necessity driven by external factors. They chose neutrality, not their neighbors, so they have to compromise somewhere out of practical need and the desperation of the alternative. This being said you can only assess the popularity of something when it becomes a free choice rather than obligation.
> you can only assess the popularity of something when it becomes a free choice rather than obligation.
Democratic elections and referendums have assessed this and the majority of the population has voted in favor of this system. For better or worse, that's democracy for ya'.
Not sure it's so simple. Most of the voting population is past the age where this affects them and people (I must admit I fall in that trap quite often) have the mentality that "it was done to me and look how well I turned out, so I'll do it to them". The only way to see if people want it is to give them the choice when the time comes.
> the population has voted
But as you said earlier, it's the same population and elected leaders who let critical systems and services degrade to the point where they would stop working without forcing children to work. Even agreeing this doesn't put the people in a bad light decision-wise, in this position it's no longer a choice but a necessity. Hence my incessant question whether the government's statement that "services will fail without child work" is supported by some study or it's just a scare tactic to get people to vote a certain way.
Yes, democracy is about getting the people's vote of confidence. How you earn that confidence is outside the democratic process and could be as simple as "feed them BS".
I can only say from the Swiss perspective, critical system and service are not degraded and the system would work perfectly fine without a few 10000 civil service works. And I don't think this is true for Austria either.
> Yes, democracy is about getting the people's vote of confidence. How you earn that confidence is outside the democratic process and could be as simple as "feed them BS".
In Switzerland getting people vote is about much more then confidence as we vote regularly on actual issues, not just on people or parties. And because its Concordance system all parties share a certain amount of confidence form the population.
The political discussion about mandatory military services are certainly happening and have been for a very long time. Generally, in a conservative society you need to have a really convincing reason to change something, and in Switzerland at least nobody has come up with a great alternative that convinces many people so the system stays as it it.
>I believe you but since you're passing this on then you/they must also have more than some words in support.
I am not supporting this, I only said it's how it works here.
>Right? Who could be more qualified to operate a critical emergency vehicle or bring someone back to life than a person who until yesterday wasn't allowed even to vote.
And yet at their age they seem qualified enough for the US to send them to war in the Middle East or give them access to TOP-SECRET military intelligence[1] before they're even allowed to drink beer. You're needlessly discrediting youths for a cheap shot at an argument. Those people who barely got to vote, as you call them, are functioning members of society, who were vetted beforehand and given 3+ months of full time training and supervision by licensed and more experienced personnel before they get to perform CPR. Also, CPR isn't that difficult or risky, especially when you don't live in a society of ambulance chasing lawyers where everyone sues everyone for the slightest inconvenience.
> What a thing to say...
I'm not saying this, the facts are. Austrian healthcare and social system, with all its flaws, does a far better job serving the majority of the population, especially the poor and the vulnerable, than the American one does. But let's not get into that right now.
>Sure, except literally not because they'd get the very same by going to school or university.
They go to school and university anyway except with social work there's no grades or exams you need to study for making the time served there less stressful and more focused on the social and practical experience. Plus it's a more diverse setting than university where you mostly meet people with shared domains and interests as you.
>Mandatory military conscription is an act of desperation in the face of potential national annihilation.
You're false again. I don't support mandatory conscription but it's how neutral non-NATO EU nations get to defend their neutrality and provide a detergent against aggressors. The military also has plenty of uses even in peace times, such as natural disasters and what not.
Ugh, "in support" of the veracity of the statement. You wrote that "the healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function" without the work of teenagers. I just wanted to know if you have any solid evidence of this. I will assume not, suspect that this is the usual political bamboozle people fall for when an explanation is needed, and move on.
> And yet at their age they seem qualified enough for the US
I'm not sure why you'd bring this into the discussion. It's devoid of value as far as whataboutism goes but indeed, I agree that it's very wrong in that case too. How about this: some of the US also considers child marriage and subsequent sexual relations, or hard agricultural work legal starting the age of 12. Hitching your wagon to the "others do it too" argument can backfire.
I'm sure those teenagers are functioning members of society but their function isn't to be forced into adult jobs at that age. If they want to pursue a career in this have them watch and learn, like any other teenager is expected in school or university.
> I'm not saying this, the facts are.
Just follow what I'm quoting. You are saying that "You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR". You're being dismissive of an entire profession as "a child can do it with a bit of training". It's not helping your argument. You actually need more than a bit of experience before driving any car safely, let alone an emergency vehicle in a critical situation. A teenager shouldn't be pushed in this kind of job. They have 40-50 years to do exactly that once they're just a bit older.
> Austrian healthcare and social system [...] does a far better job [...] than the American one does.
That's great. And again I have to say, how does this comparison help? When is it ever useful to compare to someone not doing a good job? This just says you can do worse. Focus on how to do better.
> You're false again.
And yet you go on to confirm that it's how they defend against aggressors, an indisputably desperate situation. That's exactly what desperation means, doing something to prevent/mitigate one of the worst situations a country can be in.
Now I sense that you made some assumptions about me, given the repeated US references. I'm European, my opinion about what the US is doing on internal social aspects, or external military/political aspects could be better. And I lived and worked in Austria for years many eons ago. I hope that helps you put in context what I said. Let me boil it down: let children be children; at the edge of adulthood let them choose where they go and guide them, don't force them, unless there is a desperate situation; use your critical thinking and don't believe (or worse, promote) the vagaries your government sells you when they want something their way.
> You're being dismissive of an entire profession as "a child can do it with a bit of training". It's not helping your argument.
Nobody is being dismissive of anything. I'm just showing you proof that 17 year olds can also be professionals in that field because what is a professional, but someone who received professional levels of training and got certified. Guess what? So are those 17-19 year old boys and girls to the same standards of much older people.
In fact you're the one being dismissive and ageist because you think young people can't be trained to do a job just because of their age.
> A teenager shouldn't be pushed in this kind of job.
And yet they seem to be doing it just fine. And they are not pushed, they can choose for which service they volunteer. They can work in kindergartens, but many choose emergency services because of the practical life skills learned there, camaraderie, and other personal reasons.
> don't force them, unless there is a desperate situation; use your critical thinking and don't believe (or worse, promote) the vagaries your government sells you when they want something their way.
Nobody is forcing them, and it's not my government as I'm not Austrian, and the government doesn't benefit from this as the kids don't do work for the government but they provide work for their own citizens, neighbors, etc.
It seems strange to outsiders like you and me, but this is the path that the Austrian society has democratically chosen for its kids and it seems to be working for them. Why judge someone else because they're different? School kids in Japan also clean their classrooms instead of janitors.
Germany used to have a very similar system to Austria's up until a few years ago. Same deal: do military service or "civil service" instead for 9 months. It was in theory compulsory for all male 18 year olds, but getting disqualified on medical grounds was fairly easy. Still, most young men chose to do it and they were an essential part of Germany's health care system and many other social services (and also eco-conservation).
The system was abolished because compulsory military service was not a great fit for the kind of army the politicians wanted anymore and cost a lot of money. The health care and social sector has faced some struggles as a result. While some of the vacancies have been filled by a new voluntary service scheme, overall it has contributed to a lack of service workers and it has increased costs.
I have done civil service and must say it was a fantastic time. Basically anyone I know who did it looks back at the civil service fondly, as it is much like university in terms of the social opportunities, but you get some money on the side. Military service on the other hand was reportedly much more of mixed bag (as you'd expect, I guess).
> You don't need too long training to be qualified to drive an ambulance or perform CPR. At least not here. Teenagers are quite smart and quick learners if you treat them well.
What? I did civil service in Switzerland and while there are some jobs that require CPR courses to be done before hand, in non is it actually expected that you need it regularly. And for absolutely sure will they not let 18 year old drive ambulances, that's utterly insane.
Can you show me prove that in Austria they let 18 year old civil service people drive ambulances? Because I know for a fact this is not happening in Switzerland.
Let those teenagers join the workforce, use the revenue from the increased societal productivity to hire more professional workers in the health care system.
Sure, but if suddenly cut the students loose from their social duties, you need money now to pay for those who will need to be employed to cover in their places, and you can't wait a few years till those students graduate, get jobs and pay taxes to cover those extra jobs. It's a monetary chicken adnd egg problem.
> It works in Austria quite well. The healthcare and social service systems would not be able to function without the mandatory and voluntary unpaid 9 months work of the 17 - 19 year olds before they hit off for university.
In case anyone is curious, this appears to refer to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zivildienst_in_Austria which is an alternative to conscription in the Austrian Armed Forces. Conscription applies to men (but not women), and this alternative civil service option is chosen by ~40% of these young men.
> We're talking about 17-19 year olds, not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs.
But these people are starting university one year later, which means they graduate a year later, which means these badly needed, highly qualified workers become available to the job market a year later, because they have to spend their time doing some menial job that most of them have no interest in doing. We used to have this nonsense in Germany. Most of the people I know were just goofing off, were drunk or high on the job, or were deliberately destroying equipment, because nobody wanted to be there.
Most of the students do not leave university as high qualified, badly needed workers, but as useless parasites, like lawyers, economists, psychologists, sociologists, ..............
Sure, but if you cut everyone loose now, than the whole system becomes understaffed instantly and collapses. You can't wait 10+ years until all those you cut loose have great paying jobs and their taxes pay for the necessary workers.
I have done social service instead of military in Switzerland where we have the same system. In fact we have to do 1.5 years of before we are 30. I worked in at least 5 (old people homes and hospitals) different positions. In not a single one of them is it true to say the system couldn't function if not for the civil service workers.
Simply paying normal people to do that work would be perfectly reasonable.
> is far more valuable to society than the taxes they would pay doing some minimum wage part time job waiting tables
Yeah but most people don't actually work minimum wage jobs. Me as a Software Developer spend 6 month cleaning windows. While this was reasonable fun and low stress not sure my window cleaning experience has this great benefit for society.
> not experienced workers who need to be pulled away from their well paying jobs
You start your job one year later and therefore spend 1 year less doing it before retirement, not sure how this is difficult to figure out.
It seems like you do not realize that the 30 year olds who don’t flip burgers and make more than minimum age were once those 19 year olds whose career you’ve delayed by 1 year.
You can search for different keywords to find open positions. For me personally I worked in:
- Hospital as a Programmer (they made position for me)
- In another hospital as Technician (hanging up stuff, changing light-bulls, assessing damage, configuring doors and so on)
- Old people home, I worked for in technical service, including garden work.
- Old people home, I also worked as a cleaner, mostly windows, floors and so on.
In the hospital you can also work as a bed mover for example. You can work directly in old people care and things.
In general there are 100s of position, some position are even going with international aid organization to other countries. A friend of mine did his in archeology departments digging up old stuff. Another friends simply did farm work with a mountain farmer, that's the easiest to get (he in fact simply was to lazy to get a job so they assigned him to a farmer).
> And to finance it, everyone should serve a year of their life for public services like that.
To people who argue like this, I often argued in the past that if I were to contribute on an open source project for one year instead, this would do a lot more good for the public welfare.
It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case.
The problems lie elsewhere. IMHO there are two major problems with public transport in Germany. One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused. The second is complexity. Each local transport association has its own ticketing system, and they really like to make them complicated. The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, as it is one ticket for most (unfortunately with a few exceptions...) local public transport.
> It's not really controversial in Germany, and largely the case.
Well... sort of, but the incentives are broken. Simplified version of what has happened so far: In 1994 the Deutsche Bundesbahn was fused with the eastern Reichbahn and converted into the Deutsche Bahn AG. The German state is the owner of this company but the corporation is run as it were publicly traded. Getting it onto the stock market at least in part was a goal but the last attempt was scrapped after the 2007 financial crisis.
The results of privatization were quite destructive though. In an attempt to make the Deutsche Bahn AG more profitable, cost cutting measures were implemented. The led to a sharp decline of rail transport service in rural areas. Furthermore expensive railway switches on main lines were dramatically reduced in numbers, hampering the ability to route traffic around disturbances on a track. The rest of the infrastructure is less maintained and more likely to be run until it wears out. People have accused the Deutsche Bahn AG that they are skimping on maintenance as a cost saving measure, because new construction to replace broken infrastructure will be paid by the state, but maintenance is not and thus cutting into the profits.
The DB AG has been mismanaged for at least 30 years and it shows. If I had one wish, I'd really would like to see the DB AG aspiring to the punctuality and general quality of service offered by the Swiss Federal Railways.
Japanese railway don't easily beat everything in Switzerland. If you look at rural service Swiss service is often just as good or better and more punctual.
Japanese punctuality numbers are inflated because their high punctuality of their high speed trains that run on dedicated separated infrastructure. In fact, large reason that punctuality in Switzerland suffers is because international trains that mess up the schedule (looking at you Germany).
And unlike Japan Switzerland is also world leading in using railway cargo transport, that also has to share the same infrastructure.
But in general, its not just about public and private, that a simplified vision. Its something for politicians to talk about rather then talking about the actual details of the system.
While Japan is privately operated, its certainty still under public control.
In fact in Switzerland there are quite a few railway companies for both cargo and people using the same infrastructure. Some of them are semi-private or owned by local governments or a mix of other organizations. The Semi-Private Post office runs its own trains for example.
It's hard to overemphasize just how fucked up public transport ticketing in Germany is. As a simple example, you're a tourist in Cologne for a few days, what's the best ticket if you're planning to travel around the city and take a day trip to the nearby city of Wuppertal (but across the Verkehrsbund boundary, alas) to ride the famous monorail?
It should have no issue at all to align German wide but they never did it.
The Munich MVG for example is doing an experiment were you can pay by an app from some us company were you just start and stop your journey with a button and the app gives you the best price.
They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
It's ridiculousl that modern problems are often not technical problems:-(
The issue is not the lack of technical expertise. The structure of the German public transport system is very localized, due to its historical growth. local networks are often owned by the municipalities that they are serving, the actual busses are sometimes provided by private companies on contract, the national railway carrier has contracts with state governments and certain local entities for specific services, national, state and local governments are subsidizing various services, etc.
I completely agree that it is a mess, but it is not really easy to solve with so many stakeholders and so many (sometimes conflicting but valid) different priorities at stake.
> They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
But that already works with the »DB Navigator« app by Deutsche Bahn.
You can buy tickets for many local public transport companies. No need to download a custom app.
> One is underfunding, which causes a lack of reliability, and plenty of lines that are overused.
> The 49 euro ticket is a step in the right direction here, ...
Errm, you do see the contradiction here, no?
The 49 Euro ticket is actually heavily subsidized which means more tax payer money is wasted that could be invested into the infrastructure of public transport.
In Europe, ownership of public transport is a pretty wild mix, and corporations that are publicly owned (or indirectly so) do not seem to work substantially better than private corporations that won public contracts.
Aside from ideological arguments, can you support your opinion by pointing out examples that show that public ownership of means of transport improves customer experience? Because as someone who travels all the time with public transport, I definitely care about my customer experience. I spend quite a lot of time in trains and trams, and I want the time spent there not to be arduous.
Notably, once you look at the related field of airlines, many publicly owned airlines were outright atrocious (looking at you, Alitalia). The traditional Czech airline, ČSA, was blown apart when the local social democrats appointed their useless crook of a colleague (a former minister who was looking for a nice job) to be the CEO, and he ran the airline to the ground with alarming speed.
> Even more: Public transport is a public good which should be funded by fossil fuel taxes and provided to users without cost.
A lot of public transport runs on fossil fuels. Especially, since Germany was so »smart« to shutdown all nuclear reactors so that coal has become the most important source of electricity again.
that is not incompatible with the concept?
It's not as though the resaon for public transport is soley to reduce emissions/use less of a limited resource, and even if it were & all public transport used it, its still vastly more efficient to move 50 people with 1.5x the motor that would otherwise be moving 2 people
They’re about to double the amount of carbon taxes levied on large trucks. That tax used to be used for building new roads but it’s now all being given over to new rail infrastructure.
Why is it a public good? It only benefits the individuals who are travelling. If I take the train to visit my sister, I don't see how that is in the public's interest.
Public parks you don't sit in are still public goods; public litter bins are still public goods even if you never have anything to put into them; public roads are still a public good even if you don't own a vehicle.
Likewise, if you want them to be, so is public transport.
Though, here's a question: I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport — is that just my observations being weird, or is that a true distinction? And if genuine, why?
People usually distinguish between local and long-distance travel, nobody is arguing that bullet trains should be free and planes fall into the same category.
The fact that long-distance highways tend to be free speaks more to politics than logic, and there are a few notable exceptions (eg Japan) where all expressways are tolled.
Highways are also tolled in Italy and I think France, its not that exceptional.
And in Switzerland for example you just pay a really high gas tax that funds the highway, plus you have to pay a one time fee and get a sticker, otherwise you are not allowed to drive on the highway.
>public parks, public litter bins, public roads
These examples are permanent things, that only need to be maintained, and it's easier to just let the government handle them instead of letting the individual pay or having a subscription model or something alike.
Also: all the public goods you mentioned cannot be managed by any single individual, that's why they are in the public hand, but it only goes so far as your activity is in "public range".
You can't pave your own roads, you can't carry a trash can with you wherever you go and you can't play football in your house. That's why the government gives you roads, parks and trash cans. But: it is not allowed to put your house trash into a public bin. Or have a barbecue in the public park, or block the roads for a protest.
I think using the train is more like using the car. I can agree that the tracks are a public good, but actually using the train is clearly different from that.
Just like the government provides me roads, but not with rides.
> I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport
I guess my framework fits that, because while you may need to maintain the air and the airport, the individual flights only help the individual person.
> I don't think I've ever seen planes classified as public transport
In remote parts of the world, planes absolutely should be classified as public transport. Remote towns in Alaska, for example, are essentially inaccessible without bush planes.
However, planes are expensive to operate on a per-passenger basis, and in most places there are cheaper ways to facilitate helping people move around, especially since most trips from most people are short-distance.
Most public goods don't benefit everyone equally; that's never the case, and that's fine.
My house has never been on fire (knock on wood), but I'm perfectly happy that my taxes pay for a fire department. I don't often use the park up the street that's currently undergoing a massive renovation/rebuild, but I'm happy that my taxes are paying for the renovation. I don't drive on every single road in the city, but I'm glad my tax dollars make it possible for people to get around even in places where I don't need to go. I don't have kids (and don't plan to), but I'm happy that the taxes I pay go toward educating the kids who live here.
Many public transit agencies are run at a loss; I'm absolutely fine with my tax dollars making up the difference. From there it's just a matter of degree: is it fully funded by taxes, or still partially funded by fare revenue? I'd be fine with the former, too.
It may be the case that I cause a lot less externalities, but I don't think that affects the definition of a public good. If I visited my friend by using a motorcycle, I'd cause less externalities too, but I don't think motorcycles are public goods. Same with scooters, e-bikes and normal bikes.
> but I don't think that affects the definition of a public good
You happen to be misconstruing the two definitions of "public good":
> a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization.
> the benefit or well-being of the public.
As such, something can be a "public good" without being "a benefit".
I don't think I'm misconstruing these two definitions, because I didn't talk about the definitions you just brought up. I also think it is quite clear that I'm talking about what the government should or shouldn't provide, not what some specific government currently is providing.
Because reality requires these things of us but we should minimize the impact.
You’re just stringing words together to look smart; physical reality calls the shots. Your attempt to conjure some immutable truth in Anglo gibberish is banal
> If I drink water from a public water fountain why is that in the public's interest?
If there were no fountain, then many people would get water bottles and that's too big of a hassle.
Defining a public good is quite hard, and any definition will most likely other controversial terms like "reasonably" or "foreseeable" in them. However, I think a public good is something that can be shared by many people in reasonable amounts, and that cannot reasonably be attained by the average individual. It is usually characterized by its scale.
So for example, you can't build your own park, but you can use the public park without blasting your music on max volume.
> If there were no fountain, then many people would get water bottles and that's too big of a hassle.
Right, and if there was no public transit, then many more people would need to buy and drive cars, and that's not great for the public's interest either.
But a fountain is something that naturally occurs. It is used in that way because it gives more water than anyone can use, but enough water for everyone in reasonable amounts. It's not just some kind of lesser evil.
Trains and railroads must first be built and maintained, they are on the same level as roads and busses.
I think there is a difference between providing the opportunity and giving things out for free.
You're saying public transport is on the same level as roads. Most roads are free to use because they're maintained with tax money, just like free public transport would be, because they're both in the public's interest.
Roads are explicitly set up to be directly operated upon by members of the general public – railways on the other hand, not so much. [1] So a railway without a corresponding service isn't of much use to me as an end-user.
[1] Both because there are higher safety expectations for railways than for roads and because one of the inherent working principles of railways is to bundle individual demand into larger units (a.k.a. trains) that can be moved across the network en bloc. If everybody tried to operate their own individual little train across the network the way you do with driving your car, things wouldn't work out.
Only if you assume a road network of infinite size which goods and various services can traverse without any interference from private car owners. Which a short look at any given city during peak hours should disprove and those roads are not free either.
I'm neither an individualist nor an American. I'm actually from Germany and experienced how the 3 months of Deutschlandticket affected the people around me.
If you're a business it will help you if you can select employees or receive customers from a large geographical region. As the economy and all public services depend on businesses, that's the public interest.
Not controversial in the handful of countries where public transportation is efficient and ubiquitous. Americans are fed constant propaganda about how publicly owned anything isn’t possible, sold to them by the very people whose profits rely on this being true.
Doesn't really cover a lot of things you'd want to know like price, satisfaction, reliability, etc. - all of which, I believe, are strongly negative compared with 30 years ago. Also doesn't tell you if it's long distance or commuter or both - which is an important distinction since many more people commute these days.
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
Prices were so heavily subsidized they were ruining the government's finances, so that's not a valid metric to compare on because it wasn't sustainable. Even when being bailed out by massive amounts of tax (a regressive tax!), ridership was falling because the services sucked so hard that they couldn't compete with cars/trucks, despite the latter being a source of tax revenue, not a sink.
Dunno about satisfaction but clearly, when people were truly dissatisfied they stayed away and now the primary causes of satisfaction and reliability problems are simply that the network is so in demand it's at capacity all the time, especially London commuter routers. Some of that is driven by the huge increases in population via immigration in the last 20 years but some of it is just that privatized services are better, so people use them more.
If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes.
But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)
It's certainly possible this was caused by who owned what; but I'd just add the decline on the graph begins around the UK's pyrrhic victory in WW1 which IMO marked (in tandem with Irish independence) the beginning of the decline of the British Empire; while the rise at the end is roughly congruent with the increasing wealth from exploitation of the North Sea gas deposits and (depending how much you accept the possibility of noise in the data making it hard to tell exactly which year it changed direction) joining the precursor to the EU.
North Sea came on-stream at the start of the 80s. The rise in rail traffic clearly starts around the time of privatization in ~95 and the huge plunge followed by decline starts around the time of nationalization.
Certainly there were other problems: the nationalization was downstream of the socialization of the British economy between the end of ww2 and Thatcher, and as can be seen rail traffic (a general proxy for economic health) is in steady decline from then until it rebounds slightly in the 80s before taking off again once put in (mostly) private hands in the 90s.
The reason the graph seems to run a few years ahead of the changes is that actually privatizing and nationalizing something on the scale of a national railway takes a few years to implement between politicians floating the idea and the final handover of power, but the effect on people's motivations and incentives begins almost immediately.
The infrastructure (railways and stations) is still publicly owned under Network Rail. Only the trains themselves are privately owned (often by foreign state-owned enterprises, funnily enough)
There is a big problem with this graph. Its highly misleading.
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
Nobody should be drawing any conclusions from a graph like that, since it provides no useful information allowing anyone to draw any conclusion about anything.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.
That's one of those grand standing issues that many people like to focus on. The reality is the is a wild mix of private, public and everything in between out there in the world. And some system that are increasingly good have combinations of everything.
Generally speaking making great announcements about how things will be and how an idealized version should look like often distracts from making the incremental improvements necessary to ever get to this point.
To many time is wasted in politics arguing about fundamental principles and almost non about actually improving the situation of transit riders. If you have a shitty semi private system, just taking public ownership often doesn't improve service at all.
Usually there are 10 things that would be easier to do and help people more. Once you actually have larger part of the public using it, then you have a better argument to make it public.
Ownership is no more than a collection of rights on what to do with the owned asset that is recognized by society. Regulate more and there won’t be much difference between private and public property, so ownership is less relevant than financial and incentive framework around public transportation system.
It's very plausible to have public transit systems be publicly owned by a mix of local, regional, and national bodies. Each of which might have their own local goals to incentivize with no regard for what a system on the other side of the country wants.
Public ownership and good organization can be, and frequently are, two very different things.
People love making this remark still in the UK despite the Government having much more direct control of more rail services than compared to pre-COVID, and the rail network being in an absolutely dire state. Public != good, public != bad, private != good, private != bad
Sure, but completely unrestricted free markets would also reintroduce slavery etc. to the modern world.
Free markets are great at reducing inefficiencies in a world in which no participant decides to coordinate with other participants for profit. which obviously doesn't work, just like communism doesnt work at societal scales.
Huh? How is the idea that public transit should be publicly owned Americentric? A stereotypical/caricatured Americentric take on that would be to privatize everything.
Because its publicly owned in most places publicly (Japan, China, Europe , Australia, Russia, India, South East Asia, Africa... It seemingly is only the US & Canada where it isn't
So bringing it up is very American since the comment doesn't work anywhere else.
Because public transport is owned by the public (or publicly owned entities) in many places outside the US. In Europe, it is the norm, not the exception, as is the case in many other places that have some sort of socialism/social democratic history.
Haha - at the same time many libertarians / conservatives want there to be no infrastructure owned by the public! Another way we are at war with ourselves in the good old semi-public private USA.
Well, the problem is, especially in Germany. If someone is a "Beamter" which can't be fired, has low income, there's no motivation to make a good job.
It took me 3 months to get a Bescheinigung über Daueraufenthalt" .
In theory, yes, transportation as well as communication should be owned by the public and available for free.
A state that has 100 billion for buying weapons can afford that too.
Buy Germany has deteriorated into a corrupt state and it still has a system endemic Nazi problem.
By this point, there can't be too many "Beamte" left in Germany's railway and public transit systems. After all, nobody there has received that status since the 90s.
I won't dispute that there is corruption and that there are still Nazis and right wing forces around - especially if you look in certain german states.
But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye".
Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for?
When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement.
And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.
> Why can I not do that online with my ID?
> Why is she even typing it at all
Social function of work. If you do it yourself, what will she do?
If you come up with a solution freeing hundreds of people doing some monkey jobs some in Germany will consider this evil, since people are losing their means of earning salary. This is more difficult with the officials, since they have guaranteed employment.
German speaking here. Keeping people busy with bullsh*t jobs just for the sake of keeping them busy is not a good investment, not financially nor for the sanity of the people themselves.
In fact, in Germany you can see that it leads to government paralysis everywhere. In contrast, they should free "Staatsbeamte" from those stupid jobs and encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands. No jobs lost, but talent attracted. This eventually leads to operational excellence. The current state of affairs is overly defensive and reactionary.
I live and work in Germany for almost two years now.
I witnessed at least two panic attacks caused by the implementation of your suggestion to "encourage them to start thinking themselves instead of blindly executing top-down commands".
You automatically get signed up for it if your parents were in the church and paid tax. You have to pay a fee to get out of it and keep your paper document forever in case the government forgets you don’t owe that tax for 20 years past
Berlin reporting: this is huge for anyone taking public transport.
Monthly ticket for the AB area alone was way above 80/€/month for the city only.
This is 49 for everything anywhere in Germany except for high speed long distance trains, flixbuses and flixtrains (the latter are private entities)
That's for AB (66,90). But you have to compare it to the ABC yearly "Abo", as you will have access to all areas. That's 88€ per month if you pay the 1056 lump sum for the yearly version. Over 100€ if you pay monthly.
I am spending 2 months in Germany starting in August, if I'm not mistaken this will also cover local S-Bahn/U-Bahn trains and DB routes, but will not cover ICE trains. Is this correct?
Yes, everything but ICE, unless your train is 20 minutes delayed, otherwise you can split things up via regional routes.
Can I use an ICE/IC train with the Deutschland-Ticket if I know I will reach the destination with a considerable delay?
Yes, you have the right to do so according to statutory passenger rights if the local train has an expected delay of at least 20 minutes. To travel by long-distance train, you must first buy a ticket. The travel costs will then be reimbursed subsequently upon request by the railway company with which you travel, e.g. by the passenger rights service centre of Deutsche Bahn.
Overcrowding is the best thing that could happen, we need more public transport users as quickly as possible.
Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
> Overcrowding is the best thing that could happen, we need more public transport users as quickly as possible.
Unless the capacity of public transport grows as well, no.
> Then, of course, the guy in charge who doesn't know how road signs work would have to take care of spending further investments, which is probably going to accidentally land in car infrastructure.
Roads aren't just for cars but also trucks which are the backbone of German logistics.
Certainly that's a risk, but I'd hope they've done some projections on it.
I'm not all that worried that this will cause overcrowding since I'd wager many people who bought the first round of tickets are just transferring over their current local subscription to the national one. Both my wife and I did that for example.
It is worth noting that this ticket is 10€ cheaper than our prior subscription, which I expect will result in a solid bit less revenue for the regional transit authorities. With a system that's already straining from under-investment, hopefully this doesn't compound already existing problems.
Local public transport is mainly being paid for by the local county and city councils, who in turn are often relatively cash-strapped and cannot cover large revenue shortfalls on their own.
Local and regional mainline railway services are being paid for by the state governments, who however in turn are to a large extent relying on federal grants paid for that purpose [1].
The new ticketing scheme was instigated at the behest of the federal government, which has the biggest financing power, but has only pledged a limited (technically unlimited this year, but since the new ticketing scheme only became effective in May, it's very unlikely that the original fixed amount will be exceeded this year) amount for covering any revenue shortfalls up to 2025 (and strong-armed the states into pledging the same amount of money for that period, too).
So if it turns out that the combination of cheaper tickets, still present after-effects of the pandemic (i.e. loss of ridership and revenue) and current inflation means that losses are higher than expected, there's plenty of scope for finger-pointing and pushing the blame around, and at least localised service cuts in more cash-strapped cities and counties (respectively states, in the case of mainline railways) remain a possibility.
[1] Historically, local/regional services were operated and paid for by the then Federal Railways. When, in preparation for privatisation of the railways, the responsibility for contracting for/tendering of those services was transferred to the state governments, they also received a corresponding financial grant in return for taking on that responsibility. It might or might not have been the original intention, but in practice those federal grants are the main source of financing for local/regional mainline services to this day.
There was already a 9€ ticket last year, while I wansnt in Germany at that time I didn't read a lot about overcrowding.
With a more expensive ticket the effect will probably be even smaller today, though in the long run all trains will probably get more filled up.
Everybody I know complained about it. The 9€ ticket didn’t cover the ICE trains and instead put more strain on those lines that are already needed by lower- to median income commuters. Regional train lines have rush hours too and during those 9€ Tickets months some wild videos went viral, where things got heated between old and „new“ users
Something I really appreciate in Taiwan is a single card works for all transit. What I found cool in Sydney was metro turnstiles would read contactless credit cards. And I'm shocked and thrilled that the Bay Area consolidated on one system.
The US is pretty split up and doesn't use trains outside the NE corridor, so it's not as useful, but it'd be nice if congress would start work on unifying transit payments across the country over the next decade. Also unifying car toll payments. These balkanized systems are just silly.
As an American I am increasingly jealous of European countries and their public transport (among other things cough health care cough gun control).
It feels like the only way we will ever get there as a country is one state at a time, and even then you see projects like California's high-speed rail that's massively over-budget and overdue. At least the blue states seem to _get_ it, meanwhile those who live in red or purple states will just be left behind as always because of how intensely politics has carved a divide between people and led to so many unfounded lies being propagated to their citizens.
All that to say, good on Germany. Now U.S., get your shit together.
When blue states show me a viable public transportation network for a reasonable cost I will support them in my red state.
Consider the CA high speed rail a PoC for the nation. Would you endorse copying that model? Is Chicago increasing its ridership/coverage (honest question).
Honestly, I couldn't tell you. I think the U.S. so far has failed horribly on this front. My note about blue states was simply that they are the only ones pushing for public transport like this. But will we ever see CA high-speed rail that's cheap and useful? I'm not sure.
It's obvious that the real cost of things like highspeed rail come from environmental regulation and cost of land purchases from existing land owners. European & Asian countries have obviously figured out a way to streamline this process. They have more lax environmental restrictions and acquire land either through force or by never allowing people to purchase land outright (in the case of China I believe). I don't know if we want to go that far, but at a certain point we have to do something because riding around on congested aging highways everywhere is not the answer.
"Pushing for" is not a strategy. What I'm seeing in various blue US cities here is public transport falling into disuse in 2020, turning into a homeless encampment (often with the concomitant violence and theft) in 2021, and still not recovering in 2023. Philadelphia's SEPTA is still (2022) at half the 2019 ridership. It doesn't help that some lines got almost cancelled in 2020 (reduced to just a few trains per day), which likely caused a bunch of people to buy cars and not look back.
And here I am wondering how I-5 in CA or I-75 in Atlanta having more lanes in one direction than most states have going in both directions even in their busiest of areas is blue states getting it or red states not getting it.
Also, tying in gun control or enforced Medicare-for-all is a good way of convincing people who are on the edge of public transit to not support you politically if they are a package deal, which right now it appears to be.
This is a little bit hyperbole. I-5 through LA county is mostly 4-ish lanes and even chokes down to 2 lanes wide in boyle heights by downtown LA. Its just as wide much of podunk I-75 that serves Toledo, Ohio, with a population of 270k that declines by the year. If anything given the population density, the freeways in socal are underbuilt compared to cities out east from there who seem to have just as sprawling interchanges and number of lanes despite what is sometimes an order of magnitude difference in population.
As soon as we give up our over-sized personal income and pay more taxes we'll be able to have more public infrastructure.
The issue seems to be people don't like the idea of only keeping 50% (or less) of their income + making 50% less to begin with. Most people that work at big tech get their big salaries because the companies profit in data-mining ways that would be more regulated in Europe.
While the US is investing less in transit than other countries, the projects themselves are silly expensive compared to other countries. For how little transit is used in the US, it's amazing how much (relative) funding there is.
To get the US towards building much more transit (and other infrastructure) there are many hurdles, but one of the main ones is building useful things for non-obscene amounts of money.
yeah, that goes back to us paying people more than other countries. People in the US make a killing managing projects, working in the office, etc... not to mention the huge amounts the C-Suite as salary and bonuses for their leadership on these projects.
The thing is though, it's not even most higher-salaried tech workers that we need to tax heavier. We need to tax the rich. When I say the rich I don't mean people making 300k/yr. I mean people making a million or more per year. We need to massively increase the marginal tax rate at around $3 million to around 90%. This was how it was as recently as the 80's, and repealing those taxes has led to an increase in wealth inequality this country has never seen.
To be honest, I don't really care if you have a pistol or a shotgun even. I don't want assault rifles to be easily accessible by people who want to murder children, LTBTQ people, or whoever else is deemed each week to deserve a mass murder.
I say ban all guns, or at least the guns that are designed to murder mass amounts of people.
Evil will always exist. You can't take evil out of humanity. Many places thought they could and never succeeded (e.g. communism thought they could somehow overrule mankind's tendency towards greed)
Removing guns from good people will only ensure good people will be attacked by evil people, whether inside or outside of your desired utopia.
Did you look at the papers I linked? One is about how Australia instituted a ban on guns and immediately not only saw a drop to zero mass shootings but also numerous other benefits including general murder rates dropping
I doubt you'd have the drop in this sort of situation if it were to play out, not to mention you just guaranteed the situation will progress violently.
I got the Deutschlandticket for May and am tempted to travel from Berlin to Stralsund. Using RE/RB for this journeh takes more or less three hours without any train change (so not having to deal with the possible delay(s) and missing connecting rides), however I do hope the operator supports reserving a seat in advance with this subscription, cause otherwise showing up at the station not knowing for sure I'd have a seat would deter me from using this offer and instead just book ICE/IC (if any).
Agreed. This is actually a "why public systems fail" critique approaching from the left -- we assume systems need a cost to function correctly. For something like transit, collecting fares involves:
1) Systems and equipment to issue and collect fares -- boxes, kiosks, scanners, currency handling, staff to collect and deposit currency, arrangements with payment providers, educational materials about paying fares, websites with instructions on how to pay fares (often in multiple languages)
2) Systems to enforce fare payment -- humans, typically, to police the fares
3) Systems to analyze fare rates -- are fares too low, too high, are they being paid at the correct rates, do we need to publish new content on how much fares are changing this year
4) Queues to pay fares -- entering a bus or train requires a turnstile, tap, or other impediment that slows access
5) Systems to ensure everyone has access -- either fares price out the poorest, or we provide means for the poor to get reduced and free fares. Provide systems for workers to get fares subsidized through their workplaces.
These systems are really inefficient. I mean, they might be run efficiently, but their existence is itself an inefficiency. If we believe transit is useful and valuable, we could simply pay for it once in taxes. Cutting out all the fare maintenance systems would save a huge amount of money, which could be spent on maintenance, comfort, cleaning, additional routes, etc. and the experience would be much nicer (hop on/hop off whenever you need).
Hamburg's busses don't have coin boxes or sell tickets/fares? You don't have any mechanism that requires swiping a card, tapping a device, showing a card/ticket to an operator, or otherwise proving you have, in fact, purchased a fare?
It's pretty quick, but on the busiest bus routes it slows things down.
Edit: Reading up, it looks like they don't really have those things, and rely on a combination of very infrequent inspectors (which do slow things and cost money) and the honor system.
In Switzerland there are no gates or a need for "showing a card/ticket to an operator, or otherwise proving you have, in fact, purchased a fare".
You just enter the bus/train/tram vehicle. Maybe a ticket controllant comes, maybe not (most often they dont come and check)
EDIT: To get a ticket you simple open the app and "check in". When you leave the transport you open the app and "check out". At the end of the day the system calculated the cheapest ticket for you based on that 24h period. This works across the entire country. From local buses to high speed intercity rail
You are haltingly recapitulating Evgeny Morozov's essay "Why You Should Ride the Metro in Berlin" (which is really about public transit in a large portion of Europe).
The inspectors don't slow things down. (They do cause other more serious issues, but still far less than anywhere in the US.)
For people who can't afford the ticket, there can be special prices. For example in my hometown, people with low-income pay less. Kids from low-income families pay nothing.
The new ticket for Germany makes everyone happy. No-one will leave the country because of that. In this moment I'm using it here in Munich, I paid the full price. I'm happy, even though I'm also highly taxed. It's progress to give everybody the option for affordable and simple public transport throughout Germany.
Rare piece of good news. Not so much the particulars (projects might fail for any number of reasons) but the indication that there is appetite for systemic change.
Hm nice, here in Barcelona we have a similar deal for 20 euro, but it only covers the metro area.
Still, it's rare for me to go further away and it wouldn't make sense to pay 50 bucks a month for that. And if I go to another major city I would use a high speed train which wouldn't be included anyway.
So 20 a month for all city travel is pretty ideal here, especially with Spain's low wages.
While the thing does sell, they can only already claim "millions" because existing holders of season tickets are being converted either automatically or manually, so the whole news release is also a bit of the usual PR exaggeration.
The Netherlands also has something similar: a country-wide public transit card. You put money on the card and then you can use it for all forms of public transport, checking in and out using that card. When it was introduced there was a lot of skepticism about whether it's a good thing, but now 10-15 years later I can't imagine not having it.
Likewise, there's a country-wide public transit planner, 9292.nl. It works across all public transit companies. Seeing how fractured other countries' public transit are, it's amazing how 9292 came to be. I have no idea why Dutch public transit companies decided to work together to make it possible.
We do have a single transit card, but the cost is outrageous imo. To travel 25km from Weert to Eindhoven in the south costs €6.70 one way during "rush hour". So to commute to work, I need to pay €13.40 per day, not included the bus transfer from the central station to my office (another few euros).
Now before you mention it, yes I know employers have to pay for transportation to and from work, but that doesn't solve the problem for self employed people or visitors/tourists or occasional travelers.
A few weeks ago, my wife and I wanted to go to Den Bosch to see some friends. It was cheaper and faster to drive from the edge of Limburg to Den Bosch & pay for fuel/parking than it was to take the train from our local station (for 2 people). I can live with the extra time required, but the cost was too much.
If the government wants to incentivize more train travel, I shouldn't need to pay for than the cost of a many eurozone plane tickets to travel from Eindhoven to Amsterdam by train.
While in Germany last summer, I used the 9 EUR ticket and regional trains to go from Frankfurt to Bavarian Alps. The trains were packed, one could not move there and it felt more like being in India than in Germany. I am wondering if that's going to be a norm in the future.
It is a good thing if people actually fill up the trains and get value out of them. While empty trains are comfortable, they are an inefficiency. The 9€ ticket showed that people would really like to be more mobile ´if they could afford it. Making this possible creates value for society.
And Frankfurt -> Alps is not regional transport, but inter-city at least. So faster option would have been ICE and going 250km/h. More expensive though, for sure. And a seat reservation for a few euros.
150 EUR vs 9 EUR and one still had to use slow regional trains once reaching Ulm so it was not that much different time-wise to justify much higher cost. Regional Express trains I used from Frankfurt to Ulm are also pretty fast (not ICE level, but not much time lost either).
We need Uber for Public Transit. Enter you destination and it tells you which bus to get on in real time, when to transfer and deducts payment automatically at the end of your trip.
The Uber experience on transit would make lots never riders and occasional riders use transit more often.
The mental load is a lot of some people at the end of the day, driving is just easier.
Anyone who regularly uses public transit in the USA could tell you this isn't a serious solution to a real issue.
You use either Google Maps, Apple Maps, or the Transit app to tell you what to get on. You either buy a local nfc card or have an app on your phone you tap on the sensor to pay.
Having to use more than one app isn't an significant burden compared to the fact that that trains and busses don't come to the places I want at the times I want reliably.
Some cities come close to that, but most don't. Ignoring the fact that most cities in the US don't have expansive transit, even _getting a transit card_ can be a challenge in many cities.
* in Denver, CO - there is a custom app that works fairly well until your phone is dead. Couldn't find a place to purchase tap cards, but the paper ticket vending machines worked well enough.
* Seattle, WA - still working on mobile NFC tickets, and the current mobile ticketing system seems to only allow existing (> 1 year ago) customers to pay using a credit card. All new customers seem to only be allowed to use the app by filling up their balance using cash at a convenience store. Tap cards were an extremely rare find last summer. Only a select few buses seem to send their tracking data to Apple/Google maps, the OneBusAway app was really the only one that was close to accurate.
* Dallas, TX - yet another custom app implementation
* Austin, TX - _another_ custom app
* Portland, OR - can only buy tap cards at some retailers, BUT they accept contactless credit cards and have an app that integrates with mobile NFC
While I haven't been to NYC and a number of other cities with large transit systems, Portland OR and Washington DC had the best implementations, largely because they simply integrated with the native mobile NFC wallet. DC even lets you provision your card straight from the iOS Wallet app, though you can't use a standard contactless credit card.
IMO the solution isn't an app, but rather simplifying fares and accepting contactless credit cards for fares. In Portland you "earn" your passes by riding rather than needing to purchase in advance - once you have paid $100 in a month you're automatically exempted from fares for the rest of a month.
I'm quite familiar with the situation in Denver. Your criticism is that it doesn't work well if your phone dies. True, but I'm replying to someone suggesting "Uber for Public Transit". I presume that involves a app rather than a physical product.
It would be kinda neat if we standardized across the country on one app, but it's nowhere near the top of the list of things to address. Most people mostly use one or a small number of public transit systems. You can just have more than one app. Municipalities are also increasingly opening up the payment system such that apps like Google Maps and Transit are able to offer buy ticket buttons.
It's overcomplicated. Take swiss by example. You turn on gps, press a button, take any transport you like, even boats. When you are done, press the button again and it calculates final price. It's called easyride. In theory you can avoid pressing the second time, I've read the app understands anyway that you are no longer in transport and will not charge you
Nor does GM understand ticketing nuances or optimized route costs. (discount cards, demand-based pricing). This is a big problem in cities without integrated fare systems. In many places, 3rd party planner apps are a must.
The solution to that is to get rid of the nuance and optimization opportunities and turn them into a small across-the-board discount. Far fairer.
Google Maps does offer "Buy Ticket" buttons for a number of agencies that have opened up their systems. They're far from universal coverage. But a new Uber for Transit would snap up the APIs Google has worked to open up and then be in the same position.
Because its not the interface on your phone to do that. On iPhone at least, you have apple wallet and transit agency cards often interface through those means. That's a much better system as you can access it when your phone is dead, unlike something that might be bounded behind google maps.
NYC/SF let you just tap your phone to get on transit. Apple Maps does a great job of trip planning using real time information about the status of trains. It is super smooth and easy. Easier than Uber even.
There are 90 million Germans. Even if they all stopped doing all non-work-related travels immediately, it wouldn't push the needle thanks to China and India.
I'm always confused by this. Climate change is inherently a global issue. It will take progress by _every_ country, not just those with the highest populations. Blaming China and India does no good to help the planet. We should instead push forward progress wherever we can get it and encourage technological progress, market changes, and regulation in this area.
People in India and China hate pollution just as much as the rest of us, they've just been forced by their governments to endure it for the sake of growth. India last year banned single-use plastics. Few other countries have made those sorts of sweeping regulations.
The problem is that in Germany, the city-to-city trains that can be used with this ticket do not have WIFI IIRC. Can anybody confirm this?
Traveling time without WIFI is a much higher burden to me than normal traveling time, where I can work on my projects. I actually like working on the train. It is a nice environment. But without that possibility, long train rides are a chore to me.
And it will be interesting to see how crowded the trains will be.
Durig the 9-Euro ticket times, city-to-city trains were uncomfortably densely packed.
And also the inner city transport - at least in hamburg. Which is a great datapoint I think. Because this was true for all three months if I recall correctly and it means that there is absolutely a lot of public demand for inexpensive/free ways to travel. I work in an area with a lot of publicly subsidised housing which hosts mostly families that are less well off and I sometimes get to talk to these people and what I hear time and time again is how they had trouble paying for public transport and so they put off doctors appointments, can't have their child join a soccer team because they would need a monthly ticket to get to the field or have to compromise on other parts of their life that are completely non-negociable for many others. So there are many higher order effects where making public transport financially accessible to everyone could have positive benefits for financially underpriviledged people.
Also higher public transport usage might lead to less cars and hence less polution, less road damage that needs repair and less crashes and accidents so there might also be other positive effects downstream. I would be interested in a full economic breakdown of this, although that might be hard or infeasible to do. Yet I would not be suprised if it turned out quite positive for most.
The possibility to go long distance on trains meant for commuters is an unfortunate side effect of the ticket, more tolerated than intended.
The big improvement is that the ticket you buy for your home town now also works in cities you visit, no more figuring out a different byzantine price model each time you book a hotel.
Imagine vehicle tax would only permit to drive on the roads of your home town and going elsewhere would require you to register locally. Until yesterday, that was exactly how public transit worked.
In my experience, the mobile connection is very flaky on the trains in Germany.
I would think the train can have a much more powerful antenna to talk to mobile towers and then relay that to the passangers. So that WIFI is better than mobile data.
In my experience network coverage in Germany is way below must other European countries I have visited. Some with a much lower inhabitant desisty like Finland.
From my limited experience on the German rails (Amsterdam - Berlin 5/6 times in the last 4 years) the mobile 4G/5G connection was pretty good. Only dropping off when travelling through very remote rural areas. In the Netherlands we have unlimited data subscriptions, I assume Germany has something similar? That should be enough to get some work done in the train :)
> From my limited experience on the German rails (Amsterdam - Berlin 5/6 times in the last 4 years) the mobile 4G/5G connection was pretty good. Only dropping off when travelling through very remote rural areas.
Not sure what you'd call "very remote rural areas", but when on the main rail lines through Bavaria (Munich-Rosenheim-Salzburg-Vienna and -Rosenheim-Innsbruck-Verona) if you're in the countryside you'll often experience patchy or zero mobile coverage, never mind 4G/5G.
Unlimited data here is rare (or too expensive), usually normal people have 5-10gb a month. Still it covers most web and messaged stuff, just don’t watch too much video….
With 5G speeds and unlimited data* - do you even need WiFi? Not to mention most companies nowadays have clear policies of (not) connecting to free public wifi's or even working in public spaces where your screen may be visible.
* Usually the first 50gb is max speed and then it drops to 25/25 etc - which is still really fast.
> Not to mention most companies nowadays have clear policies of (not) connecting to free public wifi's or even working in public spaces where your screen may be visible.
Why is that? Would a VPN not make it safe against most threat models? I mean assuming you are not working at a place where government actors are trying to target you specifically.
Or can they inject something to force the VPN to disable and hope non-encrypted data gets transmitted?
Because network coverage in Germany is pretty bad, so you are mostly out of reach from networks when traveling by train. It's gotten better over the years since I moved here. But I'm basically still offline 80% of the journey between Berlin and my parents place in the Netherlands. As soon as you cross the border into NL, it's fine. It's a German issue. You have this effect on all its borders. You travel to the border, you are basically offline. As soon as you cross it into Poland, France, Denmark, etc. it's suddenly fine.
Of course train wifi on intercities has the same issues since it relies on the same infrastructure. Even when it works, it tends to be a pretty poor experience and the network is low speed, over subscribed, etc.
What network are you with? This doesn't match my experience -- I've traveled around 35,000km on trains inside Germany in the last few years, and apart from one 5 minute section just outside of Berlin when going SE dresden, I've pretty much always had a full signal.
YMMV I guess. But I just wanted to say that I don't think this is completely accurate.
The track between Berlin, Hannover, Osnabruck is particularly bad. You get some connectivity near those cities but most of the way my phone is useless.
Telekom is better but they too have issues in the country side. I also encounter this issue professionally with our customers as we sell a SAAS app that our customers have to use on site and a disturbingly large number of our customers have either very poor or no connectivity as they tend to be on the edges of cities or in the middle of nowhere. Which in Germany means forget about 5G and hope for the best with a 3G/4G connection with one or two bars if you are standing next to a window. It's a specifically German problem, other countries in the EU have more modern infrastructure.
I travel long distance exclusively by train and can't really confirm. Sure there might be an issue here and there, but overall it's fine. Maybe if you want to watch a very bandwidth intensive video, but I don't know if that's realistic.
Mobile data usually works fine in German regional trains. But if you want trips longer than 2 hours, you probably want the higher speed trains anyway (which now might have less annoying poor people in them)
What’s more annoying is that the price - in regions without good public transportation it’s actually too expensive, but it’s a nice gift to big city dwellers.
It's actually not half as bad for rural residents as it is usually presented by car addicts: for those amongst rural residents who would be interested in making their cumbersome trips using public transit, subscription in conventional price models were usually prohibitively expensive. They basically took distance based single ticket price, scaled by "what if it was used for the full trip five days a week?" and applied some discount. They were offered bad service at high price. In some places 10x the price a city dweller would have to pay for their short range subscription. Sure, many out there won't buy it even at the lower price, but for those who do is a much bigger improvement over the status quo than for a city dweller. For many city dwellers, it will in fact be nothing more than an upsell option to the ticket they already have, pay more (in some places twice as much) for a ticket that will also be valid for the occasional trip out of town.
Even if there was WiFi available on the train, the mobile network outside large population centres is so terrible, you wouldn't be able to get much done. Train WiFi is not magical, it needs proper infrastructure all over the place.
This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess.
With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake.
I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be.
0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_de...