9 ms·

Yes. Regular ticket prices for trains are horrible expensive in Germany. You can pay a yearly fee (called Bahncard) to get 25% (62€) or 50% (255€) off. There is

by nisa 8y ago

Yes. Regular ticket prices for trains are horrible expensive in Germany. You can pay a yearly fee (called Bahncard) to get 25% (62€) or 50% (255€) off. There is also a flatrate for everything called Bahncard 100 (4.270€) You can also book early. Often you get a ticket for 20-60€ but these are limited. At least they made an UI for this: https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_start.post?dbkanal_007=L01_S01_D001_KIN0014_sparpreisfinder-content-button_LZ03#stay https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_start.post?dbka... If you don't use ICE/IC you can get a daily flatrate for 44€ for whole Germany or for 20-25€ for one (or multiple) federal states. Now we often have empty trains and busses are on the Autobahn...

scurvy 8y ago
Why are the prices so high?
- nisa 8y ago
  It's difficult. They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company. They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. They need to invest a lot of money in the coming years because their infrastructure is crumbling and running on attrition. Here are the prices vs. inflation: https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533/1.2598616/default/die-preise-der-deutschen-bahn.jpg https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533... However the price for a certain track depends on a lot of things and this new high-speed track has lot's of buisness customers that avoid a flight this way - so it's priced higher. It's a complicated system with lot's of subsidies, subcontractors and so on. There is a price to pay for using the track to a different company that runs the train... Another problem is that freight train traffic is even more expensive and they simply forgot to invest in the system for 30 years - now the Autobahn is clogged with trucks...
  - bogomipz 8y ago
    >"They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company" Can you say how it is "public owned" if it is not a publicly traded stock? It sound like their bid to list it on the stock exchange failed?
    - nisa 8y ago
      I'm sorry not a native speaker - I mean the GmbH is owned by the state of Germany.
      - majewsky 8y ago
        It's an AG (a stock company), not a GmbH (a limited company). But yeah, all the stocks are still owned by the federal government, and therefore all profits get credited into the federal budget.
        bogomipz 8y ago
        This is interesting. I am curious what is the upside to a stock company if all the shares are owned by the same entity(the government)? Are there some classes of the DB stack that are allowed to be publicly traded then?
        nisa 8y ago
        The original plan was to somehow make the whole thing profitable and publicy trade a large partion of shares - so they bought a lot of companies and hoped that they can refinance the train operations. Turn's out it's not so easy...it was just typical management failure, neoliberal politics and pipedreams - so they stopped it in 2005 - Hartmut Mehdorn the CEO at the time is now infamous for basically destroying everything he touches. It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.
        8y ago
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. Deutsche Bahn is infamous for extracting as much profit as possible, especially when they had no competition (long-distance buses were mostly outlawed until 2012 because of a Nazi-era law). A particularly well-known instance were the local express trains ("S-Bahn") in Berlin where they outright closed many depots and ignored mandated maintenance schedules until: > On May 1, 2009 an S-Bahn train of the class 481 in Kaulsdorf derailed due to a broken wheel. According to S-Bahners, the scheduled general inspection of that train had been postponed for two years. This accident led to the S-Bahn chaos of 2009, since the Federal Railway office mandated shortened test intervals and therefore at times only 165 out of 552 required quarter trains were available. Eventually, all axes had to be replaced because they were generally considered to be inadequate. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn (lightly edited because the original article reads like it came out of Google Translate)
- the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  Mostly because prices are fixed so it’s hard to raise then higher like airlines can do with their tickets.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Train infrastructure is a lot more expensive than you'd think. This line cost about 10 billion Euros. If you want to recoup that money over twenty years at 4 million passengers a year that's 125 Euro per passenger. This doesn't include maintenance or the cost of the trains.
  - Reason077 8y ago
    The infrastructure will last a lot longer than 20 years. Perhaps hundreds of years, with proper maintenance.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Unfortunately maintenance and upgrades to the trackside equipment aren't free either.
    - v_lisivka 8y ago
      Rome roads are lasted for more than thousand years, but Rome isn't.
- legulere 8y ago
  The German government is extracting usually around 1 billion € yearly out of the German railway company.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    German rail subsidies in 2014 were 17b a year, so not sure where this "extracting" comes from.
    - nisa 8y ago
      as silly as it sounds it's true. Deutsche Bahn AG needs to get 850 million € a year back to the state. The rail tracks and local lines are heavy subsidized but there are different companies. They really made a mess with this attempt at privatization. It went so far that Deutsche Bahn AG destroyed their own (payed with public money in the 80ies) working and good rolling stock in an attempt to keep the market prices up? https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880 https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - isostatic 8y ago
        Funnily enough Germany is held as a paragon of virtue by the nationalisationists in the UK (who now number about 65% of the country)
        Daishiman 8y ago
        Well all things considered it's way nicer to take the train in Germany than England.
legulere 8y ago
Getting tickets for 20 – 60 € is not so uncommon, even international ones. I also highly recommend this website to find cheap connections instead: https://bahn.guru/ https://bahn.guru/
ant6n 8y ago
There's also the Eurail and Germanrail (for non-eu residents) and Interrail (for eu residents) passes that give you several days of travel within a month. I paid 230 Eur for 5 full days of travel within a month, and there's twin tickets that are a bit cheaper per person. Also there's the summer special, where you can get 4 trips for 96 euros.

by nisa 8y ago

scurvy 8y ago

Why are the prices so high?

nisa 8y ago
It's difficult. They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company. They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. They need to invest a lot of money in the coming years because their infrastructure is crumbling and running on attrition. Here are the prices vs. inflation: https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533/1.2598616/default/die-preise-der-deutschen-bahn.jpg https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533... However the price for a certain track depends on a lot of things and this new high-speed track has lot's of buisness customers that avoid a flight this way - so it's priced higher. It's a complicated system with lot's of subsidies, subcontractors and so on. There is a price to pay for using the track to a different company that runs the train... Another problem is that freight train traffic is even more expensive and they simply forgot to invest in the system for 30 years - now the Autobahn is clogged with trucks...
- bogomipz 8y ago
  >"They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company" Can you say how it is "public owned" if it is not a publicly traded stock? It sound like their bid to list it on the stock exchange failed?
  - nisa 8y ago
    I'm sorry not a native speaker - I mean the GmbH is owned by the state of Germany.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      It's an AG (a stock company), not a GmbH (a limited company). But yeah, all the stocks are still owned by the federal government, and therefore all profits get credited into the federal budget.
      - bogomipz 8y ago
        This is interesting. I am curious what is the upside to a stock company if all the shares are owned by the same entity(the government)? Are there some classes of the DB stack that are allowed to be publicly traded then?
        nisa 8y ago
        The original plan was to somehow make the whole thing profitable and publicy trade a large partion of shares - so they bought a lot of companies and hoped that they can refinance the train operations. Turn's out it's not so easy...it was just typical management failure, neoliberal politics and pipedreams - so they stopped it in 2005 - Hartmut Mehdorn the CEO at the time is now infamous for basically destroying everything he touches. It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.
        8y ago
- majewsky 8y ago
  > They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. Deutsche Bahn is infamous for extracting as much profit as possible, especially when they had no competition (long-distance buses were mostly outlawed until 2012 because of a Nazi-era law). A particularly well-known instance were the local express trains ("S-Bahn") in Berlin where they outright closed many depots and ignored mandated maintenance schedules until: > On May 1, 2009 an S-Bahn train of the class 481 in Kaulsdorf derailed due to a broken wheel. According to S-Bahners, the scheduled general inspection of that train had been postponed for two years. This accident led to the S-Bahn chaos of 2009, since the Federal Railway office mandated shortened test intervals and therefore at times only 165 out of 552 required quarter trains were available. Eventually, all axes had to be replaced because they were generally considered to be inadequate. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn (lightly edited because the original article reads like it came out of Google Translate)
the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
Mostly because prices are fixed so it’s hard to raise then higher like airlines can do with their tickets.
adrianN 8y ago
Train infrastructure is a lot more expensive than you'd think. This line cost about 10 billion Euros. If you want to recoup that money over twenty years at 4 million passengers a year that's 125 Euro per passenger. This doesn't include maintenance or the cost of the trains.
- Reason077 8y ago
  The infrastructure will last a lot longer than 20 years. Perhaps hundreds of years, with proper maintenance.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Unfortunately maintenance and upgrades to the trackside equipment aren't free either.
  - v_lisivka 8y ago
    Rome roads are lasted for more than thousand years, but Rome isn't.
legulere 8y ago
The German government is extracting usually around 1 billion € yearly out of the German railway company.
- isostatic 8y ago
  German rail subsidies in 2014 were 17b a year, so not sure where this "extracting" comes from.
  - nisa 8y ago
    as silly as it sounds it's true. Deutsche Bahn AG needs to get 850 million € a year back to the state. The rail tracks and local lines are heavy subsidized but there are different companies. They really made a mess with this attempt at privatization. It went so far that Deutsche Bahn AG destroyed their own (payed with public money in the 80ies) working and good rolling stock in an attempt to keep the market prices up? https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880 https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - isostatic 8y ago
      Funnily enough Germany is held as a paragon of virtue by the nationalisationists in the UK (who now number about 65% of the country)
      - Daishiman 8y ago
        Well all things considered it's way nicer to take the train in Germany than England.

legulere 8y ago

Getting tickets for 20 – 60 € is not so uncommon, even international ones. I also highly recommend this website to find cheap connections instead: https://bahn.guru/ https://bahn.guru/

ant6n 8y ago

There's also the Eurail and Germanrail (for non-eu residents) and Interrail (for eu residents) passes that give you several days of travel within a month. I paid 230 Eur for 5 full days of travel within a month, and there's twin tickets that are a bit cheaper per person. Also there's the summer special, where you can get 4 trips for 96 euros.