To clarify, we had the 9 euro ticket recently which was the same deal but for a limited period. So everyone living in Germany would understand what was meant by 49 euro ticket. And this article is mostly meant for the German population of HN which is rather large.
This is breaking news. Give it a few more minutes and better articles will appear that don't assume a readership informed about German day-to-day business.
49 per month that is, for all buses and local/commuter trains (and the slower long-distance-ish trains).
The ticket is huge in terms of lowering the barriers of entry and simplifying the system. So far monthly passes are specific to each region, and then you have to figure out how many fare zones you will be crossing etc. With this you pay 49€ per month and can just jump in any bus or train without thinking about it (as long as you remember which kinds of trains are excluded and need proper tickets).
49 Euros is not completely covered under the unemployment allowence by the state. The max for that is 45 Euros.
Additionally, making the price 29 Euros would mean double the expected ticket sales and ultimately more money that could be used for upkeep and expansion.
It's up to the Länder to pay more to lower the price. It's their constitutional right (and duty) to do so, if they see fit. If 16 Länder agree to not spend more on it... maybe they have good arguments as well?
> making the price 29 Euros would mean double the expected ticket sales
Do you have any justification for that claim, or is that just pulling figures out of thin air?
If reducing the price by less (!) than half would that clearly mean double (!) the sales we wouldn't have had the debate we had now – which partly apparently was because the original 3 billion headline figure was estimated based on a ticket price of 69 €, but then the oh-so-wise politicians thought that 49 € would be an even nicer figure. Only on closer calculation it turned out that the additional sales from that lower price very likely wouldn't offset the additional losses generated by all already existing customers paying even less.
Based on calculations done by Greenpeace using data collected by several institutes on peoples willingness to pay for a public transport ticket. The press release [0] and actual report in pdf [1]
Out of curiosity, what is considered a slower long-distance-ish train? Just trying to think of what this would cover here in the US.
Current NYC subway unlimited is $127/month and doesn't include the commuter rails. If I wanted to have a monthly pass to the suburbs upstate where my in-laws live (a 50 min ride) it's $322/month.
We call them Regionalbahnen -- if you want to get an understanding of speed and price, go to https://www.bahn.com/en and click on "Further Options" and select only Regionalbahnen (you'll have to click the "From" or "To" box first). They are quite slow, but more importantly during the last 9 euro ticket they were so overcrowded as to be unusable (.. well, obviously not since there's a reason they were overcrowded, but you get me..).
edit: in the English version the correct thing to tick is "Types of Transport" > "Regional services, other trains", after you click the "Further Options" button.
edit2: w.r.t
> monthly pass to the suburbs upstate where my in-laws live (a 50 min ride)
This is usually covered by S-Bahnen in Germany, and those are usually under the same ticket as the underground. In most places ~it's around 80ish for such a monthly ticket.~ (edit3: this last part about the price is wrong, see below.)
> In most places it's around 80ish for such a monthly ticket.
Sure about that? A one-month ticket just for the city of Cologne (1 Million people) is 109.70 Euros. A regular one-month ticket that would include surrounding towns as far away as Bonn (30 minutes) costs 259.30 Euros [VRS level 4]. If you want to reach Düsseldorf (40 minutes) or Aachen (50 minutes), that's 351.40 Euros [VRS level 7].
Of course it's a bit cheaper if you get a yearly pass and much cheaper if your employer chips in, but the 49 Euro ticket will be a _huge_ improvement. And NYC doesn't sound all that bad in comparison to the regular rates of today.
Huh, you are right. Sorry, I was basing it on my own experiences, but I forgot I'm no longer covered under the youth laws and that was a long time ago. I will update.
With long-distance-ish I was thinking about the RegionalExpress [1], a series of trains that travels with around 80km/h (50mph), connecting cities of all sizes on routes of about 150km/90mi each. If you want to cross the country you will have to switch trains a couple of times, but you get there (though much slower than with a ICE).
Commuter rail typically covers about 30mi in about an hour, unless it's a tram or an underground.
The closest analog to commuter rails – RegioExpress – is included. It's possible to get across the country in that kind of train, but for longer distances it takes you ~2x longer, e.g. Munich-Hamburg is 12hrs instead of 6hrs via InterCity Express (still the only itinerary where domestic flights are justified).
But does it matter, if you aren't in a hurry, and mobile? With this ticket you aren't bound to one specific train connection, can hop out anywhere and anytime it suits you, maybe leave your luggage in a lockerbox in station, and explore downtown, eat, relax in whatever lies between A -> B, probably multiple times, if you feel like it.
Here are some samples for the fastest options tomorrow morning going to Munich from different places (aprox. distance as the crow flies, rounded time with long distance trains vs. local trains vs. by car):
Hamburg-Munich -- 600 km -- 6 h vs. 12 1/2 h vs. 8 1/2 h
Berlin-Munich -- 500 km -- 4 h vs. 9 h vs. 6 1/2 h
Cologne-Munich -- 450 km -- 4 1/2 h vs. 9 h vs. 6 h
Frankfurt/M-Munich -- 300 km -- 3 h vs. 5 h vs. 4 1/2 h
Nuremberg-Munich -- 150 km -- 1 h vs. 2 h vs. 2 h
Conclusion: The long distance trains are aprox. twice as fast. On longer distances the car is half-way in-between, on shorter distances, the car is only marginally faster than local transport.
Train times from bahn.de; Car from Google Maps.
EDIT: I found an interesting exception, where long distance trains and the rest differ a lot on a short distance:
Mannheim-Stuttgart -- 93 km -- 38min vs. 1h 50min vs. 1h 23min.
When Switzerland introduced "one ticket for all" I was a bit confused about what to expect. Well, travel is almost a non-event nowadays: you jump into the first thing coming by (including long distance trains, boat, bus, you name it) and go on with your trip. Adding to that is the mobile ticketing system where you check in when you start and the fare will be calculated when you check-out, always picking the best options (like, if any reductions are available on the trip, or combinations with local transport)... Plus a bus station in front of the house, regular and often connections even at night in the weekends, USB chargers and power sockets and almost working wireless (this needs work though) no wonder I keep the car only for carrying groceries and such. I hope you too will get there soon.
PS but the Swiss all-inclusive ticket is WAY more expensive, like 10x...
> but because governments like to keep track off movements.
You can buy any ticket in cash at the automatic ticket machines. I don't think it's that, the government has enough cameras to track you in general, they don't really need ticket records.
Yeah, this would be about the most inefficient way to do it. You barely ever have to show your ticket. There are no gates that track where you are. You just walk into the train and go with it.
Especially considering that tracking the general population by phone is much easier and efficient.
As TillE wrote, we don't even have gates in Germany. Passenger volume is measured by manual counting - for real. It's a typical job for students and for the retired. They count how many people are getting on and off the trains at every station. During the ride they ask volunteers about their point of departure, destination and type of ticket.
I think the difference between nominal cost, even 10 cents and free is huge in terms of behavior.
When electric cars were fairly new, free chargers were fairly common and people would horrendously abuse them. They would leave their cars plugged in past the time the charge was complete. So the people who wanted to charge their batteries every minute their car was idle spoiled it for the rest, even people who desperately needed to charge.
So I think of the same thing wrt public transportation. I believe NYC had enough subsidies that they could make their subways free, but the behavior of outliers like people who would live on the trains spoiled it for the rest.
People spend more than 49€ a month to sleep on the train now. Making the train free is a marginal difference. If you don't want people to sleep on the train, hire people to make sure people aren't sleeping on the train.
It is possible that is the long-term goal. Getting there may be incremental, and providing a 49EUR ticket could be one step in that direction. Convincing people to do "all free" may only be possible by first agreeing to a lower-cost ticket.
What it has convinced me of is that politics still only wants to spend relatively limited amounts of money on public transport (a lot of cities and counties don't have the tax base to spend seriously more money on all sorts of things, anyway; states possibly could, but aren't necessarily that willing, anyway [1]; and the federal government – that one definitively has the financing power, but you can see how hard it was to get even the current agreement of increased money beyond the originally allotted amount.
Given that situation, I definitively would have mostly preferred better rather than cheaper public transport, but apparently everyone has succumbed to a frenzy of "free, free, free, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie!"…
[1] E.g. Hessen is right now still cutting its public transport budget in order to balance debts caused by Covid, Baden-Württemberg has cancelled a stated goal of increased service quality (a goal of providing public transport at least every half hour even in rural areas and every 15 mins in urban areas) before it ever really got started because it now has to finance its share of the 49 €-ticket and doesn't want to spend even more [2], etc. etc.
[2] I don't want to be too ultra-harsh on the latter – compared to a low point in terms of financing in the mid-/late-2000s, things have definitively improved and the state government is definitively spending more on public transport again, but clearly not limitless amounts more.
Would free trains not need conductors? At least here in Belgium, conductors also check whether it's safe for the train to depart. Metros don't have this, but they have cameras throughout the vehicle and on each platform of each station.
> governments like to keep track off movements.
This doesn't make sense, train subscriptions don't make this possible. I have a train subscription but am only checked 1 times out of 10. The other 9 times no one knows where and when I got on or off the train. (Except if they examine the cameras in the stations.) A single ticket also only has a date, no time. And until a few years ago, conductors still 'cut' those, with an 'analog' tool; it's only recently they started scanning them.
This is a massive change and a huge improvement for a lot of people. This isn't directly because of the price, although there is some reduction in price to the current system, but because it simplifies the ridiculous pricing zones. For example, Berlin is split up into 3 different pricing zones: A, B, C. If you need a monthly subscription for zones A and B you'd pay 63 Euros per month. If you live just across the state border from Berlin in Brandenburg, which still is technically one continuous urban area, you're classified in Zone C and now need to pay 83 Euros. This is still somewhat simple compared to some other combination. You can see all the zones on Wikipedia.
I got nailed by this in Munich as a tourist. It was so confusing to figure out which zone (and subzone?) my ticket was actually valid for and I ended up having to pay a fine. I am reasonably well traveled and not a stranger to public transit but that one got me.
Yes, Munich has (had?) 6 zones. It's quite confusing. Surprised you had to pay as a tourist -- the usual trick we did as expats is pretend we don't speak German. Usually got away with a 5 euro fine.
Using public transport without the correct ticket is a criminal offense (Straftat) in Germany. It's not just a matter of paying an increased fee (that's the 5 Euro) when caught.
The current minister of justice is considering to analyze if the law can be changed to make it just a misdemeanor (Ordnungwidrigkeit).
In practical terms however, it is very much just a matter of paying the fine and the ticket controllers do let tourists go sometimes (not the ones which do it as a prison work, but others do). Yes, there's stories about people going to prison for it, but usually they got caught a million times and refused to pay. I know a person like that.
don't scare people :) it's not a criminal offense if you forget your purse or buy the wrong ticket. It's a criminal offense if you enter the public transit knowing that you don't have a ticket and willing to break the law. That said, the increased fee is usually 60€ and criminal charges are usually only pressed for routine offenders and those not paying their fines.
That said, I fully support Buschmann's initiative. Best minister of justice since a really long time.
Haha, I lived in Munich for many years and still got burned. I was on the wrong train and noticed after a single station along the wrong branch. No biggie, got off the train and hopped on the next one back to the station I came from. Got fined because it turned out my ticket only allowed travel in one direction, not backwards.
Most expensive kilometer of my live. Had I known, I had walked the short distance between the stations.
It is. I believe it's meant to encourage commuting by train, not long range travel. It's for example now significantly cheaper that the normal Berlin yearly ticket was while also increasing coverage.
IMO, the most effective way to make people commute by public transport is to make parking difficult and expensive.
People spend hundreds a month commuting by car so the issue is not the price of train tickets, it's that people prefer to drive as it's more comfortable and convenient. But now, if you cannot park or it will cost you a fortune you'll think 'fuck it, I will take the train'.
In Germany it’s not unusual that you need about 3x the time by train instead if you go by car.
You can’t force those who have to commute to go by train.
You have to force employers to provide (maybe not only provide, but enforce) remote work options for all the jobs where it’s simply not necessary to be on-site.
For some people it is. I personally know people here in Berlin (or rather around Berlin, zone c) that in the past would drive instead of taking transit into the city a couple times per week because if you already have a car it’s cheaper than buying the Berlin A-C monthly ticket (the one that takes you all the way from the suburbs the city center). This is now no longer the case, and being able to use the same ticket elsewhere in Germany is a nice little perk.
Obviously it depends on where in Germany you are but in/around Berlin while driving is often faster it’s usually not such a big gap because you’d be stuck in traffic in a car but not on the train. It would often be more like ~50 minutes instead of 40 (but then you can read a book on the Regio/S-Bahn instead of focusing ok driving).
To put some numbers on "not really practical": Munich to Berlin (570km/350mi) takes 4 hours on the fastest train, and about 9 hours on trains covered by this 49€ per month ticket. Practical for a student looking to get around cheaply, but anybody who makes above median income would prefer the faster ICE on such routes
Usually the car is preferrable, as it avoids the problem to get to the train station and from the final station to the destination. Plus, free choice of departure time, and no issues with carrying baggage from train to train.
In this instance the train is actually a good bit faster (4 hours vs 6). And of course on a train you can read, work, watch Netflix, on a car you are limited to podcasts and audio books
The financially-constrained people I know usually don’t use the IC/ICE - they take the extra hour or two to save 30+ EUR. Plus, making the IC/ICE all you can ride for 1/10th the current all-you-can-ride price would make getting to the airport or next big city for urgent business as dicey as going anywhere fun on the regional trains this summer was.
As a German taxpayer, I’m absolutely fine with the 49 EUR ticket not covering the fast trains, but making in-region commuting cheaper and simpler. A Nürnberg-only ticket is something on the order of 60 EUR/mo with an annual contract or 80 if you can’t commit, so this is going to be at least 10 EUR/mo. back in the pockets of a lot of people it really matters to (tickets that cover suburbs like Erlangen are even more expensive).
Anecdotally, reserving a ticket (with a seat) on IC/Es on the same day as you travel has been quite hard for me unless you splurge on 1st class or travel at unusual times. I do travel on quite a busy route however.
It is for trains as long as the train is not an IC (Inter City) or ICE (Inter City Express). That leaves you with only slower regional trains, trams, and subways.
If you were to use the €49 ticket for a train ride from Munich to Berlin (around 360 miles) it would take you 5 different trains and close to 9 hours to get there. With the ICE: No transfers and the journey is cut down to 4 hours. Price: €168 without discounts. If you book weeks in advance you can get a ticket for around €50.
Each metropolitan area has its own company running public transportation. This €49 ticket, like the €9 ticket that was tested for 3 months in the summer of 2022, is valid in almost every city and town in Germany. No matter who operates the trains or buses.
For comparison, a ticket that allows you to travel all of the fare zones in and around Nuremberg, Bavaria is €245 per month. That’s an area of about 6100 square miles.
All prices include the reduced sales tax, which is currently at 7%.
I‘m German. The truth is, people who right now use a car won‘t switch to public transport because of that ticket. There’s already studies about that for the 9€ ticket we previously had. So it probably won’t make a difference in co2 outcome. Also, those who benefit from that ticket, they usually still complain as they like to have back the 9€ ticket. So 49€ is still too expensive for them. Also, you need to keep in mind who is actually paying for that. This is the middle class. If you are part of the middle class in Germany chances are high that you pay more than 70% taxes & charges overall (payroll/income, trade tax, 19 % vat, electricity tax, health insurance, pension fund where it’s likely you’ll never see the money again… and so much more, I don’t even start writing about the Handelskammer).
So those who work have to pay a lot to keep the system running. And those who don’t, they get - compared to other countries - much help, but they still complain. There’s something in a human that makes him unhappy which money alone can’t fix.
I’m not against the 49 € ticket. I like the idea. The current government is even with all it flaws still much better than the previous one. But all those who just see the bright side of the ticket should think about the downsides, too.
My understanding is that this new ticker greatly simplifies a currently very complicated ticketing system.
But, I don't think that many people need a national ticket on a daily basis, and indeed people won't switch because of the very cheap price. Cars are vastly more expensive and people still prefer to drive.
There is a lot of politics involved, I think. Some think that public transport should be very cheap or even free (which of course actually means it's paid via general taxation) but really I don't think it makes a difference on behaviour because people can afford to pay even hundreds of euros a month if they have to.
Yes it’s making the ticket system much simpler. But I don’t think this was top priority.
For the 9€ ticket the rule seemed to be like „you can use it everywhere locally and additionally nationally for all trains which are not ICs or ICEs“ but in reality there were still some routes where you were not allowed to use it even though the train you use is an RE. Afaik you could not know except you were looking into the terms and agreements of the Deutsche Bahn.
There are two reasons why the ticket system was (and probably partially will still be) so complicated: first we have a lot of transportation companies. Each city/region has their own. And we have the Deutsche Bahn - which responsible for all the national tracks and trains. They all have their own ideas of pricing and they never appeared to be willing to work together. Also, you‘d need a good electronic system to cover all the data from all these companies to work with them but this requires some degree of digitalization which Germanys is not capable of. It’s a mess :(
> people who right now use a car won‘t switch to public transport because of that ticket.
Studies circulating in the media showed deviating results in this respect. For an opposing view: The Association of German Transport Companies (Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen, VDV) published results from one of their surveys in August, claiming that 10% of those that purchased the 9€ ticket did without at least one of their daily car journeys. 43% mentioned the avoidance of car journeys as one of their reasons for purchase.[1] Of course, this is only a sample of what is happening and is based on self-reporting by clients. But for a start, I think it is not so bad.
> claiming that 10% of those that purchased the 9€ ticket did without at least one of their daily car journeys. [...] But for a start, I think it is not so bad.
I don't know – I suppose you could say any car journey avoided is an improvement, but given the quite radical reduction of fares a figure of only 10 % avoided car journeys stills seems rather disappointing and to my mind rather confirms what was already known beforehand – while ticket prices should be reasonable and not outrageously expensive, the actual key to significantly reducing daily car usage (instead of mostly having people just make additional journeys using public transport) is by improving actual service quality and not by merely making tickets cheaper.
E.g. locally there was project where after a significant improvement in services (up to three departures per hour instead of only roughly hourly at best, plus direct connections into the city centre instead of having to change partway), 40 % of the passengers on that line were former car users!
That's what I'd call an actual success story, but unfortunately it seems that everybody has succumbed to some sort of "cheap, cheap, cheap" mania, and of course for politics slashing fares is an easier win instead of actually improving the infrastructure and somehow dealing with the evolving staff shortage [1] or the increasing planning bureaucracy [2].
[1] Not just drivers, even though that might be the most immediately visible to the general public – e.g. the local state government still doesn't seem to feel any sort of urgency in finally getting the now vacant chair of the railway department at my former university filled again, even though the former professor has been pensioned off already quite a few years ago and it's not as if we didn't also have a shortage of engineers for planning and construction, too.
[2] Instead of actual improvements, we only got a "Planning Speedup Law" ("Planungsbeschleunigungsgesetz") which in practice has hardly sped up anything at all, and sometimes possibly even made things worse (e.g. by having centralised the handling of planning enquiries at the Federal Railway Agency – but without actually correspondingly increasing staffing levels there). The only bright spot from the point of view of public transport in general and the railways in particular (though on the other hand it doesn't paint that good a picture for Germany as a whole) is that the transition of maintenance and planning of motorways from the states to the new federal "Autobahn GmbH" has been similarly botched up, and apparently the new Autobahn GmbH has quite rapidly managed to make itself rather unpopular, both as an employer for individual engineers, as well as as a contracting entity for the various individual construction and engineering companies that handle most of the actual serious work.
Our assessment of the situation is probably not too far apart. When I wrote: "But for a start, ..." I wanted to hint that there are a lot of other aspects that need improvement, too.
With regard to the "Planning Speedup Law" I am extremly sceptical too. I fear that in most cases this will result in the quality of planning suffering without an overall improvement in the situation. As soon as the stakeholders have adjusted to shorter planning processes, they will very likely submit projects at shorter notice and there will be complaints about too long process times again. At the same time, there will often not be enough time to examine the problematic points of the projects in sufficient detail and to look for better solutions.
This is great news. Meanwhile, climate activist glue themselves to airports with just two demands and one of them is that the ticket should cost only 9 Euros. (Obviously I disagree that this is a reasonable demand.)
i kinda assumed that's what they were talking about, but it seems like something that probably should have been a bit closer to the top
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