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This is an example where the federal government can do something that is impossible for companies and local governments. All the transit companies in Germany ha

This is an example where the federal government can do something that is impossible for companies and local governments. All the transit companies in Germany have different systems, different cards, some don't accept digital tickets at all -- but now the government just said they have to accept this new common digital ticket and it's done. Similar thing happened in Austria with the Klimaticket. There are dozens of local transport authorities, and the government just decided that there should be a yearly ticket (Klimaticket) and everyone has to accept it.

TulliusCicero 4y ago
> but now the government just said they have to accept this new common digital ticket and it's done. This is exactly the power of higher level government. Everyone loves to talk about making decisions more locally, but the truth is that fundamentally, local decisionmaking is no better or worse than national decisionmaking; it's just different, at least overall. In some cases it's better, but you can see that in a case like this, just having coordination forced upon local agencies that otherwise have little incentive to cooperate is actually fantastic.
- deleted 4y ago
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em-bee 4y ago
it's not that simple, there is of course the question of who is paying for this, since the respective transportation businesses do expect to be reimbursed. but, regional tickets that are valid in all transport businesses in an area already exist everywhere, so the technicalities of working out how to count and reimburse different businesses has already been worked out, and expanding this to an additional nationwide ticket is a small change. this is a very different approach and culture to for example japan where lots of independent companies providing transport exist, but as far as i can tell no collective ticket, but pay as you go everywhere.

TulliusCicero 4y ago

> but now the government just said they have to accept this new common digital ticket and it's done. This is exactly the power of higher level government. Everyone loves to talk about making decisions more locally, but the truth is that fundamentally, local decisionmaking is no better or worse than national decisionmaking; it's just different, at least overall. In some cases it's better, but you can see that in a case like this, just having coordination forced upon local agencies that otherwise have little incentive to cooperate is actually fantastic.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

em-bee 4y ago

it's not that simple, there is of course the question of who is paying for this, since the respective transportation businesses do expect to be reimbursed. but, regional tickets that are valid in all transport businesses in an area already exist everywhere, so the technicalities of working out how to count and reimburse different businesses has already been worked out, and expanding this to an additional nationwide ticket is a small change. this is a very different approach and culture to for example japan where lots of independent companies providing transport exist, but as far as i can tell no collective ticket, but pay as you go everywhere.