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Deutschlandticket: Germany’s €49 ticket pushes passenger numbers up 25%
- baron816 3y agoI wonder how often managers forget that you can often make more money and profit by lowering prices.
- jonas21 3y agoI think you mean: you can often get more users by charging less than what it currently costs to provide a service. I doubt managers forget this. It's just that you need backers with very deep pockets (the government in this case, VCs in Uber's case) to make it work.
- baron816 3y agoThat’s not what I mean.
- qwytw 3y agoYou can't imagine this could ever be profitable though?
- baron816 3y agoI just mean that when you lower prices, more people will buy it, and they’ll buy more of it. That can more than offset the lower margin on a per item purchase. If your train has 200 seats, it’s better to sell 200 tickets at $65 per ticket than it is to sell 100 at $100 per ticket.
- qwytw 3y agoOf course, but if operating a train costs you $10 per seat and you start charging $5 it will never break even.. And the article says: "€49 a month ‘Deutschlandticket’ has led to a 25 per cent rise in passengers on national railway company Deutsche Bahn's regional services" and a daily (regional) ticket costs about €20-50 depending on area. I mean obviously it might very well be worth doing this for other reasons but somebody will have to subsidize the lost revenue for various transport companies.
- hyperhopper 3y agoAnybody that has ever taken a 101 economics class knows this is true. Look up elasticity of demand.
- qwytw 3y ago> Anybody that has ever taken a 101 economics class knows this is true. The first 20 minutes of one? i.e. before arriving at concept of 'marginal cost' also I doubt demand for public transport is necessarily that elastic, short term anyway. As the article says traffic for regional trains only increased by 25% despite the price decreasing much more than that (e.g. a single day ticket previously cost 20-50 euros depending on area).
- constantcrying 3y agoIt can not be. Unless you think that transport agencies suddenly figured out how to make everything work for half the price. The government just subsidizes the losses. That is the explicit plan, profit is not intended to happen.
- hef19898 3y agoDB is not VC funded like all those food delivery shops so.
- fantyoon 3y agoInstead its owned by the Government which can borrow an infinite amount of money and does for all kinds of reasons. Right now they spend 1.5 billion Euro each year for the Deutschland Ticket[1]. I am super happy about the ticket and think its a good thing. But lets not pretend its financing would be possible without heavy government spending. [1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/deutschlandticket-2134074 https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/deutschland... (German)
- Moldoteck 3y agoJust like financing road infrastructure
- zwieback 3y agoThe article says that they are losing so much money that it's not sustainable.
- lesuorac 3y agoWhere? The only actual claim of losing money was about the 9 euro ticket.("the ultra-cheap pass cost the state too much for it to be extended.".) The "unsustainable" comment was a theory from May which should be trivial shown (or not) by now but definitely not a claim by the article. ("There’s a question mark over how long this year’s €49 pass will last, with transport bosses warning in May that it may be unsustainable too.")
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoIt's a public utility, it doesn't have to be self-sustainable if it is already covered by taxes, and provides mobility in other ways, e.g. cheap transportation means more to spend on holidays locally. Furthermore, a reduction in car emissions means lower healthcare costs. Not everything has to make money.
- robertlagrant 3y agoWell, everything needs money. You're right that some of the money here is extracted from people whether they use the service or not, but it's not great. > Furthermore, a reduction in car emissions means lower healthcare costs. Not necessarily - imagine a pandemic where people could only use public transport.
- s1mplicissimus 3y agohe says "reduction", you respond to "removal". i think that is called a strawman :) but you are right, everything needs money. so it ends up being a political issue where ideally we democratically figure out how much tax money we give to the train operators
- robertlagrant 3y ago
- rasz 3y agoExcept they are still losing money on this scheme, and what you propose works only in case of huge demand and competitor. Without competition limiting supply and rising prices makes more business sense in the short to medium term. In this instance its not about profits, even approaching even would be a huge win to environment, labor market, local industry and infrastructure.
- hutzlibu 3y agoThere are competitors to the train, buses and private cars.
- constantcrying 3y agoIt is literally kept in existence by government funding. My local transport agency (state owned) effectively charges a third of what it did before. Obviously they are taking enormous losses on this, which are financed directly by the federal government.
- pastage 3y agoThey will need to invest in more rail if that is going to be sustainable. My limited experience with German trains is positive, but going Hamburg to Berlin has always been fully booked.
- maweki 3y agoThe Deutschland Ticket is only for local and regional transport. You can't use it with anything "bookable". But your point still stands. Germany needs to invest a lot. Most of the money goes to the Autobahn.
- ck45 3y agoAccording to https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/831740-831740 https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/831740-831740, the planned investments for this year are 9.08 billion Euro for long distance railways and 8.4 billion Euro for highways.
- qwertfisch 3y agoInteresting. But of course there is a lot of investment bottleneck (or whatever the translation for „Investitionsstau“ is). For example take the „Neue Alpentransversale“ [1][2] which was a 40 year project for modernizing the tracks through Swiss with connections to all neighbouring countries. The Swiss are finished. Germany did not even start and will be ready around 2040, for just 190km of tracks. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversale https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Eisenbahn-Alpentransversa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qwertfisch 3y agoIf the German government would have sticked to the plan of building a Transrapid track between Hamburg and Berlin instead of upgrading the current tracks being able to support an ICE with only 250km/h (which took as many years as building the Transrapid track would have), then there would be much more capacity of transporting people and a functioning an future-proof track for high speed transport with over 500 km/h. Take into account the very short entrance times, compared to flying, and you save even more time. Air routes between Hamburg and Berlin would have been pointless for many years. There were a lot of political changes at the end of the 90s, some spurious arguments were made, also saying „it would be too expensive“, despite having a huge history of building train stations and airports for much much more then the planned costs … this was just an excuse to not build it because they did not want it. They said the passenger estimations were too high and it would not be profitable. Today this route is the most used one in Germany with 17000 passengers per day and a capacity of 8.7 million per year[1]. Transrapid (already the model TR08) would have been able to reach the destination in way under 60 minutes, including two intermediate stops. The ICE was able to do this in 90 minutes (when the reconstructed track was finished in 2004), but today the scheduled duration is 104–110 minutes. Also the track is shared with local trains. [1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrecke_Berlin%E2%80%93Hamburg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnstrecke_Berlin%E2%80%93Ham...
- zwieback 3y agoAs an German expat in the Pacific Northwest this fills me with longing. We have like one train here and it's slow and expensive..
- pizzapill 3y agoGrüße. I wonder if there were more trains there would you take it. A reasonable observation many North Americans make is that it would just take too long to get anywhere by train, unlike in Europe. AKA 300 years is old vs. 300 miles is far.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe vast majority of Americans live either east of the Mississippi or on the West coast at densities not dissimilar to Europe. You’ll never take HSR from NYC to LAX but Chicago or Atlanta from NYC is roughly the same distance as Paris to Berlin, and there’s a bunch of cities on the way as well.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoI would think the densities are still much smaller since most people live in car dependent suburbs around the city.
- bobthepanda 3y agoNot all countries with large rail networks have great suburban public transport either; the UK comes to mind. Even in a mostly suburban metropolitan area, most people are still quite a ways from the main airport, which is usually on the extreme of one side of a metropolitan area. You can have multiple train stations per city because of their much lower footprint and nuisance level, and generally speaking most of the time savings in rail vs air is access time to the station/airport. (Truly high speed services can just skip the suburban stations if there truly is demand for this, but generally speaking the time for an additional station is measured in single-digit minutes.)
- s1mplicissimus 3y agoGreetings from Austria! We have a similar thing going on where you can buy an every-train-and-other-public-transport-in-Austria ticket. It is called the "climate ticket" ( https://www.klimaticket.at/ https://www.klimaticket.at/ ) The price is EUR 1.095/year for regular adults (1.205 for the family ticket [=1 adult + up to 4 kids] and 825 for youth/seniors) I'm a happy owner since it's 2 year existence and have recently been baffled by the prices DB is asking when I did a trip to Berlin by ICE... It's a great peace of mind to just hop onto any bus/tram/train in the country and not have to worry about tickets, and i think it's a great step towards getting more traffic from the streets to the rail.
- mudita 3y agoThat sounds more like the BahnCard 100, which costs 4.339 Euro per year. The Deutschlandticket is only valid for slow, regional trains, not faster long distance trains.
- s1mplicissimus 3y agois the Bahncard 100 popular? Asking because it seemed to me recently every 2nd passenger (#samplesize) pulled out their Klimaticket for the ticket checks. I'd expect the 4k option for all of germany to be less popular (in % of ticket holders/population) due to pure odds (aka chances are high an average person won't regularly need to journey from hamburg to munich, but they might regularly journey somewhere inside their Bundesland. so it's less likely it's "worth it" for people?
- looperhacks 3y agoVery few people own a Bahncard 100. It's only useful if you need it for your job/business, otherwise it probably won't pay for itself. Most people prefer the car or plane (if you frequent between big cities) anyway
- barrkel 3y agoInternet connectivity is surprisingly poor on German trains. In 1st class, between Basel and Hanover, most of the time my phone (with Swisscom SIM) got better connectivity than the onboard wifi. Considering that this route connects Zurich and Frankfurt, you'd think there would be a smidgen more investment in bandwidth.
- nologic01 3y agoMakes sense to try to remove any frictions from public transport - if not making it an enjoyable and desirable experience
- TacticalCoder 3y agoI now live in Luxembourg and public transports are just totally free: buses, tramways, trains... All free, for everybody (locals and tourists alike). No pass, no nothing: you just hop in the bus/train/tramway and you're good to go. You can also rent public bicycles and they're all e-bikes/pedelec and they're very cheap (but not free).
- slekker 3y agoHas it helped with the traffic? I’ve heard that air pollution was horrible as well
- mk89 3y agoIs this something new? A few years ago it wasn't the case.
- layer8 3y agoSince March 2020.
- ulfw 3y agoThis is the way to do it. Public transport is tax paid, one way or another anyway. This completely gets rid of bullshit overhead like ticketing, ticket checking, payment processing, maintenance of payment terminals, manning of ticket counters, planning departments, billing and finance departments, third party payment fees etc etc etc
- constantcrying 3y ago>if not making it an enjoyable and desirable experience It will always be the worst part of my day and with more passengers and the regularly scheduled disasters that won't change any time soon.
- kriro 3y agoWell I ordered mine through the DB app (big mistake) on the 4th of July. I have neither received the ticket nor have they deducted any money from my account (status in the portal is "open"/"unpayed"). I got an email stating there are slight delays and someone would contact me soon on the 4th. Have called the hotline a couple of times since, with stated waiting times of 10h, 8h, no lines available message and they hangup etc. Finally reached someone at the end of July and they told me there's nothing they can do, I should write an email and they gave me an address. Sent an email, haven't heard from them since. So basically I had no ticket for the first month, don't have one as of now. From my understanding, if I'd take the train and gotten checked it would be ok in July (they stated in the delay email that the email is proof of contract and the people doing checks are instructed accordingly and to accept it until end of July). However, I've already read stories that people still had to pay the 7 Euro administrative fee for not bringing a ticket (but having one in theory, so not the full 60 euro penalty). For my upcoming train trips in August I will simply buy a ticket and ask for a refund once my ticket is finally valid. The only other option would be to take the train and risk a nice argument about having a valid contract but no ticket. Simply ridiculous. I could go to a train station with an office and see if I can get it sorted there but I'd need to take the train to get there (only a small station where I live). Also a stupid waste of time. So far the most amazing business process I have experienced in my life :P Should have just bought the ticket elsewhere (locally, deutschlandticket.de etc.) but no stupid me wanted to have everything in one app and didn't really expect the official app to cause any problems.
- sigmar 3y agoIs the app's only payment method SEPA direct debit? The website seemed to only have SEPA last time I checked
- Sakos 3y agoThere a bunch of different providers. Some of them allow other payment methods like credit card or PayPal.
- sumuyuda 3y agoMy girlfriend has the same problem. She wasn’t able to get through on the hotline and no answer on the email. She went into a ticket office here in Berlin and they told her they can’t do anything about the payment problems and to call the hotline. Total shit show. The 9€ ticket was amazing and could be purchased without a subscription. Why are they forcing you to have a subscription for the Deutschland ticket?
- leledavid 3y agoI wonder how much of the uptick could be explained by seasonality (if somebody knows some useful data source, please share). Also the 1.8 Mil new customers could very well be just natural flow and not really incremental due to the ticket. In any case - it's a great initiative.
- stephendause 3y agoMy guess is a lot of it. The 25% number is meaningless because they're not comparing to the proper baseline. Anecdotally, I was in Berlin last year, and there was a similar product, and locals said not that many people were taking advantage of it.
- 3rd3 3y agoIt could also be explained by high gas prices, inflation and overall economic adversity.
- Narretz 3y agoThe most important thing is to have longterm political support for this ticket across the board, so that people can expect this ticket to exist in 5+ years, for a reasonable price (inflation adjusted). Plus you need bigger investments into public transport, and also serve routes that won't make a profit. Otherwise few people will use it instead of cars.
- tuukkah 3y agoIt's also a problem if the trains are full because of free passengers and you can't travel when you need to even if you paid extra.
- geraneum 3y agoWhat is a free passenger?
- tuukkah 3y agoI meant those who don't pay anything per trip e.g. those who have the Deutschlandticket. They are not freeloaders and I'm not blaming them but the more they travel the greater the burden while they aren't paying more. As with any other unmetered X/month service, the service provider has to make sure there's enough capacity.
- geraneum 3y agoIt was said that after the 9€ ticket experiment, they wanted to analyzed the performance and outcome of such a scheme and I _assume_ that this has been somehow calculated to not over burden the system. I have a 49€ ticket (company provided) but if I wanted to pay per trip I would pay less per month. I don’t think I am alone.
- hyperhopper 3y agoThey clearly mean "not paying per ride"
- quartz 3y agoUnlimited travel tickets like this open up so many opportunities. I booked a Eurail ticket with my wife when we graduated college and still can't believe how amazing it was to travel at-will all around Europe for weeks on end. I think we paid $350 all in? They've gone up a little bit in price but they're still a steal. We even sprang for the 1st class ticket, which turned out to be often empty and sometimes quite luxurious, since it was only something like $60 more.
- tuukkah 3y agoI've learned that travelling on the 1st class Eurail/Interrail ticket can end up cheaper than 2nd class, as some seat reservations will be free or cheaper in 1st class. Also, there are valuable 1st class perks such as free breakfasts, luggage storage etc. that can easily add up.
- mywacaday 3y agoI once had the pleasure of traveling from Bern Switzerland to Milan though the Alps in a business car all to myself. Attempted to get some work done for about 5 minutes and stopped when I realised the views made it impossible. It's over 10 years ago but only cost around €90 one way. Also Milan train station is a work of art in its own right.
- constantcrying 3y agoThe Deutschlandticket is not a travel ticket, it is only for local transport and slow regional trains. It is not feasible to travel through the country with it.
- dgellow 3y agoYou’re not incorrect, the Deutschland ticket is mostly for local transports. But you can travel through Germany using only RE, it’s way slower than via ICE and requires lot of changes but that’s definitely feasible. It’s a quite nice way to explore the country if you do multiple halts.
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- noodles_nomore 3y agoHaltet euch da raus. Euer Circus geht mich nichts an. Wenn ihr mir einen Gefallen tun wollt, seid einfach ehrlich mit eurem Boss. Ich muss jetzt lernen. So sehr ich auch dankbar dafür bin, dass ihr mich über Kevin informiert habt (wenn das denn überhaupt wahr ist), tut mir Leid, aber ihr habt euch das selber eingebrockt.