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My wife had a daily 45km rail+2km bus trip to work which was 200€ per month. That's massive savings for many people who choose not to drive with cars. Her coll

by JanSt 4y ago

My wife had a daily 45km rail+2km bus trip to work which was 200€ per month. That's massive savings for many people who choose not to drive with cars. Her colleagues drive to work with cars for 2 km trips and ask her whether she does not own a car (we do). Taking the train is a) cheaper b) more relaxed (can read) c) better for the environment d) it's even faster in her case The €49 ticket could give public transportation a massive boost - worst case is, no additional people use trains and buses but people who can't afford cars or use public transport for enviromental reasons save quite some money.

siva7 4y ago
That's not quite in the interest of the car manufacturers that public transportation is cheaper than cars which is one of the reasons this took so long.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
  That's why it's even more impressive it took off in Germany which is normally very protective of its car industry.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    I'm still surprised by that, but personally a bit disappointed it ended up at 50 bucks, I think it was increased multiple times during the planning and discussions about extending the 9€ ticket. At least it's not 70, which I think was also on the table at some point. Still, a huge win for people who can use it daily for commute, which is unfortunately not me. I had the 9€ one and occasionally took the train into the green for hiking or other events, but didn't even come close to 50€ in fares.
  - lytefm 4y ago
    We still have massive subsidies for providing leased new cars, mostly selected from German car manufacturers, to employees (about 3 bn per year [1]). Few people in the upper middle class and above will use public transport instead of their car, if it's provided by their employer. The results from the 9€ Ticket also indicate that people aren't using their car that less often. They are just using the ticket to do additional journeys [2]. But I suppose that having this ticket available for longer than 3 months will motivate some households to get rid of/ not purchase a second car. Also, it will probably convince younger adults in metropolitan areas (like me) to not buy a car - or to delay it until it's needed for family reasons. [1]: https://www.exberliner.com/politics/red-flag-why-we-should-ban-cars-altogether/ https://www.exberliner.com/politics/red-flag-why-we-should-b... [2]: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/9-euro-ticket-hasnt-changed-how-much-people-use-their-cars-studies https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/9-euro-...
    - mytailorisrich 4y ago
      My take is that in many, if not most, cases people choose based on convenience and practicality unless one option is simply unaffordable. In Europe in general affordability of public transport is not the problem so I don't expect that decreasing prices will have a big effect on use.
      - siva7 4y ago
        I would disagree. Public transportation isn't cheap either if you're not a student or have a company sponsor, in some cases even more expensive than having a car.
        mytailorisrich 4y ago
        I didn't claim it was 'cheap'. I wrote that people can afford it in the same way people can afford a car and that other concerns are often more important.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        It surely is a problem and not everyone lives in the city center or in a nearby street with a public transport stop. Then there is the whole issue with timetables once one gets a few km away from city center, with only one connection per hour between 7 AM and 8 PM, for anything else there are taxis. Not every location in Europe is Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan,...
      - kitkat_new 4y ago
        it is a problem, especially if you need a car anyways.
    - Aachen 4y ago
      One limitation of the previous price experiment is that it was only a few summer months. Nobody sells their car for 3 months, especially when they include a summer holiday. Let's see what happens when you can count on this existing for years to come. The germans are generally quite conscious of right and wrong (see e.g. Linux and OSM usage: it's still minorities but it's much more present than in similar countries like NL), maybe very competitive pricing does help in mass transport adoption. In my opinion it should be somewhere between dirt cheap and free if your income is in the bottom 10% of incomes (and could cost twice as much for the top 50%, which includes me, because it has to be financed somehow anyway), but as an intermediate step, this is not going in the wrong direction.
  - sprash 4y ago
    It's not that impressive if you consider that the current government in Germany is driving a massive de-industrialization campaign. Destroying the own car industry fits well in the agenda.
    - siva7 4y ago
      They're not destroying it but forcing them to acknowledge the truth about climate.
      - sprash 4y ago
        When is China going to "acknowledge the truth about climate"? When it finished building the hundreds of planned coal power plants? This BS is all a pure geopolitics show with obvious traitors in power of western governments.
        brazzy 4y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
      - throwaway87915 4y ago
        Isn't that about the fuel and not the vehicle? If we manufactured diesel out of wood or algae, the same cars would suddenly become very green - in case of algae cultivation for fuel, you can reach carbon negativity (the process net-decreased carbon in atmosphere). This is likely more green than building battery electric vehicles with large capacity. Batteries are great but cars don't need more than 100km of charge. Longer trips should be on bio-diesel or bio-gas.
        Xylakant 4y ago
        The process cannot be carbon negative unless you sequester the algae somehow. All the carbon the algae captures while growing will be released when they decompose.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    The car Minister has been trying to slow down the introduction of the ticket and increase the price while trying to look like he’s working towards the ticket. This 49€ ticket is basically a permanent continuation of last summer’s 9€ ticket, which existed for 3 months.
- ivan_gammel 4y ago
  Some German car manufacturers invest in fleet management probably foreseeing the future in which people won’t own their cars. Car sharing can be the future and the answer.
- tmalsburg2 4y ago
  I don't think that people use cars because it's cheaper. Owning and using a car in Germany is pretty expensive and public transport probably was already cheaper for the vast majority of use cases.
sandworm101 4y ago
Cool, if you live near a rail line in a major city. Not everyone has that luxury. Im standing about 300km from the nearest passenger rail setvice. It is 0530, -25c, and i am about to drive 18km to work (government/military). Trains or even busses are a distant concept here.
- shlant 4y ago
  are you in Germany? in Europe?
  - yorwba 4y ago
    Germany is only slightly larger than a circle with radius 300 km.
    - shlant 4y ago
      yea I figured they are probably in the US or something which means their contribution to the discourse was essentially "bad public transport is bad"
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  IMO, it's the other way around. I'd rather have the luxury of a 18km drive to work than my current 70km train trip + 8 minute bus to work. Which means 90 minutes morning commute, 90 minutes evening commute. Yeah, apples to oranges.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    At one point, I had a 90-minute one-way some-days commute. Even though that included an only few minute drive to the train station, that wasn't really sustainable long-term. It's just a big chunk out of your day even if driving was mostly a worse option.
- fabian2k 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure there isn't a single point in Germany that is 300km from any passenger rail station. Of course rail doesn't go to small villages, but most medium-size cities have reasonable rail connections here.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late). So there's not much reading that can be done. Also, try reading while you're waiting in the cold for a bus that keeps on getting more and more delayed because of weather. My personal record so far was nearly an hour with busses promised but then suddenly vanishing from the app. Compared to this, the corresponding car trip takes about 10 minutes. I never sat in heavy traffic because you can easily circumvent that in a car. However, I have been stuck in a bus sitting in a traffic jam for more than 30 minutes on many occasions. The bus can't change it's course and the bus drivers don't like letting you exit anywhere that isn't a bus stop. But at least you can read while your colleagues have already been home for a while. Most people overlook that travel to and from stops and waiting for a connecting bus can add up significantly. And then there are all those things that time tables won't tell you.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Is there ample housing near your place of work with enough supply to keep prices affordable?
- fatnoah 4y ago
  > I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late). Can you provide more details about where you are and the distance involved? I don't understand why you wouldn't simply drive 10 minutes.
- Quanttek 4y ago
  considering that short journey time, have you thought about biking?
  - 4y ago
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
I was in Berlin once as a tourist and I was surprised how bad is the planning of buses. They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives (in the middle of the route), with 20 people on them, wasting everyone's time. That's just incredibly dumb planning. I get that the point is to be more "reliable" and "on time" but what's the point of being accurate if you're so slow?! At some points Google maps suggested we walk half an hour instead of taking the bus because the bus was slower. It takes some really funny priorities to reach this point. I haven't seen anything similar anywhere else, a bus stopping and waiting with people inside. And it wasn't something rare, it seemed to happen pretty frequently. It seemed like they are artificially padding the accuracy metric by actively slowing the buses. Their schedule is far slower than their average pace, and then they slow down everything. You get that the worst case timing is now your average timing but "accuracy" increased. That's Goodhart law in full effect.
- iamsaitam 4y ago
  This rarely happens and it's the right thing to do. Missing the bus because it arrived earlier is a no-no, specially when they're sporadic.
- codethief 4y ago
  > They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives. So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule? The bus only ever needs to wait when there are no people getting on/off the bus at multiple stops in a row (e.g. at night-time), so then those stops will be skipped. As a consequence, the bus will be a few minutes ahead of time and so at some point the driver will stop and wait to make sure the bus is still following the schedule. Sometimes the bus also needs to stop because drivers take their mandatory break. This usually happens at the end of the line, though, before they return or go on under a different line number. In any case: I have yet to see a public transport system as good as Berlin's. Yes, it might still take you a while to get from A to B (it is a big city after all) but which other major city in the world offers reliable 24/7 public transport with great coverage and is not completely overloaded all the time? The only thing I dislike is the price for single tickets which is between 3.00€ and 3.80€ depending on the zone. (That used to be a kebap!) IMO they should finally put an end of all the free-riding (by both Berliners and tourists alike) and introduce electronic ticket checks at every stop.
ttoinou 4y ago
How can it be better for the environment if your electricity is generated by coal ?
- roywiggins 4y ago
  Energy efficiency. Even a diesel train is going to be better than a personal automobile.
  - ttoinou 4y ago
    Trains are quite inefficient and disorganized
andrepd 4y ago
In my country the road system has been massively subsidised in detriment of the rail system. Tens of lines that have been ongoing since the 1860s have been disabled even while they had users and were turning a profit. Trains are constantly delayed or suppressed, lines are overcrowded in rush hours. At the same time traffic is ATROCIOUS in the two main cities where almost 2/3rds of the population lives. Then people say "why would I ever take the train if I can help it? It's almost as expensive and I cannot rely on it to go to work"... So we waste billions on sub-par methods of transport which are (1) less efficient (2) less comfortable (3) take up ungodly amounts of space in 6-lane roads and huge parking. Sad state of things. I don't know anyone who would prefer to suffer through 2 hours of gridlock every day to go to work, rather than cruising on a train reading a book or scrolling in their phone or just napping. The demand is there! Just the supply isn't...

by JanSt 4y ago

siva7 4y ago

That's not quite in the interest of the car manufacturers that public transportation is cheaper than cars which is one of the reasons this took so long.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
That's why it's even more impressive it took off in Germany which is normally very protective of its car industry.
- iforgotpassword 4y ago
  I'm still surprised by that, but personally a bit disappointed it ended up at 50 bucks, I think it was increased multiple times during the planning and discussions about extending the 9€ ticket. At least it's not 70, which I think was also on the table at some point. Still, a huge win for people who can use it daily for commute, which is unfortunately not me. I had the 9€ one and occasionally took the train into the green for hiking or other events, but didn't even come close to 50€ in fares.
- lytefm 4y ago
  We still have massive subsidies for providing leased new cars, mostly selected from German car manufacturers, to employees (about 3 bn per year [1]). Few people in the upper middle class and above will use public transport instead of their car, if it's provided by their employer. The results from the 9€ Ticket also indicate that people aren't using their car that less often. They are just using the ticket to do additional journeys [2]. But I suppose that having this ticket available for longer than 3 months will motivate some households to get rid of/ not purchase a second car. Also, it will probably convince younger adults in metropolitan areas (like me) to not buy a car - or to delay it until it's needed for family reasons. [1]: https://www.exberliner.com/politics/red-flag-why-we-should-ban-cars-altogether/ https://www.exberliner.com/politics/red-flag-why-we-should-b... [2]: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/9-euro-ticket-hasnt-changed-how-much-people-use-their-cars-studies https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/9-euro-...
  - mytailorisrich 4y ago
    My take is that in many, if not most, cases people choose based on convenience and practicality unless one option is simply unaffordable. In Europe in general affordability of public transport is not the problem so I don't expect that decreasing prices will have a big effect on use.
    - siva7 4y ago
      I would disagree. Public transportation isn't cheap either if you're not a student or have a company sponsor, in some cases even more expensive than having a car.
      - mytailorisrich 4y ago
        I didn't claim it was 'cheap'. I wrote that people can afford it in the same way people can afford a car and that other concerns are often more important.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      It surely is a problem and not everyone lives in the city center or in a nearby street with a public transport stop. Then there is the whole issue with timetables once one gets a few km away from city center, with only one connection per hour between 7 AM and 8 PM, for anything else there are taxis. Not every location in Europe is Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan,...
    - kitkat_new 4y ago
      it is a problem, especially if you need a car anyways.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    One limitation of the previous price experiment is that it was only a few summer months. Nobody sells their car for 3 months, especially when they include a summer holiday. Let's see what happens when you can count on this existing for years to come. The germans are generally quite conscious of right and wrong (see e.g. Linux and OSM usage: it's still minorities but it's much more present than in similar countries like NL), maybe very competitive pricing does help in mass transport adoption. In my opinion it should be somewhere between dirt cheap and free if your income is in the bottom 10% of incomes (and could cost twice as much for the top 50%, which includes me, because it has to be financed somehow anyway), but as an intermediate step, this is not going in the wrong direction.
- sprash 4y ago
  It's not that impressive if you consider that the current government in Germany is driving a massive de-industrialization campaign. Destroying the own car industry fits well in the agenda.
  - siva7 4y ago
    They're not destroying it but forcing them to acknowledge the truth about climate.
    - sprash 4y ago
      When is China going to "acknowledge the truth about climate"? When it finished building the hundreds of planned coal power plants? This BS is all a pure geopolitics show with obvious traitors in power of western governments.
      - brazzy 4y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_China
    - throwaway87915 4y ago
      Isn't that about the fuel and not the vehicle? If we manufactured diesel out of wood or algae, the same cars would suddenly become very green - in case of algae cultivation for fuel, you can reach carbon negativity (the process net-decreased carbon in atmosphere). This is likely more green than building battery electric vehicles with large capacity. Batteries are great but cars don't need more than 100km of charge. Longer trips should be on bio-diesel or bio-gas.
      - Xylakant 4y ago
        The process cannot be carbon negative unless you sequester the algae somehow. All the carbon the algae captures while growing will be released when they decompose.
- ant6n 4y ago
  The car Minister has been trying to slow down the introduction of the ticket and increase the price while trying to look like he’s working towards the ticket. This 49€ ticket is basically a permanent continuation of last summer’s 9€ ticket, which existed for 3 months.
ivan_gammel 4y ago
Some German car manufacturers invest in fleet management probably foreseeing the future in which people won’t own their cars. Car sharing can be the future and the answer.
tmalsburg2 4y ago
I don't think that people use cars because it's cheaper. Owning and using a car in Germany is pretty expensive and public transport probably was already cheaper for the vast majority of use cases.

sandworm101 4y ago

Cool, if you live near a rail line in a major city. Not everyone has that luxury. Im standing about 300km from the nearest passenger rail setvice. It is 0530, -25c, and i am about to drive 18km to work (government/military). Trains or even busses are a distant concept here.

shlant 4y ago
are you in Germany? in Europe?
- yorwba 4y ago
  Germany is only slightly larger than a circle with radius 300 km.
  - shlant 4y ago
    yea I figured they are probably in the US or something which means their contribution to the discourse was essentially "bad public transport is bad"
johnchristopher 4y ago
IMO, it's the other way around. I'd rather have the luxury of a 18km drive to work than my current 70km train trip + 8 minute bus to work. Which means 90 minutes morning commute, 90 minutes evening commute. Yeah, apples to oranges.
- ghaff 4y ago
  At one point, I had a 90-minute one-way some-days commute. Even though that included an only few minute drive to the train station, that wasn't really sustainable long-term. It's just a big chunk out of your day even if driving was mostly a worse option.
fabian2k 4y ago
I'm pretty sure there isn't a single point in Germany that is 300km from any passenger rail station. Of course rail doesn't go to small villages, but most medium-size cities have reasonable rail connections here.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

AnonymousPlanet 4y ago

I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late). So there's not much reading that can be done. Also, try reading while you're waiting in the cold for a bus that keeps on getting more and more delayed because of weather. My personal record so far was nearly an hour with busses promised but then suddenly vanishing from the app. Compared to this, the corresponding car trip takes about 10 minutes. I never sat in heavy traffic because you can easily circumvent that in a car. However, I have been stuck in a bus sitting in a traffic jam for more than 30 minutes on many occasions. The bus can't change it's course and the bus drivers don't like letting you exit anywhere that isn't a bus stop. But at least you can read while your colleagues have already been home for a while. Most people overlook that travel to and from stops and waiting for a connecting bus can add up significantly. And then there are all those things that time tables won't tell you.

CalRobert 4y ago
Is there ample housing near your place of work with enough supply to keep prices affordable?
fatnoah 4y ago
> I use public transport to go to work. But it's not really convenient. It takes me about 45 minutes to get there. And that's if everything goes well. Half an hour of that is walking (to and from bus stops) and waiting (you should be several minutes early because busses sometimes leave early themselves, but most of the time they are late). Can you provide more details about where you are and the distance involved? I don't understand why you wouldn't simply drive 10 minutes.
Quanttek 4y ago
considering that short journey time, have you thought about biking?
- 4y ago

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

I was in Berlin once as a tourist and I was surprised how bad is the planning of buses. They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives (in the middle of the route), with 20 people on them, wasting everyone's time. That's just incredibly dumb planning. I get that the point is to be more "reliable" and "on time" but what's the point of being accurate if you're so slow?! At some points Google maps suggested we walk half an hour instead of taking the bus because the bus was slower. It takes some really funny priorities to reach this point. I haven't seen anything similar anywhere else, a bus stopping and waiting with people inside. And it wasn't something rare, it seemed to happen pretty frequently. It seemed like they are artificially padding the accuracy metric by actively slowing the buses. Their schedule is far slower than their average pace, and then they slow down everything. You get that the worst case timing is now your average timing but "accuracy" increased. That's Goodhart law in full effect.

iamsaitam 4y ago
This rarely happens and it's the right thing to do. Missing the bus because it arrived earlier is a no-no, specially when they're sporadic.
codethief 4y ago
> They stop and wait in the station until their time arrives. So you're suggesting… they shouldn't follow a schedule? The bus only ever needs to wait when there are no people getting on/off the bus at multiple stops in a row (e.g. at night-time), so then those stops will be skipped. As a consequence, the bus will be a few minutes ahead of time and so at some point the driver will stop and wait to make sure the bus is still following the schedule. Sometimes the bus also needs to stop because drivers take their mandatory break. This usually happens at the end of the line, though, before they return or go on under a different line number. In any case: I have yet to see a public transport system as good as Berlin's. Yes, it might still take you a while to get from A to B (it is a big city after all) but which other major city in the world offers reliable 24/7 public transport with great coverage and is not completely overloaded all the time? The only thing I dislike is the price for single tickets which is between 3.00€ and 3.80€ depending on the zone. (That used to be a kebap!) IMO they should finally put an end of all the free-riding (by both Berliners and tourists alike) and introduce electronic ticket checks at every stop.

ttoinou 4y ago

How can it be better for the environment if your electricity is generated by coal ?

roywiggins 4y ago
Energy efficiency. Even a diesel train is going to be better than a personal automobile.
- ttoinou 4y ago
  Trains are quite inefficient and disorganized

andrepd 4y ago

In my country the road system has been massively subsidised in detriment of the rail system. Tens of lines that have been ongoing since the 1860s have been disabled even while they had users and were turning a profit. Trains are constantly delayed or suppressed, lines are overcrowded in rush hours. At the same time traffic is ATROCIOUS in the two main cities where almost 2/3rds of the population lives. Then people say "why would I ever take the train if I can help it? It's almost as expensive and I cannot rely on it to go to work"... So we waste billions on sub-par methods of transport which are (1) less efficient (2) less comfortable (3) take up ungodly amounts of space in 6-lane roads and huge parking. Sad state of things. I don't know anyone who would prefer to suffer through 2 hours of gridlock every day to go to work, rather than cruising on a train reading a book or scrolling in their phone or just napping. The demand is there! Just the supply isn't...