A lot of regional lines are already at max capacity in terms of rolling stock and track capacity. This will incentivise less car use for journeys where direct connections are available.
It will also give access to public transport to those in extreme poverty who have no other means of mobility, whom Germany has been prosecuting as criminals and putting in jail when their fines add up enough. Speeding and parking offenses are civil offenses. Public transport without a ticket? Felony.
The German government did that to compensate for rising gasoline prices. While I think that is in general appreciated by the public, I am not quite sure how many people aged 45 above will use this ticket. They trains will be super crowded this summer and people will just prefer to use their car instead.
Offering free train rides should only be used as incentive to use trains more.
When the rail infrastructure is alreay overwhelmed as it is in Germany it really doesn't make sense without first massively investing in the infrastructure - which will take decades.
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.
> 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, but perhaps those were only for inter-city transport.
German cities public transport ticket systems are so complicated and burocratic that even locals often don’t understand it. You have dozens of zones, extra-bike and dog tickets, time restricted and number of station restricted tickets, tickets for groups and/or families, weekend tickets for groups of families and what not. Ticket machines in Germany have more buttons than you find in an aircraft cockpit. If the public transportation would be free, all this nonsense would not be necessary anymore. That alone is a good reason to introduce free public transport in Germany.
A little late to this discussion but I'd like to add some of my anecdotal evidence/experience to this.
Tldr: the truth on the ground is more convoluted than simple articles can tell. While the ticket was a success and the research bears truth, the criticisms are not unfounded.
I moved to Munich a month ago and so, as a foreigner, have had an interesting interaction with this system.
The main thing that gets missed in every article is how convoluted the whole transit system is. In Munich, there are 2 providers, overseen by an umbrella cooperative made up of these 2 companies. There is also a zonal system that dictates how much you'll pay for the ride, and every state then has some version of this system.
As you get out of the metro and into regional train travel, there are also various classes of trains (run by a single provider nationwide). For example regional trains vs regional express trains plus different classes in each plus the ability to reserve seats vs not. There is not a single monthly pass, but a variable one that depends on which zones you'll travel on. Of for one day you have to go to a zone not covered (such as a satellite town of Munich, you'll have to buy a ticket)
This makes getting a ticket expensive but also confusing.
It's confusing and expensive enough that it's sometimes easier just to rent a car.
Now Germany is a car producing nation, and car rentals here are extremely cheap, with car sharing startups funded and subsidised by almost every German auto manufacturer.
In Munich at least, cycling is also quite popular(why specifically is something I'm not knowledgeable enough to speculate).
What the 9 euro ticket did was not only make rail travel cheaper than other options BUT ALSO significantly easier to navigate in terms of ticketing.
(This argument may be refuted by some as they argue no one checks ticket purchases on the metro trains and so incentives to purchase wasn't really a thing within the metro. Not sure how common checking was before the 9 euro ticket but we were never once checked while taking trains in the metro area but almost always got checked when taking regional trains).
From my experience, people in general who don't regularly commute and tend to drive when they do still have a close to normal tendency to drive.
It's also not easy or economical to park within the city, so most people who live and commute within the city wouldn't have been driving in the first place.
That said, it changed the calculus for us(and likely for people who are driving neutral). We would have preferably rented a car to travel around, mainly because we can, but also because it's cheaper and more convenient for longer distances. We've travelled to other states and even to Salzburg in Austria with the train with this 9 euro ticket. We've probably saved 60 euro on a monthly metro ticket and hundreds for regional travel.
There is a cost to this value however. We had to give up time in return, as taking regional trains requires multiple train hops as well as taking slower regional trains.
Also, express regional trains are not included in this 9 euro pass
And so this is where the narrative deviates or muddies at the least.
Firstly, to reinforce the primary point. The ticket has proven to be extremely popular, basically more than anyone expected.
As the research proves, it has changed the calculus for a large subset of people on what mode of transport to take. And the reasons for this includes both cost and ease.
But commuting using public transport does require a time commitment, and so reducing price and complexity likely maimly chips away at the margins.
It would be easier to see this as elasticity in the demand curve. A 9 euro ticket is extremely cheap and extremely easy to grok mentally, hence pushing demand up.
It's also removed all complexity in dealing with tickets in each state, so together with price, had driven up demand to travel interstate.
Unfortunately, the demand was significantly higher than capacity. Regional trains in Germany are not built for capacity and the system has at many times been completely overwhelmed.
This likely has affected people who take cheap regional trains to travel between towns. It however has not affected business travel or people who already pay for first class or express regional.
It has made more people travel but the argument that more people are travelling and thus producing more CO2 are wrong because marginal cost for CO2 for a train is close to 0. Only when they add more trains does this calculus change. They have likely had to do so for more popular routes.
Germany has many towns that are dependent on tourism, and so this has likely increased commerce in these towns. This is a net positive for Germany, as domestic tourism is almost always a net positive to the economy.
In summary, the 9 euro ticket was a huge success, but it's not sustainable for a primary reason: the train network is not able to support that demand.
I personally would not support a euro ticket at 9 euros. I would definitely urge the authorities introduce one that is pricier but more sustainable (and also eliminates these complexity).
The benefits accrue beyond just savings on price: reduction of inflationary pressures on people, reduced complexity, reduced emissions and increased domestic tourism.
In Germany are about 1/3 people in prison because they used a train or bus without ticket. If you can't pay you will end up in prison. Imagine how much money this does cost.
I am currently paying 70€ for a ticket for my city alone. Even at 49€ it's still essentially free given German standard of living. Combined with the unprecedented range it offers this will still make a huge impact on public transport in Germany for decades to come. Even a 10% increase in usage of public transport would make a huge difference in the long term. You must also consider that currently many local transport organizations force companies into a take it or leave it situation when it comes to offering tickets for their employees, students of universities and schools. All this becomes revolutionized by this, because it's out of their hands now. The price is almost secondary in that regard, because now the choice to use public transport instead of a car becomes significantly easier. There are still lot's of problems to be solved but this is a significant step forward.
edit just a personal anecdote to add to that. When I studied, my girlfriend moved two states over in Germany. At that time my university ticket only covered the state I lived in. Making visiting her cost me at least 84€ in total, while traveling for 8 hours per trip. I remember several times where I had to borrow money from friends and parents to meet her at all. With that ticket, I wouldn't have had to. And I am very happy for all the younger people after me that will not have to suffer through that bullshit because our politicians actually did something good for once.
Counter-intuitively, given the state of German infrastructure it seems to me they should consider doing the opposite, if it will help motivate them to actually invest in their public transport infrastructure...
What happens then is that you get lots of service between big cities, but smaller cities and towns lose service. Unless there are subsidies, prices will also increase.
In Germany at least, rail is viewed as a public good that should provide mobility to people in both big cities and more rural areas. Making it available outside the most heavily trafficked routes at a reasonable price is incompatible with privatization, again unless heavy subsidies are involved.
In germany (currently month 2 of 3) there is an ticket for 9€ per month for using local public transport. Millions of tickets are sold and people are using the so much that the trains are litterally full. And the users are still enduring it.
For those who don't know it: german trains have an lowsy reputation at best, no cooling in the summer, no heating in the winter and every user has to plan for the case the train is 15 minutes or more late or broke on the way down.
This is really an issue of the quality of public transport and general infrastructure. Southern Germany, Bavaria, has a very good railway system.
Even the regional railway lines often get you faster where you need to go than a car would, especially during rush hours.
There's also the rarely mentioned factor of parking space becoming increasingly harder to find and more expensive in city centers. In my region, this is being solved by building affordable, or even free, parking decks near subway stations on the fringes of the city.
But even with that the parking situation still remains tense.
The big reason why in this case the city of Berlin never added gates is a architectural reason. At least that’s what they claimed. Most U-Bahn stations don’t have a mid platform layer. They run directly under the road. You can’t create a universal system. If this argument is bullshit I’m not sure but it is what it is. But to the walking in part. You are only allowed on the platform with a valid ticket. Controllers can check for tickets outside of the trains but nobody normally does anyways.
To the free public transportation part. Germany has a surge in this topic with the short introduction of the 9€ ticket. A ticket that costs 9€ a month and allows German wide travel (limited to specific trains). The politicians hit a political honeypot with this idea. A lot of Germans want the continuation of this ticket even though it is questionable that it actually pays out.
Apart from the significant cost savings for people that use local public transport a lot the biggest benefit is probably that it removes a lot of the unnecessary complexity around buying tickets for many people. The German public transport network is divided into many small providers with different tickets and rules. This can make it rather confusing and annoying at times.
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.
Intercity rail is great. In Germany it allows people to self select the density and lifestyle they desire, while still working in bigger agglomeration. I can see this being a big economic and quality of life benefit.
But I thought the whole point of the German thing was to give everyone a little something?
This seems very targeted at one specific group (those commuting regularly) that is only a small part of the population affected by the cost increases. In fact train tickets have not increased anyway.
It seems a bit strange giving one group so much and the rest nothing.
It will also give access to public transport to those in extreme poverty who have no other means of mobility, whom Germany has been prosecuting as criminals and putting in jail when their fines add up enough. Speeding and parking offenses are civil offenses. Public transport without a ticket? Felony.
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