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

253 points by the_mitsuhiko 5y ago

the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
Some context here: previously there was no single ticket you could get for public transport in Austria like you could in Switzerland. There was a yearly ticket for the national rail services but that was it. With this ticket you can hop into any public transport now from long distance rail to local city trams.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  > from long distance rail to local city trams. That's the part that makes a system like this subjectively unfair. If my daily commute is a handful of bus stops and that guy's is a train for an hour from another city, then I am basically funding his commute by overpaying for my pass... even if it's cheaper to ride my bus with a pass than to buy a ticket for every ride. Edit - I read the website as saying that this is going to be the only pass available in Austria. It looks like it's not, which, of course, makes far more sense in comparison.
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    I mean this is Europe, and there's much less "this is unfair" versus "we are in this together".
    - joeberon 5y ago
      Maybe compared to America, but really, no, there's still a LOT of individualistic thinking here
    - rory 5y ago
      Even on public transport, longer commutes are relatively environmentally unfriendly when compared to shorter commutes (in the medium-to-long run). So regardless of individualism, it would generally be a public benefit to encourage shorter commutes.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        Yes, but it's not exactly that you have a lot of choice for where you work, for example.
        rory 5y ago
        I suppose it depends on the job and the market, but many people do have a lot of choice where they work (and where they live).
        southerntofu 5y ago
        I think we disagree on the "many". I would say "some" instead. Most people i know don't have a choice: they're employed in a shop somewhere or work from specific offices. Of course, the HN crowd may be more exposed to work-from-home, but that's still alien to a great part of the population, especially those who work the most precarious jobs.
        rory 5y ago
        I'm not sure how it is in Austria, but here in the US, people on the more "precarious" end of the spectrum (non-management retail and hospitality workers) have a quit rate of (very roughly) ~50% per year. So generally they do seem to be aware that they can choose a different place to work. Do you live somewhere very rural?
        southerntofu 5y ago
        Yes i reside in a less populous area (south France) where you can be happy to find a job at all, if that's what you're looking for in life. But from my understanding of bigger agglomerations: there's a high turnover rate in precarious jobs, but just because you can afford to find another precarious job elsewhere doesn't mean you get the privilege to choose where precisely. I hear in suburbs of capitals like Berlin or Paris it's not uncommon for people to travel 2-4h daily to work and back. Chances are if you switch jobs, you might have the same travel times, but to a different location.
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
      People living far from city centers usually live in bigger house/flats and less dense districts. That's usually what pull people to move to the suburbs. Some do this because of the cost of renting/buy a big place in inner city but it's the same argument. The problem is, living in a large place and sparser environment has a HUGE social cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects which is a major contributor to the ongoing biodiversity collapse (which is at least as big of a threat as climate change). "We are in this together" but not just to get people to drop private cars. We must commute much less (however clean your mode of transport) so how is it compatible with cheap transport in the long term? Or we put hard limit on urban sprawl but that will increase the cost of living in suburban/rural places even further than having people pay for their commute distance.
  - delroth 5y ago
    Pretty much all local city transport networks in Europe offer yearly subscriptions. If you just need that, that's already an option.
    - huhtenberg 5y ago
      If the Kilmaticket is not the only pass now available in Austria, then it makes far more sense.
  - md_ 5y ago
    I mean, yes, but that's like saying "all you can eat" buffets are unfair. The only "fix" would be to never offer fixed-rate pricing. It's a strange complaint, to me.
    - huhtenberg 5y ago
      If there's a buffet that serves a caviar and I only eat unpeeled cucumbers, then I'm not likely to go to that buffet.
      - md_ 5y ago
        Agreed. Many consumers will still pay-as-you-go. I fail to see the problem.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    I've never been to Austria, but I suspect this more limited pass you prefer has been available for a long time in all relevant locales. Certainly that is my experience with other public transit systems.
  - LittleNemoInS 5y ago
    If your daily commute is only a few bus stops, you'll find it way cheaper to get a pass from the local transportation company. This is for people who are travelling a lot (like commuting between cities on a daily or weekly basis).
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    But if you only require local travel, why would you buy a national pass?
    - huhtenberg 5y ago
      It sounded like it's going to be the only pass available in Austria. I must've read the site wrong.
  - hng 5y ago
    I am pretty sure that you still can get a monthly/yearly ticket for your local area. These are usually between 50-100 € in Germany. In Vienna you pay 1 € per day, so around 350 € for a year. The idea here is that you have one ticket that can be used everywhere in the country, so you probably would only get it if you travel more than a local commute on a regular base.
  - ginko 5y ago
    >If my daily commute is a handful of bus stops and that guy's is a train for an hour from another city If your daily commute is a handful of bus stops for instance in the Vienna metro, then you can buy a yearly ticket just for the Vienna public transport for 365€. https://www.wienerlinien.at/web/wiener-linien/jahreskarte https://www.wienerlinien.at/web/wiener-linien/jahreskarte
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - pvg 5y ago
    A look at this classic Viennese ticket machine would convince most people that paying more to never touch it again is not only fair but necessary and effectively a discount: https://live.staticflickr.com/1096/1427525859_9f6fcf046f_k.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/1096/1427525859_9f6fcf046f_k.j...
  - hagbard_c 5y ago
    > If my daily commute is a handful of bus stops and that guy's is a train for an hour from another city, then I am basically funding his commute by overpaying for my pass... In that case you would not buy this pass, instead opting for a local or regional pass or one tailored to that specific commute.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    Hmm, I wonder what I am 'overpaying' by having close to 1/2 of the land area of my town dedicated to cars instead of trees and grass, just so other people can live in the suburbs.
- malthaus 5y ago
  And for comparison, the Swiss equivalent costs around USD 4k a year per person 2nd class
- LittleNemoInS 5y ago
  Just to clarify : In Switzerland, one can buy a CA Travelcard (for CHF3860 a year, approximately $3850). With this card, one can travel on (nearly) all public transports in Switzerland (trains, coaches, subways, trams, etc.) free of charge. Since the public transportation system is very good, it's a good way to travel.
  - rob74 5y ago
    Ok, so the Austrian version costs less than a third of that for a considerably larger country. And the public transportation system is pretty good in Austria too...
    - ratww 5y ago
      In Germany it's also around 4k. EUR 4,027 for the BahnCard 100. We're much bigger than Switzerland, though. https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditions https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditi... EDIT: I can't find info on whether the German one covers city transportation... maybe it doesn't! - EDIT2: It does according to reply!
      - wasmitnetzen 5y ago
        It covers most local transportation, but not all. > The BahnCard 100 is also valid within the City-Ticket zone of all towns and cities covered by the City-Ticket offering City ticket coverage: https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/tickets-for-local-transport https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/tickets-for-local-transport
        ratww 5y ago
        Oh that's actually a much better deal, then. A Berlin monthly ticket is 86 a month (ok... or 63 with a 1 year commitment), which is already 1/4 (or 1/5) of the 4k...
      - raxxorrax 5y ago
        I maintain my car for for < 1000€ a year. Given, I have a "car dude" that repairs and sells me used cars in good condition (I don't drive much at all), but even if you would spend a bit more, it isn't as competitive as it needs to be. But other than that, cars are almost essential today. Have family you need to take care of? Good luck doing that with public transport. Doable perhaps if you quit your job...
bluGill 5y ago
This should be the preferred way to ride all local transit systems. One price for the whole family, ride as much as you want for the month (I think month is better then year - easier to budget, and if you move you are not out as much). If people aren't willing to pay for the pass, your system isn't useful and you need to fix that. Because it is unlimited rides people are less likely to think about using the car for trips that could go either way. Note that I said local. For trips to other cities it might (or might not) make sense to charge a different price - such trips are not as common.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Depends, I used to have a flatrate, high speed train about for commuting for a couple of years. I needed to city abos on top. Monthly costs were around 300 Euro, still cheaper / on par with a car (fuel only). That Austrian offer is the way to go, IMHO. I would even consider it for private purposes only for that price.
- toshk 5y ago
  Hmmm, problem is if it would be the dominant way of buying tickets the transport organisation would loose even more incentive to be customer oriented. Many public transportation companies, for instance Deutche Bahn, are awful and rude. They are often semi-public and semi-monopolistic, imagine paying them a year budget up front, would make things even worse.
  - welterde 5y ago
    DB already offers something similar in the form of yearly discount cards with three different levels: 25%, 50% and 100%. The latter being pretty much the same thing as the above mentioned card (although 4x as expensive).
  - bluGill 5y ago
    People do have options, if service is bad enough they can buy a car. (I don't want them to, but they can). Or vote for politicians who will do something about it (I'd prefer transit was entirely private, but for a number of reasons that isn't possible anymore)
athenot 5y ago
Impressive. It's like the care-free feeling when having a city pass and using whatever transit whenever needed, but scaled to a whole country.
locallost 5y ago
If it's really also for long distance rail, that's a lot of value. For comparison, the German Railway has something similar (but I think only for the railway) and it costs easily 3x as much. It's a bigger country but regardless. I live and work in a smaller city where I don't really need public transport, but when I was working in a city near me, the monthly ticket for the two cities was more than this. I don't know much about living in Austria, but in my mind it should be a no brainer for a lot of people.
- lonesword 5y ago
  Deutsche Bahn's BahnCard 100 [1] is around 4k euros per year and gives unlimited access to all DB trains as well as a city pass to around 110 towns in Germany. The city pass does't help if you have to commute to a suburb, but it's still pretty useful (though pricey) IMO. >but when I was working in a city near me, the monthly ticket for the two cities was more than this I commute between Cologne and Aachen, and the monthly ticket would have been around 288 (per month) euros if I had to fund it myself. My employer got me a "job ticket" that made the cost of this commute to around 98 euros per month. However, for your employer to apply for a jobticket they should employ a minimum number of people who would avail that offer (15 in Aachen, if I remember correctly). I have no idea why a regular person can't apply for this ticket if they really do commute the same route daily. [1] https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditions https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditi...
  - locallost 5y ago
    I live in a city way smaller than Cologne or Aachen and my commute was only 20 mins so it's not surprising that the price was much cheaper in my case. I've never heard of the job ticket so it maybe doesn't exist everywhere or at least not back then. But anyway that's one of the things that annoy me, all these options that I need to know. I went with my son, we got normal tickets and then somebody told me to get ticket X instead which is more expensive, but I can take kids for free. So this type of a ticket would solve a lot of problems and make it real easy for people to just ride.
scrollaway 5y ago
I really want this to exist for Belgium. Right now the public transport prices are absurd here... An all year pass for just the train in all of Belgium ranges in the 10k eur/year, and there is no national metro+bus+tram access (just Brussels is 700 EUR / year for that with no access to other cities). It's absurd and caused by fragmentation of services between Flanders, wallonia and Brussels with no coordination between them.
- FlyingSaucer 5y ago
  I completely agree. I used to live in Liege and would travel to NL, Brussels and Hasselt regularly. The juggle between different public transport subscription was difficult on top of the constant outages.
- tralarpa 5y ago
  > ranges in the 10k eur/year That's brutal. But I just visited (out of curiosity) www.belgiantrain.be and it says 3286 Euro for an "Unlimited Season Ticket" that "can be combined with other transport networks (STIB, TEC and De Lijn)" (I guess those are the local transport networks).
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    Season ticket is newish and it’s just a few months iirc. Stib is the Brussels bus service, de lijn is Flanders, TEC is Wallonia.
- adventured 5y ago
  As an American I had always heard that public transportation was super inexpensive in essentially all of Western Europe. Is that not the case generally?
  - akiselev 5y ago
    It's cheap relative to $2/liter fuel, huge taxes and registration fees on vehicles, parking, and so on. It's still scaled to the relative cost of living which can be high in major cities.
rob74 5y ago
Er... sounds good, but first they say "All public transport in Austria with a single ticket", and later "...in a specific area for a year: regional, cross-regional and nationwide". And after that, there is only one price (with various rebates) listed for the "Klimaticket Ö". Are there cheaper versions planned which are limited to e.g. one ("regional") or two ("cross-regional") states (Bundesländer)? I checked the German version, it's not a translation mistake. EDIT: Ok, found out myself, thanks Wikipedia! All but one (Kärnten) states already have a yearly public transportation ticket, with prices ranging from 365€ (Vorarlberg and Vienna) to 695 € (Oberösterreich). I guess these will be called "Klimaticket" too in the future. Might have made sense to mention this in the FAQ though... BTW the introduction date, 26.10.2021, is the Austrian National Day.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  I spent one year (gap internship) in Vorarlberg, the yearly price was about €400. They had a 50% discount if you were under 26 And a (cumulable) 50% first-time only discount if you already had a driver license I ended up paying €100 for a card that allowed me to ride any train or bus in the region for one year, whenever I wanted. I ended up biking most of the time, but I did commute by train for a while. In the end I didn't use it that much, but buying it was a no-brainer. I should also mention that some of the train lines you could take crossed the Swiss and German borders.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  The original idea by our green party was a "1-2-3 Ticket" which means 365€ for one state, double for two states, and triple for all states (per year for all public transport). They just renamed the "3" ticket to climate ticket when they introduced it, meanwhile work on "1" and "2" is still ongoing in some places afaik.
netfortius 5y ago
I like what Montpellier (France) is doing, which is a phased approach towards all public transportation free. For now it's for under 18 yo and 65+ yo, and all weekends for everyone, with a phase 3 total gratuity in 2023. I prefer to choose and accordingly pay for my long distance travels, but in the city trips consume a lot of money, on a personal / family level, which is nice to see reduced. And who doesn't want to travel with the nicest tram in France and for free??
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  >but in the city trips consume a lot of money I'm a big proponent of affordable public transport, but I don't understand the benefit of gratuity. As far as I know, the threats of the ongoing biodiversity collapse are bigger threat than that of climate change (see https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/climate/biodiversity-collapse-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/climate/biodiversity-coll...). It's crucial to both increase density (to limit urban sprawl, which requires that people travel less) and leave the individual ICE car area. Gratuity of public transport incentivizes taking the bus/train, but it also removes the cost barrier of long-distance transport when deciding where to live and work. If it costs the same to commute: 1. 15 min by foot from work if you live in a small flat 2. 40 min by public transport if you enjoy in a nice little home We may get more people in buses but we'll eat the Earth faster. Destroying/framgmenting natural habitats will have to bear a market cost, or we must put a hard limit to urban sprawling (which ends up having the same impact on people's finance as it will increase the cost of living far from city center).
- mellavora 5y ago
  I like what Luxembourg is doing, which is all public transport free for everyone, across the whole country. No phased approach, they just did it.
quadrifoliate 5y ago
Next stop: Just make public transport free for all reasonably permanent residents (for example, you could get a free ticket for next year when you file your taxes). Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.
- deleted 5y ago
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- KronisLV 5y ago
  Maybe introduce a gradual shift instead over 50 years or so: with each next year taking the originally expected profits of public transport and gradually add those as taxes for cars while at the same time also reducing the current public transport ticket prices? At the end of those 50 years public transportation could be free and the stubborn car owners or businesses would simply help subsidize more efficient ways of transportation. Maybe allow reduced taxes for electric vehicles at the same time. In the end, it wouldn't be much different than the subsidized meat production with artificially lowered meat prices in the US, nor would anyone care much about small increases like that on a year by year basis.
  - erdo 5y ago
    Except we don't have anything like 50 years!
    - KronisLV 5y ago
      Disagreed! Private individuals are becoming less and less able to afford cars in the first place (not even talking about real estate). If legislation around predatory lending schemes would be tightened, the demand for cars would decrease. If at the same time you'd invest aggressively in actually making sure that there is enough public transportation in place (as is the case in many European countries already but not the US), then it'd help with displacing them in the background as well. Couple that with a remote working culture, a few decades of employee pushback and quitting their jobs if they're asked to return to the office in careers where that's not necessary, better postal services and ride sharing apps, food delivery apps or a push for cooking meals at home and you'd see even more significant changes. Even more so if the road networks and infrastructure cannot support rush hour traffic with most of society living in a single shift mode, rather than morning and afternoon shifts. In contrast, if any initiative comes out today that calls for immediate and drastic change, it will get shot down. Real change takes a lot of patience and dozens if not hundreds of compounding factors over decades. Either that or going out into the streets with guns in hand, but that has historically worked out horribly time and time again and humanity should be past that savagery. Protests could happen, of course, since that's a bit different. Regardless, with more initiatives to limit heavy industry, global shipping of goods that could be locally manufactured and an overall push for less consumerist lifestyles, humanity might even have a few hundred years left to kick around on this rock before the long term environmental consequences actually start becoming visible! Edit: phrasing
woodlander87 5y ago
I lived in Austria for a couple of years in the late 2000s. They had an under 25 years of age ticket that was similar to this, but was very inexpensive. I think less than 50 Euros. It may have only been during the summer months though. Either way I traveled all over Austria and it cost me almost nothing. Wish I could be 25 again just for that.
- abendstolz 5y ago
  Yes, it was/is for only the duration of the summer (school) break. Has some very weird constraints regarding borders when combining with the eurorail/interrail though.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  I recently discovered that there was such a plan for TER ("slow" regional trains) in France. https://www.ter.sncf.com/nouvelle-aquitaine/offres/cartes-abonnements/pass-jeune-ter-de-france https://www.ter.sncf.com/nouvelle-aquitaine/offres/cartes-ab... 29€/month, for july and august. Not sure if they offer it every year, or if that was a 2021 special. I also recently turned 26...
turbinerneiter 5y ago
In Germany you can buy a Bahncard 100 for roughly 4k, which allows you to take any Deutsche Bahn train at any time. Not sure if the cost should scale with size of counrty, but I guess 4x is roughly reasonable between Austria and Germany. Austria probably is more expensive to build railroad in, since it's mostly mountains.
- adrianN 5y ago
  The Bahncard 100 doesn't include all public transport though. Austria also invests about twice as much (per capita) into rail infrastructure as Germany.
  - w-m 5y ago
    Which is a bit silly, but more a theoretical problem, right? I'd assume (I can't actually find a map of the coverage), that people for whom a BC 100 makes sense travel mostly by train, thus live near a train station with a good connection. Which will then be in one of the 130 cities that include the public transport with the City Ticket.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Everybody I know who has a Bahncard 100 uses it for commuting. While they generally live "close" to a train station they need public transport on both ends of the journey and buy additional tickets, e.g. another ~60€/month for a Berlin ticket.
      - w-m 5y ago
        Berlin A+B is included (one of the 130 cities). Or do they live outside, in zone C?
        adrianN 5y ago
        In Berlin only A is included as far as I know.
tyingq 5y ago
Interesting. The "family supplement" feels like it could use some work though. You pay €110 extra, and up to 4 of your children (<15 years old) can travel with you. But your partner isn't included...they would also have to pay the extra if they ever planned on being with the kids, and without you. And the kids have to buy a ticket if traveling alone. It's not expensive per se, but it seems like a narrow set of uses.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I'm an American who studied abroad in France for a bit a decade ago and did a little traveling around Europe, including to Austria. The Austrian train system was the best by far even without Klimaticket. Specifically, you bought a ticket that entitled you to a set number of kilometers and you could use it any time in the month. Moreover, the trains actually ran on time and customer service was helpful. By comparison, under the French system, the trains were often late, the customer service was almost hostile, and your ticket was for a specific train and if you missed it for whatever reason you were out of luck. This was a really big deal for me because the French government had just reneged on their commitment to pay my ~650 euro/month rent just a week or two before I arrived and consequently I chose to skip meals to save up a bit to make a couple of trips to Austria to Austria to visit my then-girlfriend-now-wife (I went from 175lbs to an unhealthy 140lbs over my 5-month stay). As a parenthetical, when I was planning to fly to Austria from Paris, I put my luggage in a 24-hour locker in Gare du Nord the evening before the early-morning flight, but the room the locker was in was closed from 10pm to 6am and the flight left CDG at 7am, so I was devastated when I had to eat the cost of the flight ticket. I begged the staff to unlock the door for me in my best, most polite French, but they would invariably say "c'est impossible" (in my experience, this is what almost all French employees would say to any request which wasn't strictly in their job description, including asking for directions which made it all the more shocking when I would ask an Austrian employee in English for some help and they were positively eager to assist, even if their English was not very good).
- hagbard_c 5y ago
  > As a parenthetical, when I was planning to fly to Austria from Paris, I put my luggage in a 24-hour locker in Gare du Nord the evening before the early-morning flight, but the room the locker was in was closed from 10pm to 6am and the flight left CDG at 7am, so I was devastated when I had to eat the cost of the flight ticket. I begged the staff to unlock the door for me in my best, most polite French, but they would invariably say "c'est impossible" Hm, was in a very similar situation at a Greyhound station in Merced when I returned from a hike through Yosemite. I had parked half of my luggage in a locker at the bus station when I took the shuttle serve to the park (which ended up with me having to put the snow chains on the shuttle bus since the driver had never performed that task...). When I returned to the station and wanted to retrieve my luggage to take the Greyhound which would eventually take me to the airport so I could catch my flight back to the Netherlands the station was closed, and would remain closed until past my bus department time. There was a cleaner in the station who I eventually managed to persuade to open the door... otherwise I would have missed the bus, which would have made me miss my flight. Since then I have made sure to check opening times on buildings containing luggage storage to avoid these problems.
qwerty456127 5y ago
Very expensive. AFAIK it's under €150/y in the neighbor Czechia (but it doesn't include inter-city trains).
- awestroke 5y ago
  Not really comparable then, is it?
- bmicraft 5y ago
  We do have many regional tickets and only the most expensive ones (over 26yrs and not senoir) even cost 365€ per year. You also have to take cost of living / pay grade and quality of service into account.
schnevets 5y ago
As miserable as public transit is for us in the US, I could actually see this kind of deal succeeding in New York (and neighboring areas of Connecticut and New Jersey). Those in the city are constantly perplexed by the various county-run transit lines and costs, but some kind of single pass would actually make bus lines approachable to visitors (whereas they are only used by those who can't afford a car today). Also, could this model be a response to a decline in ridership due to COVID? I don't know how these commuter lines fared in Europe, but I can only assume there were less folks traveling to a different area due to lockdown/remote work.
- bmicraft 5y ago
  This ticket (in Austria specifically) is not a response to covid-19, it has been in the works by our green party for many years now (2013 I think) and negotiations for the country-wide ticket have finally been concluded.
jeffbee 5y ago
Jesus an SF Muni pass costs $1176 per year and doesn't even get you out of the city of San Francisco.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That’s similar to what it would cost in Boston without commuter rail. I assume NYC is at least as much.
cutler 5y ago
That's £936 which buys you 5.5 monthly Oyster travel cards in London for zones 1-3. Rip-off Britain, anyone? I've been to Austria 3 times in the last 10 years and every time I come away with the impression that the UK is a backwards, impoverished nation in comparison. The sense of civic pride in Austria and Germany is the first thing you notice, especially the management of rents and planning standards.
fouric 5y ago
I see a detrimental incentive here. Let me explain, and then someone please show me what I'm not getting. We're trying to incentivize public over private transit because the former emits less carbon (in general). However, public transit still costs carbon, so taking less trips total seems to be better for the environment (the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" - kind of). If the marginal cost to a public transit user per trip is zero, then that incentivizes taking small, useless trips (e.g. "I could wait until the weekend to pick up a few small groceries, but transit is free, so why not go now"). Wouldn't it be better to add a *small" fee per trip, e.g. 1 EUR (much smaller than private transit), to incentivize people to make fewer trips in the first place?
- fnordsensei 5y ago
  Well, presumably the bus is going to go its route whether you're on it or not. If there's an increase in utilization of public transport, to the point where they need to run each route more often, or introduce additional routes, that'll be seen later on, when the impact of the ticket is evident. At that point, it can be weighed against any changes in private transport behavior. It's probably premature to take upfront action against overutilization of public transport.
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  Taking a trip on public transit to pick up groceries (or any similar task) still consumes time and is not convenient. I used to live in Manhattan, go to the shop on foot, and carry my groceries home. I would absolutely buy as much food as I could carry and use, because it was 45 minutes out of my night that could be used for something else, whether I bought 4 days of food or a single head of lettuce. People don't generally joyride public transit unless they have no other options. In fact, having lived both ways, I'd say you're far more incentivized to do this in a suburban setting with a car, since you're sitting in a private bubble with your own music and climate for every part of the trip except the store itself.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    > People don't generally joyride public transit unless they have no other options. I think this really depends of the network you are talking about. In some European cities, public transit networks are a blast to use. If frequencies are high enough, and modalities are well connected, you can "ride" the city as easily and naturally on a metro/tram/bus as you would have done by walking. I've took a lot (a damn lot) of bus/trams just because they were there, passing by, and allowed me to save 3 or 4 minutes (with my annual ticket, price was never my mind). (But I'm lucky enough to live in one of the lowest CO2 emitting countries in terms of energy mix.)
flemhans 5y ago
The BahnCard 100 is 3000 EUR in Germany, giving you full access to all trains. Austria is 1/10th the size of Germany. By this logic, the ticket price should be 300 EUR, not 1095 EUR.
- deleted 5y ago
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- lm28469 5y ago
  1/10th of the size doesn't mean 1/10th of the costs/usage/maintenance/&c
- TonyTrapp 5y ago
  Not that it changes much, but the BC100 is 4000€ for second class, not 3000. Both is too much to make it really popular, while I'd say Austria's pricing is extremely attractive even if the country is smaller. I pay more than half of that just for public transportation in my city in Germany.
- egeozcan 5y ago
  All trains plus many local transit options as well. It's usually valid in most bigger cities. My ex-ex-employer had given me one and I've used it many years. Incredibly liberating when you have the ability to hop onto any train and just sit. Reservations were sometimes problematic because popular trains had little amount of not-reserved free seats but Bahn.Comfort seats usually saved the day.
- FabHK 5y ago
  You could argue: If it's 1/10th the size, then it's about 1/3 the length and width. So, average distance (if you pick two points uniformly randomly) will also be around 1/3. By this logic, it should be around 1000 EUR.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  And Switzerland is also small but way more expensive, but, that's not how things work. That's not how anything works.
- 5y ago
IkmoIkmo 5y ago
Not sure I'm a fan. Certainly very interesting and I'm happy to see a significant country run the experiment, it's going to be a useful data point. But at the end of the day, what does it solve? And what does it leave unsolved? A single public transport marketplace is of course great, but many countries have those without the 'single ticket' system. For example, in the Netherlands I use one public transport card for bus, train, tram. I don't have a single ticket with one annual price, but I don't have different subscriptions or different cards for different transport methods (e.g. bus vs train), nor for different providers of the same transport method (e.g. two bus companies), it all happens on one card. So what does it solve? Admissions checking? No, you still need to present your single ticket. The thing it solves is billing, from individual subscriptions or individual tickets, to a single annual payment. But billing doesn't seem to be that big of a deal in modern systems, and it doesn't seem like it attacks the biggest issue in billing. For example in the Netherlands I'm simply billed by use. If I go 5x as far, I pay roughly 5x as much. That's all done automatic, once a month. I don't have to load prepaid money on my card, I just use the card and it's billed after at the end of the month. Really no different to a variable-usage mobile phone subscription. By introducing a single (e.g. average) payment amount per year, you're overcharging everyone who uses less than average, and undercharging power-users. Usage-based billing seems a much more fair approach. And the billing tech isn't all that complex. Moreover, the fact a substantial number of people will get a single-ticket (e.g. say it's 60% of the users), doesn't change the fact you'll still need to upkeep billing infrastructure for the other 40%. It doesn't allow you to make billing/admissions infrastructure redundant. It also doesn't allow you to differentiate at all in pricing and operators. I don't think this is a very big issue because I like public (i.e. not private) transport to be very egalitarian. But there's something to be said for allowing differences in quality/convenience etc in public, transport, too. e.g. business workers ride trains in the Netherlands in 1st class and do an hour of work on their laptops in quiet, comfy chairs, and pay extra, such that non-business users can ride cheaper in 2nd class. Having a single ticket removes any room for such differentiation, which can be useful to a point. Very interested to see the results and I'm happy they're trying, but not convinced yet.
shimonabi 5y ago
I used to live in Austria before Covid without a car and travel to my home country by train on weekends. I have the feeling they are doing this because they lost a lot of passengers during the epidemic. Maybe I'm wrong...
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  Thats how it worked in Chicago: everyone stopped riding due to sars-cov-2, the Transit Authority started selling 1/3 price passes, ridership picked right back up.
- sk7 5y ago
  You are wrong, the idea is much older and the idea for the current version (initially called 1-2-3 Ticket) was suggested by the green party in 2013 already. More Infos in the history (in German): https://kurier.at/politik/inland/gruene-spoe-oder-oevp-wer-hat-das-1-2-3-klimaticket-erfunden/400717488 https://kurier.at/politik/inland/gruene-spoe-oder-oevp-wer-h...
- holri 5y ago
  They are doing this because the green party is in the government now. This is a long-standing demand of the green party to lower CO2 emissions. They first did this in Vienna a few years ago, when they were in the city government. Now they are in the federal government and are rolling this out for all of Austria, since it was a huge success in Vienna, car travel was dramatically reduced.
dorianmariefr 5y ago
What if you lose it?
mattkevan 5y ago
Not really the same scale, but I loved having an annual travel card when I lived in London. It was so freeing knowing I could basically get on anything or go anywhere without having to worry about getting the right ticket or making sure I had enough money on the Oyster card. Plus the ticket gave a third off travel outside London. It was expensive-up front, but ended up saving so much money, especially as I could buy it via salary sacrifice before tax. Definitely recommended.
cletus 5y ago
Why should public transport cost anything at all? I mean, what's the point? You might say the service costs money. It does. The ticket prices never cover that so you're already running at a loss. You spend money on enforcement, payment and ticket machines and you reduce usage of the service. But here's the more important point: cars are already subsidized to a huge degree pretty much everywhere through roads, parking, etc. Let's also start by removing free street parking from any area reasonably serviced by public transport. Or just removing it entirely.
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  > The ticket prices never cover that so you're already running at a loss. London Underground usually runs at a profit. Not entirely from tickets, but also including other sources like advertisement. But ticket revenue is an important part of the income. Public transport also includes privately-owned transport that is run for profit, like private buses and trains, which also make a profit (or go bust).
- mellavora 5y ago
  That's what Luxembourg did. Works great!
- denimnerd42 5y ago
  how do you keep people from just riding the train perpetually?
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    why would you keep people from doing that? are so many people going to be doing that as to actually cause a problem?
    - denimnerd42 5y ago
      In my area people will ride the commuter train (without paying) for hours and sleep on it. There isn't enough fair enforcement or will to remove them. Makes the train pretty unattractive for its actual purpose. I imagine that issue becoming even worse if it's just free.
Archelaos 5y ago
In Germany the "Bahncard 100" has been available for years. It costs 4,027 Euro/yr (2. class) or 6,812 Euro/yr (1. class) for infinte train rides with Deutsche Bahn and a lot of local transport associations.[1] Since Germany is about four times as big as Austria the price is comparable to the Klimaticket, if one is really travelling a lot of long distances. For smaller areas the situation is very complicated. Almost all local transportation associations have yearly tarifs of their own. Sometimes they are valid in adjacent destinations, sometimes not or only for a limited time (such as during the summer school holidays). More consistency would be desirable here. [1] For a list see: https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/vorteile/verbuende https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/vorteile/verbuende (in German)
- bkfh 5y ago
  In the Klimaticket, all public transport is included. Cities as well as inter cities
  - fisian 5y ago
    To add to that, until now there is the ÖBB Österreichcard which allows infinite train rides on all ÖBB trains. It's about 2000€. Now it will be replaced by this Klimaticket.
logifail 5y ago
This weekend I'll be travelling from Innsbruck to Vienna, a good chunk of the entire length of Austria. I'm not here enough (and not travelling around enough) to be interested in the Klimaticket, but here's how public transport vs car stacks up: Innsbruck to Vienna is 476km (~300mi) by road. It takes about 5 hours to drive, assuming no delays. The way the world is right now, there will certainly be delays. On the fastest route you exit Austria just after Kufstein and enter Germany at Kiefersfelden, drive through Germany on the A93, then on the A8 towards Salzburg, then cross back into Austria. Pre-2015 you'd typically have crossed both those international borders at standard motorway speed(!), but since the refugee crisis, and even more since Covid, it's checkpoints (=delays) galore. By train the journey is scheduled at ~4h15m. The train also enters Germany but doesn't stop there, so no border checks. A standard ("2nd class"/economy) walk-up train fare is €74 ($85), but if you buy an annual railcard for €66 ($76) that's halved, so €37 ($43). This is a completely flexible ticket valid on any service that day, so if you are late (or early) you just get on the next train, and there's basically one every hour pretty much throughout the day. The railcard pays for itself in the first return trip. Maybe it's just me, but €37 for a 300mi journey, with a completely flexible ticket, just seems like amazing value.
- jahnu 5y ago
  Even during the lockdowns there were times of no checkpoints on the borders again. It was such a relief to finally see them gone. I hope they aren't back again. But yes that is amazing value and travel by train is just nicer.
  - logifail 5y ago
    > Even during the lockdowns there were times of no checkpoints on the borders again. It was such a relief to finally see them gone. Unstaffed, or actually gone? :) Last time I drove into Austria from Germany there were no border guards there to actually check anything, but all the traffic calming measures, warning signs and speed restrictions were still there ("cars use left-hand lane, larger/freight vehicles right hand lane"). As one might expect from Homo sapiens behind the wheel, the frantic changing of lanes by vehicles approaching the (unmanned) checkpoint caused an enormous queue and resulting delay almost as bad as if there had been border guards actually checking every single vehicle.
PaulHoule 5y ago
Leasing a car is going to be at least twice that plus you have to pay for gas, parking, etc.
Aeolun 5y ago
Holy shit that’s cheap. The same thing in the Netherlands costs me €4500. And that’s a much smaller country.
mistrial9 5y ago
When the San Francisco Bay Area tried to move to a single means of payment, a digital card Transit-Link or whatnot, it was delayed more than a year by BART due to arguements over who holds the cash payments from ticket sales, and when those funds are released, exactly. The funding of MUNI, BART, Alameda County Transit and others, have different histories and cash control, so they fought about it. source: public news story at the time
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  They are different systems. Bart is a regional transport agency funded by ticket sales and sales taxes in the Northern CA bay area. SF has regional bus lines but a few bart stops. SamTrans is the San Mateo bus system but they go all the way to Marin County and have a few stops in SF. Caltrain is a completely separate agency and funding unit that runs down the peninsula but also has two stops in SF. You can say they should all be consolidated but these are overlapping areas - BART can't have SF running it in the one area, Oakland running it in another area, etc. So consolidation means moving upward -- e.g. the state of California would run it. But no one wants to lose local control of services they are funding. Why would the city of SF cede control of its bus system to the state? So the control is where the funding is, and you have these overlapping and competing transit lines, all of which operate in San Francisco, but do not accept each other's ticket or payment systems.
whiterock 5y ago
and I live in Austria and will get it soooon. Actually for 699€ for people under the age of 26!
penguin_booze 5y ago
Meanwhile in the UK: yearly train season ticket for 1+ hr journey: only GBP 5600.
- Zenst 5y ago
  With random delays, strikes and a selection of standing room in which you can share body warmth - all thrown in upon some commutes (no luck involved).
JFKKFJ 5y ago
All public transport in Lombardy, Italy for 1039 Euro/y: https://www.regione.lombardia.it/wps/portal/istituzionale/HP/DettaglioServizio/servizi-e-informazioni/Cittadini/Muoversi-in-Lombardia/biglietti-e-agevolazioni/Io-viaggio/io-viaggio-ovunque-in-lombardia-abbonamento/io-viaggio-ovunque-in-lombardia-abbonamento https://www.regione.lombardia.it/wps/portal/istituzionale/HP...
la_fayette 5y ago
I am commuting from Germany into Austria on a daily basis. It is 4 stations in Germany, last station in Austria, around 30 km. The yearly ticket is 1.200 EUR. Germany has absolutely crazy high ticket prices, but cheap diesel cars ;-)
Proven 5y ago
It's just another taxpayer-funded way to buy votes for the furthering of climatist agenda.
switch007 5y ago
If the UK ever had such a thing I bet it’d be at least £15,000/year. Many annual tickets to commute in to London alone are £4-7,000.

253 points by the_mitsuhiko 5y ago

Some context here: previously there was no single ticket you could get for public transport in Austria like you could in Switzerland. There was a yearly ticket for the national rail services but that was it. With this ticket you can hop into any public transport now from long distance rail to local city trams.

huhtenberg 5y ago
> from long distance rail to local city trams. That's the part that makes a system like this subjectively unfair. If my daily commute is a handful of bus stops and that guy's is a train for an hour from another city, then I am basically funding his commute by overpaying for my pass... even if it's cheaper to ride my bus with a pass than to buy a ticket for every ride. Edit - I read the website as saying that this is going to be the only pass available in Austria. It looks like it's not, which, of course, makes far more sense in comparison.
- mmastrac 5y ago
  I mean this is Europe, and there's much less "this is unfair" versus "we are in this together".
  - joeberon 5y ago
    Maybe compared to America, but really, no, there's still a LOT of individualistic thinking here
  - rory 5y ago
    Even on public transport, longer commutes are relatively environmentally unfriendly when compared to shorter commutes (in the medium-to-long run). So regardless of individualism, it would generally be a public benefit to encourage shorter commutes.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      Yes, but it's not exactly that you have a lot of choice for where you work, for example.
      - rory 5y ago
        I suppose it depends on the job and the market, but many people do have a lot of choice where they work (and where they live).
        southerntofu 5y ago
        I think we disagree on the "many". I would say "some" instead. Most people i know don't have a choice: they're employed in a shop somewhere or work from specific offices. Of course, the HN crowd may be more exposed to work-from-home, but that's still alien to a great part of the population, especially those who work the most precarious jobs.
        rory 5y ago
        I'm not sure how it is in Austria, but here in the US, people on the more "precarious" end of the spectrum (non-management retail and hospitality workers) have a quit rate of (very roughly) ~50% per year. So generally they do seem to be aware that they can choose a different place to work. Do you live somewhere very rural?
        southerntofu 5y ago
        Yes i reside in a less populous area (south France) where you can be happy to find a job at all, if that's what you're looking for in life. But from my understanding of bigger agglomerations: there's a high turnover rate in precarious jobs, but just because you can afford to find another precarious job elsewhere doesn't mean you get the privilege to choose where precisely. I hear in suburbs of capitals like Berlin or Paris it's not uncommon for people to travel 2-4h daily to work and back. Chances are if you switch jobs, you might have the same travel times, but to a different location.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    People living far from city centers usually live in bigger house/flats and less dense districts. That's usually what pull people to move to the suburbs. Some do this because of the cost of renting/buy a big place in inner city but it's the same argument. The problem is, living in a large place and sparser environment has a HUGE social cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects which is a major contributor to the ongoing biodiversity collapse (which is at least as big of a threat as climate change). "We are in this together" but not just to get people to drop private cars. We must commute much less (however clean your mode of transport) so how is it compatible with cheap transport in the long term? Or we put hard limit on urban sprawl but that will increase the cost of living in suburban/rural places even further than having people pay for their commute distance.
- delroth 5y ago
  Pretty much all local city transport networks in Europe offer yearly subscriptions. If you just need that, that's already an option.
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    If the Kilmaticket is not the only pass now available in Austria, then it makes far more sense.
- md_ 5y ago
  I mean, yes, but that's like saying "all you can eat" buffets are unfair. The only "fix" would be to never offer fixed-rate pricing. It's a strange complaint, to me.
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    If there's a buffet that serves a caviar and I only eat unpeeled cucumbers, then I'm not likely to go to that buffet.
    - md_ 5y ago
      Agreed. Many consumers will still pay-as-you-go. I fail to see the problem.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  I've never been to Austria, but I suspect this more limited pass you prefer has been available for a long time in all relevant locales. Certainly that is my experience with other public transit systems.
- LittleNemoInS 5y ago
  If your daily commute is only a few bus stops, you'll find it way cheaper to get a pass from the local transportation company. This is for people who are travelling a lot (like commuting between cities on a daily or weekly basis).
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  But if you only require local travel, why would you buy a national pass?
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    It sounded like it's going to be the only pass available in Austria. I must've read the site wrong.
- hng 5y ago
  I am pretty sure that you still can get a monthly/yearly ticket for your local area. These are usually between 50-100 € in Germany. In Vienna you pay 1 € per day, so around 350 € for a year. The idea here is that you have one ticket that can be used everywhere in the country, so you probably would only get it if you travel more than a local commute on a regular base.
- ginko 5y ago
  >If my daily commute is a handful of bus stops and that guy's is a train for an hour from another city If your daily commute is a handful of bus stops for instance in the Vienna metro, then you can buy a yearly ticket just for the Vienna public transport for 365€. https://www.wienerlinien.at/web/wiener-linien/jahreskarte https://www.wienerlinien.at/web/wiener-linien/jahreskarte
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pvg 5y ago
  A look at this classic Viennese ticket machine would convince most people that paying more to never touch it again is not only fair but necessary and effectively a discount: https://live.staticflickr.com/1096/1427525859_9f6fcf046f_k.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/1096/1427525859_9f6fcf046f_k.j...
- hagbard_c 5y ago
  > If my daily commute is a handful of bus stops and that guy's is a train for an hour from another city, then I am basically funding his commute by overpaying for my pass... In that case you would not buy this pass, instead opting for a local or regional pass or one tailored to that specific commute.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Hmm, I wonder what I am 'overpaying' by having close to 1/2 of the land area of my town dedicated to cars instead of trees and grass, just so other people can live in the suburbs.
malthaus 5y ago
And for comparison, the Swiss equivalent costs around USD 4k a year per person 2nd class
LittleNemoInS 5y ago
Just to clarify : In Switzerland, one can buy a CA Travelcard (for CHF3860 a year, approximately $3850). With this card, one can travel on (nearly) all public transports in Switzerland (trains, coaches, subways, trams, etc.) free of charge. Since the public transportation system is very good, it's a good way to travel.
- rob74 5y ago
  Ok, so the Austrian version costs less than a third of that for a considerably larger country. And the public transportation system is pretty good in Austria too...
  - ratww 5y ago
    In Germany it's also around 4k. EUR 4,027 for the BahnCard 100. We're much bigger than Switzerland, though. https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditions https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditi... EDIT: I can't find info on whether the German one covers city transportation... maybe it doesn't! - EDIT2: It does according to reply!
    - wasmitnetzen 5y ago
      It covers most local transportation, but not all. > The BahnCard 100 is also valid within the City-Ticket zone of all towns and cities covered by the City-Ticket offering City ticket coverage: https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/tickets-for-local-transport https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/tickets-for-local-transport
      - ratww 5y ago
        Oh that's actually a much better deal, then. A Berlin monthly ticket is 86 a month (ok... or 63 with a 1 year commitment), which is already 1/4 (or 1/5) of the 4k...
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      I maintain my car for for < 1000€ a year. Given, I have a "car dude" that repairs and sells me used cars in good condition (I don't drive much at all), but even if you would spend a bit more, it isn't as competitive as it needs to be. But other than that, cars are almost essential today. Have family you need to take care of? Good luck doing that with public transport. Doable perhaps if you quit your job...

bluGill 5y ago

This should be the preferred way to ride all local transit systems. One price for the whole family, ride as much as you want for the month (I think month is better then year - easier to budget, and if you move you are not out as much). If people aren't willing to pay for the pass, your system isn't useful and you need to fix that. Because it is unlimited rides people are less likely to think about using the car for trips that could go either way. Note that I said local. For trips to other cities it might (or might not) make sense to charge a different price - such trips are not as common.

hef19898 5y ago
Depends, I used to have a flatrate, high speed train about for commuting for a couple of years. I needed to city abos on top. Monthly costs were around 300 Euro, still cheaper / on par with a car (fuel only). That Austrian offer is the way to go, IMHO. I would even consider it for private purposes only for that price.
toshk 5y ago
Hmmm, problem is if it would be the dominant way of buying tickets the transport organisation would loose even more incentive to be customer oriented. Many public transportation companies, for instance Deutche Bahn, are awful and rude. They are often semi-public and semi-monopolistic, imagine paying them a year budget up front, would make things even worse.
- welterde 5y ago
  DB already offers something similar in the form of yearly discount cards with three different levels: 25%, 50% and 100%. The latter being pretty much the same thing as the above mentioned card (although 4x as expensive).
- bluGill 5y ago
  People do have options, if service is bad enough they can buy a car. (I don't want them to, but they can). Or vote for politicians who will do something about it (I'd prefer transit was entirely private, but for a number of reasons that isn't possible anymore)

athenot 5y ago

Impressive. It's like the care-free feeling when having a city pass and using whatever transit whenever needed, but scaled to a whole country.

locallost 5y ago

If it's really also for long distance rail, that's a lot of value. For comparison, the German Railway has something similar (but I think only for the railway) and it costs easily 3x as much. It's a bigger country but regardless. I live and work in a smaller city where I don't really need public transport, but when I was working in a city near me, the monthly ticket for the two cities was more than this. I don't know much about living in Austria, but in my mind it should be a no brainer for a lot of people.

lonesword 5y ago
Deutsche Bahn's BahnCard 100 [1] is around 4k euros per year and gives unlimited access to all DB trains as well as a city pass to around 110 towns in Germany. The city pass does't help if you have to commute to a suburb, but it's still pretty useful (though pricey) IMO. >but when I was working in a city near me, the monthly ticket for the two cities was more than this I commute between Cologne and Aachen, and the monthly ticket would have been around 288 (per month) euros if I had to fund it myself. My employer got me a "job ticket" that made the cost of this commute to around 98 euros per month. However, for your employer to apply for a jobticket they should employ a minimum number of people who would avail that offer (15 in Aachen, if I remember correctly). I have no idea why a regular person can't apply for this ticket if they really do commute the same route daily. [1] https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditions https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditi...
- locallost 5y ago
  I live in a city way smaller than Cologne or Aachen and my commute was only 20 mins so it's not surprising that the price was much cheaper in my case. I've never heard of the job ticket so it maybe doesn't exist everywhere or at least not back then. But anyway that's one of the things that annoy me, all these options that I need to know. I went with my son, we got normal tickets and then somebody told me to get ticket X instead which is more expensive, but I can take kids for free. So this type of a ticket would solve a lot of problems and make it real easy for people to just ride.

scrollaway 5y ago

I really want this to exist for Belgium. Right now the public transport prices are absurd here... An all year pass for just the train in all of Belgium ranges in the 10k eur/year, and there is no national metro+bus+tram access (just Brussels is 700 EUR / year for that with no access to other cities). It's absurd and caused by fragmentation of services between Flanders, wallonia and Brussels with no coordination between them.

FlyingSaucer 5y ago
I completely agree. I used to live in Liege and would travel to NL, Brussels and Hasselt regularly. The juggle between different public transport subscription was difficult on top of the constant outages.
tralarpa 5y ago
> ranges in the 10k eur/year That's brutal. But I just visited (out of curiosity) www.belgiantrain.be and it says 3286 Euro for an "Unlimited Season Ticket" that "can be combined with other transport networks (STIB, TEC and De Lijn)" (I guess those are the local transport networks).
- scrollaway 5y ago
  Season ticket is newish and it’s just a few months iirc. Stib is the Brussels bus service, de lijn is Flanders, TEC is Wallonia.
adventured 5y ago
As an American I had always heard that public transportation was super inexpensive in essentially all of Western Europe. Is that not the case generally?
- akiselev 5y ago
  It's cheap relative to $2/liter fuel, huge taxes and registration fees on vehicles, parking, and so on. It's still scaled to the relative cost of living which can be high in major cities.

rob74 5y ago

Er... sounds good, but first they say "All public transport in Austria with a single ticket", and later "...in a specific area for a year: regional, cross-regional and nationwide". And after that, there is only one price (with various rebates) listed for the "Klimaticket Ö". Are there cheaper versions planned which are limited to e.g. one ("regional") or two ("cross-regional") states (Bundesländer)? I checked the German version, it's not a translation mistake. EDIT: Ok, found out myself, thanks Wikipedia! All but one (Kärnten) states already have a yearly public transportation ticket, with prices ranging from 365€ (Vorarlberg and Vienna) to 695 € (Oberösterreich). I guess these will be called "Klimaticket" too in the future. Might have made sense to mention this in the FAQ though... BTW the introduction date, 26.10.2021, is the Austrian National Day.

MayeulC 5y ago
I spent one year (gap internship) in Vorarlberg, the yearly price was about €400. They had a 50% discount if you were under 26 And a (cumulable) 50% first-time only discount if you already had a driver license I ended up paying €100 for a card that allowed me to ride any train or bus in the region for one year, whenever I wanted. I ended up biking most of the time, but I did commute by train for a while. In the end I didn't use it that much, but buying it was a no-brainer. I should also mention that some of the train lines you could take crossed the Swiss and German borders.
bmicraft 5y ago
The original idea by our green party was a "1-2-3 Ticket" which means 365€ for one state, double for two states, and triple for all states (per year for all public transport). They just renamed the "3" ticket to climate ticket when they introduced it, meanwhile work on "1" and "2" is still ongoing in some places afaik.

netfortius 5y ago

I like what Montpellier (France) is doing, which is a phased approach towards all public transportation free. For now it's for under 18 yo and 65+ yo, and all weekends for everyone, with a phase 3 total gratuity in 2023. I prefer to choose and accordingly pay for my long distance travels, but in the city trips consume a lot of money, on a personal / family level, which is nice to see reduced. And who doesn't want to travel with the nicest tram in France and for free??

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
>but in the city trips consume a lot of money I'm a big proponent of affordable public transport, but I don't understand the benefit of gratuity. As far as I know, the threats of the ongoing biodiversity collapse are bigger threat than that of climate change (see https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/climate/biodiversity-collapse-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/climate/biodiversity-coll...). It's crucial to both increase density (to limit urban sprawl, which requires that people travel less) and leave the individual ICE car area. Gratuity of public transport incentivizes taking the bus/train, but it also removes the cost barrier of long-distance transport when deciding where to live and work. If it costs the same to commute: 1. 15 min by foot from work if you live in a small flat 2. 40 min by public transport if you enjoy in a nice little home We may get more people in buses but we'll eat the Earth faster. Destroying/framgmenting natural habitats will have to bear a market cost, or we must put a hard limit to urban sprawling (which ends up having the same impact on people's finance as it will increase the cost of living far from city center).
mellavora 5y ago
I like what Luxembourg is doing, which is all public transport free for everyone, across the whole country. No phased approach, they just did it.

quadrifoliate 5y ago

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

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KronisLV 5y ago
Maybe introduce a gradual shift instead over 50 years or so: with each next year taking the originally expected profits of public transport and gradually add those as taxes for cars while at the same time also reducing the current public transport ticket prices? At the end of those 50 years public transportation could be free and the stubborn car owners or businesses would simply help subsidize more efficient ways of transportation. Maybe allow reduced taxes for electric vehicles at the same time. In the end, it wouldn't be much different than the subsidized meat production with artificially lowered meat prices in the US, nor would anyone care much about small increases like that on a year by year basis.
- erdo 5y ago
  Except we don't have anything like 50 years!
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    Disagreed! Private individuals are becoming less and less able to afford cars in the first place (not even talking about real estate). If legislation around predatory lending schemes would be tightened, the demand for cars would decrease. If at the same time you'd invest aggressively in actually making sure that there is enough public transportation in place (as is the case in many European countries already but not the US), then it'd help with displacing them in the background as well. Couple that with a remote working culture, a few decades of employee pushback and quitting their jobs if they're asked to return to the office in careers where that's not necessary, better postal services and ride sharing apps, food delivery apps or a push for cooking meals at home and you'd see even more significant changes. Even more so if the road networks and infrastructure cannot support rush hour traffic with most of society living in a single shift mode, rather than morning and afternoon shifts. In contrast, if any initiative comes out today that calls for immediate and drastic change, it will get shot down. Real change takes a lot of patience and dozens if not hundreds of compounding factors over decades. Either that or going out into the streets with guns in hand, but that has historically worked out horribly time and time again and humanity should be past that savagery. Protests could happen, of course, since that's a bit different. Regardless, with more initiatives to limit heavy industry, global shipping of goods that could be locally manufactured and an overall push for less consumerist lifestyles, humanity might even have a few hundred years left to kick around on this rock before the long term environmental consequences actually start becoming visible! Edit: phrasing

woodlander87 5y ago

I lived in Austria for a couple of years in the late 2000s. They had an under 25 years of age ticket that was similar to this, but was very inexpensive. I think less than 50 Euros. It may have only been during the summer months though. Either way I traveled all over Austria and it cost me almost nothing. Wish I could be 25 again just for that.

abendstolz 5y ago
Yes, it was/is for only the duration of the summer (school) break. Has some very weird constraints regarding borders when combining with the eurorail/interrail though.
MayeulC 5y ago
I recently discovered that there was such a plan for TER ("slow" regional trains) in France. https://www.ter.sncf.com/nouvelle-aquitaine/offres/cartes-abonnements/pass-jeune-ter-de-france https://www.ter.sncf.com/nouvelle-aquitaine/offres/cartes-ab... 29€/month, for july and august. Not sure if they offer it every year, or if that was a 2021 special. I also recently turned 26...

turbinerneiter 5y ago

In Germany you can buy a Bahncard 100 for roughly 4k, which allows you to take any Deutsche Bahn train at any time. Not sure if the cost should scale with size of counrty, but I guess 4x is roughly reasonable between Austria and Germany. Austria probably is more expensive to build railroad in, since it's mostly mountains.

adrianN 5y ago
The Bahncard 100 doesn't include all public transport though. Austria also invests about twice as much (per capita) into rail infrastructure as Germany.
- w-m 5y ago
  Which is a bit silly, but more a theoretical problem, right? I'd assume (I can't actually find a map of the coverage), that people for whom a BC 100 makes sense travel mostly by train, thus live near a train station with a good connection. Which will then be in one of the 130 cities that include the public transport with the City Ticket.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Everybody I know who has a Bahncard 100 uses it for commuting. While they generally live "close" to a train station they need public transport on both ends of the journey and buy additional tickets, e.g. another ~60€/month for a Berlin ticket.
    - w-m 5y ago
      Berlin A+B is included (one of the 130 cities). Or do they live outside, in zone C?
      - adrianN 5y ago
        In Berlin only A is included as far as I know.

tyingq 5y ago

Interesting. The "family supplement" feels like it could use some work though. You pay €110 extra, and up to 4 of your children (<15 years old) can travel with you. But your partner isn't included...they would also have to pay the extra if they ever planned on being with the kids, and without you. And the kids have to buy a ticket if traveling alone. It's not expensive per se, but it seems like a narrow set of uses.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I'm an American who studied abroad in France for a bit a decade ago and did a little traveling around Europe, including to Austria. The Austrian train system was the best by far even without Klimaticket. Specifically, you bought a ticket that entitled you to a set number of kilometers and you could use it any time in the month. Moreover, the trains actually ran on time and customer service was helpful. By comparison, under the French system, the trains were often late, the customer service was almost hostile, and your ticket was for a specific train and if you missed it for whatever reason you were out of luck. This was a really big deal for me because the French government had just reneged on their commitment to pay my ~650 euro/month rent just a week or two before I arrived and consequently I chose to skip meals to save up a bit to make a couple of trips to Austria to Austria to visit my then-girlfriend-now-wife (I went from 175lbs to an unhealthy 140lbs over my 5-month stay). As a parenthetical, when I was planning to fly to Austria from Paris, I put my luggage in a 24-hour locker in Gare du Nord the evening before the early-morning flight, but the room the locker was in was closed from 10pm to 6am and the flight left CDG at 7am, so I was devastated when I had to eat the cost of the flight ticket. I begged the staff to unlock the door for me in my best, most polite French, but they would invariably say "c'est impossible" (in my experience, this is what almost all French employees would say to any request which wasn't strictly in their job description, including asking for directions which made it all the more shocking when I would ask an Austrian employee in English for some help and they were positively eager to assist, even if their English was not very good).

hagbard_c 5y ago
> As a parenthetical, when I was planning to fly to Austria from Paris, I put my luggage in a 24-hour locker in Gare du Nord the evening before the early-morning flight, but the room the locker was in was closed from 10pm to 6am and the flight left CDG at 7am, so I was devastated when I had to eat the cost of the flight ticket. I begged the staff to unlock the door for me in my best, most polite French, but they would invariably say "c'est impossible" Hm, was in a very similar situation at a Greyhound station in Merced when I returned from a hike through Yosemite. I had parked half of my luggage in a locker at the bus station when I took the shuttle serve to the park (which ended up with me having to put the snow chains on the shuttle bus since the driver had never performed that task...). When I returned to the station and wanted to retrieve my luggage to take the Greyhound which would eventually take me to the airport so I could catch my flight back to the Netherlands the station was closed, and would remain closed until past my bus department time. There was a cleaner in the station who I eventually managed to persuade to open the door... otherwise I would have missed the bus, which would have made me miss my flight. Since then I have made sure to check opening times on buildings containing luggage storage to avoid these problems.

qwerty456127 5y ago

Very expensive. AFAIK it's under €150/y in the neighbor Czechia (but it doesn't include inter-city trains).

awestroke 5y ago
Not really comparable then, is it?
bmicraft 5y ago
We do have many regional tickets and only the most expensive ones (over 26yrs and not senoir) even cost 365€ per year. You also have to take cost of living / pay grade and quality of service into account.

schnevets 5y ago

As miserable as public transit is for us in the US, I could actually see this kind of deal succeeding in New York (and neighboring areas of Connecticut and New Jersey). Those in the city are constantly perplexed by the various county-run transit lines and costs, but some kind of single pass would actually make bus lines approachable to visitors (whereas they are only used by those who can't afford a car today). Also, could this model be a response to a decline in ridership due to COVID? I don't know how these commuter lines fared in Europe, but I can only assume there were less folks traveling to a different area due to lockdown/remote work.

bmicraft 5y ago
This ticket (in Austria specifically) is not a response to covid-19, it has been in the works by our green party for many years now (2013 I think) and negotiations for the country-wide ticket have finally been concluded.

jeffbee 5y ago

Jesus an SF Muni pass costs $1176 per year and doesn't even get you out of the city of San Francisco.

ghaff 5y ago
That’s similar to what it would cost in Boston without commuter rail. I assume NYC is at least as much.

cutler 5y ago

That's £936 which buys you 5.5 monthly Oyster travel cards in London for zones 1-3. Rip-off Britain, anyone? I've been to Austria 3 times in the last 10 years and every time I come away with the impression that the UK is a backwards, impoverished nation in comparison. The sense of civic pride in Austria and Germany is the first thing you notice, especially the management of rents and planning standards.

fouric 5y ago

I see a detrimental incentive here. Let me explain, and then someone please show me what I'm not getting. We're trying to incentivize public over private transit because the former emits less carbon (in general). However, public transit still costs carbon, so taking less trips total seems to be better for the environment (the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" - kind of). If the marginal cost to a public transit user per trip is zero, then that incentivizes taking small, useless trips (e.g. "I could wait until the weekend to pick up a few small groceries, but transit is free, so why not go now"). Wouldn't it be better to add a *small" fee per trip, e.g. 1 EUR (much smaller than private transit), to incentivize people to make fewer trips in the first place?

fnordsensei 5y ago
Well, presumably the bus is going to go its route whether you're on it or not. If there's an increase in utilization of public transport, to the point where they need to run each route more often, or introduce additional routes, that'll be seen later on, when the impact of the ticket is evident. At that point, it can be weighed against any changes in private transport behavior. It's probably premature to take upfront action against overutilization of public transport.
ericbarrett 5y ago
Taking a trip on public transit to pick up groceries (or any similar task) still consumes time and is not convenient. I used to live in Manhattan, go to the shop on foot, and carry my groceries home. I would absolutely buy as much food as I could carry and use, because it was 45 minutes out of my night that could be used for something else, whether I bought 4 days of food or a single head of lettuce. People don't generally joyride public transit unless they have no other options. In fact, having lived both ways, I'd say you're far more incentivized to do this in a suburban setting with a car, since you're sitting in a private bubble with your own music and climate for every part of the trip except the store itself.
- pjerem 5y ago
  > People don't generally joyride public transit unless they have no other options. I think this really depends of the network you are talking about. In some European cities, public transit networks are a blast to use. If frequencies are high enough, and modalities are well connected, you can "ride" the city as easily and naturally on a metro/tram/bus as you would have done by walking. I've took a lot (a damn lot) of bus/trams just because they were there, passing by, and allowed me to save 3 or 4 minutes (with my annual ticket, price was never my mind). (But I'm lucky enough to live in one of the lowest CO2 emitting countries in terms of energy mix.)

flemhans 5y ago

The BahnCard 100 is 3000 EUR in Germany, giving you full access to all trains. Austria is 1/10th the size of Germany. By this logic, the ticket price should be 300 EUR, not 1095 EUR.

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lm28469 5y ago
1/10th of the size doesn't mean 1/10th of the costs/usage/maintenance/&c
TonyTrapp 5y ago
Not that it changes much, but the BC100 is 4000€ for second class, not 3000. Both is too much to make it really popular, while I'd say Austria's pricing is extremely attractive even if the country is smaller. I pay more than half of that just for public transportation in my city in Germany.
egeozcan 5y ago
All trains plus many local transit options as well. It's usually valid in most bigger cities. My ex-ex-employer had given me one and I've used it many years. Incredibly liberating when you have the ability to hop onto any train and just sit. Reservations were sometimes problematic because popular trains had little amount of not-reserved free seats but Bahn.Comfort seats usually saved the day.
FabHK 5y ago
You could argue: If it's 1/10th the size, then it's about 1/3 the length and width. So, average distance (if you pick two points uniformly randomly) will also be around 1/3. By this logic, it should be around 1000 EUR.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
And Switzerland is also small but way more expensive, but, that's not how things work. That's not how anything works.
5y ago

IkmoIkmo 5y ago

Not sure I'm a fan. Certainly very interesting and I'm happy to see a significant country run the experiment, it's going to be a useful data point. But at the end of the day, what does it solve? And what does it leave unsolved? A single public transport marketplace is of course great, but many countries have those without the 'single ticket' system. For example, in the Netherlands I use one public transport card for bus, train, tram. I don't have a single ticket with one annual price, but I don't have different subscriptions or different cards for different transport methods (e.g. bus vs train), nor for different providers of the same transport method (e.g. two bus companies), it all happens on one card. So what does it solve? Admissions checking? No, you still need to present your single ticket. The thing it solves is billing, from individual subscriptions or individual tickets, to a single annual payment. But billing doesn't seem to be that big of a deal in modern systems, and it doesn't seem like it attacks the biggest issue in billing. For example in the Netherlands I'm simply billed by use. If I go 5x as far, I pay roughly 5x as much. That's all done automatic, once a month. I don't have to load prepaid money on my card, I just use the card and it's billed after at the end of the month. Really no different to a variable-usage mobile phone subscription. By introducing a single (e.g. average) payment amount per year, you're overcharging everyone who uses less than average, and undercharging power-users. Usage-based billing seems a much more fair approach. And the billing tech isn't all that complex. Moreover, the fact a substantial number of people will get a single-ticket (e.g. say it's 60% of the users), doesn't change the fact you'll still need to upkeep billing infrastructure for the other 40%. It doesn't allow you to make billing/admissions infrastructure redundant. It also doesn't allow you to differentiate at all in pricing and operators. I don't think this is a very big issue because I like public (i.e. not private) transport to be very egalitarian. But there's something to be said for allowing differences in quality/convenience etc in public, transport, too. e.g. business workers ride trains in the Netherlands in 1st class and do an hour of work on their laptops in quiet, comfy chairs, and pay extra, such that non-business users can ride cheaper in 2nd class. Having a single ticket removes any room for such differentiation, which can be useful to a point. Very interested to see the results and I'm happy they're trying, but not convinced yet.

shimonabi 5y ago

I used to live in Austria before Covid without a car and travel to my home country by train on weekends. I have the feeling they are doing this because they lost a lot of passengers during the epidemic. Maybe I'm wrong...

droopyEyelids 5y ago
Thats how it worked in Chicago: everyone stopped riding due to sars-cov-2, the Transit Authority started selling 1/3 price passes, ridership picked right back up.
sk7 5y ago
You are wrong, the idea is much older and the idea for the current version (initially called 1-2-3 Ticket) was suggested by the green party in 2013 already. More Infos in the history (in German): https://kurier.at/politik/inland/gruene-spoe-oder-oevp-wer-hat-das-1-2-3-klimaticket-erfunden/400717488 https://kurier.at/politik/inland/gruene-spoe-oder-oevp-wer-h...
holri 5y ago
They are doing this because the green party is in the government now. This is a long-standing demand of the green party to lower CO2 emissions. They first did this in Vienna a few years ago, when they were in the city government. Now they are in the federal government and are rolling this out for all of Austria, since it was a huge success in Vienna, car travel was dramatically reduced.

dorianmariefr 5y ago

What if you lose it?

mattkevan 5y ago

Not really the same scale, but I loved having an annual travel card when I lived in London. It was so freeing knowing I could basically get on anything or go anywhere without having to worry about getting the right ticket or making sure I had enough money on the Oyster card. Plus the ticket gave a third off travel outside London. It was expensive-up front, but ended up saving so much money, especially as I could buy it via salary sacrifice before tax. Definitely recommended.

cletus 5y ago

Why should public transport cost anything at all? I mean, what's the point? You might say the service costs money. It does. The ticket prices never cover that so you're already running at a loss. You spend money on enforcement, payment and ticket machines and you reduce usage of the service. But here's the more important point: cars are already subsidized to a huge degree pretty much everywhere through roads, parking, etc. Let's also start by removing free street parking from any area reasonably serviced by public transport. Or just removing it entirely.

joshuaissac 5y ago
> The ticket prices never cover that so you're already running at a loss. London Underground usually runs at a profit. Not entirely from tickets, but also including other sources like advertisement. But ticket revenue is an important part of the income. Public transport also includes privately-owned transport that is run for profit, like private buses and trains, which also make a profit (or go bust).
mellavora 5y ago
That's what Luxembourg did. Works great!
denimnerd42 5y ago
how do you keep people from just riding the train perpetually?
- marcellus23 5y ago
  why would you keep people from doing that? are so many people going to be doing that as to actually cause a problem?
  - denimnerd42 5y ago
    In my area people will ride the commuter train (without paying) for hours and sleep on it. There isn't enough fair enforcement or will to remove them. Makes the train pretty unattractive for its actual purpose. I imagine that issue becoming even worse if it's just free.

Archelaos 5y ago

In Germany the "Bahncard 100" has been available for years. It costs 4,027 Euro/yr (2. class) or 6,812 Euro/yr (1. class) for infinte train rides with Deutsche Bahn and a lot of local transport associations.[1] Since Germany is about four times as big as Austria the price is comparable to the Klimaticket, if one is really travelling a lot of long distances. For smaller areas the situation is very complicated. Almost all local transportation associations have yearly tarifs of their own. Sometimes they are valid in adjacent destinations, sometimes not or only for a limited time (such as during the summer school holidays). More consistency would be desirable here. [1] For a list see: https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/vorteile/verbuende https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/vorteile/verbuende (in German)

bkfh 5y ago
In the Klimaticket, all public transport is included. Cities as well as inter cities
- fisian 5y ago
  To add to that, until now there is the ÖBB Österreichcard which allows infinite train rides on all ÖBB trains. It's about 2000€. Now it will be replaced by this Klimaticket.

logifail 5y ago

This weekend I'll be travelling from Innsbruck to Vienna, a good chunk of the entire length of Austria. I'm not here enough (and not travelling around enough) to be interested in the Klimaticket, but here's how public transport vs car stacks up: Innsbruck to Vienna is 476km (~300mi) by road. It takes about 5 hours to drive, assuming no delays. The way the world is right now, there will certainly be delays. On the fastest route you exit Austria just after Kufstein and enter Germany at Kiefersfelden, drive through Germany on the A93, then on the A8 towards Salzburg, then cross back into Austria. Pre-2015 you'd typically have crossed both those international borders at standard motorway speed(!), but since the refugee crisis, and even more since Covid, it's checkpoints (=delays) galore. By train the journey is scheduled at ~4h15m. The train also enters Germany but doesn't stop there, so no border checks. A standard ("2nd class"/economy) walk-up train fare is €74 ($85), but if you buy an annual railcard for €66 ($76) that's halved, so €37 ($43). This is a completely flexible ticket valid on any service that day, so if you are late (or early) you just get on the next train, and there's basically one every hour pretty much throughout the day. The railcard pays for itself in the first return trip. Maybe it's just me, but €37 for a 300mi journey, with a completely flexible ticket, just seems like amazing value.

jahnu 5y ago
Even during the lockdowns there were times of no checkpoints on the borders again. It was such a relief to finally see them gone. I hope they aren't back again. But yes that is amazing value and travel by train is just nicer.
- logifail 5y ago
  > Even during the lockdowns there were times of no checkpoints on the borders again. It was such a relief to finally see them gone. Unstaffed, or actually gone? :) Last time I drove into Austria from Germany there were no border guards there to actually check anything, but all the traffic calming measures, warning signs and speed restrictions were still there ("cars use left-hand lane, larger/freight vehicles right hand lane"). As one might expect from Homo sapiens behind the wheel, the frantic changing of lanes by vehicles approaching the (unmanned) checkpoint caused an enormous queue and resulting delay almost as bad as if there had been border guards actually checking every single vehicle.

PaulHoule 5y ago

Leasing a car is going to be at least twice that plus you have to pay for gas, parking, etc.

Aeolun 5y ago

Holy shit that’s cheap. The same thing in the Netherlands costs me €4500. And that’s a much smaller country.

mistrial9 5y ago

When the San Francisco Bay Area tried to move to a single means of payment, a digital card Transit-Link or whatnot, it was delayed more than a year by BART due to arguements over who holds the cash payments from ticket sales, and when those funds are released, exactly. The funding of MUNI, BART, Alameda County Transit and others, have different histories and cash control, so they fought about it. source: public news story at the time

rsj_hn 5y ago
They are different systems. Bart is a regional transport agency funded by ticket sales and sales taxes in the Northern CA bay area. SF has regional bus lines but a few bart stops. SamTrans is the San Mateo bus system but they go all the way to Marin County and have a few stops in SF. Caltrain is a completely separate agency and funding unit that runs down the peninsula but also has two stops in SF. You can say they should all be consolidated but these are overlapping areas - BART can't have SF running it in the one area, Oakland running it in another area, etc. So consolidation means moving upward -- e.g. the state of California would run it. But no one wants to lose local control of services they are funding. Why would the city of SF cede control of its bus system to the state? So the control is where the funding is, and you have these overlapping and competing transit lines, all of which operate in San Francisco, but do not accept each other's ticket or payment systems.

whiterock 5y ago

and I live in Austria and will get it soooon. Actually for 699€ for people under the age of 26!

penguin_booze 5y ago

Meanwhile in the UK: yearly train season ticket for 1+ hr journey: only GBP 5600.

Zenst 5y ago
With random delays, strikes and a selection of standing room in which you can share body warmth - all thrown in upon some commutes (no luck involved).

JFKKFJ 5y ago

All public transport in Lombardy, Italy for 1039 Euro/y: https://www.regione.lombardia.it/wps/portal/istituzionale/HP/DettaglioServizio/servizi-e-informazioni/Cittadini/Muoversi-in-Lombardia/biglietti-e-agevolazioni/Io-viaggio/io-viaggio-ovunque-in-lombardia-abbonamento/io-viaggio-ovunque-in-lombardia-abbonamento https://www.regione.lombardia.it/wps/portal/istituzionale/HP...

la_fayette 5y ago

I am commuting from Germany into Austria on a daily basis. It is 4 stations in Germany, last station in Austria, around 30 km. The yearly ticket is 1.200 EUR. Germany has absolutely crazy high ticket prices, but cheap diesel cars ;-)

Proven 5y ago

It's just another taxpayer-funded way to buy votes for the furthering of climatist agenda.

switch007 5y ago

If the UK ever had such a thing I bet it’d be at least £15,000/year. Many annual tickets to commute in to London alone are £4-7,000.