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The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things. This is a map of German public transit companies:

The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things. This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess. With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on. The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake. I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be. 0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_der_Verkehrsverb%C3%BCnde_und_Tarifverb%C3%BCnde_in_Deutschland.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_de...

3D30497420 3y ago
A good example of this complexity is Berlin. Many people have monthly passes for just A and B zones, which comprise the bulk of central Berlin. However, the new airport is just over the border in zone C, which requires an additional ticket. The transit authority knows this and will catch and fine people who neglected or forgot to buy a B to C ticket.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- patall 3y ago
  What is complex about the B/C border? That Hönow is B? Because else, it is literary the federal state border. A/B is the S-Bahn-Ring. Sure, three zones are not super simple and where zone C ends is somewhat arbitrary. But aside from that, it's the most logical and simple solution possible.
  - rcme 3y ago
    Generally, I agree, it isn't very complicated to understand. But, it's very easy to forget to buy a C ticket if you're used to hopping on the U-bahn with your monthly AB ticket.
    - mejutoco 3y ago
      The announcement mentions you do need it when announcing the stop. By then it is prob too late, though. If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that.
      - cbmuser 3y ago
        > The announcement mentions you do need it when announcing the stop. By then it is prob too late, though. Not on all lines. If I remember correctly, I have only heard it on the new announcements for the BER airport. And, they actually tell you on time so you have a chance to buy an extension ticket.
        mejutoco 3y ago
        It is pretty good, but on time here means to leave the wagon to buy a ticket and take the next train (unless you buy it on the app).
      - carlmr 3y ago
        >If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that. I don't know the BVG app, but if you're not regularly in some city installing an app, finding out how it works, adding your payment info is a huge hassle. We need a single app for all German transit, that is well designed. Instead of hundreds or thousands of apps for every city and village. What I also really liked is the chargeable chip cards in Taiwan. You could enter and exit anywhere. Your card is charged with exactly the distance traveled. No thinking needed. Short distances are always cheap. E.g. if you travel from zone B-C but start just one stop before B ends, you wouldn't pay for the whole of B. You just pay what you use, which is fair.
- cbmuser 3y ago
  If you think that Berlin's zone system is complex, you haven't seen the public transport in many other cities like Munich which has 6 zones or Japanese cities where trains are operated by different companies. Berlin's system is rather simple and comparably cheap.
  - TulliusCicero 3y ago
    Yeah but these days Japanese trains can all use the suica (and similar) cards to tap in and out, right? You don't actually need to understand the different rail companies or zones or whatever, you just get your one card and put money on it and then tap.
    - inferiorhuman 3y ago
      For regional, yes, a Passmo, Suica, or whatever card works pretty much everywhere. For Shinkansen service, you still have to buy tickets.
- jameshart 3y ago
  This is an improvement over how Berlin used to handle people who crossed arbitrary borders within the city, though.
calaphos 3y ago
For regular commuters the price is a big deal. Not only where tickets crossing multiple zones complicated to get but also unreasonably expensive (~200Eur/Month). In contrast the 49 Euros is less expensive than (almost?) any single zone monthly ticket out there.
- brd529 3y ago
  Monthly train pass on New Jersey Transit, LIRR and Metro North can get to above $300 once you are 20 miles from NYC.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    About 40 miles outside of Boston I'd be around $500/month to have commuter rail plus subway per month.
    - kspacewalk2 3y ago
      They're essentially actively trying to dissuade talking public transit regionally. Curious choice.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Driving and parking would cost even more. Pretty typical of commuting into major cities. Commuting into a city, especially without free parking, on a daily basis costs a lot.
mikae1 3y ago
> With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on. There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4 https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.
- bahnkenner 3y ago
  By "local" transit, I mean regional commuter trains (Regionalbahn, Regionalexpress and S-Bahn), not the faster long-distance trains (Intercity and Intercity-Express, the latter being Germany's high-speed trains).
  - mikae1 3y ago
    Thanks!
morsch 3y ago
I mean, you don't have to figure it out. You can just punch in start and end of your journey into one of several apps that work nationwide, and pay whatever it says. Of course, many people don't have any of the apps, particularly people who rarely use public transport, which are also the people most easily confuse by the complicated fee structure. Unfortunately, the new monthly ticket does little to help them. 49 EUR isn't a value proposition for them, and so they are still stuck with the awful status quo.
- eliaspro 3y ago
  You're out of luck, if none of the route segments is served by Deutsche Bahn (which is often the case for regional routes), because then you'll be unable to buy your ticket using the most common nation-wide app DB Navigator.
  - fweimer 3y ago
    Or worse, you can still buy the ticket, but it's not valid for any trains actually in service. This stuff is really non-obvious. For example, train operators can license certain Deutsche Bahn trademarks without accepting Deutsche Bahn tickets.
    - danhor 3y ago
      Where? As far as I know, all the Deutsche Bahn Tickets for regional traffic use the Deutschlandtarif, which is accepted in all "normal" (excluding heritage trains and the likes) regional trains in all of Germany.
      - Pamar 3y ago
        Is the Metronom (Hamburg-Bremen) covered by the 49€ ticket, too?
        MrJohz 3y ago
        A quick Google seems to suggest that that's the case, and their website is advertising ways to buy the Deutschlandticket pretty clearly.
kingofpandora 3y ago
This is typical in most countries that aren't very small. I'm struggling to think of a moderately-sized country that doesn't work have regional transit authorities with their own ticketing systems. I haven't been everywhere in the world so I bet they do exist, but I've yet to see one.
- z2 3y ago
  While Japan has regional ticketing systems and companies, they did standardize nationally on supporting 3 major prepaid transit cards (pasmo, suica, icoca) so most rapid transit and regional transit are low friction enough to just tap in and tap out. China has done the same with T-Union. I suppose with NFC contactless payment, a plausible future state is just supporting credit card payments everywhere, though of course this doesn't solve the monthly pass problem.
ghaff 3y ago
And for visitors who may not even speak the primary language, public transit is awful in most places in terms of onboarding jet lagged visitors. Apparently no one does UX trials of people who have zero familiarity with the system and don't speak the language--though at least they maybe accommodate major Western languages. But, in general, it's pretty awful and you at least should do some research in advance.
- riedel 3y ago
  I agree that vending machines are really a mess. However I recommend the Deutsche Bahn Navigator App. If you have an account you can easily get most tickets. Also states like Baden-Württemberg got their act together recently and made it possible to book tickets all way through. I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing. but the new ticket is really nice wrt booking.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I was just in Amsterdam. One of our locals there said that, although there's an ongoing switch to just tapping contactless credit cards, he advised just getting a contactless transit chip card because even if it cost a few dollar more it would more reliably work everywhere. Things have improved in most places over time but it can still be confusing for the occasional visitor. I remember at some point pre-pandemic I was in the UK with a friend and we had all these these different tickets/receipts were trying to use to go through a turnstile and doubtless really pissing off the people lined up behind us but it was super-unintuitive what we needed to stick into the machine.
    - Symbiote 3y ago
      The UK has since simplified that into one ticket, possibly also a receipt of you ask for it. Prior to this, the ticket and seat reservation were seperate bit of paper.
      - ghaff 3y ago
TulliusCicero 3y ago
Exactly. The new ticket is an excellent example of when national government can be superior to more local government: when the national government forces coordination to solve fragmentation problems, where local agencies lacked the...motivation to solve things on their own. On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level. A complex system per locality can still work okay for local residents; and if it's painful for visitors, well, visitors don't vote, and it's not the kind of thing that's likely to kill tourism.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Which reminds me to give a shout-out to the Clipper card. The SF Bay Area really did the right thing here. 24 different systems, all of which use the same card: https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/where-to-use.html https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/where-to-use.html And they have now expanded that card-based system to include a mobile app, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, so now I just tap my phone and I'm all set.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yeah, not as much in the Bay Area these days, but the Clipper card is a huge improvement over the previous system. And I imagie by the time I eventually run down my Clipper balance I'll be fine with my phone.
    - wpietri 3y ago
      It's been a while since I set it up, but I'm pretty sure that setting up Clipper on Google Pay (or Google Wallet or whatever it is) is using my old Clipper balance. So you might be able to swap it over now and have it ready to go for your next trip.
    - andromeduck 3y ago
      They not to keep too much of a balance on any one card. It's something $50 and a 2+ hour wait one the phone to transfer balances between cards IIRC.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
Your comment is a fascinating take on perspective. To you it's a fractured, difficult system. To this American, it has been absolutely futuristic every time I've been there. Wish we could get such an awful system anywhere near where I live.
- rconti 3y ago
  Yup. As an American, I found it quite easy to navigate transit systems every time I visited Germany; most recently Berlin. Especially these days with things like Google/Apple maps transit directions that work more-or-less flawlessly. But maybe it's because I'm used to systems like Caltrain that don't even have a functioning app, and which just randomly cancel trains for huge chunks of the day, or BART, which has an even-more-insane pay-per-distance system than anything I've seen elsewhere.
- bahnkenner 3y ago
  If you go from the US to Europe, you'll think European public transit is great. If you go from Europe to East Asia, your perspective will change again.
moltar 3y ago
You are so right! I was just in Munich and had some of the most confusing experience in any public transport system I’ve ever used. And I’ve seen many! It was so shocking. The UIs of the ticket machines are horrendously slow and confusing. Stop names are always in German even when switching languages. This, of course, doesn’t align with Google Maps half the time, as my GM is set to English.
- tcptomato 3y ago
  What stop names are translated?
  - Pamar 3y ago
    I suppose Hbf<->Central Station, but apart from that yeah, can't think of other examples
gravypod 3y ago
If only NY/NJ could figure this out. I often take a longer route to work as it's much cheaper than buying the three separate tickets I'd need.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
In cities outside of germany, when you arrive at a new city you buy a transit ticket, you swipe that at the entrance and the exit, and anything related to zones or whatever works automatically, you don't have to think about it.
- aix1 3y ago
  I read your comment as suggesting that this is the norm outside Germany. While systems like this exist (e.g. in London) in my experience they aren't as common as I wish they were.
gmerc 3y ago
What did it used to be.It’s always been this way in the last 3+ decades since privatization.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
[flagged]

3D30497420 3y ago

A good example of this complexity is Berlin. Many people have monthly passes for just A and B zones, which comprise the bulk of central Berlin. However, the new airport is just over the border in zone C, which requires an additional ticket. The transit authority knows this and will catch and fine people who neglected or forgot to buy a B to C ticket.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
patall 3y ago
What is complex about the B/C border? That Hönow is B? Because else, it is literary the federal state border. A/B is the S-Bahn-Ring. Sure, three zones are not super simple and where zone C ends is somewhat arbitrary. But aside from that, it's the most logical and simple solution possible.
- rcme 3y ago
  Generally, I agree, it isn't very complicated to understand. But, it's very easy to forget to buy a C ticket if you're used to hopping on the U-bahn with your monthly AB ticket.
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    The announcement mentions you do need it when announcing the stop. By then it is prob too late, though. If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that.
    - cbmuser 3y ago
      > The announcement mentions you do need it when announcing the stop. By then it is prob too late, though. Not on all lines. If I remember correctly, I have only heard it on the new announcements for the BER airport. And, they actually tell you on time so you have a chance to buy an extension ticket.
      - mejutoco 3y ago
        It is pretty good, but on time here means to leave the wagon to buy a ticket and take the next train (unless you buy it on the app).
    - carlmr 3y ago
      >If you use the bvg app it tells you which ticket you need for any destination, but non-locals might not know that. I don't know the BVG app, but if you're not regularly in some city installing an app, finding out how it works, adding your payment info is a huge hassle. We need a single app for all German transit, that is well designed. Instead of hundreds or thousands of apps for every city and village. What I also really liked is the chargeable chip cards in Taiwan. You could enter and exit anywhere. Your card is charged with exactly the distance traveled. No thinking needed. Short distances are always cheap. E.g. if you travel from zone B-C but start just one stop before B ends, you wouldn't pay for the whole of B. You just pay what you use, which is fair.
cbmuser 3y ago
If you think that Berlin's zone system is complex, you haven't seen the public transport in many other cities like Munich which has 6 zones or Japanese cities where trains are operated by different companies. Berlin's system is rather simple and comparably cheap.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  Yeah but these days Japanese trains can all use the suica (and similar) cards to tap in and out, right? You don't actually need to understand the different rail companies or zones or whatever, you just get your one card and put money on it and then tap.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    For regional, yes, a Passmo, Suica, or whatever card works pretty much everywhere. For Shinkansen service, you still have to buy tickets.
jameshart 3y ago
This is an improvement over how Berlin used to handle people who crossed arbitrary borders within the city, though.

calaphos 3y ago

For regular commuters the price is a big deal. Not only where tickets crossing multiple zones complicated to get but also unreasonably expensive (~200Eur/Month). In contrast the 49 Euros is less expensive than (almost?) any single zone monthly ticket out there.

brd529 3y ago
Monthly train pass on New Jersey Transit, LIRR and Metro North can get to above $300 once you are 20 miles from NYC.
- ghaff 3y ago
  About 40 miles outside of Boston I'd be around $500/month to have commuter rail plus subway per month.
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    They're essentially actively trying to dissuade talking public transit regionally. Curious choice.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Driving and parking would cost even more. Pretty typical of commuting into major cities. Commuting into a city, especially without free parking, on a daily basis costs a lot.

mikae1 3y ago

> With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on. There were some exceptions mentioned in https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4 https://youtu.be/hzuAohOSLi4, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.

bahnkenner 3y ago
By "local" transit, I mean regional commuter trains (Regionalbahn, Regionalexpress and S-Bahn), not the faster long-distance trains (Intercity and Intercity-Express, the latter being Germany's high-speed trains).
- mikae1 3y ago
  Thanks!

morsch 3y ago

I mean, you don't have to figure it out. You can just punch in start and end of your journey into one of several apps that work nationwide, and pay whatever it says. Of course, many people don't have any of the apps, particularly people who rarely use public transport, which are also the people most easily confuse by the complicated fee structure. Unfortunately, the new monthly ticket does little to help them. 49 EUR isn't a value proposition for them, and so they are still stuck with the awful status quo.

eliaspro 3y ago
You're out of luck, if none of the route segments is served by Deutsche Bahn (which is often the case for regional routes), because then you'll be unable to buy your ticket using the most common nation-wide app DB Navigator.
- fweimer 3y ago
  Or worse, you can still buy the ticket, but it's not valid for any trains actually in service. This stuff is really non-obvious. For example, train operators can license certain Deutsche Bahn trademarks without accepting Deutsche Bahn tickets.
  - danhor 3y ago
    Where? As far as I know, all the Deutsche Bahn Tickets for regional traffic use the Deutschlandtarif, which is accepted in all "normal" (excluding heritage trains and the likes) regional trains in all of Germany.
    - Pamar 3y ago
      Is the Metronom (Hamburg-Bremen) covered by the 49€ ticket, too?
      - MrJohz 3y ago
        A quick Google seems to suggest that that's the case, and their website is advertising ways to buy the Deutschlandticket pretty clearly.

kingofpandora 3y ago

This is typical in most countries that aren't very small. I'm struggling to think of a moderately-sized country that doesn't work have regional transit authorities with their own ticketing systems. I haven't been everywhere in the world so I bet they do exist, but I've yet to see one.

z2 3y ago
While Japan has regional ticketing systems and companies, they did standardize nationally on supporting 3 major prepaid transit cards (pasmo, suica, icoca) so most rapid transit and regional transit are low friction enough to just tap in and tap out. China has done the same with T-Union. I suppose with NFC contactless payment, a plausible future state is just supporting credit card payments everywhere, though of course this doesn't solve the monthly pass problem.

ghaff 3y ago

And for visitors who may not even speak the primary language, public transit is awful in most places in terms of onboarding jet lagged visitors. Apparently no one does UX trials of people who have zero familiarity with the system and don't speak the language--though at least they maybe accommodate major Western languages. But, in general, it's pretty awful and you at least should do some research in advance.

riedel 3y ago
I agree that vending machines are really a mess. However I recommend the Deutsche Bahn Navigator App. If you have an account you can easily get most tickets. Also states like Baden-Württemberg got their act together recently and made it possible to book tickets all way through. I recently was in Netherlands trying to get from the Hague to the islands south of Rotterdam and it was also quite confusing. but the new ticket is really nice wrt booking.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I was just in Amsterdam. One of our locals there said that, although there's an ongoing switch to just tapping contactless credit cards, he advised just getting a contactless transit chip card because even if it cost a few dollar more it would more reliably work everywhere. Things have improved in most places over time but it can still be confusing for the occasional visitor. I remember at some point pre-pandemic I was in the UK with a friend and we had all these these different tickets/receipts were trying to use to go through a turnstile and doubtless really pissing off the people lined up behind us but it was super-unintuitive what we needed to stick into the machine.
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    The UK has since simplified that into one ticket, possibly also a receipt of you ask for it. Prior to this, the ticket and seat reservation were seperate bit of paper.
    - ghaff 3y ago

TulliusCicero 3y ago

Exactly. The new ticket is an excellent example of when national government can be superior to more local government: when the national government forces coordination to solve fragmentation problems, where local agencies lacked the...motivation to solve things on their own. On a technical level, it was always possible for different transit agencies to cooperate to simplify things for consumers, but they didn't, and likely never would, at least not on this level. A complex system per locality can still work okay for local residents; and if it's painful for visitors, well, visitors don't vote, and it's not the kind of thing that's likely to kill tourism.

wpietri 3y ago
Which reminds me to give a shout-out to the Clipper card. The SF Bay Area really did the right thing here. 24 different systems, all of which use the same card: https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/where-to-use.html https://www.clippercard.com/ClipperWeb/where-to-use.html And they have now expanded that card-based system to include a mobile app, Google Pay, and Apple Pay, so now I just tap my phone and I'm all set.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah, not as much in the Bay Area these days, but the Clipper card is a huge improvement over the previous system. And I imagie by the time I eventually run down my Clipper balance I'll be fine with my phone.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    It's been a while since I set it up, but I'm pretty sure that setting up Clipper on Google Pay (or Google Wallet or whatever it is) is using my old Clipper balance. So you might be able to swap it over now and have it ready to go for your next trip.
  - andromeduck 3y ago
    They not to keep too much of a balance on any one card. It's something $50 and a 2+ hour wait one the phone to transfer balances between cards IIRC.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

Your comment is a fascinating take on perspective. To you it's a fractured, difficult system. To this American, it has been absolutely futuristic every time I've been there. Wish we could get such an awful system anywhere near where I live.

rconti 3y ago
Yup. As an American, I found it quite easy to navigate transit systems every time I visited Germany; most recently Berlin. Especially these days with things like Google/Apple maps transit directions that work more-or-less flawlessly. But maybe it's because I'm used to systems like Caltrain that don't even have a functioning app, and which just randomly cancel trains for huge chunks of the day, or BART, which has an even-more-insane pay-per-distance system than anything I've seen elsewhere.
bahnkenner 3y ago
If you go from the US to Europe, you'll think European public transit is great. If you go from Europe to East Asia, your perspective will change again.

moltar 3y ago

You are so right! I was just in Munich and had some of the most confusing experience in any public transport system I’ve ever used. And I’ve seen many! It was so shocking. The UIs of the ticket machines are horrendously slow and confusing. Stop names are always in German even when switching languages. This, of course, doesn’t align with Google Maps half the time, as my GM is set to English.

tcptomato 3y ago
What stop names are translated?
- Pamar 3y ago
  I suppose Hbf<->Central Station, but apart from that yeah, can't think of other examples

gravypod 3y ago

If only NY/NJ could figure this out. I often take a longer route to work as it's much cheaper than buying the three separate tickets I'd need.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

In cities outside of germany, when you arrive at a new city you buy a transit ticket, you swipe that at the entrance and the exit, and anything related to zones or whatever works automatically, you don't have to think about it.

aix1 3y ago
I read your comment as suggesting that this is the norm outside Germany. While systems like this exist (e.g. in London) in my experience they aren't as common as I wish they were.

gmerc 3y ago

What did it used to be.It’s always been this way in the last 3+ decades since privatization.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

[flagged]