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.
It perhaps not much of a consolation, but it is just as well that railway infrastructure itself ages slowly. Public transport is considerably less expensive in Germany compared to my country (Britain, specifically England): a German Deutschlandticket costs €49 per month and provides unlimited rail travel on non-express lines, and unlimited local bus travel. A typical 5 hour rail journey - one off, one way - booked months in advance currently costs about €200 in Britain. It's a high-quality service, but not in any way affordable for the majority of workers to commute with.
The reason I bring this up is to say that Germany is still doing a great job at making rail public transport available, despite the crumbling infrastructure. As long as it can still get you from A to B reliably and safely, it is making a positive contribution to reducing the carbon footprint of travel. Hopefully, by the time that the infrastructure has degraded to the point where the service is dangerous or out of capacity, various components will have become slightly cheaper as well (rail crimping, for instance).
Stuff like this is why I prefer to take a bus in Germany.
Trains are overbooked with free tickets and promotions (free pass for entire summer for 50 euro). While underlying infrastructure is not ready for such load. It leads to delays and mistakes. Plus railway stations in Germany look like homeless shelters!
On other side Germany has excellent motorway network. Flixbus is very cheap, quite comfortable, goes all the way to airport, and always on time!
Really? I live in Munich. Whenever I want to travel to other large German cities, I've found flying to be much cheaper than going by train. The only reasonably priced tickets seem to be the local ones. I don't understand how people can afford train prices unless they have a discount or someone else paid.
Actually we have a Germany-wide ticket for public transport since last year. With 49€/month it is very affordable and entitles us to use public transport and regional trains as much as we want. The federal government funds the system with a few billions but it’s a great success so far.
Berlin reporting: this is huge for anyone taking public transport.
Monthly ticket for the AB area alone was way above 80/€/month for the city only.
This is 49 for everything anywhere in Germany except for high speed long distance trains, flixbuses and flixtrains (the latter are private entities)
Slightly misleading part: In May, Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national railway company, launched a ticket costing €9 that gives a full month of travel from June until the end of August. Any two stations within Germany can be connected with the deal, so passengers travelling more than 50 miles can save money with a single journey.
The ticket was not introduced by DB but by a broad coalition of public transport companies and the government that finances the whole thing. The truly revolutionary aspect is, apart from its price point of 0,20€ per day, that now you can buy a single ticket at the next ticket office or machine and use it to ride all of the buses, trams, ferries and trains (excepting night trains, ICs and ICEs) in all German regions and cities, in some cases even including the first stop in neighboring countries as the case may be.
The Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen (VDV) has recently proposed to continue offering a nationwide ticket with these rules for a price of 69,00€ per month. While that would be a gain over present practices and prices (especially since this "ÖPNV-Klimaticket" would include taking regional trains between places), I sure hope that given our present situation (climate, energy, war, inflation), there will be a ticket for more like 20 or 30€ per month (which has been dubbed the "1-Euro-Ticket" since that would be its price per day). We are continuing to pour billions each year into car-centric traffic and have done so for decades while closing thousands of kilometers of railway lines in the 1990s alone. Its high time to reverse this utterly misguided policy.
I visited Berlin this summer and Germany has a 9 euro ticket that gives you unlimited travel on local/regional transport services during until the end of the calendar month. The ticket can be bought only throughout the summer months.
For a tourist that was in town only for a few days, it was just amazing, no worries when taking any public transport for ticket zones, right tickets or time of availability. I imagine it was great for commuters too, price-wise at the very least. To me it seems like a great idea, honestly, I'm just not sure what the _real_ costs were and how financially viable such a measure would be over the long term.
Yeah, riding train in Germany is just too expensive. Unfortunately I still have to use it because currently it is more flexible than the bus lines. I really hope that the competition will drive the train prices down, but that's something I don't believe in...
Visiting my girlfriend at the other and of Germany costs 220 Euro if I pay the full price. Sometimes you get cheaper tickets but that's still too much. Just visiting each other twice a month cost about 400 Euro which woudl be better invested in a vacation or something similar.
As someone using the German railway for a large distance destination couple a weeks ago it was a total disaster, we got stranded in a unfamiliar German city. Deutsche bahn told us they didn’t have any of their (partner) hotel rooms left. Just arrange something yourself. That was very nice because all the hotels were full anyway. It took us another 2 hours of calling to find something. I was exhausted when I finally checked in somewhere at 1 am.
I try to avoid flying, but the German railway is giving me nightmares. I frequently travel through Germany and it is the exception if there aren’t any large issues.
The article itself is very thin when giving its reasons. I’m sure it’s oké for people without the money to spend, but I would rather pay more for increased reliability. If the German summers are similar to how the Dutch maintains their railways, I’m sure they will plan a ton of construction while the masses of people that usually take the trains for work are on holiday. So I’m inclined to see this promotional as compensation for bad summer train service.
As a German: It is amazing, but not just because of the price, also because of the unbelievable simplicity that it makes possible.
You pay 9€ and you get 1 ticket. The transport company then charges the government back based on usage.
Why is this a big deal? Well, try finding out how to get anywhere in Germany not using the national railroad. Here's the map [0].
Not only is there hundreds of local transport companies, they are also all part of different, partially overlapping, partially non-boundary-aligned conglomerates for which your ticket might or might not be valid.
Not in Germany, may be in big cities, but any other region is plagued by disruptions and way less frequent services paired together with horrible local public transport.
The former government owned national railway basically owns every piece of important track and doesn’t give a damn about customers. The prices are constantly rising while the service declines. Can’t count how much time I’ve wasted on several train stations, waiting for up to two hours for late trains, hell, even having to get a hotel multiple times.
In most of Germany urban areas and metropolitan cities are just a 30-45min train ride away. At the normal ticket pricing you will pay 32 euros for the roundtrip. Now you pay 49 for the whole month. It's a game changer for a lot of people living in rural areas despite everyone without any knowledge living in those areas arguing against it but it's Germany of course everyone and their mom will argue against it with arguments that have no meaning for the people it really effects.
I think we're missing the context of gas prices here. German gas prices are far higher than in the US, making train more cost-effective. We don't have cheap flights, except apparently Berlin-Frankfurt, so we can't rely on air travel the same way the US does. This overall makes train travel much more attractive in Germany. Then there are things like regional tickets, day tickets, BahnCard discounts, etc.
German here. I have a Bahncard 100, which allows me unlimited train travel (plus unlimited local public transport in many cities) in Germany with most trains for one year. Fast or slow. I don't care. I usually pick the faster one.
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.
Germany's long distance trains are comfortable but the reliability of the Deutsche Bahn is abysmal. In 2023, more than one third of their long distance train were delayed, a metric that has been going down for quite a while. My own experience is much worse, with three out of five long distance trips canceled without notice and a fourth one replaced by a voucher for a 450km taxi ride.
In a country the size of Germany clamoring to have an environmentally oriented politic, train should be a convenient alternative to both car and airplane but unfortunately the train network is a joke.
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.
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