The 49 euro ticket is a phenomenally good deal. Normal transit tickets vary per city, but for example in Berlin it's 3.50 per trip. So if you take transit twice a day for 7 days, you already recoup the cost of the Deutschland ticket, which lasts the entire month! This makes it good even for tourists who stay for ~a week.
At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in Germany, but a bit more borderline for a tourist.
Compare with eg Toronto's monthly pass, which is $156. A single trip is $3.35, which comes out to 24 two-trip days to recoup the cost of the card. That's almost exactly the number of business days in a month. And that card's only for Toronto!
One thing worth considering is that the 49€ ticket also lets you travel outside of your usual transit zone. We took so many “Deutschland Ticket trips” to towns that wouldn’t be worth a full-priced ticket. We just board the train with lunch and a beer, have a little day trip, then be home in the evening.
Berlin was also relatively cheap before. We already had sensible monthly passes. For people in parts of the Ruhrgebiet, the savings are even more substantial.
A London monthly travel card is £235 from zone 4 and £300 from zone 6. That's 420 to 540 CAD, and you get the pleasure of sweating in the tunnels, freezing on the overground platforms waiting for the next train 30 minutes and cancellations left right and centre.
At least they've finally got their shit together with mobile coverage.
Of course you get to use the buses too for that, and some of those were run by DB until this year, so it's nice to have been subsiding the the nice German tickets! They sold up to private equity, because of course they did, it's Britain and everything has to be private equity.
It is somewhat popular, so I doubt they will kill it outright. Rather I would guess they "reform" it: lots of variants, much higher price, beaurocratic hoops... and then when people stop using it, say "see, it wasn't so great after all".
Same playbook in the UK, where people like the NHS but certain parties don't.
Same playbook in the US, where "big government" has to be bad, so anything that does currently work well gets sabotaged.
A lot of times it's even worse than this, because what will happen is well-run public services will be sold off to the private sector. Who then runs away with extreme greed granted from the privilege of an inelastic market. So prices soar and quality plummets.
Then, we can point and say "see? Look at how bad it is! It would only be worse if the government ran it!"
Extra points if you're able to extract public funds to waste on such private endeavors. See: private schools in America (Yes, they get public funds!)
Well, of course, if we didn't have traffic ministers again and again, who do everything they can to make rail less attractive and road more attractive, then we could probably have a great system. But automobile lobby is so strong, they buy all the politicians in that role, probably even before they land in that role, so I guess normal people will have to keep suffering, so that those politicians can have a life of luxury. Thank you.
Quite many "normal people" also enjoy the freedom of the automobile. It has contributed significantly to the culture of autonomy, unity on large scales (beyond one's local town), and cosmopolitanism. Online, it is acceptable to be cynical about cars, but in the real world, among common people, this mindset is not that prevalent.
Even in European countries lauded for great public transport, people own and enjoy cars. Of course, there are benefits to public transport that the car cannot offer, such as efficiency at scale. But it's not so black-and-white. There are also benefits to car ownership that public transport cannot offer, such as independence.
One might say that Uber, car sharing companies, and shopping online are bridging the independence gap. To an extent, this is true. But not always. Particularly, not when the non-car-ownership option is much more expensive, and not when people’s needs demand a higher level of independence.
My point: much of this has more nuance than is opined online. Do not presume when speaking for “normal people”.
Personal opinion but I see personal cars as more of a burden than freedom, compared to public transport.
You need to care for the car even when you are not travelling. You need a parking space, insurance, maintenance, etc... And when you are driving, you need to be attentive, sober, and well rested, otherwise you are a danger to yourself and others. With public transport, you have none of that, no one will die if you take a nap, and once you are at your destination, you are free, you don't have a ton of metal to care for.
The same applies to taxis and ridesharing, but public transport is usually more efficient and cheaper.
"Normal people" are often short-sighted. They only know what they know. They're heavily advertised to, and they lack imagination.
In the US people are dropping like flies from obesity and disease. But even their day-to-day quality of life is awful, because naturally they don't feel good. A portion of this is directly because of a pro-car culture. When you can't walk anywhere ever that has an effect.
People in the US are still very pro-car. They can't, or maybe don't want to, connect the dots on the consequences of that. American individualism is so extreme that people are happy to kill themselves, so long as they're the one who pulls the trigger.
Their words may not be reliable. This is why we need data. How much money are average people spending? How healthy are average people? Etc etc. That should influence our decisions around public policy.
"Normal people" have been on overcrowded trains with spotty service. They know what putting someone else in charge of how, when and where they can travel inevitably turns out.
"Normal people" also know multiple people who have died in car accidents. They also struggle to walk up a flight of stairs and hate their lives.
Once again, you cannot trust what so-called "normal people" say. Particularly when there's political pressure at play. I'll say it again, but plenty of people would happily shoot themselves if they got to pull the trigger.
Hyper-individualism of the US, and the rest of the West to a lesser extent, is a cancer. We work hard every single day to ignore it's plagues. The extreme cognitive dissonance our citizens are forced to produce means they're not reliable narrators.
The reality of the human condition is that humans will always GREATLY favor the status-quo, no matter what. Because they're already living it and, if they're not dying, they have a strong survival incentive to maintain it. Change is risk, and risk is bad.
When I get in my car to drive, I don't think "oh God this has the greatest chance of killing me out anything I can do". Even though it's true. Do you know why I don't think that?
Because that sucks ass. If I had to live like that, I'd probably kill myself. I'm here, with the status-quo. So, I must make the best of it.
I'm not unique. Every single person, you included, lives like this. You have no choice but to ignore as much of the bad shit as you can, because you can't fix it in your lifetime.
It's much easier, and better for your own health, to believe people are getting stabbed like kabobs in the subway and you're oh so safe and comfy in your nice suburban home. That's a much better thought process than the reality, which is that you're much more likely to die and it's not even close. So that's what you choose to believe and that's the belief you nourish.
It's comfirmation bias, but it's the life blood of the human condition. The alternative is worse.
Automobile lobby? That's BS. The German rail system has been cost-saved to death, it now barely handles the increased passenger volume as a result of the D-Ticket. Overcrowded trains, even more delays and train cancellations (b/c of insufficient staff coverage, malfunctioning doors, etc.) even with S-Bahn trains are getting out of hand. "Transitwende" my ass! Same with the "Energiewende".
How i envy the Dutch and Belgian transport situation!
I don't get why you would write your first two sentences.
It is very obvious how the automobile lobby has a direct influence here.
Here is an excellent documentary (in German) that analyzes the issues with the DB.
https://youtu.be/-dmtNToFwuI?si=3ydA_QOjzOvTke2_&t=480
At the linked time stamp, they mention that every minister of transport in the very influential period from 2009-2021 came from Bavaria, with heavy influence from companies like Audi, MAN, and BMW.
This last week we would've probably all seen the photos of the gridlock on I-75 as Tampa Bay residents fled Hurricane Milton. If you followed the story you know it eventually became almost impossible to evacuate.
We should also know how much more efficient buses are on roads at moving people than individual cars are. You can fit ~60 people on a bus that takes up the space of ~2 cars.
What should happen in these emergencies is there should be dedicated bus lanes and dedicates buses to evacuate people.
But beyond that, what we should learn from this is that lack of public transit (intracity and intercity) is a public safety issue. Cars simply aren't an efficient use of resources.
You can see from the comments here people will talk about "subsidies" for rail. Why does rail need to turn a profit? Roads don't. The Post Office doesn't. The Fire Department doesn't. Yet for some reason we hold public transport infrastructure to a higher standard.
Americans, in particular, love their cars. And there has been a powerful lobbying operation to associate rail with tax increases. This is so short-sighted because nobody is confiscating your car. Fewer people on the roads will improve your driving experience and travel times.
We see in the UK that it's cheaper to fly to Spain than to take intercity train journeys. As far as I'm concerned, citywide rail (eg the Tube in London, the NYC Subway) should be free and intercity rail should have a nominal cost that is cheaper than driving.
Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.
Funding road repairs, construction, and expansion from general tax revenues is similarly subsidizing a different mode of transit, and it's likely a much higher value than the 3b€ you mention (and likely more than overall railway sector subsidizing, tho I'm not familiar with Germany's budget). Also recognizing that other positive externalities exist, but pricing them at $0, seems silly.
Not to mention subsidised parking spaces. Free and even paid street parking is highly subsidised by the city and by other tax payers. There's also the environmental cost of not having that land be a park or nature and instead have it contribute to being an urban heat island with all its asphalt.
Not writing an academic paper about it doesn't make it right either. This is the problem, when it's just hearsay, the rest of us have nothing to judge its accuracy with.
When looking at something as complex as people's behaviour, then it's worth allowing for seasonal variations in public transport use (e.g. when it's raining people may decide to get the bus rather than walk). Could it be related to the length of their journeys and/or their net worth? (There's a strong correlation between health and wealth). How does it compare to a similar section of the population that drive or cycle instead?
in Paris (and pretty sure that applies to pretty much any big western city, new york for instance is worse in a few of the criterias ill reference) subway increase stress, frequent delays(if you have 2-3 train as part of your commute you will experience it daily), pollution down under is high, virus/covid transmission is high, pickpockets are everywhere if not worse, bedbug, pee smell, junkies. Id take a car any day.
So I live in NYC, and constant honking and worrying about being run over by cars when I'm trying to cross the street contribute way more to my stress than the state of the subway in NYC. Driving, or being around vehicles driving, is incredibly stressful.
Also, I was in Paris last year and I found your subway system more pleasant than ours. Methinks you doth complain too much.
I lived years in NYC and in Paris, it might be more pleasant on the touristic places and crime is definitrly less violent. for everything else it stays true and id take crossing the street and honking anyday versus having to deal with public transportation with all the drug addicts and violence that is in NYC subway. hell I was commuting walking 40 min morning 40 min night not to deal with subway
This is much less of a problem in large Asian cities. They're only really stressful in rush hour crowds. But in places like NY the public seems much less interested in the initial policing, maintenance, and cultural attitude shifts that would be required to make it happen. Like, you could still have the artists, street performers, and other so-called charming quirks while still making sure the problematic passengers get the help they need. What's it going to take? You could even do a trial period, like one year of safe, clean metros and see if people want to go back to the way things are now.
Post Szasz and Reagan we’ve had the policy of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Thus you have a lot of people with schizophrenia who have no insight into their condition who are very hard to manage. Even in a town where services are relatively available there are many people who take years to accept a diagnosis which can get them on disability and receiving permanent help.
Probably the best we can do for these people is get them stabilized on an antipsychotic drug and then get them in the clinic every few months for a depot injection but even that is pretty hard.
This dates back to at least JFK and probably farther back. The institutions of the 1950s were terrible for the mentally ill - putting them on the streets is a better answer than the abuse a lot of them suffered. Of course the Kennedy's had enough to treat their mentally ill family members to better institutions than the government mandated ones.
If a reformed institution could treat the mentally ill better than the the streets is an open question - in theory it can, but human nature is all too often to abuse in that way and so you should question if any reform can stick. If you say yes then it is on you to verify. If you say no - we need a better answer than the street (I can't think of any - or at least not any that I don't have other objections to)
The Paris metro is amongst the most frequented in the world and operates near peak capacity. You absolutely can’t compare it to anything in Germany. Germany doesn’t really have a city which can be compared to Paris. Berlin has the most populated urban area and it has less than half the population of the Paris one. The only similar city in Europe is London.
Plus there is no bed bugs and pickpockets are an oddity outside of the most touristy stations.
Anyway, considering how awful it is to drive and park in Paris, you would have to be crazy to use a car instead of taking the train which is why nearly everyone does. Plus, with the mandatory employer subvention, it’s incredibly cheap at 44€ a month. The only credible alternative is biking which is indeed more and more popular.
pickpockets an oddity? brother I took all the suburban trains you can think of, the paris subway on a regular basis ive seen people injecting their arms on the wagon, antisemitic attacks, stabbings, punching, people shit on the floor, drunks and pickpockets are a daily thing in paris in EVERY public transportation. some bus lines in non-touristic areas are even so infamous that everyday legions of comments tell stories of how people got robbed their phones or wallets. ill take a car any day and guess what? that is what every rich person including the city mayor will do once they ban outsiders from having car in the name of greenwashing. they will ban cars in paris for middle class and then have people that drive ubers coming from poor suburbs and exploit them to drive around while us commoners have to live through the criminal hell that is paris public transportation.
Living since almost 15 years near Paris, in a few different places, regularly taking line B, C, D, M6, M7, M13, M1, some buses, as part of my regular commute, and have never encountered the shit you are talking about. I do know that some places are more problematic than others, by example M6 drivers regularly warn of pickpockets on saturdays (it's a touristic line, the only one I regularly take that have such announcements), sure not everything is perfect, but you are either biased (where did you live when you were in Paris?) or actually purposely actively trying to spread fud to insist like you are.
could you draw the magic wall that blocks pickpockets from stealing non touristic areas? i wanna make sure im not in one.
you can go tonight around 8pm to porte de la villette and come back here tell me you felt safe.
its very hard to understand paris subway is a living hell if you did not travel to better subways cities. seoul, tokyo, hong kong, taipei are what a subway should be. anything less is hell
First, please, be respectful. You are not my brother, nor my friend.
Second, why are you blathering so much non sense. I have been taking the Paris metro daily for the past decade, commuting on the B, then the 6 first, then the 8 as I moved. I regularly go around including on some of the allegedly poor lines and cross Gare du Nord quite often. Stabbings never happen. An attack would be a newspaper worthy thing. People don’t take shit in the metro. What kind of non sense is that. And pickpockets are limited to the touristy parts because well there is not much to pickpocket in the other parts.
At first, I thought you were some kind of Russian chill spreading misinformation but then it finally hit me that you are probably using your car all the time and trying to justify your prejudice.
everything I wrote I’ve seen it with my own eyes. saying brother to you is much more respectful than you calling me a russian troll. I am a second generation immigrant born in one of the worst suburb of Paris and everything I described I have seen it with my own eyes. also I don’t own a car. I just traveled and lived in many places (in US and asia) and can totally say the Paris subway is a horrible experience. people like you that have a strong political bias that make them bend the facts and reality are also the reason things won’t ever get better. Saying “pickpockets are only in touristy areas” just like if there was some magic line they wouldnt cross is the proof that you have gone away from facts and common sense. If I am telling you I know personally multiple bus lines being pickpocket-ridden where mostly parisian take the bus it is a fact and a reality. Your own experience of commuting might be different than mine good on you for enjoying it but maybe be tolerant enough to accept my own experience.
> strong political bias that make them bend the facts
I have a strong political bias because I feel the need to intervene when someone spread utter lies about stabbings in the Paris metro. Sure, I’m the one having issues here.
The issue is not accepting your experience. You are talking non sense about factual things.
Parisians mostly don’t take the bus by the way. The buses are awful and have been running like shit for the past two years as drivers are not being hired in preparation of the privatisation. Are you sure you actually know what you are talking about?
so now you half agree with me saying bus are awful. I just have now to convince you on trains, the other public transportation :)
many parisians take the bus to go through paths that are not covered well by subway especially true for horizontal paths for instance in left bank. ive seen a few stabbings myself taking rer and subway. i was even there when a random guy was stabbing people a few years back in st denis for no reason. I saw young people take out knives to fight after an argument, I ve seen people holding knives to threaten others. why do you think even the SNCF when they moved their office to saint denis wanted to have a specific arrival gate for their employees-only before backtracking when someone smarter than the average told them it would send the wrong message? have you came out next to barbes? have you seen that people got murdered just in front of gare du nord for no reason? have you been to north east stations where a horde (the right word) of junkies are crawling in the station and are all dangerous?
> so now you half agree with me saying bus are awful
They are awful because they are never on time. Your post is pure delusion. I feel insulted by you even implying I could half agree.
> why do you think even the SNCF when they moved their office to saint denis wanted to have a specific arrival gate for their employees-only before backtracking when someone smarter than the average told them it would send the wrong message?
You are unlucky. I was working as a contractor for SNCF at the time of the move so I 100% know that what you are saying is pure bullshit. There never was a plan for a separate gare. The part of Saint Denis where SNCF is is perfectly safe anyway. I find it hilarious that you think it's even possible to open a new gare for a specific use case on the RER D, one of the busiest line in one of the busiest metro network.
not a separate gare they wanted to have a specific arrival bridge to go to the office.
about the perfectly safe I guess your colleagues disagreed and I also disagreed for having spent 20 year in st denis projects. but I guess im a russian troll :
https://www.lemonde.fr/banlieues/article/2013/01/24/la-sncf-...
Absolutely. Next time you see a free parking spot mentally calculate the rent of ~10m² on that part of the city to understand how much of a subsidy that is. Then multiply by 50 parking spots in a street. Then think how many thousands there are all over the city...
do you have free parking? cities are making money out of parking spots. a lot of money. so much than one would say they have an incentive to reduce parking space to increase price and reduce expenses
Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue.
They should be making decisions based on how to improve quality of life for residents.
Parking should exist where public transport is not a viable option. Ideally the work to make public transport an option should be prioritised over the work to making parking exist.
Cities and councils can make money from public transport too, it'll work out OK revenue-wise, and quality of life improvements can be considerable.
Practically in a city like Ithaca NY there are stores like Wal-Mart that have oceans of free parking about a mile from the Ithaca Commons which is a pedestrian mall surrounded by parking meters and concrete corkscrews that cost about $1 an hour. Years ago local shops could stamp your parking ticket and give you a few hour for buying something but the city decided it couldn’t afford it.
That $1 isn’t much, but many believe the Commons can’t compete on that basis and shoppers will avoid the Commons and go to stores on the commercial strip instead, it doesn’t help that the Commons doesn’t have a diversity of shopping, instead it has some gift stores, a legal cannabis dispensary that is just about to reopen after being closed for some reason, numerous head shops, a bookstore, and numerous CBD stores that I think sell real weed in a back room.
> Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue.
... although if they were, the price of parking would be way higher. The optimal price for parking is a time-and-day-dependent price set high enough that around 10% of spots everywhere in the city are free at any given time, so that people who need parking can generally find it conveniently nearby to where they're going.
> set high enough that around 10% of spots everywhere in the city are free at any given time, so that people who need parking can generally find it conveniently nearby to where they're going
OTOH, if there is always that much space available (and presumably there didn't used to be before the price hikes) then it is evidence that a lot of people have chosen to go elsewhere because parking became too expensive.
Can the location compete with that "elsewhere"? If it is a unique location with unique reasons to visit, probably yes. But if it is the typical old downtown with stores competing with the strip mall with similar stores but free parking, probably not.
I've seen the depressing cycle of multiple vibrant downtown cores become abandoned after parking meters came in. I very much prefer a strong active downtown core even if finding parking is a pain, to one that is mostly all boarded up and abandoned but there's plenty of paid parking.
There's not that much free space available. It's a maximum of 10%. Almost everyone who was ever going to be able to go here is able to do so, they're just paying more for the privilege and they aren't wasting as much time driving around creating traffic trying to find parking.
Let's say there are 500 parking spots. With free parking and a vibrant area, all spots are taken and there are N people circling around looking for parking. Not sure what N is but let's say 50 (seems reasonable).
If after the price increase there are 10% (50) parking spots open, that means at least a 100 people went elsewhere (20%). That's a pretty significant drop in business to the local stores.
And speculation aside, I've seen this happen in two downtowns I frequented. Parking meters were installed, people went elsewhere, the vibrant downtown died and was boarded up and abandoned. And it's not just a transfer of business to a different location, but a loss of cultural significance. Because the old downtown had artists and musicians who no longer have a place at the strip mall. The stores moved, but the culture was lost.
parking costs over 200euros a day in Paris. the city also is on the board of private parking companies…. conflict of interest is high, corruption is also knocking at the door. greenwashing is the new criminal activity for suits
what is the relation. no one ever talked about more cars. I a merely asking why the mayor office is at the board of private parking companies getting paid for that while at the same time removing public parking space.
You have a fundamentally different model of the social contract to me. We're unlikely to ever agree. However...
I believe that relying on individual purchasing power ("utility"), to improve the average quality of life is an experiment (often referred to as "Reganism" or "Thatcherism"), that after 40+ years of trialling has shown to be net negative to social mobility, overall net happiness and other factors important to me as a UK middle-class (this isn't the same as what middle-class means in the US), citizen with a significantly-above median income for my age, social background and other predictive factors, as compared to natural experiments in free market economies where such trials did not take place (most of Northern Europe), in the same time frame.
The core problem with free markets being used as a mechanism to settle all societies ills is that theory ignores natural monopolies. You can't have a car parking space and a children's park in the same place: you must make a choice. And if you choose based on economic utility, the outcome with the direct revenue will allow a realised "win" over that which has indirect or non-utility rewards such as "happy, well-adjusted, children who have learned to be nice to each other".
If you believe in the right wing view of economics without taking into account the lack of natural monopolies, you and I are unfortunately going to be so far apart from being able to find common ground we might just be wasting each others' time.
If you do understand the nature of a natural monopoly from a land use to utility company infrastructure, then you'll realise that when you follow the thread that car parking at market prices denies other monopoly uses of that land, that residents can't influence that through purchasing decisions, and that cities and councils would be failing in their duty to provide an equitable and comfortable city/town in which to exist by making decisions about monopoly situations purely based on revenue potential.
You can visit your local park hopefully you live in an area with one. You can invest time using transit to get to another park. Traveling during rush hour would be difficult. Traveling with many children or younger children adds a difficulty. Being disabled or older or worse disabled with children more difficult. For the young, childless, plenty of time on their hands or live next to a park of course walking a few steps is a no brainer.
But it's like buying a gym membership across town with the idea that you would walk everyday. You aren't going once winter hits.
Not American but have been young and took transit and walked everywhere but also seen seniors in wheelchairs who stopped going to the park after they stopped allowing cars to park.
Disabled etc spots are different imo. But most sane places have a mixture of parks/shops/other facilities within the bounds of a small neighbourhood that are easily walkable for most.
What percentage of people driving around in their 3-ton trucks are disabled? This is an argument for fewer cars, not more: so that people who truly need it can use it more efficiently.
What social contract? That's a convenient fiction, but no one ever agreed to any social contract anywhere.
My adopted home of Singapore goes a lot harder on private initiative than Thatcher and Reagan ever dreamed off. And thanks to that, and some other factors, they went from third world to first world (or arguably zeroth world) in less than a generation.
> The core problem with free markets being used as a mechanism to settle all societies ills is that theory ignores natural monopolies. You can't have a car parking space and a children's park in the same place: you must make a choice.
Revenue means people are willing to pay for something, something they value. So it's not the be-and-end-all for how to run your city, but it's better than many other ways political decisions are made. (And better than whatever political decision procedure leads to mandatory minimum parking requirements, IMHO.)
The fact that you didn't explicitly opt-in to it before you were born does not mean there is no implicit social contract between you and your fellow citizens.
> What social contract? That's a convenient fiction, but no one ever agreed to any social contract anywhere. My adopted home of Singapore goes a lot harder on private initiative than Thatcher and Reagan ever dreamed off.
Do you chew gum when you are at home in Singapore? No, you don't, because it's illegal. Did you agree to that, were even you given a choice? No, of course not.
Singapore is more authoritarian than most liberal democracies. That means you do as your told. That's the social contract. If you disagree with the people in power to loudly, you got to rot in jail. https://www.smh.com.au/world/lee-kuan-yew-a-towering-figure-...
As it happens, Singapore got lucky. The people in charge are good at running a country efficiently. In particular, they didn't line their own pockets too aggressively - certainly not in a way that was out of line with liberal democracies. The Singapore it's an outlier compared to other authoritarian countries. Generally, once politicians eliminate the competition, they use their control to milk the economy for all they are worth.
> Do you chew gum when you are at home in Singapore? No, you don't, because it's illegal. Did you agree to that, were even you given a choice? No, of course not.
It's more like a license than a contract.
> Singapore is more authoritarian than most liberal democracies.
The Singaporean government is a smaller part of life than in most other places. Much less red tape to fill out before you are allowed to do anything and regulations are simpler.
Yes, there are some weird regulations about how you can say things. But they affect the form more than the substance. You are pretty much allowed to say whatever you want, just not however you want it.
Yes, Singapore got lucky in that they had (and have) a hardworking population, and competent leadership.
Why do you insist that Singapore is authoritarian? We have free and fair elections, that are regularly observed to be so by international organisations.
Well I'm not going back to Singapore until they treat gay men like myself better. I've been there; Singapore is a private money pit/playground for Western and Asian high business, much like Dubai.
When have you last been? They have recently improved the de jure treatment of gay people. (The de facto treatment hasn't changed.)
I agree that the laws about homosexuality are weird, but they are also democratic: it's broadly in line with what the population wants as far as I can tell.
That's not what democratic means. If the people did not vote on them, it's not democratic, even if it appears as though they would hypothetically vote for it.
Without trying to ridicule you, asking “what social contract?” In this kind of discussion is like a first year university student asking “what’s a fraction?” in first year maths classes.
An entire section of philosophy is built on this question alone, and why there is such a thing as a social contract.
public transportation is not a viable option in the west. too much crime too many lenient judge. in asia it is top notch. because people are educated and this just works. once we fix this you can take our cars.
It has secretly become unrealistic to have cars in a city, we still do it but more out of tradition. You wouldn't build parks (tho that would be nice) 1 parked car, the road next to it and the second side walk take about as much space as an apartment and we stack those one on top of the other.
Something like this is quite hilarious if you think about it.
You don't have to build it like that. Where I live now, the parking lot is effectively the basement under the apartment buildings and playground. You'd barely interact with it unless you're driving.
Housing is getting so expensive that people share tiny apartments while still able to afford two cars. With that ratio you need 10 floors of parking for 10 floors of housing.
I always thought it funny how popular elevators are for vertical travel. A monorail station in the basement or even a ski lift seems a lot less space consuming.
If it means you can get a home 120m2 (1300 sq ft) in stead of 60m2 (650 sq ft) it seems worth considering.
Road wear scales with the fourth power of weight over the axle so, even with personal cars getting heavier, I’m not sure that moving people from cars to trains makes much of a difference – I think most wear typically comes from heavy vehicles or weathering – so it mightn’t make much difference to repair costs.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t other advantages. Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy, and time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.
> time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.
This is not really true on busy trains. I've commuted both on trains and in cars, and when comparing transportation methods near the saturation point, cars win when it comes to personal comfort.
A traffic jam is no fun, but you can still sit, aren't jostled about by other people, have your personal space, and keep your climate controlled to a good level.
In a full train, you will be standing up, pressed against a bunch of other people. The climate will be other people's sweat. You may be able to use your phone, but not much more.
On a longer quiet route the train can be very nice. Get your laptop out, do a little work, nice coffee or tea with you. But on a busy commuter line it's more annoying than a car.
> I've commuted both on trains and in cars, and when comparing transportation methods near the saturation point, cars win when it comes to personal comfort.
Note that if you're at the saturation point of both modes, you're moving a lot more people with (light/heavy) rail:
Also worth considering that while it may be personally comfortable for you in on saturated rail, you're still moving towards your destination, whereas at car saturation you may be physically comfortable, but you are not making progress towards your goal of actually achieving your goal of getting to your destination while your speed is zero.
That is like saying that with pig factory farming (aka intensive pig farming) you can produce far more meat per square foot than with organic pig farming and therefore it must be better.
Or, from another perspective, you have a budget of $/€ y for transportation, what mode of transportation will allow you to move the most people for that money? Unless you believe in MMT, government budgets are a finite resource, so how do we get the most bang for our buck?
Certainly you need some roads as vehicles such as trucks (UK: lorries) are very handy for society in running the economy. I myself own a car, a motorcycle, a bicycle, and have a transit pass (though I can use debit/credit tap-to-pay) and use each mode when appropriate. But the overemphasis on automobiles—specifically for private transportation—is suffocating the availability for other options.
To go back to your analogy: if you have a starving population, then factory farming is better because you can provide more calories to more people (and probably at lower cost). In that case organic is worse because you may be sacrificing people's well-being by not having enough capacity. Once you solve your first problem (enough calories/capacity), then you have the luxury of other considerations.
Obviously it is better. The better alternative to intensive animal husbandry is not eating meat (or other animal products, but in a lesser way) than greenwashing via "organic" designation.
I.... I really don't feel like driving in a traffic jam is better than being in a train in anything except the most extreme cases of train crowding. I haven't experienced massive commuter driving but even the cases I've just been stuck in stop and go traffic for 30 minutes it felt worse than any train ride I've taken except for the few times I was in "I feel like I'm going to get crushed" levels of crowded.
And like... generally speaking, the crowded train is still going to get you where you need to go. I don't know how you walk away from the 30 minute trip that took 2+ hours with any happy feelings. To each their own of course
I want to preface this by saying that my favourite mode of transportation has been NS rail in the Netherlands, but that I do 99% of my travel (where I live, in Canada) by car since I live outside of the city.
>the cases I've just been stuck in stop and go traffic for 30 minutes it felt worse than any train ride I've taken except for the few times I was in "I feel like I'm going to get crushed" levels of crowded.
I would much rather sit in a seat that has been meticulously adjusted to fit my body perfectly, with climate controlled to the exact temperature I want, with music/audiobook/etc playing at the exact volume I want, with 0 encroachment on my personal space, than to sit on a crowded commuter train, where crowded == more or less every seat is taken, with some people likely standing. I don’t care if I have to be in stop and go traffic for a bit, I know how to drive smoothly (usually smoother than trains) and I have pretty good patience, so I just sit there and relax listening to music for a bit longer than normal.
Maybe if you drive a particularly barebones/uncomfortable car[0] I could see a train being preferable. Aside from that, I will take the car over the train for commuting pretty much every time. The exception is if the train is notably consistently faster, or if I’m somewhere like the Netherlands where cars are more of a general inconvenience.
[0] Or any modern non-luxury car, since every manufacturer has decided “sporty” sells so you need 20” wheels with rubber band tires and sports suspension on your commuter car. I would highly recommend driving something like a 1990s Buick Roadmaster or Chevrolet Caprice, or Lincoln Continental, or equivalent vehicle - we had figured out how to make commutes incredibly comfortable for little money 30 years ago, but it seems like pretty much everyone forgot.
> I don't know how you walk away from the 30 minute trip
You never drove with the DB before I take it (die Bahn - German trains). You routinely have that a 30min trip takes multiple times of what it should.
* train coming in late
* no replacement
* suddenly from another track
* people taking their life
* missing the follow train
* having to wait because an ICE gets priority
You don't know how many trips I had to cancel because coming 3 hours to late (when starting the trip 30min early) isn't viable.
Yeah sure being in a traffic jam sucks! Big time. I hate it with all my heart, but I then start playing a podcast or calming music and actually get something out of it. It's actually not so nervewracking if you change your mindset. It bothers me more that I know that my mileage will tank for that short while... But yeah if I can I stay at home...
I'm fortunate enough to have only taken trains in places where there's an understanding that people actually... really actually do need to get to where they're going.
If your network doesn't have any sort of resilliance to failure, not much to do really.
(Aside: for the longest time I was always a bit miffed at France's train network, because it's mostly "go to Paris"/"move away from Paris" and very few sideways connections. Germany's transit map has always looked more evenly spread out! But every German I know who tries to take train transport complains about this lack of resiliance and now I'm pretty convinced that the network is too thinly spread out)
i also live in germany and its crazy. we are one to of the most developed country in the world and our train suck that hard that beeing stuck in traffic is way more pleasant and faster then beeing stuck somewhere for hours because of die bahn.
and that’s frequent. i did have to take the train for 6 months with 1 change of train and it was completely full all the time and late half the time so a missed the other train. its not all trains but some are freaking late all the time. especially those between frankfort and stuttgart.
there is a talk from daniel kriesel on youtube called bahn mining. very worth it
edit:// i use the 49 ticket because it is nice to use trams and buses in towns.
But if the train is that busy it likely couldn’t be replaced by people travelling in personal cars anyway as they would take up to much road space and cause a huge traffic jam and there would be nowhere to park at the end of the journey in a presumably dense city centre.
German cities have much less parking lots than American ones because of the way they were built. There may be a few that you can replace with a building, but not a lot.
Aren’t roads necessary from a “last mile” perspective for like, all sorts of things a functioning country needs? Last time I checked trains don’t run directly from farms to grocery stores and so we need trucks and therefore roads in order to get food to consumers, among other things.
> Aren’t roads necessary from a “last mile” perspective for like, all sorts of things a functioning country needs?
Yup, absolutely! But at least where I've worked on road design, the number of lanes on a local road is governed pretty much solely by the number of cars (trucks just have a larger impact on asphalt structure choices and, balance with the impacts of freeze-thaw, resurfacing schedule).
But this is about longer distance travel - trains generally being used for intercity travel vs highways. Even still, I don't argue against road subsidization, but rather in favour of more train subsidization.
They're necessary because cities are built around the idea that everything must be done through a car, so roads become necessary. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The underlying discussion is all about urban planning and how we want societies to organize space.
I do not know about Germany, but most countries have taxes on car ownership and fuel, so you need to offset those against the expenditure on roads. Road construction and maintenance also benefits other road users - transport vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians and emergency vehicles etc.
> The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles.
This should read: The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by heavy trucks.
Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight. A fully loaded cement truck or transport truck is doing way more damage than a fully loaded box truck, which is doing much more damage than a Hummer EV, which is doing much more damage than a Tesla Model S or F150, which is doing more damage than a Nissan Micra or Mazda Miata. Here’s[0] a page with a neat chart showing relative comparisons. Note that it tops out at 18k lb trucks, which are ~1200x as damaging as something like a Prius; it doesn’t include fully loaded trucks, which can exceed 80k lbs in North America. The amount of damage to roads they do compared to average or lightweight cars is mind boggling.
Once you get into those larger vehicles, vehicle weight doesn't matter so much (for regulations and for road wear). What matters is axle weight, which stays fairly consistent as you increase overall vehicle weight. eg for delivering bulk construction materials, dump trucks have either one, two, or three load axles (along with the steering axle, which is calculated separately), and the load it can carry scales pretty closely with that (gross around 10t per axle (22k lbs), net around 7t per load axle). Anything over the standard limit pays significant fees for a permit (at least where I am)
German chancellor plans to put road repairs into 2% mandatory defense budget to meet NATO requirements, so not that much of a load to overall german budget.
Not trying to detract discussion, just finding it hilarious that when facing a potentially existential threat from russians who repeatedly claim they will wipe them out, they will do just about anything rather than making their military into something a bit better than an chronically underfunded joke its now.
Actually, it makes quite a bit of sense to plan ahead to make sure that your infrastructure can efficiently transport the weapon systems you already have, or you are planning to have.
What's the use of tanks if you can't get them to the battlefield? [1]
Although some infrastructure was already built taking logistics into account [2], concrete structures have a life expectancy of about 50 years, and many bridges are past that age and need urgent replacement. And that costs a lot of money.
A small reminder on the importance of bridges: [3]
It is also important to make sure your military equipment can travel across rough ground after the retreating enemy has destroyed all roads, rails, and bridges. Of course in that situation you don't care much about saving the ground you are covering while chasing the enemy, but lack of roads is not fatal (there is good reason the military likes it - it makes their logistic much easier on safe ground)
Germany spends some 70 billion euros maintaining the road system, only about a third of which is offset by taxes on drivers [1]. If we accept that investments in roads reduce carbon emissions by 0 million tonnes per year, then that works out to NaN € per tonne -- much worse than other carbon abatement methods!
Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore wouldn't be privy to them. Instead I rely almost exclusively on Germany's public transport for my daily commutes, which I find perfectly satisfactory for this purpose and significantly more convenient than parking and maintaining a car.
A third can't be right. 15 billion from petrol and 18.2 billion from diesel alone make up almost half of that. 48.76 million vehicles times €100 (back of the envelope calculation) for vehicle tax puts that number above half.
From the article (sorry for the bad link before; fixed below [1]):
> The revenue from taxes and levies on road traffic amounts to around 50 billion euros annually. Around half of this is earmarked by law via the mineral oil tax, i.e. around 25 billion euros. This means that just over a third (36%) of the earmarked revenue from road traffic covers the costs of roads and other facilities such as parking lots and the like. It is therefore clear that the public sector is heavily subsidizing road traffic.
My understanding is that these two forms of taxes add to more than 50%, but then almost half of those taxes must be reinvested elsewhere by law (i.e., not into roads), hence the 1/3 figure. But even if you ignore this reallocation of taxes, you still have a deficit of around 20 billion euros.
That's because the selection of numbers is a little bit weird. The 70 billion on the cost side are composed of 38 billion for construction and maintenance, 14 billion for traffic police and 18 billion for public funds spent for accidents. The generated income is only taxes on fuel and the tax car owners have to pay.
If you include the cost of the traffic police, there is way more stuff that you can include on the income side like taxes on car sales and part of the cost comes also back to the government in the form of taxes. There is likely also a large part of the costs that is missing. Doing this properly is a lot of work and doing it precisely is hard to impossible. These sort of things almost always include estimates for the higher order effects.
Btw: I googled the study[1] and apparently it was funded by the "Netzwerk Europäischer Eisenbahnen e.V." (Network of European Railways Association). I would take any statements and numbers with a huge grain of salt.
Maybe in UK local roads are funded differently? If you counted only national roads in Poland it would seem that Poland takes more in revenue than spends on roads, which isn't true if you count expenses on all the local roads that aren't in national budget.
Even if you don't drive a car yourself you depend a lot on things delivered by road. Most of the road wear is done by trucks bringing you food, construction materials and whatever else. You can't exactly replenish your local grocery store by rail or cargo bike.
Most of the need for roads though is cars. It is rare to see a multi-lane road where trucks are restricted to only 1 lane and cars allowed the rest - if though trucks wouldn't fill that single lane and in turn the other lanes could be built much cheaper. (in part because the road needed for a car isn't that much cheaper than the road needed for a truck - labor is about the same, and weather is often a large factor)
Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.
"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.
We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.
If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with.
Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even try to put a value on how we spend public money will not be a reasonable stance until public money is infinite.
This analogy simply doesn't work because transit isn't fungible. Trains and air travel or cars simply aren't "the same park". The benefit of trains is objectively not just the carbon footprint. The money spent by the government benefits the public in other ways, not just environmentally. Ignoring the wear on (and cost of ownership of) personal vehicles, for instance, dismisses a huge amount of savings for folks who can take trains instead. Rail travel is safer and results in fewer deaths. The list goes on. Even "having a train that takes me to work so I can relax on my commute" is an important one. And many of those things are almost impossible to truly quantify the monetary value of and jam into a spreadsheet.
All the things you listed are examples of "other axes" that I listed as being valid objections. I also agree that it's hard to estimate the dollar cost or benefit of these things. But I think we do have to attempt to estimate it, since we have no other sensible way to decide how to allocate public funds.
It's not even all that difficult to estimate, really. For example, every business does it, of necessity.
Markets are a useful tool that societies use to optimize certain kinds of capital allocation and goods production, where that makes sense. No more no less.
Most of the things societies value most highly don't fit into the market hole.
If trains were exclusively a mechanism for capturing or avoiding carbon, then the metric of $ / tons would be valid. Trains very obviously are not that.
> It's not even all that difficult to estimate, really. For example, every business does it, of necessity.
This isn't even true. I run a business, and I frequently make decisions based on what I believe to be the right thing to do rather than what the data shows as being the most profitable outcome. The very notion of a "loss leader" is driven on fuzzy data where execs simply hope the loss in revenue from sales is made up for in other benefits that can't be concretely valued.
Numbers vary around the world, but FEMA in the US decided on $7.5M in 2020.
Financial investments are economic decisions. Whether or not you like the idea of assigning financial value to fuzzy concepts like happiness or quality adjusted life years, you still have to do it. The simple act of choosing to spend $N or not choosing to spend $N puts an implicit price on the result.
By putting approximate numbers in the spreadsheet - no matter how crude - we can at least end up consistent and fair. Otherwise we could end up spending vast sums to make a few people a little happier instead of smaller sums to make lots of people a lot happier.
No, but we can look at the amount of misery, that is prevented by not using cars. Traffic jams, pollution, accidents, waste of resources,...
The difference is so huge, we don't need to put a number on it. Public transport might be unpleasant for the individual, but is clearly very much better for everyone than using cars.
The park to park comparison is the opposite of what's being discussed. That's comparing the value of apple to another from the same tree - there are many subjective elements to compare but given that they're both nearly identical it's quite easy. Still doesn't fit on a spreadsheet e.g. bitterness, likelihood of having a worm inside, prettiness, whatever.
What is being suggested is comparing a train subsidy to... Unknown. Other modes of transportation? The money being spent on other carbon reduction efforts?
I don't understand why carbon reduction is the primary topic for discussion when trying to put a dollar value on the thing. Two apples are still a little difficult to compare but you at least can agree that the bigger tastier one is probably better value (unless the smaller is cheaper and you need to do gram for dollar value, idk, good luck). A train vs other things though is imo essentially impossible to compare, a genuine apples to oranges comparison.
For carbon reduction, I challenge the OP estimate. It assumes everyone drives if no train, as I understand it. So that's the carbon reduction comparison - wow great so many people not driving. But it's not just that. Less parking lots need to be constructed. Less concrete, less carbon. Less roads need re paving every 10 years or whatever - let's compare the carbon of rail maintenance to an asphalt road. Less car accidents, less cars needing to be recycled at plants. Maybe city designs start accommodating the train subsidy, less car centric design, more vertical and dense, less car travel that wouldn't have been served by the train but is now served by walking. On and on and on.
You can't compare these two on carbon alone, and that's not even considering the fact that I find it kinda ridiculous to focus on just carbon as a measure of worth-to-humans. There's so many other factors at play that I genuinely think it's impossible to put a dollar value on. Reduction in road noise for people near the highway. Reduction in smog and thus a reduction in lung cancer and related medical costs. Reduction in human deaths from car accidents. Increase in psychological happiness in commuters not exposed to daily road rage and also suddenly having more time to read or play games. Endless, endless comparisons.
Dollars are a bad way to measure value. We either need a new way to describe value-for-dollars or a new way to describe actual value. Conflating the two was capitalism's ultimate coup and this thread is a great example of why.
>Less parking lots need to be constructed. Less concrete, less carbon. Less roads need re paving every 10 years or whatever - let's compare the carbon of rail maintenance to an asphalt road.
Yes, these are all valid other axes to consider. I nevertheless think it's necessary to estimate each of their values as so many "points", which, yes, may be subjective. Those points might as well be dollars, because dollars are what we (as the local government) finally wind up spending on whatever projects we decide on.
Why "might as well be?" Dollars can't accurately determine something's real value and I'm baffled that people continually assume this.
A teacher is more valuable than an investment banker and yet the investment banker is paid more. Maybe I can make a spreadsheet of all the instances of such things and it would reach tens of thousands of rows. It seems to me plain as day so I don't get it.
Sometimes the dollar value is accurate, often not. The frequency that it's incorrect makes me wonder at the authority we grant dollar valuations.
Who's "we"? The public is mostly not made up of consultants and do not appreciate consultant logic being applied to everything. People would prefer to define values and then act on those values.
So you would be good with spending more money and even increasing total carbon footprint, if it just felt good?
Seriously, if you're not going to measure anything or use logic, I'm not sure how you can even call them "defined" or "values". It sounds like, "I saw it on TV/internet/billboard so it must be true".
Yes, because that is exactly how American cities are currently built today -- expensive carbon-intensive roads paved out to sprawling suburbs, the independent financial upkeep of which is not sustainable long-term. [0]
The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1]
From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized.
If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all.
Strong towns is a terrible source of numbers and has been debunked many times. Streetcar suburbs have been sustaining themselves for 140 years - rebuilding their infrastructure. Infrastructure is a tiny % of any government budget (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...) and so infrastructure spending could go up a lot.
I didn't say that. The OP argued "Actually this is bad because the cost per ton of carbon saved is higher than some other way to save carbon."
The original replyer pointed out that "ways to save carbon" are not necessarily fungible and there are other benefits to subsidized rail travel. The followon dismissal was to throw back and come up with a way to "price" those other benefits.
What I am objecting to is the entire chain of thinking that starts with trying to do simplistic, reductionist price comparisons and then refusing to consider other factors that don't fit in the pricing exercise.
That isn't "consultant logic", that's the way the world works. Resources are finite. We can't do everything everyone wants to do, so we need some means of prioritizing which things we are to do. You can call names all you want, but this is an unavoidable reality of existence.
> "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing"
We don't even do that for cars. We shifted most of the transport cost to the individuals without any calculation. Nowadays, cars are the most costly item in a household besides the house itself, is that okay? I'm not so sure.
A car is an incredibly complex and incredibly useful machine. In a non-feudal banker run economy, a car would cost 5 times as much as a house. Or rather the house would be 5 times cheaper than the car.
The cost of something is not related to what it is worth to life. In any case the real measure is what someone is willing to pay. I'm driving a 25 year old car because I choose to buy a more expensive house, and put my kids in various activities - as a result I don't have enough money left over to pay for a new car. I do have enough money to pay for a used car when the current one breaks and is unfixable, but I have choosen to spend elsewhere - those used cars provide exactly as much value to me as a new car and save me money. (I save even more money by riding my bike where possible so I rarely drive)
Neither land nor materials are scarce. They've been artificially made expensive to prop up the feudal system. This planet is still mostly wilderness - go zoom in anywhere on Google Maps and you'll see. And building materials are easy to find in nature everywhere except for in the oceans and the deserts.
I know it's easy and a habit to always defend the status quo, no matter what it is, but when it comes to housing the situation is much beyond ridiculous. I can purchase a literal airplane for half of what it would cost me to buy a run-down shack where I'm from, which is a region that neither has any high paying jobs nor lack of space. It's a mostly deserted, low-population density region, with population shrinking every year because people cannot afford a fucking simple house to live in. Housing prices has nothing to do with economy nor supply and demand. It is all politics and it's all a scam.
By the way, what do you think it takes in energy, factories and labour to make the material needed for a car? A whole lot more than what it takes for a house.
Ah, you made the classical blunder of forgetting location matters!
Living in the woods sounds grand until you have to live in the woods. The vast majority of humans prefer to live in Urban areas, where land is more expensive.
Living in the woods also sounds fun until you realize you have no infrastructure for anything. How will you shop? Cook? Entertain yourself?
There is a lifestyle there, yes. But that's the trick - lifestyle. You have to dedicate your life to achieving just the basics.
I wrote in the comment above that land and housing is expensive also in regions with low population density. Because the land owners there also demand top dollar for the land they have. The same problems are in rural areas as in urban areas, of course it is accentuated more in urban areas since those are also places where people can make a high income and population is denser.
I've lived in the woods, so I know exactly how it is. As long as you have a vehicle you are fine. Haven't you ever been outside of a city in your life? They have energy and modern comforts. I've lived off grid as well, and that was fine. You have to plan differently.
You are arguing from obsolete standpoints, which probably have never been true. Why? To defend a status quo that is strangling generations of people?
Right, so a vehicle... and a road and a city and thousands of years of human innovation.
> They have energy and modern comforts
Right, at the expense of the city which keeps the rural and even suburban areas on Welfare. Because providing funding to places where nobody lives in a money burner. Luckily, the "status-quo" is 100% to burn money on rural and suburban areas.
Yes, that is right. Opinion building is a thing in a democracy.
The problem with op is that he attaches a strong value statement ("isn't good value") to an incomplete assessment. Now that's doing politics! Isn't that what we want to get away from? Don't we want to have it all objective and fact based?
So here is the question: How should we make decisions? Is it possible to use $ as a neutral decision making data point? Or do we have to discuss things broadly, and include elements that haven't been broken down to the cent, to reach a consensus about how we want to organise society?
I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.
I agree with you that it's important to avoid using such a bad strategy as feel good vibes, which could easily happen if one is careless.
However it might suffice to find a strong justification, rather than a pure quantification. One way to build such a justification is to consider rail transport as a part of a coherent whole, as part of a broader vision.
Indeed I think such a strategy can result in a better outcome than the one arising from optimizing everything in isolation; the latter risks leading to a local optimum.
However it is key that the vision is feasible and correctly evaluated. If one were to bet everything on one vision and that vision failed, if say one important factor was forgotten and not accounted for, the result might be rather unfortunate.
So concretely, making local public transport cheaps could fit into a vision of "where will people live, where will they work, and how will they commute from the first place to the second". Whereas including intercity rail and bus is harder to understand maybe it would fit into a vision of "how people will keep in contact with old friends and relatives after moving cities". Maybe "how people will spend their vaction, or go on business trips"?
Let's focus on the former one. It could then go hand in hand with zoning regulation, public-private partnership of building housing+utilities etc. Trying to encourage certain industries to provide jobs.
Ok, the GP is only using carbon offsets, but the economic one are just as good. Forgoing car ownership allows for that money to then go other economic uses. Forgoing fuel costs, $20 for electric, $100 for gas, again allows that to go into the other areas of the economy. These are easy to calculate, why not use them?
No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
That figure includes every single government-owned street, AFAIK. Total infrastructure costs are higher but don't seem that much higher than in Germany?
> Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be
I'm not convinced this is true. Because a train enables more density, it enables more places you can reach once on it. A car enables more geographical area, but there is a lot less things to do in that area, and those things to do are what matters. If you want to go camping miles from anyone else than a car will get you there, but if you want to do a city activity (restaurant, movies, live music, show, work) a train can get you to a much greater variety of those things.
Note that with both the real question is the network. A car where there are not roads won't get you anywhere. A car where there is one road doesn't get you far. Same for a train - I live in a city without a train and so obviously I can't get anywhere on it. I've been in cities with trains and I was able to get places on it - enough that I didn't need to have a car.
At this rate I would be surprised if the Texas HSR is complete before 2050. Texas has not come to terms with anything. I say that as a resident for the last 10 years.
> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
Before scaling people moving up so much, I'd question why encourage so much movement.
Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need. By eliminating the need for 95% of high-speed people moving (whether by car, train, bus, no matter), that problem becomes automatically solved. And we get a nicer life walking/biking to most places and when we need/want to drive farther, there's no congestion.
> Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need
The only way to achieve this is density. Urban areas.
When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
The problem is that you can make MUCH more money building huge homes than affordable housing. And people, being ultra-individualistic, believe they need the huge home as opposed to denser housing. So here we are.
> When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
What you call "not possible" is where I live, so clearly it is possible.
Trying to shoehorn all solutions into one and only one way of doing things turns people off and hinders progress.
Sure you can have dense urban areas that are walkable/cycleable. You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable. Instead of turning people away from a good cause by telling them they can't have the life they want, let's promote walkable/cycleable communities in all areas.
> You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable
You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
If you have a store and you have to service, say, 1,000 people to make it profitable you might have a store every .5 miles in the city. Maybe that then translates to 5 miles in the suburb. Well... it's not very easy to walk 5 miles. It's trivial to walk .5 miles.
Stores are one example, but this really applies to literally everything. Besides things like parks, which don't need to turn a profit.
Sure, you can have walkable suburbs in that you can walk in the suburbs. But, to me, that's not what walkable means. Walkable means I should be able to do ALL of my tasks, whatever they may be, without a car. That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever. But it's very possible, and even trivial, in cities.
"Walkable" infrastructure only really matters if there's somewhere to walk to. Sure, it's nice having sidewalks that lead nowhere, but people won't turn to them like they would in Chicago.
> You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
Agreed, but you don't actually need the same amount for the suburban demographic.
For example where my friend lived in Manhattan (and I spent most weekends) we could walk to tons and tons of bars, multiple clubs, music venues and such, in addition to stores for food/medicine/etc. The sheer volume of that can't be replicated in a suburb.
But.. it is also not needed. Ones moves to the suburb when being a bit older, less single and more parent. So I don't need to be able to walk to dozens of bars anymore.
> That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever.
Sure it's possible. Like I said in original comment, that's where I live, a walkable suburb. I can walk/bike to the office, two supermarkets, theater, daycare, middle school, movies, at least 3 banks, library, pharmacies, clothing stores, restaurants and many other specialty stores I'm not listing. Also a couple city parks and a state park. The only thing in short supply are bars (one brewery within walking distance) and music venues (one bar/restaurant/live music hall within walking distance). But given the older married parent demographic, that's plenty for me.
95% is way too high a target! I sometimes want to get supplies at the special Asian food store - there won't be one in my 95% neighborhood - nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood. Note that I only counted for me - in the real world most people are in a marriage like relationship, each of the pair has their own interests and different jobs.
What we should aim for is everybody is in walking distance of 5 restaurants, 1 grocery store, 1 general goods store, 1 library, 1 elementary school (but not higher level - after about 6th grade students benefit from larger schools where they can take classes different from their neighbors), 2 parks, 3 churches. Then put them in close walking distance of good public transit so they can do other things that they do in life all the time (Note in particular going to work every day is not in the above list for most!). You should of course debate exactly what should be on the list and exact numbers, but the above is a good starting point.
> nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood
Agreed. I did mistype what I was thinking though. Not 95% of destinations one might ever want, but my thought was 95% of trips. Nearly all my trips are routine, either to/from office (bikeable) or supermarkets (walkable), movies/library/restaurants/misc shops (all walkable), parks/sports (walkable), basic medical care (walkable).
I certainly have hobbies/needs I must to drive for, but those are fairly occasional trips. My thought is that if we as a society make it so that nearly all routine trips can be local (walk or bike) then the exception will be rare enough that we don't need more road capacity.
Induced Demand needs to DIE as a concept. It is a GOOD thing - if you build any infrastructure and people change their behavior because of it, that means your city wasn't meeting the needs of the people. The whole point of a city is all the things people can do in them - if you just want to stay you get out of the city: you can find cheap houses in Montana with nothing around that will meet your needs just was well. The rest of us live in/near a city because as romantic as the cabin sounds, we overall prefer all the options a city gives us.
Note that I didn't specify you should get ahead of induced demand, only that you should. Trains are much cheaper in the long run for most cities but it requires a large investment to make them useful.
I don’t think you understand how this concept works. Because commuting by car after increasing the road capacity gets easy again, and because it’s also the most co convenient and (for a brief moment) fastest way to commute from point A to B, people switch over from using other means and the roads get saturated again soon after. You cannot increase the capacity to accommodate everyone driving, and everyone absolutely would want to drive if possible. It has nothing to do with the city’s ability to deliver, it’s about human condition and our innate need to make lowest effort possible.
Also, this is such a wildly American take, from a European perspective. No one expects city to somehow make driving cars easy here, not anymore. Would also be wild from NYC or Chicago perspective. Having lived in NYC I would not replace Subway with a car in that large of a place. Even without traffic it would take too long to move about.
Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.
I actually do stand by my assertion in this case. The reason is because unfortunately, after a certain scale, cars are actually actively harmful to growth.
That's why I brought up Texas in particular. Interstate 45 as an example is effectively at saturation. Even if you add new lanes to it, you only get marginal throughput benefits when you actually try to get between Dallas and Houston or commute to either city from the region between them. The same goes for I-10 out of Houston.
Texas has reached the point where car ownership is actually costing the state and local governments astronomical amounts of money for marginal amounts of congestion relief (that is then immediately saturated).
I don't deny that cars have a place in low density regions and I think they are great for specific uses or areas but generally I believe that cars hinder growth in any metro environment in the long term. Doubly so because car centric infrastructure is extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't use a car which makes transition at that density threshold extremely painful for everyone involved.
Of course a car does, but does that mean you should ignore all the benefits brought by bicycles? And if we go that far, should we overlook our own muscular locomotion? It all enables the same mobility after all.
Cycling at 110F ambient temperature can be outright hazardous (speaking of Texas).
Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
Also, cycling in a city, when you cycle for 2-3, maybe 5 miles, is fine. Cycling for 20 miles is pretty taxing and time-consuming, but in a low-density, car-oriented environment 20 miles correctly qualifies as "nearby".
> Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
1. Shower at home.
2. Have a change of clothes.
In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work five days a week and never showered there (even though available). (And believe me: people I worked with would have told me if it was a problem. )
Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
Also:
3. How much you sweat depends on your exertion level: take it easy and you don't sweat as much, at least in the morning when it's cooler. (I'm in Toronto, where summer afternoons are sometimes >30C, and I've cycled home in 35C weather; high-ish humidity too.)
> Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
As much as I agree with your general point, this isn't strictly true.
For a sizable chunk of the population, sweat doesn't contain high concentration of compounds that when digested by bacteria produce body odor.
However, despite being a sizable population, people lucky enough to have this trait are in the minority. I don't know the actual percentage but among European populations it's as low as 2% and among east Asian populations it's as high as 50%. Either way less than half the population.
The rest of the population has variations of that trait and their sweat produces moderate to extreme amounts of amino acid based compounds that when digested by bacteria produces the VOCs that make up the infamous body odor smell.
You can't just compare the entire multi purpose road network of the US to a single rail company. That's just not a serious comparison.
Besides, you didn't include the cost of the vehicles or the cost of fuel for the cars. I presume the number for Amtrak include all operating costs.
The truth is that different modes of transport have different strengths and weaknesses. In densely urbanized areas trains and trams are typically more efficient than cars.
There are definitely places where rail is awesome, a great example is New York to DC. Better than driving or flying by a mile.
But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive. It just more expensive for the government to build an operate rail than it is for them to build and operate roads. You’re right that part of it is because some of the cost is shouldered by the car owner. But, even in Europe, car ownership is very common outside of city centers. You can’t really expect there to be a rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub.
I gave data showing that the hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on roads supports trillions of miles traveled, while billions of dollars spent on Amtrak (largest rail system in the US) leads to an order of magnitude less miles traveled
Yes but like I said the comparison is totally flawed since you counted all costs for Amtrak but only a subset of costs for car traffic.
If you are convinced roads+cars is an order of magnitude more efficient than rail, maybe you can explain what you think is the cause of that difference. Does rail require more land? Does it require more maintenance hours? Does it require more expensive materials? Does it require higher insurance fees? What's the reason?
operating and capital costs for transit in the USA are absolutely sky-high compared to the rest of the world. It doesn’t cost Japan billions to extend their subway a couple miles, but it does in NYC. The “why” is complex but well documented.
> rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub.
The specific people pushing this form of development also want you to live in ultra-high-density housing in an urban center - that's the whole idea and eventuality of this type of development.
You WILL raise your family in an apartment, they WILL ride a bicycle everywhere they aren't using mass transit. You will own nothing and like it.
I don’t really need to jump to that conclusion. I think there’s a certain naïveté that if high-speed rail is ever built in America, it’ll be this wonderfully efficient, cheap system that takes me exactly from where I am to where I wanna go faster than flying. When the reality is that high-speed rail really only makes sense for certain very dense corridors then things like the Philly to Pittsburgh high-speed rail wish is the kind of thing that would be an economic disaster.
The idea isn't to "force" people to do anything, it's to stop PRIORITIZING those people.
Suburbs are on heavy welfare from city centers, who pretty much provide all the money. Roads are prioritized to such an insane degree that everyone suffers. The people you may identify with - low-density huge homeowners - don't realize it, but they're being heavily subsidized by everyone. Particularly those in denser areas.
People would like to live in denser areas and have it, you know, not suck ass. They would like to be able to go anywhere without 1 hour of traffic. They would like to be able to bike without risking their lives. That means SOME money given to urban sprawl and roads needs to be diverted to public transit. Boo hoo.
Anecdotally, I frequently take day (or weekend) trips to other European cities by rail. It is usually quicker than the roads but also crucially you can be productive on the train. If I had to drive my car there then I probably wouldn't bother.
This reminds me of this Swedish office on a train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbrI3refig , made for a company which had an hour train commute from Stockholm. It's even got 8 telephone line (4 in and 4 out)!
I guess a lot of people would use work booths/conference rooms on trains, but the price/profit has to work for both sides (the train company and users). As for trains, the old-fashioned 6 seater compartments offer more privacy for groups.
This is an aside, but I’d never seen that “Beyond 2000” show before.
Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing.
Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”
Yeah - as someone born in 1979, I find repetitions of the idea that global warming / climate change only came into public awareness 'in the last 15 to 20 years' on TV news and in documentaries deeply troubling. Global warming was constantly discussed on (British) television during my childhood. At least as much as the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. Perhaps this wasn't the case in America?
The funny thing is that people were calling for protecting the future of the children - and now we've just moved the goalposts to those children's children.
you could also work from a car if someone else is driving it like a taxi, but imagine the price difference to travel such a long distance every day over rail versus metro + rail.
Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.
We could bring down the cost of the taxi by putting more people in the car, to share the cost of the driver. That'll bring the costs down significantly.
If the car is sufficiently large, we can get, say, 50 people in a car with a single driver. That should make the extra cost of the driver split between the 50 lassengers significantly cheaper.
We could go further and link multiple cars together, with a single driver up front. They will be driving on one another's slipstream vastly improving fuel efficiency which will bring down costs even further.
Imagine if we can get them to run on some sort of rail or metal track, which makes rolling resistance of the wheels basically 0. No more expensive rubber tyres that need replacing and yet again improved fuel efficiency. This will bring down the costs even further!
And if we put those rails in a tunnel or on a elevated structure we can automate the whole process and get rid of that driver. (we cannot automate anything where humans or animals might get in the way - it remains to be seen if we ever will)
Europe is not exactly the standard bearer for productivity though, is it? If one wants to advance an argument for emulating European style passenger rail, this is really not the right argument.
Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions).
There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.
True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.
All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child.
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
The other great thing about public transport is you don't have to "lug" / "chauffer" them at all after about 8 or so (what age makes sense depends on area and the kid of course). They can exercise some independence.
Maybe that's true in small, peaceful countries like Denmark, but in the US children "excersising some independence" would likely be kidnapped, raped or killed.
This has never been significantly true, and becomes less true every year.
The probability that any given child will be kidnapped or otherwise threatened by a stranger is minuscule compared to the chance that they will be abused, kidnapped, or killed by a family member.
By that thinking, looking at the data, you should prevent kids from seeing their family… Understand the nonsense? But nonsense gets often commonsensical when everyone in your circle believes it. Going outside has more benefits than risks. Like biking, yes you are at risk of accident, but in the average you’ll be fitter and live longer.
The US has much better access to mental health care than any European country. Not to mention everyone who lives in a walkable city there lives in a state where healthcare access is good.
> Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not
I'm talking about ages 0 to 3 when parents need to use a stroller. It's a huge pain to do this in public transit. It's easier when the kids are older but if you have more than one child the car still wins.
Both my kids were born in Berlin (now 6 & 8 years old) and we never owned a car. In some ways transit is even easier with a stroller as you can just roll into the subway/train instead of having the disassemble the stroller and put it into the trunk. Buses require a bit more effort to board with a stroller but newer busses allow the driver to lower them near the curb to make boarding with stroller easier. We’ve done that for the entire time our kids used strollers.
>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.
And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.
> And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down.
At least here (California) those intersections have stoplights and pedestrian crossings, so the width and moving speed of the road are not relevant. The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
I don't remember exact age but certainly before kindergarden age my child (and all the neighborhood friends in that age range) knew how to operate the pedestrian walk buttons and cross safely.
I fully agree it can be nicer walk when you don't have to cross a larger road. But at the same time, the difficulty of doing it is often greatly overstated. Press button, wait a bit, cross. Done. This is not in the top-100 things I'd like to see improved in society.
> The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
You live in a place with some combination of far more traffic enforcement or far more conscientious drivers than me.
All I see when I look around is a sea of people glancing up and down between the road and their phone. It would be negligent to let my kids cross an arterial road, especially after dark.
Not sure about far more conscientious, but people do stop at red lights. Seeing someone run a red light is very rare, maybe once every 3-4 years. And even those aren't blatant, they are people trying to get through before the red but failing. So what I do (and teach the kids) is that when the pedestrian crossing goes green (or white, technically) then wait a second, look left & right, and if everyone is stopped, then cross. That eliminates the risk of someone trying to rush through in the last second, and at that point it is perfectly safe to cross.
It's currently being discussed in Europe, since the "independent import" route to import a special vehicle has started to be exploited to import unsafe American vehicles. (The Cybertruck is one example.)
And yet I frequently see (in New Zealand), properties with oversized double garages (often built to fit oversized American vehicles) and driveways that take up half the land on the property. Cars use a huge amount of space in roads, carparks, garages, and are responsible for pushing things further and further away from the home. And then somehow cars are seen as the solution for the very problems they create. There's plenty of real world evidence that there are better ways to solve this.
I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.
Honestly, I don't want that lifestyle. I live in the burbs with a big house and yard. We travel plenty and go to places that are dense/walkable but I love coming back home to my carbrained neighborhood with an HOA.
That's really too bad: your lifestyle does not support maximal economic output of the land you are using and tax dollars you're paying.
HOA? Hah!- those shouldn't be allowed, neither should home ownership generally. You really need to live and raise your family in an apartment.. taxes should be raised enough that we can phase out private home ownership.
Your children will attend a public school and understand and implement equity from an early age. They will learn to use and love mass transit, only the approved destinations are necessary.
The Party may decide that the 50% of your income you are generously allowed to spend on approved items is too much. Social programs aren't free, you know, you need to pay "your share."
As someone who grew up in suburban sprawl, maybe it makes parenting easier, maybe. But they also had to drive me to and from school every day, and band practice, and every single game, and whenever I wanted to hang out with my friends. I would argue my parents basically were moonlighting as my Uber driver for about 16 years until I got my own car.
Big yards are great, but empty. Mom, can you drive me to my friend's bigger backyard? That times the 5 other friends that want to go to the friend's house that has the biggest backyard. Comically the 5 cars all waiting at the same stop light before the final turn, taking up the entire residential street as we all get dropped off and later picked up.
Eh, going to my friend's house is tedious. I'll just fully immerse myself in world of Warcraft, get fat, get socially maladjusted by spending all my time on the internet and 4chan, and enter college as a practically sociopathic asshole with no social skills.
Could just be me. But if I have kids, I'm raising them somewhere where they can just get on a train to get to band practice.
This was the life of my farmland friends in Wisconsin. In Houston if I had ridden my bicycle the mere 2 miles to my friend's house (half mile to leave my neighborhood, half mile to enter his, one mile or so on actual roads), I would almost certainly have one day been killed by a car or truck that failed to expect a kid on a bike.
We didn't have sidewalks. That area is still missing sidewalks actually.
In some ways our beautiful outside world is safer than it was 60 years ago, in others perhaps it's more dangerous.
Trains scale better than cars in dense areas and offer more than just emissions reductions. Good rail infrastructure is a big part of makes a large city world-class and improves everyday lives. Subsidizing trains is better than a lot of other uses of government funds.
Germany has a pretty high population density and the metropolitan areas have evolved around medieval cities, so they are sometimes very bad a carrying a lot of traffic. Getting around by car in lots of major German cities is a major PITA and parking your car there (if you live there) is just as horrible. Inside cities, public transport is much more efficient.
How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.
Keep in mind there’s only about 50 miles of high-speed rail in the U.S. so far. With major cities like Dallas and Houston or San Francisco and LA still unconnected by fast rail, there's significant room to boost GDP and improve lives. Expanding rail isn't just about GDP growth, it's about enhancing daily living and connecting communities more effectively. As RFK famously noted, GDP measures everything ‘except that which makes life worthwhile’. Rail development does both, supporting the economy and enriching our lives.
Almost nobody will take that train daily, and it is stupid to think anyone would or should. However it is reasonable to expect the train will be crowded from all the people who take it less often. Companies send their people to other cities often for various business reasons. People take several vacations per year. Nobody is doing this daily - but the sum total of weekly, monthly, yearly, and once in a lifetime trips add up to a lot of people very day.
If I could take a train instead of a plane, I would. Doubly so if it saved me money. Savings for individuals means more money to spend on other things.
For many it helps cover the gigantic rent hikes. Many workers need public transportation to commute because they can’t afford a car, which keep becoming more expensive because cheap cars don’t make profits. It was not rare before for public transport subs to cost upwards of 100 EUR
I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but there's a strong danger of comparing apples and oranges if these things aren't spelled out imo.
I remember Brad deLong did back of the napkin analysis to determine how much a bart fare should be including the cost of freeways. It was minus $2.00 or something.
Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail. No business can run without access to road, most businesses can run without access to rail.
There is basically no way to compare rail vs roads and making some arguments based on that.
Everyone who don't own a car have significantly less access to roads than someone who do.
Of course it's possible to compare the advantages and drawbacks of different modes of transport. No society can function without roads, but it's still a question of priorities.
A lot less! So we (society) should be promoting cycling as much as feasible. Also bike parking, which is often forgotten. My town is very bike friendly in nearly every way, except there's no secure bike parking which limits which stores I can bike to.
> Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail.
Similar argument can be made about highways to which not everybody has (direct) access, they are not a matter of life and death for most businesses and are heavily subsidized.
A subsidy is only a subsidy if users don't necessarily pay the full cost, and the rest is borne by some other group of people who _don't_ use the service.
One issue is that people often benefit from infrastructure without explicitly using it.
Example, road network isn't paid by car owners. But non-drivers clearly benefit from the road network, is the road network subsidized?
Other example, people who rarely take the train still benefit from rail infrastructure (freight, reduced congestion etc). Is the rail network subsidized?
At least in the US, those taxes are nowhere near enough to pay for maintenance, let alone new construction. The rest is a straight subsidy from the general fund, typically paid for by passing the debt to our children.
You don’t generally see figures from any jurisdiction (and I’ve seen numbers for a lot of countries and states) where those charges and taxes make much more than 50% or so of the actual costs of building and maintaining road networks, and that’s just the actual spend before even trying to quantify all the social and environmental costs!
Calculating the subsidy associated with state maintenance of roads for private vehicles is difficult.
Some basic level of signage and hazard prevention (potholes, ice etc) is necessary for emergency vehicles and other government operations.
Thereafter, although there is some maintenance cost associated with the road wear from private vehicles and the additional infrastructure required for higher traffic volumes, we don’t have an easy way to calculate the cost.
Wouldn't the very patterns of development be different (and more amenable to rail) if the state didn't spend oodles of money building nice roads to make sprawl livable?
There is plenty of undeveloped land that people don't move to because there are no roads to get to.
We have more than a century of data showing that roads are subject to induced demand. If you build more roads, people move and sprawl (and take more trips in general) until traffic is once again unbearably bad.
If you build more lanes, more people move further out. Roads create sprawl.
I disagree that it's difficult: excepting toll roads and "unassumed" roads‡, the subsidy is 100% (and most toll roads are likely subsidized at a substantial fraction of their cost, since the tolls are rarely high enough to be self-sufficient).
It doesn't matter whether the money used to pay for road maintenance comes from property taxes (like in Toronto), income taxes (Ontario areas not maintained by cities / regions / counties), or gas taxes (much of the U.S.?). If you're not paying per use of the road, there is a 100% subsidy on the maintenance of the road.
There are definite costs to not maintaining those roads (people won't move where there aren't roads; unmaintained roads will result in more costs to the people using those roads as their vehicles are damaged more frequently—which may result in costs to the municipality for not properly maintaining those roads), but we should not pretend roads are self-sustaining or aren't entirely subsidized.
‡ Unassumed roads are those built privately by the landowners in common and are not maintained by the local government. When used for private dwellings, these roads usually fall under the sway of the local government after a period of time, even if they were built initially by a subdivision subcontractor.
I’m not sure if it’s the case here with Germany, but typically we refer to transit spending like this as “subsidies” but for some reason we forget that building and maintaining roads and highways and such are subsidies too.
In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
Not much. A lot more comes from state funding, which can be anything from property tax to sales tax to additional fuel taxes. Because you pay about the same fuel tax per mile on a 60 mph road as a 25 mph road (but the 60mph road costs 100x as much), you also find driving on slow roads becomes a subsidy to building fast roads.
I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. Did I miss something or is this one of the situations we're we are making up new definitions for words?
A contract isn't a subsidy... A subsidy would be giving them dollars without any particular strings attached except perhaps to use those funds to develop the product. If the contract is to provide money in exchange for services, that's called a transaction.
I see it differently: for example the fact that the US government spends a lot of money on military can in my opinion clearly be called a subsidy for the military-industrial complex.
So then if the government buys pens and reams of paper, then it's the government subsidizing office supply stores? But it's not a subsidy if a corporation spends money on the same supplies?
My employer does business with the DoD and with private corporate entities. Both the government and the private sector spend the same money and receive the same products and services. I appreciate that you have a different perspective, but I have a hard time considering my employer "subsidized by the US government" just because the government purchases our product.
paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment. An investment must have some sort of residual value, which over time, is recouped and perhaps even makes a return (hopefully).
> paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment
Disagree. There is a lot of residual value in reducing congestion and road usage. Roads need fewer repairs, CO2 impacts the atmosphere less, cities move more efficiently, etc.
There’s residual value also in people spending more time on tax-paying activities and running the economy instead of being stuck alone in their cars. Etc.
If you pay $50 more in taxes because you got a $40 train ticket subsidy that’s a huge win. I don’t know if that’s how the numbers shake out, but governments are def not doing stuff like this just to throw money in the furnace.
It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer.
These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.
And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.
roads are much cheaper per mile than rail, so you can have more roads than you can have rail.
you can also have lower grade roads, which is once again, cheaper (so you can have more of it). You cannot have lower-grade rail - the train will crash.
Therefore, to provide a massive network of transport, roads are the only option. Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers, and therefore, you can expect to make back the cost of the rail from this dense usage.
In the US, we see many places where rail has been abandoned. In the place I live (upstate NY, Finger Lakes) there are multiple walking trails that were previously locations of rail lines, which shut down more than half a century ago. The rails themselves are long gone. In some places you can see where earth was moved and concrete structures were installed to allow drainage. Maintaining these lines made no sense with the existence of a road network carrying motor vehicles. There are also abandoned canals from an even earlier time.
People certainly didn't complain about having paved roads, or being able to buy their own automobiles. I understand it's frustrating when the public goes charging off in a direction you don't want them to.
> It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation.
Because you need roads to e.g., get produce from a farm to the grocery store. You can’t have a functioning society that doesn’t involve roadways for moving people and goods the “last mile.”
>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.
Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.
The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.
Oh please, far-right? It is leftists, that sees everything beside them as far-right. I would call it conservative. Something the 'left' forgets, that there are also some real people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld. Yuck.
> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld
Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.
Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.
Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.
Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.
What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.
The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.
Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.
I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.
I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".
Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.
An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.
If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.
The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.
Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.
Sure if you define terms in your own strict way you can write a long comment on how everybody else is using the term wrong. Why should people use your definition though?
Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism, minimal to no taxation, minimal to no government spending, and privately-controlled infrastructure.
That's just the fundamental nature of a two-dimensional political spectrum. It has nothing to do with me.
Anyone claiming that a government exhibiting decidedly left-wing traits is somehow "far right" is simply making a wrong analysis.
> Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Incorrect. Left-wing ideologies promote downward distribution of power from established elites; one particular subset of left-wing ideologies (socialism) promotes labor control of the means of production, and one particular subset of socialism promotes a situation in which the working class controls the state which then acts as the vehicle through which control of the means of production is exercised (but libertarian socialism, for instance, also exists.)
Right-wing ideologies instead promote systems which concentrate power in narrow elites; different varieties of right-wing ideology justify this based in various mixes kf views of inherent merit, whether based on sex/gender, race, individual bloodline, “revealed merit” in notionally competitive environments where capacity at time t is heavily influenced by success at t-1, or whatever else.
You are confusing the left-right axis with the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is a different axis of ideological (or sometimes merely praxis) variation.
> Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism
Right wing promotes authoritanism, which is pretty much the opposite of individual rights. Right wing governments stand for strict laws and strong enforcement, where the people must obey or else.
This is observably false. One observation is that the US government debt grows more quickly when the Republican party is in power.
What is true is that left-wing ideology promotes taking a bit from everyone to give a lot to everyone, while right-wing ideology does not promote giving a lot, or anything, to everyone, but often still promotes taking a bit, or a lot, from everyone and funneling it to places that do not benefit very many people.
Leftists will promote plans like: tax carbon emissions and use the money to subsidize clean power plants. Rightists will enact (without promoting) plans like: give a lot of taxpayer money to this company for unclear reasons, and don't worry about how to raise the money - make it the next government's problem to deal with the debt pile. The latter is, of course, individualist.
Unfortunately right wing parties throughout the West have been taken over by grifters, and anything like traditional conservatism has been tossed by the wayside.
You're absolutely right that some political parties wrongly use a term like "conservative" in their party name, or otherwise incorrectly portray themselves as being "right wing".
Ultimately, though, they're still left-wing parties in practice, pushing left-wing ideologies, regardless of the facade they might try to put up.
A party doesn't just become "right wing" because they claim to be, especially when their actions and policies are decidedly left-wing.
Destroying "degenerate" cultural institutions is very much right wing; so is giving taxpayer money to cronies; so is overloading the government with debt.
This entity you're describing clearly isn't "right wing" if it uses left-wing practices like taxation, public debt, and government-funded "cultural institutions" (whatever that actually means).
Taxation is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there would not be any taxpayer money to give "cronies" because such funds never would be collected from taxpayers in the first place.
Public debt is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there wouldn't even be any government entity capable of incurring debt.
"Cultural institutions" involving the government are inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, the government simply wouldn't have the resources to create "cultural institutions" and any such entities that did exist would be created, funded, and operated by the private sector alone.
If you're truly upset about the things you just described, then it's because you dislike left-wing ideologies, even if you don't recognize it.
Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.
If I tell you that the air is clear, and you respond "That applies to all air on earth", you've provided no additional information.
If I tell you that humans are generally between zero and 120 years of age, and you respond "That applies to most humans", you've provided no additional information.
If I tell you "most comments on HN are well-written and thoughtfully constructed" and you respond "That doesn't apply to yours", you've provided some additional information.
Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.
There seems to be, implict in the term "subsidy," the notion that it is government largesse. My notion is to rebut that pointing out we do not expect a positive ROI on most government expenditures.
Most of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations.
You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.
Road vehicles are heavily taxed in European countries. I don't have the figures for Germany, but the UK spends £12bn per year on roads, while it collects £25bn in road fuel duty and £7bn in vehicle excise duty.
According to a study by the HTW Berlin, Germany collects €50 billion in road taxes and duties, but spends €30 billion on road maintenance and €30 billion on traffic police and road accident victims. Add to this an estimated €10-30 billion in environmental damage due to air and noise pollution.
I dont know how things are in germany but in the netherlands a lot more people own cars which slows down traffic.
All over the world they keep rebuilding congestion points only for traffic to increase.
If making public transport cheaper attracts more travelers there will be fewer cars on the road. The money spend on public transport will aso make car travel more efficiënt. Roads will last longer. Fewer upgrades are needed. Cars will last longer. etc
It is hard to picture how many cars it takes to move a train full of people.
> 7.6 percent fewer kilometres travelled by car.
> German cars were recorded to have travelled 582.4 billion kilometers.
That's why motorists should always vote for more public transport, instead of increasing road lanes - road per user is improved if you reduce the number of other cars
It saves the commuters the cost of buying a car, insurance, gas and maintenance. it saves building new roads and lifecycle costs of maintaining a road. Trains allow dense developments with a little bit of walking. Walking is healthy, a bit of exercise saves a ton on healthcare costs. Density makes everything cheaper. Carbon emissions are just a bonus.
Disturbingly, your link includes Carbon capture and storage from a fossil power plant, which has never been demonstrated practically and is basically a scam at this point, pushed by oil companies.
Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.
However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid
The only carbon capture/sequestration method I’m aware of without significant tradeoffs outside of price is direct air capture, and last I saw, that clocked in at $600-1200/ton (Climeworks). So maybe not such a terrible deal?
The startups in this space were targeting $100/ton before the recent inflation hit.
It turns out if you divide the $/ton by 100, you get $/gallon of gas equivalent.
Burning a gallon of gas emits 20 lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is in the oxygen), and a ton is 2000 lbs.
Anyway, at $6-12 dollars per gallon of gasoline, direct air capture is clearly much worse than just not burning oil. At $1-2, it’s less than the current gasoline taxes in the US.
Well it's not just a carbon credit, it also provides subsidized public transport to everyone, reduces congestion, improves city air and likely cuts road deaths. Arguably tax dollars extremely well spent.
Except that due to this cheaper ticket congestion on trains is horrible and since the infrastructure is poorly maintained it’s quite common to be late by 1-2 hours while being packed in a sardine tin.
That's a matter of train infrastructure and frequency keeping up with demand. There's a big lag there. You don't just buy 100 new trains overnight. It's a symptom of ramping up. Not of high usage.
I live in Barcelona and here the metro comes every 2-3 minutes. Even during the night it might be 7 minutes. This helps so much with congestion but also trip planning: no need to check train times before you go. Id imagine busy routes in Germany could do similar.
The big benefit of this is also not needing a car. Not having to worry about maintenance, write-off, finding parking and the cost thereof, summer and winter tyres, damage, no-claim bonus, travelling while having drunk, going back from a different place than you arrived. It's so incredibly more convenient than having a car. All at a flat rate of 21€ here.I hope never having to need one again.
€21.35 for a T-Usual card which allows unlimited travel on all public transport for 30 days, yet you still have people in here kicking and screaming to use their car and roads
I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies.
I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff.
That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people. Sure - there would still be occasional maintenance - but nobody always on duty driving trains (automated), nobody selling tickets (online), nobody cleaning stuff (automated cleaning of trains inside and out) etc.
In Japan, rail companies also own the land around the station. There is often a mall or office right on top of the station. So they capture a more of the value of having public transport.
In western countries land lords benefit a lot from nearby public transport for free and maybe only contribute in taxes.
Originally, rail worked kind of like this in the US too. Alternating squares of land adjacent to tracks were ceded to railroads, so you'd have sections of public land and private land beside each other.
I learned about this when someone was trying to make a test case of "corner crossing" from one patch of public land to another a while back.
You can be smack in the middle of Central, and then walk up a path behind the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and be on Old Peak Road hiking up to Victoria Peak. Or be in Wan Chai, take the stairs next to the Rolls Royce car dealer, and be on Bowen Road Fitness Trail and in Aberdeen Park within minutes.
HK island, New Territories, the outer islands and even large parts of Kowloon are predominantly green, parks and forests.
As GP mentioned, occasionally the subway operator MTR will build a new station, build a shopping mall on top, and housing for 50,000 people.
Opening the railways to competition has utterly ruined the UK's rail network. Ticket price has skyrocketed while service quality has fallen.
In the 30s, French rail companies begged and lobbied the government to nationalize them, so they could exit the burden that was maintaining a rail network.
Rail just isn't profitable, but is vital to society, and will become even more so as gas becomes increasingly expensive/lacking. Some things should just never be opened to competition.
According to GPT, the price per kilometre for rail travel is between €0.23-0.46 in the UK and €0.13-0.20 in Germany. I'm not able to verify those numbers but from my own personal experience I wouldn't doubt it.
Rail in the UK is just so bad that I stopped using it to go to the airport. Everything is constantly delayed or cancelled like I can plan a journey to arrive 2hrs before my flight and the train will randomly pause for 1hr when I'm half way... also the luggage situation is extremely stressful as the racks are out of sight and generally full, like where else am I meant to put my large suitcase after that?
It seems like trains are much larger in Europe with a lot of double deckers.
If there's two of us it's easier and sometimes cheaper to pay £100 for a taxi to the airport door to door (we're fairly rural)
There is very little true competition on UK railways. Most services are run on Government-granted franchises which give a monopoly or at best a duopoly on specific routes.
There are a handful of open-access train operators who operate outside the franchises, but they can't just decide to compete on a route if that route is already covered by a franchise.
To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.
> To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.
The problem with that is that on a mixed-traffic railway it's very easy to run out of capacity once you have a mixture of trains with differing stopping patterns (and perhaps some freight on top) running along the same line. Once you reach that point, competition stops being directly about passengers and starts being about train paths, which can have rather annoying side effects for passengers.
Plus connections don't really work well with competition, either, because a) that'd require coordination between possibly differing operators, which is anathema to unfettered competition, and b) where a regional feeder route might only run hourly or half-hourly, it's impossible to have good connections with more than one or at most two sets of connecting trains anyway.
(Also c) through-ticketing with sufficient passenger rights in case you miss a connection enroute – at least the UK kept a national ticketing system even throughout privatisation and including all open-access operators, whereas in Germany it's an incompatible free-for-all, despite a legal obligation for railway companies to ostensibly offer through-tickets.)
When installed and kept up properly with good policymaking railways are always a positive for the economy. They cause a huge amount of cheap movement that increases business activity. Little towns that become railway stops develop much faster. The bigger stations are great for shops and food. The access to education and high-value driving extracurricular activities increase for younger people too. They overall make the economy resilient against all sorts of crisis (energy, markets)
The more railways are used for commuting, the less people are on the road. So it increases the road efficiency too and reduces degradation. Railways are great drivers of innovation and the technology they generate can be backported to cars, they are initial investment drivers.
However, the first if/when is a big one. You can half ass roads. You pay compensation for a pothole every now and then and make small improvement to get votes. You cannot half ass railways. They require constant maintenance and a whole mindset built around them.
Japan does railways correctly. China is getting there. The Netherlands is nearly a paradise of bike and railways. Germany isn't.
The countries with almost the same culture, Austria and Switzerland, care much more about their railways and invest them properly however their government aligns. Germans keep electing the right wing party with their ministers of ~BMW~ transport and then complain about 50% of the non-cancelled trains are late and the maintenance cost of the falling apart rail system is quadrupled.
That is so the wrong approach. If I’m very reductive, I could say that if we automate everything there would be no one to commute left. Staffing is good for people: for safety, information, help for the vulnerable, expertise, robustness of the system, etc.
Perhaps some public services can’t turn a profit but are still necessary. Perhaps they can turn a profit if even more people use them. Perhaps other economic models are needed for these companies, see for example Singapore and Hong Kong where the rail company owns the land at stations and are allowed to develop there which funds the network and incentivizes buildout.
I doubt that moves the needle a lot unless you're making _everything_ fully automatic, i.e. including the infrastructure creation & maintenance and streamline that extremely well.
If you take a ride from Hamburg to Berlin with the ICE, there's maybe 8 staff on board, 200-300 passengers, it takes ~2 hours and the average ticket price is 77€ according to some travel app.
Even if you get rid of all 8 of them, the price per ticket isn't going to be lowered significantly.
The staff on board also contribute to keeping the train safe and pleasant - if there’s an unruly passenger, or a washroom malfunctions, I’m happy to have paid a bit extra for my ticket for a couple of people to be on hand to deal with the problem instead of being trapped for two hours.
But there is also the ~80 staff manning stations at each end and along the route, and more staff in the control room, the cleaning staff, the people who manually do maintenance checks every single night, etc.
You can get rid of the cleaning staff right now. The terminals will become disgusting and people will stop using them. There is no way around this type of overhead. If you have larger numbers of people passing through, you need cleaning and maintenance.
Your original point isn’t even true - in California there is constant maintenance of the road network and crews of community service workers doing their sentence cleaning trash on the highway shoulder.
Lol, that depends heavily what you consider staff. E.g. look at freight, if you move cargo by trucks you need 1 staff member (sometimes called drivers) per truck. Train on the other hand needs only 2 people per hundreds of meters of train...
Even worse for individual car transport. You need one staff (driver) per vehicle...
I don't know. They have the restaurant car on some trains so that's another 2-3 people, and I really have no idea about their operation so I added some buffer. I wouldn't expect there to be more than 8 on a train unless it's some special event.
For some high speed routes there’s a limit on how many carriages one attendant can supervise (maybe to ensure timely evacuation?) so a 12 carriage ICE train needs 3 attendants to fully operate.
Yeah, it seems that "self-driving trains" are a much, much more tractable problem than self-driving cars. On the other hand, the cost of the driver is amortized over many passengers, and much of the labor isn't driving but rather serving as conductor, etc, so it may not even matter too much.
> automated cleaning of trains inside and out)
For the outside, you can imagine a carwash.
For the inside, my brain goes to scary dystopian places. Like, "what if we make the inside out of chemically-inert glass-based materials, and clean it by immersion in pirhana solution?" One would just need to recycle the solution, and recharge it with hydrogen peroxide. This would rule out the use of plastics in the interior, however.
Maybe something more like a dishwasher could also work, but I'm not sure it'd be Strong Enough for Tough Stains. It could even just make a mess. I've heard stories of Roombas that encounter dog poop; they say it goes badly...
Longer isn’t always better for trains. Longer trains need bigger platforms and stations are often the most expensive parts of the network. Big trains also weigh more, so they accelerate slower and have longer trip times.
Weight savings can also translate into cheaper bridges and viaducts, though that’s only true for dedicated track. If you’re sharing with freight they are always going to be far heavier.
Much better is upgrading signalling, automating the train, and running far more service because frequency is king for public transit. Many short trains at high headways vs less frequent long trains has the same total capacity but the short, frequent trains provide far more value. When people don’t have to think about the schedule and can just show up and ride public transit is great.
There are also limits to the value of standardizing rolling stock. You don’t want every train set to be bespoke, but there is also danger in every train being exactly the same. If there is a parts shortage or identified design flaw your whole fleet can be grounded all at once. If you have some diversity you can limp along if one design has to be sidelined.
When you rent each carriage from a rolling stock company you’re incentivized to run as short trains as possible to keep them as full as a sardine can. Renationalize the whole lot.
At some point the train is longer than the station platform. Then you need to extend the platform, or passengers have to know that they need to be in specific cars to be able to exit.
This analysis is too simple. Roads need to be maintained, road accidents are a burden on the national health service and air pollution has a long term negative impact on people's health
Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.
I’d ignore unpriced other externalities, that is a large rabbit hole. (Do people increase consumption of other goods thanks to the savings of this ticket…)
I’d rather look at the project, subsidies again and the cost and realise that at this scale there are few individual projects. So this is a very large knob to dial down the emissions.
Secondly, the subsidies go into the German economy. The rail system is very domestic economy heavy, so at a time where the German economy is going into a recession, spending 3bn to subsidise transport and reduce people’s cost of living and pay for German workers and investments is not such a terrible idea.
So while the price tag is high, the money isn’t turned into trees or buried like in pure abatement projects and at this scale it is a nice leaver to pull.
It’s arguable that $100 per ton is a real carbon price.
It translates to about $1 a gallon tax on gasoline which is (a) not enough to change people’s behavior (at its peak gas was almost $2 more than it is now and I drove just the same) but (b) people in 2024 will complain bitterly about it anyway. That is, polities are hypersensitized to that sort of imposed solution right now: for a long time people in the US accepted fluctuations in the gas price because it was seen as a market price so we only had riots whenever a black person was shot by the cops; in “normal” countries (including France and Egypt) you have riots when the price of petroleum goes up because it is seen as being controlled by the state. I think the US has gotten more “normal” post COVID-19 and with GHG controls on the horizon. $1 a gallon is not quite going to make EVs beat gas but it certainly happens at a price below $500 a tonne.
Favorable CCS from industrial sources is quoted around $100 a tonne but that is (c) from a plant that runs 24-7 (e.g. if your natural gas plant runs 20% of the time the capital cost of CCS is multiplied 5x at least disregarding that the plant might not run well when it is starting up and shutting down) and (d) has few realizations.
The biggest positive externality of rail is suppressed traffic congestion, it is a big quality of life thing if you can avoid sitting in a traffic jam. (Reminds me of posters I saw in Germany that said Zukunft onhe Stau)
I find rail tourism to be luxurious compared to motortourism in that one gets to the center of town and doesn’t need to stress about parking, traffic and all that. Contrast that to the fight to refuel your rental car at the airport.
Not disagreeing but it’s important to point out that the US is a different beast because of the car and roadway dependency. In Europe a large part of the population lives in places easily reachable without a car. But in the US EVs are completely central to reducing CO2 from transportation, unless you’d rather rebuild the entire country. In Europe you can make meaningful changes by simply improving, expanding, investing in existing infrastructure. Most people I know who have a car in EU region are not fully dependent, but enjoy more convenience due to overcrowded or unreliable public transit, grocery stores being further away etc. Those problems are orders of magnitude easier to solve than “let’s build rail through a giant web of sparse suburbs”.
When I spent a year in Dresden I greatly enjoyed using the train instead of the plane for travel around the area as far as London in one direction and Sunny Beach, Bulgaria in the other. I lived close enough to walk to work and could do a lot of shopping on foot (great bakery 2 blocks away, a fancy chocolate store, a butcher, etc.) but sometimes used the tram to go to the city center and to further out towns.
I was maybe 3-4 blocks from a regional rail or S-Bahn station which that ticket entitles you to ride and it is a great ticket that can get you to nearby mountains or the Czech Republic or nearby cities like Leipzig. Really you could ride across Germany on the S-Bahn comfortably stopping where you want and staying overnight in a hotel occasionally. Nothing beat those sleeper trains which eliminated the hotel stay then you wake up in Dortmund and change trains for Amsterdam.
(EMEA people in 1998 seemed more inclined to use airlines than rail to go to distant domestic and international cities, they had service that was better and cheaper than the US; air service has become even more competitive in EMEA since then)
Dresdenites I knew who had cars would drive them to the appliance and furniture stores and even to nearby places like Quedlinburg and even to Berlin, Munich, Bremen, etc. with a resignation to traffic jams like that of the Los Angelino.
Delivery service is far along in the US and I would expect a truck to deliver anything larger than 7 cubic feet of sawdust even on my farm so I don’t need a truck. I have 8 horses but no trailer because we know many people who will move a horse for us for less than a month’s payment on a big ass truck.
A more fitting complaint about cats would be the Pendlerpauschale, which is paid out to people driving to and from work in their car. It's a much larger sum than the €3b spent on the train ticket subsidy.
It used to be different, but these days that one is paid to everybody who commutes, no matter by which mode. And people who commute by public transport are actually slightly privileged, in that they can claim their actual ticket costs if that works out more advantageous, whereas everybody else is limited to the basic km-dependent allowance, even if their car commutes maybe actually costs more.
And while there are arguments to be had about negative incentives posed by it with regards to incentivising people to commute farther than necessary, the original basic principle is quite simple: Just as companies are mostly only taxed on their profits, so workers ought to pay their income tax only on the money made after deducting any work-related expenses.
And Germany hasn't solved the cost-of-housing problem, either, so a certain degree of commuting is unavoidable. In fact, recently the housing minister basically declared her defeat by announcing that her latest plan for dealing with that problem wasn't building more where people want to live and can make a living, it was subsidising people to move back to the countryside.
There are generally taxes (e.g., car or gas taxes) that cover the costs. I don't know about Germany's situation, but it is not impossible to make that net zero.
And these comparisons often exclude externalities like carbon emissions, pollution from tires and brakes, road accident costs, noise pollution and the cost of suburban sprawl.
If you would even attempt it to make it net zero you would get truly ungodly amounts of pushback, I don't think you understand how bad it would be. Truly, for those used to a privilege, fairness is an attack.
Furthermore: you have a state of affairs where you are pretty much forced to own and drive a car to e.g. get to work or move around. You make it reflect its true cost making it impossible to afford for anyone except the rich. What now?
The system simply doesn't have more capacity right now.
Germany neglected or even removed their rail infrastructure, especially for the past 25 or so years, after privatization. These "subsidies" are a course correction.
These investments also make it a real pain to use the system right now, because a lot of lines are closing months at a time and the alternatives are already overloaded. I'd rather have a car for the next 5-10 years too - and I live very central with many connections.
For people less familiar. Germany privatised its national rail company in the 90s but the federal government is the only shareholder. It’s a weird model that doesn’t make much sense. DB is a monopoly so the rules of competition don’t apply (and don’t work with railways anyway) it’s led to perverse cost cutting incentives and fat bonus programs for C level employees. Combine that with a conservative government’s austerity politics since the GFC and the whole system is at breaking point at the moment. Reforms and work is happening but the amount of work is staggering and means frequent line closures. DB estimates its trains to be running reliably in 2070.
Expat in Germany since 2014.
(Also, I do not own a car).
I can confirm that Dbahn service was not so great from the start, and became noticeably worse after COVID.
I live in Rostock. 2 weeks ago I landed in Hamburg at 2:30pm and tried to return home by train. Distance is 185 km, and I arrived home at 10:00pm
Reasons: works on the line that forced us to go to Lubeck first, then take two more regional trains to reach Rostock. On top of that, one train from Lubeck to the next stop was so full that a hundred passenger could not get in (me included).
The next train was canceled.
Finally we got a (packed) train at around 8pm.
All "fine" except that this is the third time in the last 12 months that the same line undergoes maintenance forcing you to move to Lubeck first and adding 1 hour to your trip.
Rostock-Berlin: similar story. For three times in the last year there were some problems between Oranienburg and Berlin, forcing you to either travel around it with a 1 hour detour or to disembark in Oraniemburg and move to S-Bahn (sort like BART).
In other words: railways are overstressed and failing repeatedly causing massive delays; Oraniemburg is 40km from Berlin Central Station. I find it unconceivable that you have to repair the same short segment thrice in 12 months.
So it is still a state enterprise in all but in name.
The swiss federal railyway has the exact same model (a company fully owned by the federal government) and it works very well.
Blaming the ownership model for the DB's woes is just wrong in my opinion. German railways have been chronically underfunded, overburdening the company with below cost ticket and the company has some perverse incentives with respect to rail maintenance and other things.
If the state had any control over DB, they wouldn't have been invested in Arriva (a bus company) until a few months ago, and they wouldn't make most of their cargo revenue with trucks (DB Schenker).
The state is the owner of the DB company. If they didn't like where the company is going they could just fire the CEO and board and pick other people and then define any goal they want. To me it looks that the bund is not active enough in their oversight (as 100% owners) of the DB. I assume no one wants to take the blame because it is such a shitshow.
I can't answer why DB is doing certain things which Arriva and their cargo division.
The DB is losing more than EUR2 billions per year[1] so the managment is probably trying hard to get this trainwreck under control. Kinda ironic that their truck business is actually doing the heavy lifting. It's one of the only divisions besides energy that actually makes money subsdizing the other failing parts of the railway. Withouth those you would be looking at EUR2.6 billion losses per year[2]. Great thing they have DB Schenker going for them! I don't undestand the complaints about that.
Also I don't think it is possible to fix the DB without more government subsidies. It looks like they barely get any (sometimes discounts on power but thats it)[2].
If you check the SBB (a very well run operation) you can see from the public finances
that about half of the operating income is from public-sector funding (aka government subsidies) without that it would be in deep red[3].
Me and my wife are certainly considering getting a car. Cars are a pain in cities, but it would save literally hundreds of hours over the course of even a single year due to just how poor the infra is.
It's head and shoulders above all the subsidies to the car industry that just increase emissions. In terms of value it can't even be compared, one is positive and the other negative.
E.g. during the original 9 Euro Ticket, the government also reduced taxes on gas to fight inflation, and this cost as much as the subsidies for the 9 Euro Ticket. The gas tax reduction's costs were 3 billion, and the 9 Euro Ticket costs were 2.5 billion.
So I would call it exceptional value when compared to other things.
Roads, highways and gas are massively subsidized, much more per kilometer travelled than rail. I think if you factor in spared road maintenance alone, from travellers using the train instead of their cars, you might see the operation is actually saving public money.
I'm not sure you've fully accounted for the full carbon reduction here, which is not just the replacement of cars from the road but also the transition to a car-free lifestyle.
It gets people out of their cars because it's cheaper than petrol. When train tickets (in other countries) cost more than the cost of petrol for the journey, commuters who already sank the cost of buying a car + insurance ask why they should bother paying a premium for the train ticket when the cost of petrol will be cheaper.
Only after people transition to taking the train in the morning, do they then start to ask questions like "do I get value out of paying for insurance on a car I don't drive?" and start to make decisions like selling their cars. In this case the carbon reduction is not only the carbon reduction of the trips that would have been taken by train, but the carbon reduction from the use of the car altogether, and future car maintenance and replacement.
If you recognise that there are other positive impacts that you haven't allowed for, then why stating that your incomplete assessment shows that it isn't good value? Does that show bias?
Fewer people in cars means fewer road deaths, safer streets for walking and cycling, quieter cities, less nimby obstructionism due to parking complaints, and less inhaled tyre participates, among other benefits.
"social cost of driving" and "vehicle mile travelled" are two key phrases that will lead you to research on various costs of car travel e.g.
> The air pollution-related damage attributable to driving, therefore, can be estimated at $10.7 billion to $41.6 billion per year – an average of between $93 and $360 per U.S. household per year.
> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
That assumes that there is still sufficient potential for additional use of these cheaper carbon abatement methods. The tricky part about fighting climate change is that we have to make change in many different places. Each partial solution has only a limited capacity for deployment.
They are certainly very big. Rail is extremely safe so you reduce deaths and injuries from accidents. You reduce other types of pollution. You make towns and cities a lot pleasanter. You save individuals a lot of money.
> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
You spelled “counterfeit carbon credit” wrong. There's no carbon sequestration technology that can fix carbon at industrial scale at that cost yet (and maybe never).
- Air Pollution and related deaths / morbidities
- Road tear and wear
- Congestion related loss of business and time
- Can actually work on train or rest
Many of these can be calculated and measured.
Rail doesn’t significantly pollute more or deprecate faster on the infrastructure side empty or full.
But the roads and cars are used less, which means they require less maintenance. CO2 emission isn't the only pollution caused by cars either. People get cheaper transport options available to them.
All those other wins for society should be counted too, there may not even be a cost left to count towards CO2 reduction.
But most importantly, taking 3 billion in taxes and handing them out as subsidised pricing to some of the people isnt really a cost (to society as a whole), it's an income redistribution.
In the short run, the trains are running anyway, so you might as well fill them up.
This is something that particularly frustates me in the case of buses the UK. They're ridiculously expensive (well, except for the temporary current £2 scheme), and empty. There seems to be a political consensus that we should have them, so it would make far more sense for them to be free in all instances, except when demand is so high they're full (e.g. rush hour)
How much does it cost to keep up the motor roads in Germany? Likewise, how much do the externalities of it (like pollution, and massive numbers of deaths and injuries) cost?
One other positive externality could be this: The health effects of tire abrasion in cars are not clear yet, not least because tire manufacturers don’t disclose their ingredients. For all we know these fine particulates could be as bad as PFAS.
Maybe but it’s also subsidizing travel for people, possibly increasing revenue for tourist spots and restaurants, it could keep people from buying a new ICE vehicle etc. It seems like one of those things that has a lot of benefits outside the immediate situation.
> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry.
I'm perplexed by the way you omitted the fact that these subsidies cover bus services, both local and regional (it's in the article's leading sentence).
From there you proceeded to use that cherry-picking to single out a specific type of service while also cherry-picking the tradeoffs.
This is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin, my head is spinning. Luckily HN came to the rescue for once. But sadly this is the kind of reasoning that actually works in politics and finance.
Where are you reading that? The 2 billion (2.3 billions exactly) figure was for 2023 and only covered the period from the ticket's introduction in May through to December, i.e. only two thirds of a fully year.
The cost of carbon capture is not equal to the value it provides to humanity. In fact, not emitting CO2 that you could have, is even more valuable than CO2 you remove later from the atmosphere.
If we look past carbon emission, we can see that the value is much bigger.
You mention that the rail industry is already substantially subsidized. What you did not mention is that the automotive industry is as well. Roads are paid by state and republic. Car purchases are often subsidized via a flat return by the republic (which primarily benefits the rich). Petrol is also subsidized.
Now all these automotive subsidiaries benefit only the people who own cars, and much more the wealthy ones. In Germany, only 43 million private households own a car. That's just roughly 50 %.
But if you get people to choose public transport over your auto, then this benefits everyone. Better air quality, less noise pollution, less streets and more space for pedestrians. Anecdotally, a close neighbourhood removed some parking spots in favour of space for local cafes and public benches with plants. Removing just two parking spots give enough places for 10 people to sit together and enjoy a sunny Sunday -- which otherwise would be dead space occupied by the cars of two or even one household.
How many tons of CO2 are in 1 degree of global temperature? This idea that removing “a lot” is somehow “helping” just seems hand-wavy to me. If the goal is “reduce temperatures,” then what precisely is the goal number? And then, how much CO2 equals that? And how much is the cost per degree to reduce and what is the cost per degree to not reduce?
There is a lot of “modeling” but has anyone actually proven “reducing 8000 tons of carbon reduces temperatures by n degrees?” And is it beneficial to lower temperatures? Are there benefits to higher temperatures that haven’t been quantified?
Just seems like the plan is “spend whatever it takes forever” — when whatever it takes isn’t even quantifiable. Basically investing without ever knowing the return on the investment.
Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as some white label system, so it was very confusing to purchase (you cannot buy them at the machines).
The price hike is the wrong direction here if we are reducing that much time on the road. Kudos though for the great rail systems. The USA has a lot to learn here and it’s baffling how terrible it is here. I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient. In the USA I spend 10-15 mins trying to park any time I go anywhere
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
The Deutschlandticket costs max 49 Euros (next year it will cost 58€ per month) and is valid for one month for mostly all local®ional public transport systems (plus a few selected non-regional trains) in the whole of Germany. The subscription will renew automatically.
Companies often support employees by paying some of the costs. Then it typically costs 34.30 € per month. From next year on, employees pay 40,60 € per month max.
Here in my home city already 94% of the 213000 pupils use the Deutschlandticket for 0 € per month. Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
> Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these effect is they far outgrow the attention span of polititians as they take years to come to full force.
When I started studying at university it was an optional additonal fee paid with the Semesterbeitrag and the ticket was only valid in the city (not even the state) and its close surroundings. A bit later they didn't allow us to opt out anymore but lowered the price a bit.
> Studierende der sieben Leipziger Hochschulen im Zuständigkeitsbereich des Studentenwerkes Leipzig zahlen den Beitrag von 176,40 Euro verpflichtend mit der Immatrikulation bzw. Rückmeldung zum Wintersemester 2024/25.
It varies a lot by university. In Osnabrück the Semesterticket basically allowed to travel as far as Hanover, Münster and Bremen, which was pretty far as that goes. In Rostock on the other hand it only covered the city and a few of the surrounding villages (back in 2011, though).
I think there was a provision of opting out if you needed a regular public transport ticket anyway to get to the uni (because you lived too far outside) but that varies by uni as well.
I only pay 20 EUR a month because a 25 EUR subsidy by my employer. It is a total nobrainer although, I often even use it less, just because I can jump on any local train, tram, bus without worrying about a ticket (particularly as we don't have NFC payment). Actually the 9 EUR will effectively mean a 50% raise for me, so I am not sure if the raise even makes sense economically because people like me just would cancel.
They are indeed crazily low. The real prize is just hidden by subsidy. But more and more the true cost will be revealed. There is no free lunch.
But hey, germany could never really decide, are they living in an authoritarian, left or right utopian la-la-land or in a free country. For some time the american influence was huge, but i fear, the influence will diminish and the pendulum swings again.
For those not familiar with how this works/worked: At most universities, a similar fee was collected from all students. That was then used to finance a regional "public transport flatrate".
N.b.: mk89 is technically not quite correct, it wasn't free (nothing in life is). It's usually bundled with the tuition/enrollment fee.
Implementation details differed per University, but for us the fee (80 or 100€, can't recall) was socialized across all students and payed together with the tuition fee; opting out was not possible (with some exceptions, like disabilities). The money went from the University administration to the AStA - the "general students council" (the executive section of the elected student self-government). The AStA then negotiated with the local public transport company/companies as well as with the Deutsche Bahn (e.g. to get access to certain inter-regional train connections - we still have cooperations with 3 or 4 nearby universities, and students somehow need to get there).
Those negotiations can be a royal pita, and often the students were in a weak position.
Source: I was in the AStA (~12 people), but not involved with that task.
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF."
I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)
"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."
You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.
What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.
I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.
But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.
This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.
In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.
So much this. I often use DB navigator to plan trips within france. As soon as you're not going to or from Paris, the sncf offer and app are just terrible. Often, sncf-connect will refuse to offer me TER-only (regional train) trips, because one of the legs can also be done by TGV. Basically impossible to plan this kind of thing with the SNCF apps.
But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.
It might be more intuitive if this was the first travel app every developed. But I don't personally any other transit UI that uses this pattern, and that makes using the sncf search "the weird one" and not in a good way.
Google maps and Apple maps all work like SNCF. The first thing you enter is your destination and then you can optionally change the point of departure if it is not your current or default location.
I would say this is a pretty familiar and useful pattern in general: Necessary and mandatory info first, optional data which has sensible defaults later.
I don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays.
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes,
It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable,
resilient technology!
I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open
all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and
timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that
perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget
that helpful clerk.
Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with
reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.
For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian
and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious
discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and
allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper
ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses
and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine
used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket.
Simply genius.
> For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.
They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!
I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).
No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.
They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours
There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips
That is something we can agree upon.
reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want
SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
> There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do the same on bahn.de or in DB Navigator (which is mostly equivalent to a canned version of the site plus a few extras). Not all trains allow seat selection, sometimes seats are assigned automatically. Other trains - e.g. Dutch Intercity trains - do not offer reservation at all. The Swedish/Danish Öresundståg (a service running mostly in the south and west of Sweden) theoretically allows reservation but this hardy ever works, at least when booking through DB. Do mind that I use DB to book trips crossing several countries using different operators, in this case SJ (Swedish state railway), Öresundståget, DSB (Danish state railway), DB, Eurobahn and NS (Dutch state railway). All in a single booking with a single payment and a single point of contact using a single ticket.
"The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated."
For the last compensation I tried to get it took Deutsche Bahn 15 days to send an automated acknowledgement that they had received my request. I took another 20 days until they processed it.
I would not call that quick, but was it easy?
Here is the procedure for the form translated from their site:
Procedure in the digital application in the customer account:
To do this, first select the main ticket for your journey in your customer account and start the online application.
If you had no other disruptions (e.g. delay), enter "Delay of less than 60 minutes". In the next step, a new message box will appear with the following sentence: "I had additional expenses due to the delay | I was unable to use my reservation". Click on the appropriate box and follow the next steps.
Alternatively, you can also request a refund of the reservation fee in writing (informally). Please send your request to the following address:
DB Dialog GmbH
Passenger Rights Service Center
60647 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Needless to say that the form had me fill in a lot of useless stuff they either don't need to know or should know already. And of course
you can send paper...
That description of the process is quite concise I'd say? Here's how it goes for me:
1: I'm delayed by more than 20 minutes somewhere along the trip upon which a new section 'request compensation' appears in the travel schedule.
2: If upon arrival I'm delayed by more than 60/120 minutes I select that option or log in to bahn.de where I select the option from the relevant itinerary.
3: it asks me when I arrived, if this ends up being more than 60/120 minutes later than the intended arrival time it asks me if I was able to use the booking for the whole trip or whether I needed to arrange alternative transport. It also asks me whether I had extra expenses like a hotel, in the latter case it tells you to submit proof of payment - a hotel bill, a taxi bill - so they can reimburse those costs. I have never done this but my daughter has had 4 hotel stays paid by DB by now. Proof can be submitted digitally, i.e. a photo of the receipts.
4: I need to fill in the details on how I want to be reimbursed - voucher or bank transaction. I always select bank transaction and fill in my bank details (IBAN - a single bank account number which works in most of Europe).
5: I confirm the submission, get a receipt via mail and one via snail mail a few days later. It usually takes about a week or two for the money to appear in my bank account, the quickest it has ever been was 5 days.
I don't consider this to be a bad process, it works and can be completed in a few minutes at most. Yes, you can send in paper as well - this is Germany we're talking about, they love paperwork - but I've never bothered with that. I do get all those confirmations via snail mail but those don't bother me, I can watch my bank account to see when the reimbursement has been completed. I have never had any problems getting reimbursed, they always paid.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do all that in the DB app. You can manually select which seats you want or just say the types of seats you want (e.g. compartment or open area, isle or window, table or no table, quiet area or not, family area etc).
One fun experience, arriving in München and trying to buy ticket for the airport train online. The app requires your birthdate. The date selector starts from present and only allows to go back one month at a time. So if you're 40 years old, you would need to click 480 times... We bought paper tickets from a machine . Machines work well compared to other countries though.
I couldn't disagree more. You can say a lot of bad things about Deutsche Bahn, but of all the travel apps I have used, DB Navigator and bahn.de were the best.
SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.
I can't tell for other countries, but SNCF digital solutions have been a great example of everything you should not do for as long as I can remember. Actually bahn.de used to be a far better interface to consult french train hours than whatever fancy new name SNCF would come every few months or so.
The DB navigator app is actually decent. The one downside is it kicks you out to a website to book many international tickets, but you can still plan and track your journey delays etc. in the app.
It kicks you out to a website if you are lucky (I had this when traveling through Austria), but often it just says: "Sorry, I cannot book this for you.".
In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.
It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.
I just used the DB Navigator for extensive travel in Germany without any problems. It doesn't provide quite as much information about how to deal with connections for a delayed train, but that is minor compared to the very transparent function for buying and displaying tickets.
>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.
Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.
If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.
I don't carry a phone around with me at all times. Phones are expensive, wasteful, socially and environmentally harmful, time consuming, and they erode our freedoms.
I’d love to see an in-depth analysis of the overall production costs for paper and ink vs electronic. Tree to processing to ticket vs smartphone, grid, network, software, and so on. I imagine the paper process is exceptionally cheaper but I could very well be wrong.
Sure. And how do you pay? I mean, really. You're forced to create an account, then link a payment method (PayPal and/or Visa/Mastercard may or may not be supported, Apple Pay almost never is). Sometimes you also have to link a mobile phone number or the number is the account identifier.
Paper is fine for the environment. Paper takes an absolutely tiny portion of a tree (and burning the pulp waste tends to result in a net energy surplus from the pulp mill!), whereas the amount of energy to create one computer (even a phone) is massive.
As a tourist I agree, and the Deutschland Ticket App is Region locked, so you are bound to the complexity of the system, which seems unnecessary and way too expensive as opposed to the ticket locals get.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible
It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
I couldn't pay for my ubahn with a credit card on the bahn, and the app required me to use some kind of a paypal derivative. I did not pay.
Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.
Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.
Pay before. That's how the transport systems generally work in Germany. In many trains you need to have a ticket BEFORE entering the train and also BEFORE entering the platform in the train station.
> Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email.
If you don't pay before, and the train doesn't have a ticket machine on it (most don't, but some e.g. trams in Berlin do) you are riding illegally. That's how it works in Germany.
> The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that.
Yeah, it's in the app.
> Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
That's how it works. Typical here for local trains: there are no barriers in train and bus stations. One can just enter the train and bus without any ticket check. But you have to make sure that you have a ticket. The local trains have no installation to buy a ticket anymore. Typically one would buy them online or have a subscription ticket. How does the system make sure that people pay and don't game the system? There are random checks.
If you want a ticket, buy it before entering a train. Train stations have either ticket systems or a ticket office. But most people by now do it online either per website or app.
For long-distance trains I would always book in advance (it's often also cheaper) and book a seat, too.
Yes, that is why, instead of using a payment network, they choose to use an app, which still needs one to transact within the financial system and lets the government adjacent company run arbitrary code on one’s phone.
Yeah, cool, I understand, it is how it is done. I am not arguing that, and I already conceded that.
Why are you bringing the same argument back up again?
Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And it asked me to use a paypal account. I do not carry my papyal credentials with me.
I have never gotten on long distance trains and expected to pay on them, not what I am arguing about.
And when I mean that the app was not an option, I mean that in our case, we couldn't use the app to submit a return. I was not the one submitting those forms, I was too lazy. The people who did told me the app did not work for their case. Given that you've told me 2x that "you can just do it in the app", what else can I say besides the fact that when tried, it did not work? Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
> Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too.
> All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
You can buy with credit cards (and a few other options) using the usual payment terminals. Again, you usually have to pay outside of the train. The terminals are at the train station.
The DB app is absolute hot garbage. God forbid you don't have internet or it randomally updates logging you out. All of his previous arguments are valid.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
> With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
They also have an extensive web-based ticket shop.
You don't need to print PDF tickets. One can also show a PDF ticket on an electronic device, without printing it. I used the DB ticket PDFs for several years, without printing it. Nowadays a load the long-distance train tickets onto the phone and have it in the DB app, I have also a PDF version via mail.
> For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
I have that here also in my city. The reality: most people have a subscription, that's the by far dominant model. Simpler and less tracking needed.
> It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
Larger cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, ... are central for large traffic regions. For example the traffic region here in Hamburg serves roughly 3.7 million people.
> That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
We now have a Germany-wide affordable subscription-based ticket for local®ional public transport. That's my understanding of public transport gone digital, nation-wide. The basics were operational after only a few months of planning.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that
required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.
I agree with the part about complicated tariffs/tickets but not much else. Although not sure how many countries make it simple, the only one I am aware of is Switzerland which conveniently solves the problem by making everything expensive.
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.
> I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient
Sure, if you live in a larger city and you never leave… I lived in Munich for years and never needed a car, just comfortable shoes, a bike and occasionally a transport ticket.
Try to get to a smaller town or village, you are lucky if you only spend twice as much time getting there as with a car.
The trains get randomly cancelled, delay is basically guaranteed, the workers go on strikes relatively frequently, so you can never rely on trains working for anything remotely important.
I agree. Let's grant that SBB is more organized than DB. But given that Germany is 8 times as big as Switzerland and with 33,000 km has a significantly larger train network than Switzerland's 5,300 km, it's no surprise that trains accumulate more delays in Germany.
As a UK citizen living in Berlin, I assure you that for all the cancellations and repair works, there's many places which look up to the German system.
(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).
I visited the UK, which is my home, and the UK train system was amazing. Got multiple tight connections with zero delays. Far better than I’ve experienced living in Germany
Interesting, i am in the opposite situation. Using the deutsche bahn for long distances is often horrible so I never thought I would miss it but omg I really didn't have a good experience with Uk trains. The ticketing is complicated and the trains were often so unbelievably dirty and run down. Never had this experience in an ICE. Okay there are sometimes issues like the toilet boing out of order or the restaurant closed but the train is usually clean and fairly nice. And while the delay wasn't massive I still had delays. It's also sooo slow, there's no high-speed train. Last time I took the train from southampton to edinburgh and it really took forever and I was soo slow.
Even Edinburgh-London is slow! It's a similar distance than munich-berlin, a train I often take. In germany these are sleek, clean trains that take just over 3 hours, with only one or two stops with the sprinter. The train in the UK takes around 5 hours, significantly longer. I can do 3 hours on a friday evening work and arrive not too late to then meet friends for drinks, you can't do that with 5 hours.
And not only ICE, it's the same experience with regional trains. I used to live in Baden-Württemberg and took a lot of regional trains. I didn't think I would miss it with the delays from the new central station that they've been building for what feels like forever but now I do.
There are many things that the UK does better than Germany but trains they manage to do even worse (or maybe its not that bad?)
Fair. I've had one flight to the UK that cost less than the train ticket from the UK airport to my actual destination. Air tickets got a lot more expensive after the pandemic, but it's still close.
(OTOH, I've also had one case where it was cheaper to take the ferry and trains back from the UK to Berlin than fly, presumably because of massive demand as that was the day Stansted airport was closed by 1cm of snow and I had an 8 hour queue for a replacement flight that was itself also cancelled).
I recently needed two tickets from NYC to LA, and was astonished to find air tickets for $80 and rail tickets for $2200. It's so unbelievably expensive (not counting that the flight was a few hours and the train was 56 hours).
Competition, I suppose. Still, that seems extreme. A few years (might have been eight) back, I traveled Amtrak's Zephyr from Chicago to California. The roomette for two (coach would have been cheaper) was some $450, about the same as 2nd class air fare for one then. But yes, the train isn't in a particular hurry, expected travel time is some 50h, but 1.5h in, it was already 20m late for no apparent reason. Most passengers were tourist, but I also talked to a fellow who was going to California to pick up a used car for his daughter.
I like the idea of long distance train traveling, as one can get off and back on later (check the fine print of your ticket though). Apparently, that's not customary however and earned me an interview by a TSA agent (a very polite fellow, odd as it may sound) who approached me (with a local Sheriff in tow) at a scheduled stop.
> If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Just in case this is helpful to someone, you can buy the ticket from one of those different transport organizations you mentioned and avoid that time limit to cancel. The one to use for that is https://www.mopla.solutions/, it's a simple app (alternatively web site) that worked really well for me (no affiliation).
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
The €9 ticket was a 3 month temporary offer, which was not originally intended to continue permanently at all.
> I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
The ticket is subsidised by the German government(beyond the amount that all rail infrastructure and most services are subsidised) for the purpose what is covered in the article - encouraging permanent modal shift of regular travellers(primarily commuters) from road to rail. If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Airtravel is also subsidised by the German tax payer. Much more than the 49 EUR ticket. No matter if you are a tourist or not. (Arguably mostly for tourists actually.)
Commercial aviation fuel is tax exempt in the EU, I would already count that as a subsidy (yes, I count not taxing something that's normally taxed as a subsidy, even if it isn't done by directly paying out money).
ICE from Hamburg to Munich is about 5 hours. That's basically the other end of the country. Not sure where 9 hours come from.
And your 2 hour flight easily goes to 4-5 hours if you add the security theatre and the extra overhead that transport to/from the airport entails. They are far outside the city whereas central stations are usually in the city center.
> If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Tourist&foreigners can use the Deutschlandticket, too.
But: it's a monthly subscription automatically renewing every month, so one has to cancel it early enough when planning to leave the country. You'll also typically need a smartphone for the ticket.
Well, on mobile they make you think you need the app, but it's region locked. I happened to email them about how this is annoying for tourists yesterday and got a very German response,
"Downloading the Deutschlandticket.de app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store is only possible in certain countries." (ikr, it's THE problem)
> You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)
It started with 9€, is 49€ now, and will be 58€ starting 2025.
You can buy for a single month when booking through the right company. "mo.pal" is a good one, for example. However, I agree that it is a bit predatory.
All of these tickets are only for local/regional trains, not the faster/long-distance trains. You can get from one end of the country to another by changing trains a few time, but e.g. getting from Munich to Berlin would be 6h (direct) with fast trains and 10+ h (changing 3 times) with the regional ones.
The subscription model is intentional - this isn't meant to help tourists or to be bought when you need it, it's meant to make sure people have already pre-paid the cost when making a decision whether to take a train or a car (by being cheap enough that people subscribe even if they don't use it all the time).
As a tourist, the cost was well worth it. Used buses and rail to get everywhere, booked one DB train from Berlin to Bamberg but otherwise travelled all over Germany during my time there.
It’s not really made for tourists from outside the country, you already have special tickets for people who visit for a short time. It’s for the local population. The price hike is from 49€/month to 58€/month next year. It’s the opposite of predatory IMHO, you have it on your mobile app in a few tap and can cancel easily
Yep, it's not really meant for tourists.
They really want everyone to stay in the subscription model, because it's heavily subsidized, so they need to hit a high enough LTV anyways.
Cancellation terms vary by vendor. With some better ones, you can cancel 24 hours before the end of the month to avoid being billed for the next month.
Not only — when I visit friends in the UK, I've had single rail tickets cost more than the increased next years' cost of a monthly nationwide ticket here in Germany.
The size "excuse" is often brought up, I don't think that's valid though, e.g. Sweden with a significantly lower density has much better public transport. Or if we talk absolute size I think even Russia has a better rail transport system than the US for example. Like usual I think it can largely be attributed politics and to the strength of the car lobby in the US (as well as a weird desire to "stick it to poor people"), which caused a complete focus on individual travel.
There’s a happy medium somewhere though and the US doesn’t meet it at all. I can’t even take a bus from my neighborhood in a California city to the grocery store in a timely manner and it’s often cancelled
Oh, I know - I live in Oakland. I think even here the population density is lower than in European cities. (It's definitely lower than in Asian mega-cities.)
But yes, I do wish California did better. People are used to bad transit, and have never visited Tokyo or even NYC, so expectations are low.
The EU is only about half the land area of the USA; Germany is roughly equivalent of the fourth largest US state, Montana, and only CA, TX, and AK are bigger.
You said the USA was big. Now you're saying population is the important thing. Combined that's population density, so does Maryland have this? Connecticut? etc.
On the density front, NYC is famously high density, and yet so far as I can tell a monthly pass for just there is double the raised price this ticket will be next year: https://new.mta.info/document/118601
I don't have the details, but every single time I have heard the mention of Deutsche Bahn in the last few years it has been accompanied by comments of how broken it has become, with constant delays and cancellations, to the point where for many people it is no longer a viable option for commute or for anything where you cannot risk to be up to several hours late.
I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.
There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.
>There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I feel most know about Japan's shinkansen being run well.
For those who don't, the average delay is 1.1 minutes on average.
For comparison, the DB long distance trains are considered on time if they're less than 6 minutes late, and still only 64% are considered on time.
They have dedicated tracks. In Germany all train lines (freight, local trains, long-distance trains) share the same tracks and especially at different speeds this causes delays and problems.
Building new track or even adding more lanes is extremly difficult because of NIMBY's and from 1995 to 2005 switches and extra lanes for overtaking where build back to save costs.
Additionally signalling is in large parts still very labour intensive and smaller tracks are often still running with technology from the early 20th century and late 19th century.
So the problem Deutsche Bahn has to solve is quite a bit harder than shinkansen.
among intercity trains run by Deutsche Bahn, the on-time rate hovers around 2/3. it's technically true that "most were on time", but one third being late is really terrible, especially since you often need to make a tight connection.
even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck.
Long-distance trains are worse statistically because they travel longer Router and therefore have more opportubities to gain delay. Across all trains, puncuality is like 95%.
Long distance trains are getting more unreliable (ICE, IC) due to repair works on the tracks - regional / local trains are mostly fine (at least in my place here) and I can't remember the last time there was an delay longer than 10 minutes here. However lately I've saw that trains are cancelled due to manpower shortages and due to the nature the local trains are organized (there is a tender and a railway company wins that tender for 5 years with the same rolling stock) peaks in capacity like on the weekend are not dealt with.
It was broken long before the offer though so the reduction in driving being moderate probably reflects fewer shifts in daily commute and mostly more leisure usage.
What? How? I have the ticket and despite that I never use any regional train because they're generally awful.
(Local busses and trams on the other hand work pretty well)
Germany is smaller than California. The United States is very, very large place, mostly unpopulated. It’s hard to apply whatever Germany, a small, densely populated country does to the US, which is largely empty land.
Why do we have to pretend that routes between Montana and South Dakota have to come up when discussing ways of improving rail usage in the US? We could treat routes between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis like Germany. We could treat high speed rail in California or the Northeast like Japan. Choosing to live in an extremely rural area shouldn't just be a "well it doesn't help" me trump card to defeat things that will help most of the population.
We also have a similarly frustrating kind of arguments in germany itself.
Like, focus on public transport won't work. Because in some tiny towns of 30k people living there, there is never a bus around so why care? Like... dude. In Hamburg, we have subway stations that move more people in minutes than people live in your town. Yes, it may not work on your case. Your case is however a side note. It needs consideration, but not focus.
Or electric vehicles. There are interesting questions about electric vehicles in uncontrolled situations, emergency services and long-distance situations. As well as regions without a good charging infrastructure. Yes. These are problematic. Except, most likely, more unique cars drive past my window in an hour on a workday than exist in that tiny town. Just keep your ICE car for the trip to spain you never take by car, but we should optimize the vehicles in cities. Again, it needs consideration, but not focus.
Exactly. Always somebody trots out invalid arguments about size and population density. There are smaller states in the USA that are about as dense as Germany, like Maryland and Connecticut. So, why don't those states have great state-wide public transit systems?
Yep, federal income tax is a big reason. For states to fund this on their own requires additional taxation. Some places like FL don’t even have a state income tax, so they are stuck trying to get tourists to fund transportation projects somehow or increasing sales taxes or higher tolls. And of course higher tolls have the unfortunate side effect of reducing demand for the thing to begin with.
This is a boring trope. Whether it’s a group of United States or a single State is a debate as old as the country. You’re going to need really compelling reasons for states to give up their representation and participate in the state vote required to amend the constitution to remove their rights.
You talk about states as if they are people. But they are not. States are a fiction invented by people (and let's be honest, by rich and powerful people), and so they can be torn down by people (likely not the rich and powerful).
"State representation" and "states' rights" are not compelling to most people, other than via some vague appeal to "isn't it great that New Mexico can do one thing and Maine can do something else?", which by itself does not require "state representation" or the current ideas of "states' rights".
States are organizations of people. Boosted representation isn’t compelling to people who don’t care, but the people in smaller states do care. It means more fed govt consideration when it comes to regulatory decisions and funding.
Your post of “bUt thEYre nOt pEOple” is pointless. When people talk about the rights of governments nobody is saying that the government is a person.
If federal rules provide some version of equal treatment, then "boosted representation" for small states is about nothing but a desire for local power.
There's no reason for smaller states to get less money per capita for schools, or less money per mile for US highways, or less money per million dollars of damage from a natural disaster. And indeed, they do not, because we have historically believed in fairness.
However, the idea that the 300k residents of Wyoming should be able to exert outsize power of regulatory decisions just because "they are a state" is anti-democratic. We put the things we don't want majoritarian decisions on into the constitution; the rest is up for a vote, and a handful of people shouldn't be able to veto the decision of the many just because they happen to be clustered in one place.
It was a valid debate back when travelling to the capitol took months by horse. Nowadays everyone uses services from other states on a daily basis, and possibly work in another state (with WFH) on a daily basis. It's pretty darn clear that the USA simply could not exist as a bunch of separate states anymore.
And frankly, states are already giving up their representation in the current system. If you're not a swing state, you're irrelevant. If you live in a populated state, you have a second-class vote.
If the USA had a modern voting system and anyone proposed the current pile of junk, they would be laughed out of the room.
> And frankly, states are already giving up their representation in the current system. If you're not a swing state, you're irrelevant.
You’re talking about presidential elections, which are a tiny slice of the picture. Wyoming has 2 senators and so does California. That’s huge for Wyoming.
> It was a valid debate back when travelling to the capitol took months by horse. Nowadays everyone uses services from other states on a daily basis, and possibly work in another state (with WFH) on a daily basis. It's pretty darn clear that the USA simply could not exist as a bunch of separate states anymore.
None of this is relevant because crossing states to work has been a thing since the founding of the country. The only meaningful difference between the founding and now is the massive expansion of the duties of the federal government
Because those states are part of the same federal government and they have a say in what the federal government does. These rail systems almost always require federal government level investments.
Another significant issue is that the USA wasn’t built for rail, and to do so now requires sign off by land owners, municipalities, and so on. The amount NIMBY-oriented policies in California, for example, is a serious impediment. Oddly, people cite rural areas as an issue, but rural areas aren’t typically an issue. It would be comparably inexpensive to run high speed rail over undeveloped land, while tearing up buildings, roads, water, sewer, and power would be tremendously costly. For much of Europe, rail transport was put in place long before automobiles became commonplace. For much of the USA, the cities didn’t even exist at that time, and they were mostly built around automobiles.
For places like NYC, Chicago, Boston, yeah. And we see rail in those locations. We do not see rail in towns and suburbs around those areas. In Atlanta, for example, MARTA exists, but NIMBY policies in Northern suburban counties keep it from expanding. This is especially bad considering more people live in those counties than in the city proper. Further, even if one could get sign-off, the cost to acquire the property required would be incredibly costly. Land prices are historically high, and after acquisition would need to be cleared and then rail would need to be laid. Unless the USA wants to get rid of compensation for imminent domain seizure, I don’t know how this kind of rail development would ever be done.
Considering how the wasteful cars / trucks / planes are on their way out in a short time frame (decades), while buses / rail / barges are much less so,
I expect that transition to happen naturally as economic pressures make the position favoring the minority able to still afford cars / trucks / planes as less and less politically tenable.
And how many people regularly commute across the United States? The absolute majority of the journeys people make regularly is still quite short, so why not start by optimizing for them? Then continue with building high speed intercity connections between the urban areas with <500 km distance to create valuable alternatives to being stuck in the highway traffic and dealing with the airport security nonsense.
Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?
Also even if you're worried about going cross-country, that requires what, two fast lines between the coasts to get good routes? So even though those areas don't have many people per square mile, passing through would need an extremely small amount of track per square mile.
1. CA is the 3rd largest state in the USA. Do any of the 47 smaller states have something like this?
2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.
It was one of the most intelligent ( and rare) decision the government took.
Off course, there are parties loosing money like car manufacturers and oil producers.
It's also a decision where the federal government tries to take the credit, but in case of any financial shortfalls, for now municipalities and counties (and as far as regional railways services are concerned, the states, too, to some extent) will be left holding the short end of the stick, because the federal and state revenue support for the reduced fare comes with a hard cap.
While currently even the federal government is subject to the so-called Schuldenbremse ("debt brake"), municipalities and counties are under much stronger legal obligations to balance their budgets, and in a lot of states, public transport is an entirely voluntary matter for municipalities to provide (and even where it isn't, the mandated minimum obligation probably won't entice anybody to take public transport if you don't have to), which starts mattering in a budget crunch.
Already the first major cities have threatened future service cuts. For now that may just be political posturing, but it's still not what you would want to hear in that context, and certainly doesn't serve to encourage people getting rid of their cars, either.
I agree.
I still have to rely on my car for basically everything because the same government also fucked up the rail system so severely that it barely works in my region.
When I moved from a small village to the city, I sold my car and wanted to use public transportation for everything.
I'm not fond of driving, especially in cities, so this looked like a no-brainer.
I had my first bad experiences quickly when I learned that public transportation wasn't anywhere as reliable as I previously thought.
I had to choose between going to work 45 minutes earlier (of course, unpaid and without the possibility of leaving earlier) or risking being too late half the time.
I had to travel further for my next job, but I thought it would be better because it was another connection.
I was wrong.
It was usually better in the mornings, but my way home usually took between 1,5 and 3 hours instead of the planned 45 minutes.
The next job I chose only because there, at least, I could take the S-Bahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn Trains, and it was a direct connection, which was way more reliable.
But it was very loud, very smelly, cold in winter, and very hot in summer (I remember having a working AC twice in the four years that I traveled that line), and there were (not always empty) beer bottles rolling around the floor almost all the time.
I always paid for the entire year in advance, so the 90-minute daily drive did cost a little more than 220 Euros monthly.
Otherwise, it would have been even more expensive.
So, the current ticket would have improved that, at least financially.
Now, I barely take the train anymore.
I broke my ankle so badly in my youth that the doctors told me that they had to completely cut it open from both sides to see if they could improve it in any way. They also said that there was a strong possibility that I would wake up with a fused ankle after the operation.
They recommended I only do that when the pain becomes unbearable, which I am now waiting for.
So, I am permanently in pain, and walking is terrible for me.
Still, when I have to go to the nearby city center, I prefer walking for 45 minutes instead of taking the 10-minute trip by train.
That is what relying on German public transportation for more than ten years did to me.
I tried that train connection multiple times before and stopped after it took me over an hour twice (after about five trips total).
Disclaimer: It is not that bad everywhere in Germany. That's why I wrote "in my region" in the beginning.
Within Berlin, for example, I had good experiences with public transportation.
Well, at least regarding its availability.
There were still junkies in there.
And homeless people who smelled like they were living on that train for at least a few weeks.
But well, that's another topic.
Remember that it cost a small rent to get this subscription until the 9€ experiment. Flat fee national transport, I don't remember the exact price but it's multiple hundreds a month in both the Netherlands (NS altijd/trein vrij) and Germany (Bahnkarte 100). Even my local subscription to go ~10km between two cities in Germany (NRW) cost 90€ a month until that experiment
A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded
Except for people who simply don't have 60€ a month easily, so they're left out. Also, it will absolutely not stay at 60€, it will become more expensive each year until the local tickets are cheaper again - defeating the whole purpose (if it won't be reverted outright after the next election, which the conservatives will win).
I'm not saying it shouldn't be free like in Luxembourg, just made the comparison with how it has been for decades until the recent 9€ experiment and now ~60€ subscription. It's already a lot better than it used to be, even if it's not perfect
Do you know how it works, actually, if you need to get to work but can't because of the cost? If you can't afford 60€ then you also won't be able to afford a car that costs probably >3x times as much for a barebones old model when you include the necessary insurance, road tax, and fuel. Bürgergeld pays your rent afaik but do they front e.g. costs when you get a job to actually get there until your first paycheck? Can one apply for a public transport subscription in low income situations?
For a developed country, 59 EUR is not all that expensive if it helps you get to a job. Having it be too cheap would probably degrade the quality of service for busier routes and make it harder for future projects to pay themselves off.
I find the comparis estimate an overestimate. Take their VW Polo example. You would definitely not insure it for 1207 Fr a year and an annual service is not 3000 Fr a year. You take their estimate for VW Polo, put numbers a layman folk pays for, and you will get a number around 5000 a year. If you buy a second hand car, then you get a very competitive price to the GA, but also get more flexibility.
I am not saying anyone should by a car, quite the contrary, just stating the fact that 4000 Fr/yr is not competitive enough to car.
Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
Well you'll usally have 563€/month as a single or 506€/month if living with a partner. State pays health insurance and rent (up to a certain limit in size of the flat). In most cities it's further subsidized (25-29€ for the 49€ ticket).
If that's enough depends a lot where you live, if you have family or not and your livestyle.
You have to pay your energy bills (40-70€/month) and internet / cell-phone (40-50€/month) for yourself.
If you are a healthy single it's perfectly fine if you life a simple life. But you can't really put aside any savings.
> Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
Yes, but people will still be greedy and complain about every little thing.
> Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
Germany can actually be quite cheap on the basic goods. I mean, it's the country who invented the concept of discount-market and is now spreading Aldi&Lidl to the world. There are also many shops and programs for supporting poor people, selling stuff for lower prices or second hand, and such things. And of course this includes offering a lower price for the ticket.
The safety net also provides people with cheaper tickets. At least in my city, the ticket costs much less for people who depend on the social safety net.
That was a different Ticket. A highly subsidized time-limited offer. It was never meant to be economical. The 49€ is the economical viable solution, after a long discussion, which still is subsidized. And the 59€ is just the rise to fine-tune the price to actual usage and inflation.
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Poor people, as also students, get a lower price. Usually around 19-29€. And many workers can get it through their company, or can get something back from taxes. The amount of people who are really paying the full price themselves is probably not that high.
€59 is a steal. The goal is to move people to public transport and strengthen economy, not to be a charity to folks that want unlimited (!) transportation but don’t have € 60/month to show for it.
Even so, cities subsidize this ticket for the “poor”, so practically their costs are even lower.
Someone said in other comment that that 9 ticket was one time only
> That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
I really really would like to see Labour in the UK to use their sizeable majority + Parliamentary sovereignty to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure, including more train subsidies, but they seem very cautious and also terrified of raising taxes. Such a waste that the UK is one of the few places where Parliament could just ram shit through and yet building anything in the UK is so hampered by self-imposed red tape.
> through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago
New towns will just be full of commuters and have no life in them. We need to build high rises in cities, and give people living in apartments real rights - the leasehold system is feudalism.
And give Manchester and Birmingham real metro/tube systems!
HS2 was an ongoing project, it was threw. It was simply cancled by a fucking asshat person who tried to appeal to the far right in a series of stunts to save his sorry ass.
New housing has to be built along transportation corridors. If you want to efficiently build housing, you have to extend transportation infrastructure into areas and then grow towns around that.
This isn't actually hard and has been done for 100 years but somehow in modern day many countries are to stupid to understand this.
HS2 spent years and billions trying to keep the moaners in the chilterns happy. The number of tunnels is insane.
The M40 didn’t have this problem.
Yes transportation goes without saying. Places like Telford and Milton Keynes and the likes. There are tons of places on the WCML that could have MK style communities.
Terrified of raising taxes? I dunno, they are planning to raise taxes and introduce new ones. Cautious? Not in the least. Walking into one PR disaster after another.
There is no way to fix the UK railways, because it would require expensive engineering projects and purchase of private land/properties at low prices. People would vote them out as soon as they could. So no chance of that happening anytime soon.
Lots of people seem surprised that the new government apparently have no desire to improve the dire state of the UK. But that was never on the cards and the idea that they might have done so is pure projection. The current leadership of the Labour party are from the right-wing Labour First faction who have always been very clear that their aims are not to improve the country but to keep the left out of power. They will govern in the same business-as-usual nothing-can-ever-get-better vein as the Tories and their Blairite predecessors.
However I don't blame the public for not knowing this fact. There was (and to some extent still is) a media lockdown on reporting who is behind the Starmer project. (Because if it had been reported on it might not have succeeded).
Hundreds of thousands of people use public transit daily in America. Long headways, poor coverage, and lackluster maintenance budgets are a much more important problem than what you're describing.
I was in San Francisco recently, and, okay, maybe San Francisco is special or something, but the public transport seemed basically fine? Insofar as it existed; coverage wasn’t great, but it didn’t seem particularly threatening where it existed.
BART is different than most systems. Generally people are talking about buses in my experience. Most trains/subways are relatively tame compared to buses. I was carless for a couple of years in college and had to live off campus to afford rent and riding the bus I encountered more than a few times that made me nervous.
If you ask some particular demographics about San Fran they'll tell you you'll get stabbed with a fentanyl coated super knife the second you step on the subway. And then they'll parade your body up and down the streets and dump you in the communal body bonfire.
Naturally, those people have never been to San Fran. They live in an ugly home in North Texas, where they commute 2 hours a day to their shitty office job and they know at least 5 people who have died in a car accident.
I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does.
A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.
If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.
In the same spirit, I never really associate the meaning of "transient" as "someone passing through," rather it's just a word for "homeless person" for me.
>That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
They don't just sell fear. They sell confirmation bias too.
The man who lives in an ivory tower in the suburbs is happy to read the news about a stabbing on the subway as it makes him feel less bad for not putting his money where his mouth is and riding it himself.
I used to live in Toronto in 2019 to 2020 and used the transit exclusively.
I return as a visitor of Toronto every quarter for work and there are many times where I Uber instead of TTC because of these comments. Even slightly busy at 4-5 PM there's always folks who have hit the gym and skipped showering and most days there's "something" happening on the TTC.
Noted, while I appreciate the citation it isn't entirely correct.
How many of those are Uber specifically with passengers? Why this specific? Because Uber has a ranking system and my gut feels says anything with a ranking system that has tons of feedback weeds out bad drivers.
The other portions of my comments is psychological safety, how many times do individuals get in an Uber and feel unsafe vs being in the TTC?
How many times do individuals take an Uber service, are crammed and with a driver that smells? Even if I got a ride like that I know the market system will remove that driver.
If you told me the TTC required an identification card to enter onto and TTC could suspend/revoke access I'd go back because there would be a regulating system to remove behavior that riders don't want.
I mean... this is a huge stretch. Car accidents are, more or less, completely out of your control as a driver. You can be an amazingly defensive driver and die. And you can drive like an ass and get lucky.
In fact, I'm sure a lot of those Uber drivers are rated well because they get there fast. Well, you have to drive like a maniac for that. In the city you need to drive bold if you want to get there with limited BS. That means risking your life.
I spent years riding public transit in Portland, NYC, Seattle, SF, San Diego, Chicago, and other US cities. I can tell you anecdotally that public transit in the US is dangerous and meant for the poors who don’t have their shit together to level up and commute via car.
Ride 8AM and 5PM every workday for a year and tell me that it’s safe when you roll through the bad parts of Long Island/ brooklyn/Queens or the south side of Chicago. Tell me that you don’t have to take the inconvenient early train because of nTh handicap ramp pickup or last-mile cyclist that slows down your commute. Security on transit only cares about fare collection. The US is not like Europe where there is some latent pride in your ancestors accomplishments.
European here. Spent a week in NYC with a 9 month old. Traveled all over 4 of the 5 boroughs and never felt in the slightest threatened. The only major issue was the lack of elevators. Fortunately NYC people are really friendly and helped us with the stroller every time.
Remember folks, if someone says they don't want to ride transit with a hobo smoking meth, they're lying and they're a bad person. Even if they've previously experienced it firsthand.
The current government in Queensland Australia announced 50c fares for 6 months trial. There is an election this month, the gov declared it will be made permanent, the opposition which is tipped to win has so far maintained they will also keep it. It has boosted PT travel significantly.
This is a vast oversimplification. Lots Angles Metro keeps posting month over month increases in ridership despite the perceive danger and unsavory experience.
I'm sure cleaner cars would help at the margins. Speed, convenience, comfortable, and cost all matter.
This is just false. In the US, when public transport is good by the same measures as other countries use, such as frequency, coverage and so on, Americans use public transport just fine.
The real reason, rather then looking at the most basic surface level is actually the horrible land use planning and the horrible transportation and city engineering. This includes things like zoning, building regulation, environmental regulation and many other things.
I think this is one reason why it is rarely expanded, people associate the stops as a way for criminals to get around; but I think usage is not great largely because it hasn't expanded...it's a self-feeding cycle.
The main reason is because Americans are unbelievably wealthy and can afford large homes that require multiple cars for the family to get around. It’s a positive sign of American prosperity and the envy of the world hence the massive immigration demand and relative lack of expatriatism.
If America gets to a point where that’s no longer possible and people have to live in smaller and more densely populated areas not by choice but by necessity then the country is truly in decline.
Let the Germans cram themselves into smaller homes and trains. I truly hope Americans can continue to prosper and acquire comfortable homes with more utility and private transport powered by cheap energy for all.
What’s satirical about it? Why would people want a world where they are forced to live on top of each other in small places if they don’t have to due to plentiful energy and vast material wealth?
If some new age Protestant needs to live worse to fulfill some spiritual hole then they can do it. But everyone else wants a large yard, comfortable home with many rooms, nice cars, and well maintained infrastructure to drive and park.
Because living further apart means more driving, which sucks? And it means less community, which sucks? And it means you'll be fatter and die earlier, which sucks?
I'm not saying those are 100% true. I'm saying those are reasons and I can think of much, much more.
The real puzzle imho is to get people to use public transport for the mostly empty route and time combinations. There are many of those for different reasons.
Trains are so heavy it doesnt really cost or save anything if there are people inside or not.
Which are used to justify expensive non-Advance tickets.
£80 if I have the audacity to go to greater London today without having planned ahead (3 hour journey + tube). And the same cost coming back - off peak of course. £160! Vs £55 in petrol
Travel at quieter times to benefit from cheaper off peak tickets they used to say. Hah.
Yes! Now we are getting on to the true cost of advanced tickets.
Fines for making mistakes, rebooking fees, rebooking and having to pay a higher fare, lost tickets because sometimes it's just easier to book a new ticket, losing out when unwell etc...
I bet they make a tidy sum from unused advance tickets
(Great Britain specific):
Although worth noting when it's out of your control the railway does have to offer you options. You don't have 100% of the liability.
And if your train is cancelled you're entitled to take the one before/after for example or get a refund
My favorite part of this deal is how you can use the same ticket in every city in Germany. Before you had to learn which app to install and then go through the (usually) broken registration setup. And you needed to learn the zones too.
Now I just arrive to a city and hop into the transport method of my choice.
This is my favorite thing about transport in Switzerland. If you have a general subscription you can use trains, buses, even ships.
There are exceptions such as privately ran gondolas going up to mountains but mostly you can just go anywhere without worrying about it.
Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.
Germany is a dense country with a developed rail network, you are never far from a train station.
Bear in mind that this includes also city transportation, which makes it a great deal.
My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a lot...)
What exactly do you mean by that? "never far" as in "always within walking distance"? That would be very wrong.
The other factor is that frequency of service is low outside of major cities. At the need to change and a small-distance trip can take a couple of hours.
Yeah, but doesn't make the Bahn more punctual, or reduce those comute times from 3h down to the 1h that is possible by car, not having to jump across four connections, with related delays and dropped connections.
The 49 Euro ticket is about local transportation, when you are talking about 3h you are talking about intercity transportation not covered by this ticket.
Intercity travel has lots of punctuality problems but many of the local train operations and S-Bahn are often much superior. At least in places where I have been, like Karlsruhe, Berlin, Hamburg the local transport has been very good.
Not everything in live is about long distance communing.
> 3h down to the 1h
That completely depends on the details of your route and ignores lots of possible aspects. As a universal statement its just outright false.
No, they're talking about the local connections that are covered by the ticket. They're that bad.
I've had similar experiences commuting into Cologne where it's 40 minutes by car or 2 hours by train, and that's without delays. In the rush hours it's 60 minutes by car. A missed train connection adds another half hour.
I wish, more like 80km, with the luck to jump between bus, two connecting trains, plus bus on the destination, and better not lose any of those connections.
What's your definition of 'big train station hubs'? There are plenty of places that have small train station that connect to bigger hubs. The claim that its only useful for people close to 'big hubs' is simply false.
Yes there are places where cars are better in some aspects, but that is the case no matter how the ticket is structured. You can't magically extend the train network by reducing ticket price.
And if cars are the only viable option is questionable, as there are many people even in those places who don't own a car. They just have to live with subpar bus system or other local transport.
It helped anybody and everybody that wanted to travel for any reason. It meant I could go to the nearest big city to catch a movie at an IMAX theatre, something that was significantly more expensive before. You don't need a big train station hub to have trains, and you only need a few trains or buses to make up for the cost and make it worth it. Since, you know, it applies to buses as well. I live in a small shithole town, and it's extremely convenient to have the Deutschlandticket because it means I can take the bus to anywhere in the area, including the nearest train station, and I can take a train to anywhere I want from nearby towns to cities hours away. Even though I own a car again, I still have the ticket because of how useful it is and how much money it saves.
I don't understand how anybody can paint this as a bad thing. Are you also against universal health care by any chance?
maybe 3 hours in the car and 1h with public transport.
if you are in the rushhour and a traffic jam (not an unusual problem), then the train will be faster. Plus one can work in the train or relax.
My regional train here 20km going into the city center is impossible to beat by car.
77.77% of the people live in cities. 55% live in cities with >20k people. Generally Germany is a decentralized country with a lot of regions with local center cities. There are 15 cities with >500k people. France has only four.
Nope, it suffices to live 80 km away from workplace, and not being lucky to live in places with direct connections, where at least three changes are required, with local connection bus, two train changes, plus additional bus/metro/tram on destination.
It really depends on a lot of factors but I generally agree that many people vastly overestimate the time savings of taking a car.
And that's before we get into questions like "How many of your hours of paid work are required to make car payments, insurance payments, tag, title and maintenance?"
For the lucky ones living up to 30 km from city center they are supposed to commute, without having to ever change transport.
Just yesterday I hit jackpot, as my train got delayed 10 minutes delaying my connection to the following 30 minutes later train, as it turns out, the previous connecting train was delayed for 1h blocked at the station, so I got to jump into the 1h delayed train, instead of the one that would be coming in 30m later, which got to depart 5 minutes after I jumped into it.
The poor souls on that 1h delayed train weren't so happy as me.
As a counter example I live in Rome where city trains are the best public transport available and house prices are heavily linked to closeness to subway or train station, yet we still are the city with most cars per capita in Europe and probably in the whole west.
If only those living close to train stations used trains it would massively reduce the need for cars and consequently the heavy traffic we usually experience.
I live 15 minutes walking from the closest station and it's so much better to go to work by train than by car, the trip is shorter, I don't have to drive, find a parking spot, a legal one, where I can't be fined and don't have to pay for it, while on the train I can read and air conditioning actually works and train cars are usually not crazy full like subway ones.
TL:DR that's how trains work they are not supposed to solve every commuting problem but the solvable ones
Just about all of which used to have train service, right?
I mean, in the US I've been to a lot of small towns where there is no train service, but the old station is still there, with the rails all torn out and replaced with houses, or roads, or bike paths.
And in the UK, the infamous Beeching cuts in the 1960s removed lines based on a profitability model which wasn't applied to roads, causing many communities to lose rail service and essentially require everyone there to shift to cars (replacing trains with bus service failed.)
How much of Germany is like that, where the people in the country insisted on good roads for their cars, causing the rail system to be decommissioned, and now they are stuck with that decades-old decision to prioritize the more environment destroying option?
People talk a lot of nonsense about 'Beeching cuts' without really understanding the history. 'Beeching' has simply become a political buzzword anybody who knows even a little about rail likes to bandy about.
Lines started closing around the 1930s and after WW2 this continued. Beeching was only working on this topic a short time and produced a report that suggested lots of things. Some of those things were done, others weren't. Cuts happened before Beeching and after him. And they happened during various different railroads organization schemes.
That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost. They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities. At that time bus services were often government run.
And Beeching was actually correct in many cases. The British rail system was simply not rationally build. It was basically built by partly speculation driven rush. While this is not a bad and certainly gave Britain a great rail system, once you have centralized control it does actually make sense to reevaluate. Lots of lines didn't make rational sense to continue.
Now of course I agree that to many lines were closed that shouldn't have been closed. But that is only a small part of the issue with the rail system. Britain still has a pretty high rail density.
The Beeching report of course cut no lines. It was just a report. By "Beeching cut" I mean the systemic policy of the time of prioritizing roads over rail, using the report as synecdoche.
> They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities.
That belief is the core of my comment, not the specific details of which lines were cut.
Once the lines are torn up, and the land not banked for future possible reuse, it's very hard for a car-centric area to switch away from cars.
How much should the sore feelings of those consigned to live in a car-only area affect the decision to promote rail service in order to reduce CO2 emissions?
In my opinion, zero.
> That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost.
When I wrote 'profitability model' I wasn't saying it was strictly about profitability. The report clearly uses profitability as one of the driving factors, but not the only factor.
My point is that the model which lead to statements like "As soon as the required procedure permits, it is desired to withdraw those passenger train services which are clearly uneconomic" was not applied to roads. Outside of a few toll roads and bridges, the direct earnings of a road is zero, resulting in an expected loss in total gross revenue.
The environment impact to the cuts clearly wasn't included, but neither was the implied increased demand for new roads, nor the higher road maintenance costs, much less concepts of induced demand that Leeming was just then formulating.
Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. You would have to change to another train to get to a station with a regular service to London, and increasing services wouldn’t be possible without significantly increasing terminal capacity.
Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station.
Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.
Okay, now the village has no train service, so they are required to use cars or buses to get around.
Then the UK introduces a "UK ticket", £50/month for local train service anywhere in the UK.
If those villagers protest against the ticket, because it's funded by their taxes while they can't use it, how should we understand that complaint?
One way is to use their anger to justify shutting down the new ticket scheme. This is typical us-vs-them politics.
A second is to say "suck it you car-addicted freaks", as if they had a choice in the matter and were not stuck with the results of decisions made during their grandparents' time.
A third is to re-connect train services, an option made much more expensive by the decision to not bank the rail lines for possible future expansion; a hidden debt which must now be paid.
But then who will pay those costs?
Simply saying 'only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option' is entirely too simplistic to be meaningful.
My village - which is far larger nowadays - never had a station.
Subsidising buses like the £2 fare makes far more sense for most people than subsidising trains. Not that we get a bus which goes anywhere useful like a train station there’s 6 a day but you then need to change to another bus to get to the station.
Offering free parking at stations would help with a “living close to station” lot. I went to Birmingham a few weeks ago, choice is drive 30 minutes to station, pay £12 to park, then pay £17 for the train fare. Instead I just drove the extra 40 minutes and paid £10 to park in Birmingham.
From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station.
Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency.
> The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.
You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?
> But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels
Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down
Vegans? Veg[a..z1..9A..Z]ns? Are there any vegyns out there who object to being put on the meat/no-meat spectrum? Are you afraid HN will censure you if you spell out the complete word?
Oh aha thanks for pointing that out. Now that you mention it that does seem obvious. I definitely didn't catch that from the first use though. There should be a better word to capture both those meanings that doesn't confuse my poor regex sensibilities like that. :|
I didn't get that either; not that obvious after all! I thought they were making a joke about vegan being a swear/taboo word, given the context of saying people don't want to hear of it because it allegedly threatens their morality
It's not a question of moral standing or identity but rather that public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do. Those things gaining too much popularity threatens the way you do things.
We have examples of this happening, eg smoking. It has become unpopular enough that governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes or just making it entirely illegal for only a certain year cohort (literal age discrimination).
> public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do
Is there a citation for this claim?
> governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes
Is it nonsensical? There is research[1][2] showing that flavoured tobacco is one of the primary factors used to attract younger users. We know that tobacco is bad, and also that flavoured tobacco increases its usage, so unless you are against public health policy measures themselves, it follows logically that flavoured tobacco should be covered by public health measures.
When public health measures turn into "hello, we're now making your life worse" then yes, I am against them.
Imagine you drink coffee your whole life. You rely on it. Now your government comes in and goes "coffee is now illegal, you're welcome!!!"
It changes your life against your wishes and you can't do anything about it. The only action that realistically works is preemptive - don't let coffee become disliked enough to enact such a ban. That's why people argue against it. Principles such as "people should be free to make their own choices" aren't values our society cares about. (Important to remember: it's popular to hate on things everyone else hates on, so you gotta keep it under a critical mass.)
>Is there a citation for this claim?
Asking for a citation doesn't make sense. You know damn well there isn't one. Nobody is going to credibly announce that their goal is to ban something popular, because that would make it harder for them to force that change on you. It's done piece by piece. Maybe the people that start it don't even want a ban, but it eventually escalates.
But logical reasoning can explains it too: people support public transport for climate reasons. Why would they not want you to make 'the right choice' like them?
yes, another successful example is slavery. another unresolved one is abortion. in all of these cases the freedom in question is arguably immoral. laws are downstream of moral convictions.
Personally I'm not opposed to public transport, in fact I want to like the railway. I tried.
But the German railway is in such a poor state that I never use it.
Not for small trips (with regional trains that are covered by my 49€ ticket) and especially not for longer trips (long distance trains like ICEs).
Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get your connecting train. Or maybe you won't arrive at all, happened enough times to me that I frankly don't trust it anymore.
And considering how expensive ICE tickets have gotten... yeah I'd rather take the highway, despite that I don't like driving much.
I don't know where you drive for long car trips, but going south from e.g. Hamburg on the A1, or through the Ruhrgebiet by car is a much bigger coin flip with respect to arrival times (while always being significantly slower even on good days). So why the complains about punctionality for trains, but somehow it's fine for car travel?
Can't speak for Hamburg since I'm from the south.
And frankly, even if a car trip ends up in congestion and you need 6 hours instead of 4, its still somewhat preferable to being dropped off at some random station in the middle of nowhere in the night and hoping the last regional train at 23:48 will actually make it to its destination. (Yes this happened to me)
It takes forever compared to driving in most cases, catching the transit often involves a walk, and a lot of public transit is kind of grungy. This doesn't apply or matter as much in some cases (e.g. the NY subway) but in general it's not great, at least not in the USA.
Does transit not always involve a walk, even a small one? It's not like everyone lives next to a subway station, and most destinations aren't right next to a subway station either.
Because missing important appointment (Termin) that you have arranged 3 fucking months before by waiting in a phone queue for 30 minutes because your Sbahn was cancelled because of a nonsense signal-related reason is so much better.
I kind of agree and disagree with you. My main train lines in Berlin are U8 and Ring and it can be annoying sometimes.
And I will still probably never get a driver's license. Been going without for 40 years already. Just being able to jump into any train, bus, tram or ferry anytime is really nice. I could pay double the monthly price for this privilege.
Only 62,7% of the trains were in time (and by in time they use a rigged system to count what is in time and what is not). So it's basically a 50% chance if you will be delayed at your destination or in time. Also note, that if you have to change trains mid travel you have that chance again. That means you will be late very very often. If you travel as an individual and you don't value your time at all this is a great deal, if you travel for business purposes good luck to you.
Apart from that, it's a lot more stressful (and time consuming) to go to a train station and leave at a train station instead of just driving by car.
Punctuality of local trains is much higher than the long distance ones whose stats you’re quoting here. For rapid transit, punctuality is less of an issue, compared to frequency.
I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason, why DBahn can’t get the trains to run on time. This isn’t Italy after all. The Swiss and Japanese manage to do it. Can someone explain?
DBahn was privatized in a way that combines the worst of both worlds: private but 100% owned by the state. Opaque labyrinth of 600 subcompanies.
Also, some textbook examples of bad incentives. For example, repairing bridges is paid by DB. If a bridge is beyond repair, then the tax payer pays. Predictable result: doing hardly any maintenance until the bridge fails. (That example is by now fixed, but shows the clear lack of planning)
Finally, the system is just over capacity. Many more trains but same infrastructure as decades ago. If you got rid of half the schedule and used a swiss-like system of stopping several minutes at every station, the trains could be on time. But the trains already are overcrowded, so then what do you do with all the passengers?
It's the classical combo of poor budget and conflicting budgeting with aging infrastructure and bad management. DB was privatized 20, 30 years ago, but parts of the infrastructure is public property and managed by the state. So DB willingly let rot them until the state will start renewing, which does take ages of course. At the same time, DB also started saving significant money, because that's what private companies are doing, so they removed parts of the infrastructure, which later started harming the planing on a nationwide level. And on top of this, there are parts of the infrastructure which are literally up to 150 years old, but still in use for whatever reason.
Or in other words: classical underfunded, overused legacy system showing its age.
> At the same time, DB also started saving significant money, because that's what private companies are doing, so they removed parts of the infrastructure
As strongly encouraged by their regulators (the Bundesnetzagentur and the Eisenbahnbundesamt), though, too, because for a long time the main political mandate regarding the railways was mainly to save money.
Germans are generally quite precise, which can be both good and bad. It can mean that things are done correctly, but it can also mean that people waste endless time obsessing over how to exactly implement every minute detail of a rule.
Just to give you an example of the latter: a Vietnamese-German woman (a German citizen who speaks German natively) was recently in the news because the local authorities have refused to issue her baby a birth certificate for over 6 months.[0] When she went to get a birth certificate, the authorities told her that her last name, Le Nguyen - which already appears on all of her German documents - does not meet their standards. They refuse to issue a birth certificate for her baby until she changes her last name to something the German regulations allow.
To make the situation even more absurd, the problem is that the German regulations state that double family names do not exist in Vietnamese (surprise: they do).[1] If the mother had a French double name, it would be no problem.
The problem is not even the baby's last name - it has the father's last name. The problem is that the birth certificate has to list the mother and father, and the authorities refuse to write the mother's name.
Instead of just giving the mother a bit of leeway and issuing a birth certificate, the authorities insist on inflexibly following some completely incomprehensible interpretation of the regulations. Suddenly, after thirty-something years of living in Germany, this lady has to suddenly change her last name, and until she does that, her baby - a German citizen - has no official documentation and cannot receive any government benefits.
Repeat this daily across many aspects of daily life, and you can see how it would become a problem.
I have to admit the ‘all access’ ticket system was pretty awesome when I visited. Note that this did not include trains going into Austria (even if you road them only in Germany). Nearly every city is joined by rail and it’s incredible.
Sadly in the US Midwest we just don’t have there population density to do this sort of thing.
Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies?
Otto von Bismarck introduced much of the social safety net in Germany, incl. health insurance (in 1883). He definitely was not a communist. He once called it "practical christianity" ("praktisches Christentum").
Even if you were, is that really a bad thing? Why do we demonize communism (and socialism ) so much ?
Poor implementation in Soviet Union or in PRC that is only seen through the color of propaganda with the inherent cultural and ideological biases is hardly a good basis for judging a movement that was a response to centuries of extreme worker exploitation in direct result industrialization and raise of machines.
Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
We learn and try to take to best from all economic systems not demonize any of them.
I moved some years ago from Dresden, Saxony, Germany to Rheintal, Switzerland - looking for some bigger mountains. In Dresden-area there was a nice 4-people day ticket for the whole area - <20EUR for 4 people total. Switzerland? Every guest spends at least 50CHF per person per day, wild.
Their accompanying website [0] says mobile phone data comes from teralytix while car movement data is sourced through inrix [1], which appears to gather data through navigation apps of some sort (vague as can be expected but the linked paper [2] claims that).
Would be interesting to see if the subsidy is covered by additional economic activity to cover the shortfall. If not it won’t last long, money doesn’t grow on trees
Someone in the comments mentioned this costs 3B per year when in comparison Germany spends 20B per year on Oil/Gas subsidies/tax benefits.
Arguably if more people are using rail it can become palatable to shift that money away from the tax benefits and subsidies for Oil which (equally) artificially lower fuel prices from real market prices (and which people seem to have no problem with).
Military spending is a bit of an odd one. It's basically expensive by design and ideally doesn't have any real effect.
It's not far off from a proof-of-work system. Especially given how there are many cheaper options to get rid of an enemy, but those have been outlawed such that the only options remaining are costly in people, money and goods.
How many people used the tracking app for how long? How were they chosen?
The study would be flawed if the group is not chosen to represent correctly the entire population. E.g., if they called for volunteers using the app, mostly people will apply that are engaged in climate change mitigation anyway and / or are in the target market for the 49 Euro ticket.
The data are based on cellphone tower data and app tracking data which, according to them [1] "is based on millions of app tracking movement patterns […] [and was shown by] Koch et al (2023) to be representative for the population of car-owners"
Is it a good practice when you give out blanket subsidies? Does targeted subsidies work better and are cost effective? I am researching this topic applied to taxation field.
Targeted subsidies entail explicit extra administrative costs and implicit costs (or benefit omissions) when some eligibles do not receive the subsidy due to e.g. paperwork friction. The alternative is universal benefits + taxes. See https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/11/universal-be...
Which I as a German simply fail to fathom. The quality of our Deutsche Bahn is so bad I would never drive by train. The worst thing is that they are incapable to have their trains be on time. Whenever you travel there is an extremely high chance you will not arrive at your destination in time.
It's still more punctual than going by car. I can't remember any long distance car trip where I wasn't stuck in traffic and my trip was much longer than predicted by the navigation system.
Not every trip is time sensitive, most trains do run on time, and not all trains are operated by your nemesis. If you still refuse to "ever" take a train anywhere, that's on you rather than the system
Because it is a regional problem and some areas work mostly fine. I also fail to fanthom why people drive in rush hour, queuing every day for hours. Yet people do that. And people love to complain, especially those that only take trains on public holidays. But hey, here in Sweden the trains are worse than in Germany, but people complain far less and trains are full anyways.
No amount of subsidy will make me give up my car. Obviously I also use trains but having a car is just too convenient in some situations and in some places not having a car is just disability.
The ticket achieves most of its goal even if you keep your car for the more annoying edge cases but move a significant fraction of your trips from car to rail.
The 49 euro ticket is a phenomenally good deal. Normal transit tickets vary per city, but for example in Berlin it's 3.50 per trip. So if you take transit twice a day for 7 days, you already recoup the cost of the Deutschland ticket, which lasts the entire month! This makes it good even for tourists who stay for ~a week.
At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in Germany, but a bit more borderline for a tourist.
Compare with eg Toronto's monthly pass, which is $156. A single trip is $3.35, which comes out to 24 two-trip days to recoup the cost of the card. That's almost exactly the number of business days in a month. And that card's only for Toronto!
One thing worth considering is that the 49€ ticket also lets you travel outside of your usual transit zone. We took so many “Deutschland Ticket trips” to towns that wouldn’t be worth a full-priced ticket. We just board the train with lunch and a beer, have a little day trip, then be home in the evening.
Berlin was also relatively cheap before. We already had sensible monthly passes. For people in parts of the Ruhrgebiet, the savings are even more substantial.
A London monthly travel card is £235 from zone 4 and £300 from zone 6. That's 420 to 540 CAD, and you get the pleasure of sweating in the tunnels, freezing on the overground platforms waiting for the next train 30 minutes and cancellations left right and centre.
At least they've finally got their shit together with mobile coverage.
Of course you get to use the buses too for that, and some of those were run by DB until this year, so it's nice to have been subsiding the the nice German tickets! They sold up to private equity, because of course they did, it's Britain and everything has to be private equity.
FWIW TFL is more reliable than DB AFAIK. But yeah...highest price per passenger mile is in the UK, it's ridiculous.
After the next elections, I fully expect it (and cannabis) to be reversed by the CDU, who will win without a doubt.
It is somewhat popular, so I doubt they will kill it outright. Rather I would guess they "reform" it: lots of variants, much higher price, beaurocratic hoops... and then when people stop using it, say "see, it wasn't so great after all".
Same playbook in the UK, where people like the NHS but certain parties don't.
Same playbook in the US, where "big government" has to be bad, so anything that does currently work well gets sabotaged.
A lot of times it's even worse than this, because what will happen is well-run public services will be sold off to the private sector. Who then runs away with extreme greed granted from the privilege of an inelastic market. So prices soar and quality plummets.
Then, we can point and say "see? Look at how bad it is! It would only be worse if the government ran it!"
Extra points if you're able to extract public funds to waste on such private endeavors. See: private schools in America (Yes, they get public funds!)
Well, of course, if we didn't have traffic ministers again and again, who do everything they can to make rail less attractive and road more attractive, then we could probably have a great system. But automobile lobby is so strong, they buy all the politicians in that role, probably even before they land in that role, so I guess normal people will have to keep suffering, so that those politicians can have a life of luxury. Thank you.
Quite many "normal people" also enjoy the freedom of the automobile. It has contributed significantly to the culture of autonomy, unity on large scales (beyond one's local town), and cosmopolitanism. Online, it is acceptable to be cynical about cars, but in the real world, among common people, this mindset is not that prevalent.
Even in European countries lauded for great public transport, people own and enjoy cars. Of course, there are benefits to public transport that the car cannot offer, such as efficiency at scale. But it's not so black-and-white. There are also benefits to car ownership that public transport cannot offer, such as independence.
One might say that Uber, car sharing companies, and shopping online are bridging the independence gap. To an extent, this is true. But not always. Particularly, not when the non-car-ownership option is much more expensive, and not when people’s needs demand a higher level of independence.
My point: much of this has more nuance than is opined online. Do not presume when speaking for “normal people”.
Personal opinion but I see personal cars as more of a burden than freedom, compared to public transport.
You need to care for the car even when you are not travelling. You need a parking space, insurance, maintenance, etc... And when you are driving, you need to be attentive, sober, and well rested, otherwise you are a danger to yourself and others. With public transport, you have none of that, no one will die if you take a nap, and once you are at your destination, you are free, you don't have a ton of metal to care for.
The same applies to taxis and ridesharing, but public transport is usually more efficient and cheaper.
"Normal people" are often short-sighted. They only know what they know. They're heavily advertised to, and they lack imagination.
In the US people are dropping like flies from obesity and disease. But even their day-to-day quality of life is awful, because naturally they don't feel good. A portion of this is directly because of a pro-car culture. When you can't walk anywhere ever that has an effect.
People in the US are still very pro-car. They can't, or maybe don't want to, connect the dots on the consequences of that. American individualism is so extreme that people are happy to kill themselves, so long as they're the one who pulls the trigger.
Their words may not be reliable. This is why we need data. How much money are average people spending? How healthy are average people? Etc etc. That should influence our decisions around public policy.
"Normal people" have been on overcrowded trains with spotty service. They know what putting someone else in charge of how, when and where they can travel inevitably turns out.
"Normal people" also know multiple people who have died in car accidents. They also struggle to walk up a flight of stairs and hate their lives.
Once again, you cannot trust what so-called "normal people" say. Particularly when there's political pressure at play. I'll say it again, but plenty of people would happily shoot themselves if they got to pull the trigger.
Hyper-individualism of the US, and the rest of the West to a lesser extent, is a cancer. We work hard every single day to ignore it's plagues. The extreme cognitive dissonance our citizens are forced to produce means they're not reliable narrators.
> Once again, you cannot trust what so-called "normal people" say.
Yes you can. That's what a democracy means.
Perhaps normal people also have a more substantiated view of facts :)
What does this mean?
The reality of the human condition is that humans will always GREATLY favor the status-quo, no matter what. Because they're already living it and, if they're not dying, they have a strong survival incentive to maintain it. Change is risk, and risk is bad.
When I get in my car to drive, I don't think "oh God this has the greatest chance of killing me out anything I can do". Even though it's true. Do you know why I don't think that?
Because that sucks ass. If I had to live like that, I'd probably kill myself. I'm here, with the status-quo. So, I must make the best of it.
I'm not unique. Every single person, you included, lives like this. You have no choice but to ignore as much of the bad shit as you can, because you can't fix it in your lifetime.
It's much easier, and better for your own health, to believe people are getting stabbed like kabobs in the subway and you're oh so safe and comfy in your nice suburban home. That's a much better thought process than the reality, which is that you're much more likely to die and it's not even close. So that's what you choose to believe and that's the belief you nourish.
It's comfirmation bias, but it's the life blood of the human condition. The alternative is worse.
Automobile lobby? That's BS. The German rail system has been cost-saved to death, it now barely handles the increased passenger volume as a result of the D-Ticket. Overcrowded trains, even more delays and train cancellations (b/c of insufficient staff coverage, malfunctioning doors, etc.) even with S-Bahn trains are getting out of hand. "Transitwende" my ass! Same with the "Energiewende".
How i envy the Dutch and Belgian transport situation!
I don't get why you would write your first two sentences. It is very obvious how the automobile lobby has a direct influence here. Here is an excellent documentary (in German) that analyzes the issues with the DB. https://youtu.be/-dmtNToFwuI?si=3ydA_QOjzOvTke2_&t=480 At the linked time stamp, they mention that every minister of transport in the very influential period from 2009-2021 came from Bavaria, with heavy influence from companies like Audi, MAN, and BMW.
> The German rail system has been cost-saved to death
Yes, because the the traffic ministers allocate the spending of their resort to the Autobahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn.
This last week we would've probably all seen the photos of the gridlock on I-75 as Tampa Bay residents fled Hurricane Milton. If you followed the story you know it eventually became almost impossible to evacuate.
We should also know how much more efficient buses are on roads at moving people than individual cars are. You can fit ~60 people on a bus that takes up the space of ~2 cars.
What should happen in these emergencies is there should be dedicated bus lanes and dedicates buses to evacuate people.
But beyond that, what we should learn from this is that lack of public transit (intracity and intercity) is a public safety issue. Cars simply aren't an efficient use of resources.
You can see from the comments here people will talk about "subsidies" for rail. Why does rail need to turn a profit? Roads don't. The Post Office doesn't. The Fire Department doesn't. Yet for some reason we hold public transport infrastructure to a higher standard.
Americans, in particular, love their cars. And there has been a powerful lobbying operation to associate rail with tax increases. This is so short-sighted because nobody is confiscating your car. Fewer people on the roads will improve your driving experience and travel times.
We see in the UK that it's cheaper to fly to Spain than to take intercity train journeys. As far as I'm concerned, citywide rail (eg the Tube in London, the NYC Subway) should be free and intercity rail should have a nominal cost that is cheaper than driving.
In some ways, it's all kind of moot, since the current usage of cars, trucks, planes is all unsustainable on short timescales (decades).
Bus and rail is likely to be unsustainable for much longer (centuries ?).
Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/ghg-abatement...
Funding road repairs, construction, and expansion from general tax revenues is similarly subsidizing a different mode of transit, and it's likely a much higher value than the 3b€ you mention (and likely more than overall railway sector subsidizing, tho I'm not familiar with Germany's budget). Also recognizing that other positive externalities exist, but pricing them at $0, seems silly.
Not to mention subsidised parking spaces. Free and even paid street parking is highly subsidised by the city and by other tax payers. There's also the environmental cost of not having that land be a park or nature and instead have it contribute to being an urban heat island with all its asphalt.
Healthcare cost also decline, and people become less sick because you have to walk some amount to get to the train.
The air quality improving should also be a factor.
Although you fall sick more often in winter when using public transportation.
Is that a rigorous statistical analysis or just your impression?
Some people actually try these things... And not writing an academic paper about it doesn't make it wrong.
Not writing an academic paper about it doesn't make it right either. This is the problem, when it's just hearsay, the rest of us have nothing to judge its accuracy with.
When looking at something as complex as people's behaviour, then it's worth allowing for seasonal variations in public transport use (e.g. when it's raining people may decide to get the bus rather than walk). Could it be related to the length of their journeys and/or their net worth? (There's a strong correlation between health and wealth). How does it compare to a similar section of the population that drive or cycle instead?
You can look into it yourself. This is a web forum, not university.
I don't understand how are your questions going to answer anything anyways - it's not like the answer is going to be the same anywhere.
in Paris (and pretty sure that applies to pretty much any big western city, new york for instance is worse in a few of the criterias ill reference) subway increase stress, frequent delays(if you have 2-3 train as part of your commute you will experience it daily), pollution down under is high, virus/covid transmission is high, pickpockets are everywhere if not worse, bedbug, pee smell, junkies. Id take a car any day.
So I live in NYC, and constant honking and worrying about being run over by cars when I'm trying to cross the street contribute way more to my stress than the state of the subway in NYC. Driving, or being around vehicles driving, is incredibly stressful.
Also, I was in Paris last year and I found your subway system more pleasant than ours. Methinks you doth complain too much.
I lived years in NYC and in Paris, it might be more pleasant on the touristic places and crime is definitrly less violent. for everything else it stays true and id take crossing the street and honking anyday versus having to deal with public transportation with all the drug addicts and violence that is in NYC subway. hell I was commuting walking 40 min morning 40 min night not to deal with subway
This is much less of a problem in large Asian cities. They're only really stressful in rush hour crowds. But in places like NY the public seems much less interested in the initial policing, maintenance, and cultural attitude shifts that would be required to make it happen. Like, you could still have the artists, street performers, and other so-called charming quirks while still making sure the problematic passengers get the help they need. What's it going to take? You could even do a trial period, like one year of safe, clean metros and see if people want to go back to the way things are now.
It is easy to say but not easy to do.
Post Szasz and Reagan we’ve had the policy of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Thus you have a lot of people with schizophrenia who have no insight into their condition who are very hard to manage. Even in a town where services are relatively available there are many people who take years to accept a diagnosis which can get them on disability and receiving permanent help.
Probably the best we can do for these people is get them stabilized on an antipsychotic drug and then get them in the clinic every few months for a depot injection but even that is pretty hard.
> deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill
This dates back to at least JFK and probably farther back. The institutions of the 1950s were terrible for the mentally ill - putting them on the streets is a better answer than the abuse a lot of them suffered. Of course the Kennedy's had enough to treat their mentally ill family members to better institutions than the government mandated ones.
If a reformed institution could treat the mentally ill better than the the streets is an open question - in theory it can, but human nature is all too often to abuse in that way and so you should question if any reform can stick. If you say yes then it is on you to verify. If you say no - we need a better answer than the street (I can't think of any - or at least not any that I don't have other objections to)
The Paris metro is amongst the most frequented in the world and operates near peak capacity. You absolutely can’t compare it to anything in Germany. Germany doesn’t really have a city which can be compared to Paris. Berlin has the most populated urban area and it has less than half the population of the Paris one. The only similar city in Europe is London.
Plus there is no bed bugs and pickpockets are an oddity outside of the most touristy stations.
Anyway, considering how awful it is to drive and park in Paris, you would have to be crazy to use a car instead of taking the train which is why nearly everyone does. Plus, with the mandatory employer subvention, it’s incredibly cheap at 44€ a month. The only credible alternative is biking which is indeed more and more popular.
pickpockets an oddity? brother I took all the suburban trains you can think of, the paris subway on a regular basis ive seen people injecting their arms on the wagon, antisemitic attacks, stabbings, punching, people shit on the floor, drunks and pickpockets are a daily thing in paris in EVERY public transportation. some bus lines in non-touristic areas are even so infamous that everyday legions of comments tell stories of how people got robbed their phones or wallets. ill take a car any day and guess what? that is what every rich person including the city mayor will do once they ban outsiders from having car in the name of greenwashing. they will ban cars in paris for middle class and then have people that drive ubers coming from poor suburbs and exploit them to drive around while us commoners have to live through the criminal hell that is paris public transportation.
Living since almost 15 years near Paris, in a few different places, regularly taking line B, C, D, M6, M7, M13, M1, some buses, as part of my regular commute, and have never encountered the shit you are talking about. I do know that some places are more problematic than others, by example M6 drivers regularly warn of pickpockets on saturdays (it's a touristic line, the only one I regularly take that have such announcements), sure not everything is perfect, but you are either biased (where did you live when you were in Paris?) or actually purposely actively trying to spread fud to insist like you are.
could you draw the magic wall that blocks pickpockets from stealing non touristic areas? i wanna make sure im not in one. you can go tonight around 8pm to porte de la villette and come back here tell me you felt safe.
even the RATP asking to close their stations but I am the one talking shit : https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/paris-ile-de-france/...
its very hard to understand paris subway is a living hell if you did not travel to better subways cities. seoul, tokyo, hong kong, taipei are what a subway should be. anything less is hell
First, please, be respectful. You are not my brother, nor my friend.
Second, why are you blathering so much non sense. I have been taking the Paris metro daily for the past decade, commuting on the B, then the 6 first, then the 8 as I moved. I regularly go around including on some of the allegedly poor lines and cross Gare du Nord quite often. Stabbings never happen. An attack would be a newspaper worthy thing. People don’t take shit in the metro. What kind of non sense is that. And pickpockets are limited to the touristy parts because well there is not much to pickpocket in the other parts.
At first, I thought you were some kind of Russian chill spreading misinformation but then it finally hit me that you are probably using your car all the time and trying to justify your prejudice.
everything I wrote I’ve seen it with my own eyes. saying brother to you is much more respectful than you calling me a russian troll. I am a second generation immigrant born in one of the worst suburb of Paris and everything I described I have seen it with my own eyes. also I don’t own a car. I just traveled and lived in many places (in US and asia) and can totally say the Paris subway is a horrible experience. people like you that have a strong political bias that make them bend the facts and reality are also the reason things won’t ever get better. Saying “pickpockets are only in touristy areas” just like if there was some magic line they wouldnt cross is the proof that you have gone away from facts and common sense. If I am telling you I know personally multiple bus lines being pickpocket-ridden where mostly parisian take the bus it is a fact and a reality. Your own experience of commuting might be different than mine good on you for enjoying it but maybe be tolerant enough to accept my own experience.
> strong political bias that make them bend the facts
I have a strong political bias because I feel the need to intervene when someone spread utter lies about stabbings in the Paris metro. Sure, I’m the one having issues here.
The issue is not accepting your experience. You are talking non sense about factual things.
Parisians mostly don’t take the bus by the way. The buses are awful and have been running like shit for the past two years as drivers are not being hired in preparation of the privatisation. Are you sure you actually know what you are talking about?
so now you half agree with me saying bus are awful. I just have now to convince you on trains, the other public transportation :)
many parisians take the bus to go through paths that are not covered well by subway especially true for horizontal paths for instance in left bank. ive seen a few stabbings myself taking rer and subway. i was even there when a random guy was stabbing people a few years back in st denis for no reason. I saw young people take out knives to fight after an argument, I ve seen people holding knives to threaten others. why do you think even the SNCF when they moved their office to saint denis wanted to have a specific arrival gate for their employees-only before backtracking when someone smarter than the average told them it would send the wrong message? have you came out next to barbes? have you seen that people got murdered just in front of gare du nord for no reason? have you been to north east stations where a horde (the right word) of junkies are crawling in the station and are all dangerous?
> so now you half agree with me saying bus are awful
They are awful because they are never on time. Your post is pure delusion. I feel insulted by you even implying I could half agree.
> why do you think even the SNCF when they moved their office to saint denis wanted to have a specific arrival gate for their employees-only before backtracking when someone smarter than the average told them it would send the wrong message?
You are unlucky. I was working as a contractor for SNCF at the time of the move so I 100% know that what you are saying is pure bullshit. There never was a plan for a separate gare. The part of Saint Denis where SNCF is is perfectly safe anyway. I find it hilarious that you think it's even possible to open a new gare for a specific use case on the RER D, one of the busiest line in one of the busiest metro network.
not a separate gare they wanted to have a specific arrival bridge to go to the office. about the perfectly safe I guess your colleagues disagreed and I also disagreed for having spent 20 year in st denis projects. but I guess im a russian troll : https://www.lemonde.fr/banlieues/article/2013/01/24/la-sncf-...
https://www.lefigaro.fr/societes/2013/01/16/20005-20130116AR...
https://www.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-vie-de-bureau/20140502...
Yes, even just 15 or 30 minutes more spent on commute every day is a significan quality of life decrease.
Absolutely. Next time you see a free parking spot mentally calculate the rent of ~10m² on that part of the city to understand how much of a subsidy that is. Then multiply by 50 parking spots in a street. Then think how many thousands there are all over the city...
do you have free parking? cities are making money out of parking spots. a lot of money. so much than one would say they have an incentive to reduce parking space to increase price and reduce expenses
Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue.
They should be making decisions based on how to improve quality of life for residents.
Parking should exist where public transport is not a viable option. Ideally the work to make public transport an option should be prioritised over the work to making parking exist.
Cities and councils can make money from public transport too, it'll work out OK revenue-wise, and quality of life improvements can be considerable.
Practically in a city like Ithaca NY there are stores like Wal-Mart that have oceans of free parking about a mile from the Ithaca Commons which is a pedestrian mall surrounded by parking meters and concrete corkscrews that cost about $1 an hour. Years ago local shops could stamp your parking ticket and give you a few hour for buying something but the city decided it couldn’t afford it.
That $1 isn’t much, but many believe the Commons can’t compete on that basis and shoppers will avoid the Commons and go to stores on the commercial strip instead, it doesn’t help that the Commons doesn’t have a diversity of shopping, instead it has some gift stores, a legal cannabis dispensary that is just about to reopen after being closed for some reason, numerous head shops, a bookstore, and numerous CBD stores that I think sell real weed in a back room.
Free parking sounds like government over-reach, communism even. We should leave it to the market to take care of.
> Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue.
... although if they were, the price of parking would be way higher. The optimal price for parking is a time-and-day-dependent price set high enough that around 10% of spots everywhere in the city are free at any given time, so that people who need parking can generally find it conveniently nearby to where they're going.
> set high enough that around 10% of spots everywhere in the city are free at any given time, so that people who need parking can generally find it conveniently nearby to where they're going
OTOH, if there is always that much space available (and presumably there didn't used to be before the price hikes) then it is evidence that a lot of people have chosen to go elsewhere because parking became too expensive.
Can the location compete with that "elsewhere"? If it is a unique location with unique reasons to visit, probably yes. But if it is the typical old downtown with stores competing with the strip mall with similar stores but free parking, probably not.
I've seen the depressing cycle of multiple vibrant downtown cores become abandoned after parking meters came in. I very much prefer a strong active downtown core even if finding parking is a pain, to one that is mostly all boarded up and abandoned but there's plenty of paid parking.
There's not that much free space available. It's a maximum of 10%. Almost everyone who was ever going to be able to go here is able to do so, they're just paying more for the privilege and they aren't wasting as much time driving around creating traffic trying to find parking.
Let's say there are 500 parking spots. With free parking and a vibrant area, all spots are taken and there are N people circling around looking for parking. Not sure what N is but let's say 50 (seems reasonable).
If after the price increase there are 10% (50) parking spots open, that means at least a 100 people went elsewhere (20%). That's a pretty significant drop in business to the local stores.
And speculation aside, I've seen this happen in two downtowns I frequented. Parking meters were installed, people went elsewhere, the vibrant downtown died and was boarded up and abandoned. And it's not just a transfer of business to a different location, but a loss of cultural significance. Because the old downtown had artists and musicians who no longer have a place at the strip mall. The stores moved, but the culture was lost.
> If after the price increase there are 10% (50) parking spots open, that means at least a 100 people went elsewhere (20%).
Your math ain't mathing.
parking costs over 200euros a day in Paris. the city also is on the board of private parking companies…. conflict of interest is high, corruption is also knocking at the door. greenwashing is the new criminal activity for suits
Yeah, any sane person looks at Paris and their first thought is "hmm, this needs more cars".
what is the relation. no one ever talked about more cars. I a merely asking why the mayor office is at the board of private parking companies getting paid for that while at the same time removing public parking space.
> Cities and councils should not be making decisions based on how to raise revenue.
Why not?
> They should be making decisions based on how to improve quality of life for residents.
Residents can use money to purchase goods and services to improve their quality of life.
> Parking should exist where public transport is not a viable option.
And the market can provide parking at market-prices. (And, cities and councils can perhaps also offer parking at market prices on their properties.)
You have a fundamentally different model of the social contract to me. We're unlikely to ever agree. However...
I believe that relying on individual purchasing power ("utility"), to improve the average quality of life is an experiment (often referred to as "Reganism" or "Thatcherism"), that after 40+ years of trialling has shown to be net negative to social mobility, overall net happiness and other factors important to me as a UK middle-class (this isn't the same as what middle-class means in the US), citizen with a significantly-above median income for my age, social background and other predictive factors, as compared to natural experiments in free market economies where such trials did not take place (most of Northern Europe), in the same time frame.
The core problem with free markets being used as a mechanism to settle all societies ills is that theory ignores natural monopolies. You can't have a car parking space and a children's park in the same place: you must make a choice. And if you choose based on economic utility, the outcome with the direct revenue will allow a realised "win" over that which has indirect or non-utility rewards such as "happy, well-adjusted, children who have learned to be nice to each other".
If you believe in the right wing view of economics without taking into account the lack of natural monopolies, you and I are unfortunately going to be so far apart from being able to find common ground we might just be wasting each others' time.
If you do understand the nature of a natural monopoly from a land use to utility company infrastructure, then you'll realise that when you follow the thread that car parking at market prices denies other monopoly uses of that land, that residents can't influence that through purchasing decisions, and that cities and councils would be failing in their duty to provide an equitable and comfortable city/town in which to exist by making decisions about monopoly situations purely based on revenue potential.
You can't have a car parking space and a children's park in the same place: you must make a choice.
They also provide utility. If you remove parking spaces near a children's park less children can/will visit. You need a balance.
Tell me you are an American, without telling me you are an American.
You can reach a children's park on foot or by taking public transportation, so ideally there's no need for a parking lot right next to it.
You can visit your local park hopefully you live in an area with one. You can invest time using transit to get to another park. Traveling during rush hour would be difficult. Traveling with many children or younger children adds a difficulty. Being disabled or older or worse disabled with children more difficult. For the young, childless, plenty of time on their hands or live next to a park of course walking a few steps is a no brainer.
But it's like buying a gym membership across town with the idea that you would walk everyday. You aren't going once winter hits.
Not American but have been young and took transit and walked everywhere but also seen seniors in wheelchairs who stopped going to the park after they stopped allowing cars to park.
Disabled etc spots are different imo. But most sane places have a mixture of parks/shops/other facilities within the bounds of a small neighbourhood that are easily walkable for most.
You can also use a bike or take a cab etc.
What percentage of people driving around in their 3-ton trucks are disabled? This is an argument for fewer cars, not more: so that people who truly need it can use it more efficiently.
What social contract? That's a convenient fiction, but no one ever agreed to any social contract anywhere.
My adopted home of Singapore goes a lot harder on private initiative than Thatcher and Reagan ever dreamed off. And thanks to that, and some other factors, they went from third world to first world (or arguably zeroth world) in less than a generation.
> The core problem with free markets being used as a mechanism to settle all societies ills is that theory ignores natural monopolies. You can't have a car parking space and a children's park in the same place: you must make a choice.
You might want to read up on how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
What you are describing here has nothing to do with a 'natural monopoly'.
Funny enough, most places in the US have outrageous mandatory minimum parking space requirements. A free market would most likely provide less street parking. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parking_mandates and especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
Revenue means people are willing to pay for something, something they value. So it's not the be-and-end-all for how to run your city, but it's better than many other ways political decisions are made. (And better than whatever political decision procedure leads to mandatory minimum parking requirements, IMHO.)
The fact that you didn't explicitly opt-in to it before you were born does not mean there is no implicit social contract between you and your fellow citizens.
> What social contract? That's a convenient fiction, but no one ever agreed to any social contract anywhere. My adopted home of Singapore goes a lot harder on private initiative than Thatcher and Reagan ever dreamed off.
Do you chew gum when you are at home in Singapore? No, you don't, because it's illegal. Did you agree to that, were even you given a choice? No, of course not.
Singapore is more authoritarian than most liberal democracies. That means you do as your told. That's the social contract. If you disagree with the people in power to loudly, you got to rot in jail. https://www.smh.com.au/world/lee-kuan-yew-a-towering-figure-...
As it happens, Singapore got lucky. The people in charge are good at running a country efficiently. In particular, they didn't line their own pockets too aggressively - certainly not in a way that was out of line with liberal democracies. The Singapore it's an outlier compared to other authoritarian countries. Generally, once politicians eliminate the competition, they use their control to milk the economy for all they are worth.
> Do you chew gum when you are at home in Singapore? No, you don't, because it's illegal. Did you agree to that, were even you given a choice? No, of course not.
It's more like a license than a contract.
> Singapore is more authoritarian than most liberal democracies.
The Singaporean government is a smaller part of life than in most other places. Much less red tape to fill out before you are allowed to do anything and regulations are simpler.
Yes, there are some weird regulations about how you can say things. But they affect the form more than the substance. You are pretty much allowed to say whatever you want, just not however you want it.
Yes, Singapore got lucky in that they had (and have) a hardworking population, and competent leadership.
Why do you insist that Singapore is authoritarian? We have free and fair elections, that are regularly observed to be so by international organisations.
Well I'm not going back to Singapore until they treat gay men like myself better. I've been there; Singapore is a private money pit/playground for Western and Asian high business, much like Dubai.
When have you last been? They have recently improved the de jure treatment of gay people. (The de facto treatment hasn't changed.)
I agree that the laws about homosexuality are weird, but they are also democratic: it's broadly in line with what the population wants as far as I can tell.
That's not what democratic means. If the people did not vote on them, it's not democratic, even if it appears as though they would hypothetically vote for it.
Without trying to ridicule you, asking “what social contract?” In this kind of discussion is like a first year university student asking “what’s a fraction?” in first year maths classes.
An entire section of philosophy is built on this question alone, and why there is such a thing as a social contract.
> An entire section of philosophy is built on this question alone, and why there is such a thing as a social contract.
The existence of the towering edifice of Catholic theology doesn't disprove Hinduism. (Nor does it prove Catholicism.)
> Residents can use money to purchase goods and services to improve their quality of life.
i live in a city with pollution problem. where can i buy this clean air to improve the quality of my life?
Air filters are a fairly common purchase to increase this.
You might want to look up Coasian Bargaining.
public transportation is not a viable option in the west. too much crime too many lenient judge. in asia it is top notch. because people are educated and this just works. once we fix this you can take our cars.
They make money because they don't have to pay for the true value of the land. It's free to them.
It's still a subsidy because they are charging less than the market value of the most valuable possible use.
I think even high rates don't get close to breaking even.
It has secretly become unrealistic to have cars in a city, we still do it but more out of tradition. You wouldn't build parks (tho that would be nice) 1 parked car, the road next to it and the second side walk take about as much space as an apartment and we stack those one on top of the other.
Something like this is quite hilarious if you think about it.
https://www.alamy.com/parking-in-the-courtyard-of-high-rise-...
It reminds me of grazing cows having 80 times as much space as people in some parts of my country.
You don't have to build it like that. Where I live now, the parking lot is effectively the basement under the apartment buildings and playground. You'd barely interact with it unless you're driving.
Well when you put it like that it sounds very economical!
Housing is getting so expensive that people share tiny apartments while still able to afford two cars. With that ratio you need 10 floors of parking for 10 floors of housing.
I always thought it funny how popular elevators are for vertical travel. A monorail station in the basement or even a ski lift seems a lot less space consuming.
If it means you can get a home 120m2 (1300 sq ft) in stead of 60m2 (650 sq ft) it seems worth considering.
Yes, though all of that is more of an argument in favour of dropping car subsidies, than an argument in favour of more rail subsidies.
Road wear scales with the fourth power of weight over the axle so, even with personal cars getting heavier, I’m not sure that moving people from cars to trains makes much of a difference – I think most wear typically comes from heavy vehicles or weathering – so it mightn’t make much difference to repair costs.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t other advantages. Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy, and time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.
> time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.
This is not really true on busy trains. I've commuted both on trains and in cars, and when comparing transportation methods near the saturation point, cars win when it comes to personal comfort.
A traffic jam is no fun, but you can still sit, aren't jostled about by other people, have your personal space, and keep your climate controlled to a good level.
In a full train, you will be standing up, pressed against a bunch of other people. The climate will be other people's sweat. You may be able to use your phone, but not much more.
On a longer quiet route the train can be very nice. Get your laptop out, do a little work, nice coffee or tea with you. But on a busy commuter line it's more annoying than a car.
> I've commuted both on trains and in cars, and when comparing transportation methods near the saturation point, cars win when it comes to personal comfort.
Note that if you're at the saturation point of both modes, you're moving a lot more people with (light/heavy) rail:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity
Also worth considering that while it may be personally comfortable for you in on saturated rail, you're still moving towards your destination, whereas at car saturation you may be physically comfortable, but you are not making progress towards your goal of actually achieving your goal of getting to your destination while your speed is zero.
That is like saying that with pig factory farming (aka intensive pig farming) you can produce far more meat per square foot than with organic pig farming and therefore it must be better.
> […] and therefore it must be better.
Yes, it is better from a capacity point of view.
If you have a linear path that is x metres wide, and you want/need to move a certain number of people, not-cars will move more people:
* https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Corridor...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis–Mogridge_position
Or, from another perspective, you have a budget of $/€ y for transportation, what mode of transportation will allow you to move the most people for that money? Unless you believe in MMT, government budgets are a finite resource, so how do we get the most bang for our buck?
Certainly you need some roads as vehicles such as trucks (UK: lorries) are very handy for society in running the economy. I myself own a car, a motorcycle, a bicycle, and have a transit pass (though I can use debit/credit tap-to-pay) and use each mode when appropriate. But the overemphasis on automobiles—specifically for private transportation—is suffocating the availability for other options.
To go back to your analogy: if you have a starving population, then factory farming is better because you can provide more calories to more people (and probably at lower cost). In that case organic is worse because you may be sacrificing people's well-being by not having enough capacity. Once you solve your first problem (enough calories/capacity), then you have the luxury of other considerations.
Obviously it is better. The better alternative to intensive animal husbandry is not eating meat (or other animal products, but in a lesser way) than greenwashing via "organic" designation.
I.... I really don't feel like driving in a traffic jam is better than being in a train in anything except the most extreme cases of train crowding. I haven't experienced massive commuter driving but even the cases I've just been stuck in stop and go traffic for 30 minutes it felt worse than any train ride I've taken except for the few times I was in "I feel like I'm going to get crushed" levels of crowded.
And like... generally speaking, the crowded train is still going to get you where you need to go. I don't know how you walk away from the 30 minute trip that took 2+ hours with any happy feelings. To each their own of course
I want to preface this by saying that my favourite mode of transportation has been NS rail in the Netherlands, but that I do 99% of my travel (where I live, in Canada) by car since I live outside of the city.
>the cases I've just been stuck in stop and go traffic for 30 minutes it felt worse than any train ride I've taken except for the few times I was in "I feel like I'm going to get crushed" levels of crowded.
I would much rather sit in a seat that has been meticulously adjusted to fit my body perfectly, with climate controlled to the exact temperature I want, with music/audiobook/etc playing at the exact volume I want, with 0 encroachment on my personal space, than to sit on a crowded commuter train, where crowded == more or less every seat is taken, with some people likely standing. I don’t care if I have to be in stop and go traffic for a bit, I know how to drive smoothly (usually smoother than trains) and I have pretty good patience, so I just sit there and relax listening to music for a bit longer than normal.
Maybe if you drive a particularly barebones/uncomfortable car[0] I could see a train being preferable. Aside from that, I will take the car over the train for commuting pretty much every time. The exception is if the train is notably consistently faster, or if I’m somewhere like the Netherlands where cars are more of a general inconvenience.
[0] Or any modern non-luxury car, since every manufacturer has decided “sporty” sells so you need 20” wheels with rubber band tires and sports suspension on your commuter car. I would highly recommend driving something like a 1990s Buick Roadmaster or Chevrolet Caprice, or Lincoln Continental, or equivalent vehicle - we had figured out how to make commutes incredibly comfortable for little money 30 years ago, but it seems like pretty much everyone forgot.
> I don't know how you walk away from the 30 minute trip
You never drove with the DB before I take it (die Bahn - German trains). You routinely have that a 30min trip takes multiple times of what it should.
* train coming in late * no replacement * suddenly from another track * people taking their life * missing the follow train * having to wait because an ICE gets priority
You don't know how many trips I had to cancel because coming 3 hours to late (when starting the trip 30min early) isn't viable.
Yeah sure being in a traffic jam sucks! Big time. I hate it with all my heart, but I then start playing a podcast or calming music and actually get something out of it. It's actually not so nervewracking if you change your mindset. It bothers me more that I know that my mileage will tank for that short while... But yeah if I can I stay at home...
I'm fortunate enough to have only taken trains in places where there's an understanding that people actually... really actually do need to get to where they're going.
If your network doesn't have any sort of resilliance to failure, not much to do really.
(Aside: for the longest time I was always a bit miffed at France's train network, because it's mostly "go to Paris"/"move away from Paris" and very few sideways connections. Germany's transit map has always looked more evenly spread out! But every German I know who tries to take train transport complains about this lack of resiliance and now I'm pretty convinced that the network is too thinly spread out)
i also live in germany and its crazy. we are one to of the most developed country in the world and our train suck that hard that beeing stuck in traffic is way more pleasant and faster then beeing stuck somewhere for hours because of die bahn.
and that’s frequent. i did have to take the train for 6 months with 1 change of train and it was completely full all the time and late half the time so a missed the other train. its not all trains but some are freaking late all the time. especially those between frankfort and stuttgart.
there is a talk from daniel kriesel on youtube called bahn mining. very worth it
edit:// i use the 49 ticket because it is nice to use trams and buses in towns.
But if the train is that busy it likely couldn’t be replaced by people travelling in personal cars anyway as they would take up to much road space and cause a huge traffic jam and there would be nowhere to park at the end of the journey in a presumably dense city centre.
Most people are likely buying this for the regional tickets. Those trains sell seats, and do not have passengers standing for the 1-3 hour journey.
> Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy
Looking at most German cities, the effect of this is negligible.
I actually observe reduction of parking spaces in public spaces.
Although I don't think it could be an effect of Deutschlandticket, too little time to have an effect IMHO.
German cities have much less parking lots than American ones because of the way they were built. There may be a few that you can replace with a building, but not a lot.
Aren’t roads necessary from a “last mile” perspective for like, all sorts of things a functioning country needs? Last time I checked trains don’t run directly from farms to grocery stores and so we need trucks and therefore roads in order to get food to consumers, among other things.
Much less roads. Humans can walk - and for health should.
a few trucks are still needed but trucks used to haul are a minoricy of traffic
> Aren’t roads necessary from a “last mile” perspective for like, all sorts of things a functioning country needs?
Yup, absolutely! But at least where I've worked on road design, the number of lanes on a local road is governed pretty much solely by the number of cars (trucks just have a larger impact on asphalt structure choices and, balance with the impacts of freeze-thaw, resurfacing schedule).
But this is about longer distance travel - trains generally being used for intercity travel vs highways. Even still, I don't argue against road subsidization, but rather in favour of more train subsidization.
They're necessary because cities are built around the idea that everything must be done through a car, so roads become necessary. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The underlying discussion is all about urban planning and how we want societies to organize space.
I do not know about Germany, but most countries have taxes on car ownership and fuel, so you need to offset those against the expenditure on roads. Road construction and maintenance also benefits other road users - transport vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians and emergency vehicles etc.
The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles.
Think of how often dedicated walking and cycling routes need to be repaved—almost never.
Car owners only pay about half of the cost of road maintenance in the US[1].
[1] https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
> The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles.
This should read: The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by heavy trucks.
Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight. A fully loaded cement truck or transport truck is doing way more damage than a fully loaded box truck, which is doing much more damage than a Hummer EV, which is doing much more damage than a Tesla Model S or F150, which is doing more damage than a Nissan Micra or Mazda Miata. Here’s[0] a page with a neat chart showing relative comparisons. Note that it tops out at 18k lb trucks, which are ~1200x as damaging as something like a Prius; it doesn’t include fully loaded trucks, which can exceed 80k lbs in North America. The amount of damage to roads they do compared to average or lightweight cars is mind boggling.
[0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...
Once you get into those larger vehicles, vehicle weight doesn't matter so much (for regulations and for road wear). What matters is axle weight, which stays fairly consistent as you increase overall vehicle weight. eg for delivering bulk construction materials, dump trucks have either one, two, or three load axles (along with the steering axle, which is calculated separately), and the load it can carry scales pretty closely with that (gross around 10t per axle (22k lbs), net around 7t per load axle). Anything over the standard limit pays significant fees for a permit (at least where I am)
How much in germany, which is what the post is about? How much in other countrie?
> The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles.
Given the fourth power law I find it hard to believe that larger vehicles, especially good vehicles , are not significant.
Even without wear, surfaces deteriorate. You cannot claim that pavements and cycle lanes are zero maintenance, or have negligible costs to build.
German chancellor plans to put road repairs into 2% mandatory defense budget to meet NATO requirements, so not that much of a load to overall german budget.
Not trying to detract discussion, just finding it hilarious that when facing a potentially existential threat from russians who repeatedly claim they will wipe them out, they will do just about anything rather than making their military into something a bit better than an chronically underfunded joke its now.
Actually, it makes quite a bit of sense to plan ahead to make sure that your infrastructure can efficiently transport the weapon systems you already have, or you are planning to have.
What's the use of tanks if you can't get them to the battlefield? [1]
Although some infrastructure was already built taking logistics into account [2], concrete structures have a life expectancy of about 50 years, and many bridges are past that age and need urgent replacement. And that costs a lot of money.
A small reminder on the importance of bridges: [3]
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/what-can-stop-nato-...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64664944
It is also important to make sure your military equipment can travel across rough ground after the retreating enemy has destroyed all roads, rails, and bridges. Of course in that situation you don't care much about saving the ground you are covering while chasing the enemy, but lack of roads is not fatal (there is good reason the military likes it - it makes their logistic much easier on safe ground)
A strong German military with an ascendant far right party. What could possibly go wrong.
I believe the road budget was 132.8 billion between 2016 and 2030
Germany spends some 70 billion euros maintaining the road system, only about a third of which is offset by taxes on drivers [1]. If we accept that investments in roads reduce carbon emissions by 0 million tonnes per year, then that works out to NaN € per tonne -- much worse than other carbon abatement methods!
Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore wouldn't be privy to them. Instead I rely almost exclusively on Germany's public transport for my daily commutes, which I find perfectly satisfactory for this purpose and significantly more convenient than parking and maintaining a car.
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[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...
A third can't be right. 15 billion from petrol and 18.2 billion from diesel alone make up almost half of that. 48.76 million vehicles times €100 (back of the envelope calculation) for vehicle tax puts that number above half.
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Taxes/Excise-Du...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/810662/passenger-cars-st...
https://www.zoll.de/DE/Unternehmen/Kraftfahrzeugsteuer/Steue...
From the article (sorry for the bad link before; fixed below [1]):
> The revenue from taxes and levies on road traffic amounts to around 50 billion euros annually. Around half of this is earmarked by law via the mineral oil tax, i.e. around 25 billion euros. This means that just over a third (36%) of the earmarked revenue from road traffic covers the costs of roads and other facilities such as parking lots and the like. It is therefore clear that the public sector is heavily subsidizing road traffic.
My understanding is that these two forms of taxes add to more than 50%, but then almost half of those taxes must be reinvested elsewhere by law (i.e., not into roads), hence the 1/3 figure. But even if you ignore this reallocation of taxes, you still have a deficit of around 20 billion euros.
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[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...
I'm a bit baffled why Germany's numbers are so bad here. In the UK the government takes far more in revenue from drivers than it spends on the roads.
That's because the selection of numbers is a little bit weird. The 70 billion on the cost side are composed of 38 billion for construction and maintenance, 14 billion for traffic police and 18 billion for public funds spent for accidents. The generated income is only taxes on fuel and the tax car owners have to pay.
If you include the cost of the traffic police, there is way more stuff that you can include on the income side like taxes on car sales and part of the cost comes also back to the government in the form of taxes. There is likely also a large part of the costs that is missing. Doing this properly is a lot of work and doing it precisely is hard to impossible. These sort of things almost always include estimates for the higher order effects.
Btw: I googled the study[1] and apparently it was funded by the "Netzwerk Europäischer Eisenbahnen e.V." (Network of European Railways Association). I would take any statements and numbers with a huge grain of salt.
[1]: https://www.htw-berlin.de/forschung/online-forschungskatalog...
Maybe in UK local roads are funded differently? If you counted only national roads in Poland it would seem that Poland takes more in revenue than spends on roads, which isn't true if you count expenses on all the local roads that aren't in national budget.
No my op includes local roads though you're right you do have to gather the data from local authorities
Although the UK probably still makes cars, making and exporting cars is not as big a part of the UK economy as it is of the German economy.
Maybe that is why.
> 15 billion from petrol and 18.2 billion from diesel alone
Not all petrol or diesel is consumed by motor vehicles that (primarily) drive on the road.
Even if you don't drive a car yourself you depend a lot on things delivered by road. Most of the road wear is done by trucks bringing you food, construction materials and whatever else. You can't exactly replenish your local grocery store by rail or cargo bike.
Most of the need for roads though is cars. It is rare to see a multi-lane road where trucks are restricted to only 1 lane and cars allowed the rest - if though trucks wouldn't fill that single lane and in turn the other lanes could be built much cheaper. (in part because the road needed for a car isn't that much cheaper than the road needed for a truck - labor is about the same, and weather is often a large factor)
Yes if there are trucks the road maintenance is A LOT more expensive.
But we could definitely have 99% being done over rail and 1% by road.
Show your work.
Plenty of transportation is already done by rail. Even halving road delivery without degrading service is nigh impossible.
Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.
Gp said they know about these other factors but doesn't know how to price them. Do you know a way?
"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.
Nobody said that. But if you're gonna spend the public money, you need some way of determining "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing".
We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.
If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with.
Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even try to put a value on how we spend public money will not be a reasonable stance until public money is infinite.
This analogy simply doesn't work because transit isn't fungible. Trains and air travel or cars simply aren't "the same park". The benefit of trains is objectively not just the carbon footprint. The money spent by the government benefits the public in other ways, not just environmentally. Ignoring the wear on (and cost of ownership of) personal vehicles, for instance, dismisses a huge amount of savings for folks who can take trains instead. Rail travel is safer and results in fewer deaths. The list goes on. Even "having a train that takes me to work so I can relax on my commute" is an important one. And many of those things are almost impossible to truly quantify the monetary value of and jam into a spreadsheet.
All the things you listed are examples of "other axes" that I listed as being valid objections. I also agree that it's hard to estimate the dollar cost or benefit of these things. But I think we do have to attempt to estimate it, since we have no other sensible way to decide how to allocate public funds.
It's not even all that difficult to estimate, really. For example, every business does it, of necessity.
Society is not a business.
Markets are a useful tool that societies use to optimize certain kinds of capital allocation and goods production, where that makes sense. No more no less.
Most of the things societies value most highly don't fit into the market hole.
If trains were exclusively a mechanism for capturing or avoiding carbon, then the metric of $ / tons would be valid. Trains very obviously are not that.
> It's not even all that difficult to estimate, really. For example, every business does it, of necessity.
This isn't even true. I run a business, and I frequently make decisions based on what I believe to be the right thing to do rather than what the data shows as being the most profitable outcome. The very notion of a "loss leader" is driven on fuzzy data where execs simply hope the loss in revenue from sales is made up for in other benefits that can't be concretely valued.
Can you estimate the dollar value of happiness?
Yes. For that matter, you can calculate the dollar value of a human life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life
Numbers vary around the world, but FEMA in the US decided on $7.5M in 2020.
Financial investments are economic decisions. Whether or not you like the idea of assigning financial value to fuzzy concepts like happiness or quality adjusted life years, you still have to do it. The simple act of choosing to spend $N or not choosing to spend $N puts an implicit price on the result.
By putting approximate numbers in the spreadsheet - no matter how crude - we can at least end up consistent and fair. Otherwise we could end up spending vast sums to make a few people a little happier instead of smaller sums to make lots of people a lot happier.
Can you estimate the additional happiness brought by trains?
No, but we can look at the amount of misery, that is prevented by not using cars. Traffic jams, pollution, accidents, waste of resources,... The difference is so huge, we don't need to put a number on it. Public transport might be unpleasant for the individual, but is clearly very much better for everyone than using cars.
> Public transport might be unpleasant for the individual
Where is this true?
When it’s overcrowded, typically caused by policies such as work from office.
At least here, that only happens the day after holidays.
The park to park comparison is the opposite of what's being discussed. That's comparing the value of apple to another from the same tree - there are many subjective elements to compare but given that they're both nearly identical it's quite easy. Still doesn't fit on a spreadsheet e.g. bitterness, likelihood of having a worm inside, prettiness, whatever.
What is being suggested is comparing a train subsidy to... Unknown. Other modes of transportation? The money being spent on other carbon reduction efforts?
I don't understand why carbon reduction is the primary topic for discussion when trying to put a dollar value on the thing. Two apples are still a little difficult to compare but you at least can agree that the bigger tastier one is probably better value (unless the smaller is cheaper and you need to do gram for dollar value, idk, good luck). A train vs other things though is imo essentially impossible to compare, a genuine apples to oranges comparison.
For carbon reduction, I challenge the OP estimate. It assumes everyone drives if no train, as I understand it. So that's the carbon reduction comparison - wow great so many people not driving. But it's not just that. Less parking lots need to be constructed. Less concrete, less carbon. Less roads need re paving every 10 years or whatever - let's compare the carbon of rail maintenance to an asphalt road. Less car accidents, less cars needing to be recycled at plants. Maybe city designs start accommodating the train subsidy, less car centric design, more vertical and dense, less car travel that wouldn't have been served by the train but is now served by walking. On and on and on.
You can't compare these two on carbon alone, and that's not even considering the fact that I find it kinda ridiculous to focus on just carbon as a measure of worth-to-humans. There's so many other factors at play that I genuinely think it's impossible to put a dollar value on. Reduction in road noise for people near the highway. Reduction in smog and thus a reduction in lung cancer and related medical costs. Reduction in human deaths from car accidents. Increase in psychological happiness in commuters not exposed to daily road rage and also suddenly having more time to read or play games. Endless, endless comparisons.
Dollars are a bad way to measure value. We either need a new way to describe value-for-dollars or a new way to describe actual value. Conflating the two was capitalism's ultimate coup and this thread is a great example of why.
>Less parking lots need to be constructed. Less concrete, less carbon. Less roads need re paving every 10 years or whatever - let's compare the carbon of rail maintenance to an asphalt road.
Yes, these are all valid other axes to consider. I nevertheless think it's necessary to estimate each of their values as so many "points", which, yes, may be subjective. Those points might as well be dollars, because dollars are what we (as the local government) finally wind up spending on whatever projects we decide on.
Why "might as well be?" Dollars can't accurately determine something's real value and I'm baffled that people continually assume this.
A teacher is more valuable than an investment banker and yet the investment banker is paid more. Maybe I can make a spreadsheet of all the instances of such things and it would reach tens of thousands of rows. It seems to me plain as day so I don't get it.
Sometimes the dollar value is accurate, often not. The frequency that it's incorrect makes me wonder at the authority we grant dollar valuations.
Who's "we"? The public is mostly not made up of consultants and do not appreciate consultant logic being applied to everything. People would prefer to define values and then act on those values.
So you would be good with spending more money and even increasing total carbon footprint, if it just felt good?
Seriously, if you're not going to measure anything or use logic, I'm not sure how you can even call them "defined" or "values". It sounds like, "I saw it on TV/internet/billboard so it must be true".
Yes, because that is exactly how American cities are currently built today -- expensive carbon-intensive roads paved out to sprawling suburbs, the independent financial upkeep of which is not sustainable long-term. [0]
The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1]
From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized.
If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all.
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[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/12/6-principles-f...
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
Strong towns is a terrible source of numbers and has been debunked many times. Streetcar suburbs have been sustaining themselves for 140 years - rebuilding their infrastructure. Infrastructure is a tiny % of any government budget (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...) and so infrastructure spending could go up a lot.
I didn't say that. The OP argued "Actually this is bad because the cost per ton of carbon saved is higher than some other way to save carbon."
The original replyer pointed out that "ways to save carbon" are not necessarily fungible and there are other benefits to subsidized rail travel. The followon dismissal was to throw back and come up with a way to "price" those other benefits.
What I am objecting to is the entire chain of thinking that starts with trying to do simplistic, reductionist price comparisons and then refusing to consider other factors that don't fit in the pricing exercise.
That isn't "consultant logic", that's the way the world works. Resources are finite. We can't do everything everyone wants to do, so we need some means of prioritizing which things we are to do. You can call names all you want, but this is an unavoidable reality of existence.
Here's an alternative proposition then: try those things and if there's demand - stick to them.
No need for estimations, especially that they're typically wildly off, as the world is too complicated to summarise it on a spreadsheet.
> "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing"
We don't even do that for cars. We shifted most of the transport cost to the individuals without any calculation. Nowadays, cars are the most costly item in a household besides the house itself, is that okay? I'm not so sure.
A car is an incredibly complex and incredibly useful machine. In a non-feudal banker run economy, a car would cost 5 times as much as a house. Or rather the house would be 5 times cheaper than the car.
The cost of something is not related to what it is worth to life. In any case the real measure is what someone is willing to pay. I'm driving a 25 year old car because I choose to buy a more expensive house, and put my kids in various activities - as a result I don't have enough money left over to pay for a new car. I do have enough money to pay for a used car when the current one breaks and is unfixable, but I have choosen to spend elsewhere - those used cars provide exactly as much value to me as a new car and save me money. (I save even more money by riding my bike where possible so I rarely drive)
A 25 year old car is still several orders of magnitude more complex than a house.
Any man can build a house for himself and his family if he sets his mind to it.
Almost no man can build an even semi-modern car. They depend on huge supply chains and thousands of specialized workers.
The house is artificially made more expensive than the car, as a vehicle for inflationary money making.
The house is "made more expensive" because land and materials are scarce.
You can, right now, build your own house. And it won't be cheap if it's anywhere that matters.
Also we have standards and regulations. Turns out burning down entire cities because of some cost cutting sucks, so we did away with that.
Neither land nor materials are scarce. They've been artificially made expensive to prop up the feudal system. This planet is still mostly wilderness - go zoom in anywhere on Google Maps and you'll see. And building materials are easy to find in nature everywhere except for in the oceans and the deserts.
I know it's easy and a habit to always defend the status quo, no matter what it is, but when it comes to housing the situation is much beyond ridiculous. I can purchase a literal airplane for half of what it would cost me to buy a run-down shack where I'm from, which is a region that neither has any high paying jobs nor lack of space. It's a mostly deserted, low-population density region, with population shrinking every year because people cannot afford a fucking simple house to live in. Housing prices has nothing to do with economy nor supply and demand. It is all politics and it's all a scam.
By the way, what do you think it takes in energy, factories and labour to make the material needed for a car? A whole lot more than what it takes for a house.
> This planet is still mostly wilderness
Ah, you made the classical blunder of forgetting location matters!
Living in the woods sounds grand until you have to live in the woods. The vast majority of humans prefer to live in Urban areas, where land is more expensive.
Living in the woods also sounds fun until you realize you have no infrastructure for anything. How will you shop? Cook? Entertain yourself?
There is a lifestyle there, yes. But that's the trick - lifestyle. You have to dedicate your life to achieving just the basics.
I wrote in the comment above that land and housing is expensive also in regions with low population density. Because the land owners there also demand top dollar for the land they have. The same problems are in rural areas as in urban areas, of course it is accentuated more in urban areas since those are also places where people can make a high income and population is denser.
I've lived in the woods, so I know exactly how it is. As long as you have a vehicle you are fine. Haven't you ever been outside of a city in your life? They have energy and modern comforts. I've lived off grid as well, and that was fine. You have to plan differently.
You are arguing from obsolete standpoints, which probably have never been true. Why? To defend a status quo that is strangling generations of people?
> As long as you have a vehicle you are fine
Right, so a vehicle... and a road and a city and thousands of years of human innovation.
> They have energy and modern comforts
Right, at the expense of the city which keeps the rural and even suburban areas on Welfare. Because providing funding to places where nobody lives in a money burner. Luckily, the "status-quo" is 100% to burn money on rural and suburban areas.
So, congratulations, the status-quo benefits you.
> Right, so a vehicle... and a road and a city and thousands of years of human innovation.
Or a boat, you know? Roads are everywhere and have nothing to do with any urban/rural division you feel so strongly about.
> So, congratulations, the status-quo benefits you.
I live in the city.
> I live in the city
That's actually hilarious
Yes, that is right. Opinion building is a thing in a democracy.
The problem with op is that he attaches a strong value statement ("isn't good value") to an incomplete assessment. Now that's doing politics! Isn't that what we want to get away from? Don't we want to have it all objective and fact based?
So here is the question: How should we make decisions? Is it possible to use $ as a neutral decision making data point? Or do we have to discuss things broadly, and include elements that haven't been broken down to the cent, to reach a consensus about how we want to organise society?
The concept is called "measurability bias"
These incentive is not permanent or has to be.
You try it, if thing gets better you keep it or you stop it.
I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.
If Germany wants to be a militarized state again, the infrastructure will be fixed again. You have to transport things around.
Tbh, i think, germany has too much not needed but costly infrastructure maintained only for a few people.
> germany has too much not needed but costly infrastructure maintained only for a few people
What infrastructure do you mean? Can you give an example?
so how do you propose the limited public money ought to be spent on which project? Perhaps just feel good vibes?
I agree with you that it's important to avoid using such a bad strategy as feel good vibes, which could easily happen if one is careless.
However it might suffice to find a strong justification, rather than a pure quantification. One way to build such a justification is to consider rail transport as a part of a coherent whole, as part of a broader vision.
Indeed I think such a strategy can result in a better outcome than the one arising from optimizing everything in isolation; the latter risks leading to a local optimum.
However it is key that the vision is feasible and correctly evaluated. If one were to bet everything on one vision and that vision failed, if say one important factor was forgotten and not accounted for, the result might be rather unfortunate.
So concretely, making local public transport cheaps could fit into a vision of "where will people live, where will they work, and how will they commute from the first place to the second". Whereas including intercity rail and bus is harder to understand maybe it would fit into a vision of "how people will keep in contact with old friends and relatives after moving cities". Maybe "how people will spend their vaction, or go on business trips"?
Let's focus on the former one. It could then go hand in hand with zoning regulation, public-private partnership of building housing+utilities etc. Trying to encourage certain industries to provide jobs.
Asthma from air pollution is calculatable.
Cancer reduction, road repairs, reduction in vehicle costs for tax payers, reduction in road fatalities, all of these can be added up.
Ok, the GP is only using carbon offsets, but the economic one are just as good. Forgoing car ownership allows for that money to then go other economic uses. Forgoing fuel costs, $20 for electric, $100 for gas, again allows that to go into the other areas of the economy. These are easy to calculate, why not use them?
Road building and maintenance avoided?
I know a way.
Politics.
Doesn't having a car do this too?
No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
Then you've instead created sprawl which has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use, as well as disconnecting people and communities.
> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
Do they pay for the streets in low density suburbs or do local towns and cities? Also, water infra, electrical infra, etc.
That figure includes every single government-owned street, AFAIK. Total infrastructure costs are higher but don't seem that much higher than in Germany?
TxDOT does not maintain local or county roads which are a massive portion of cost in sprawl.
To add specifics: Dallas does not cover road maintenance with its budget and must sell bonds to cover the $10b in "deferred maintenance".
https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2024/04/a-voters-guide...
> Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be
I'm not convinced this is true. Because a train enables more density, it enables more places you can reach once on it. A car enables more geographical area, but there is a lot less things to do in that area, and those things to do are what matters. If you want to go camping miles from anyone else than a car will get you there, but if you want to do a city activity (restaurant, movies, live music, show, work) a train can get you to a much greater variety of those things.
Note that with both the real question is the network. A car where there are not roads won't get you anywhere. A car where there is one road doesn't get you far. Same for a train - I live in a city without a train and so obviously I can't get anywhere on it. I've been in cities with trains and I was able to get places on it - enough that I didn't need to have a car.
The term is called 'growth ponzi scheme'. Regions wax and wane in economic importance, less so when they're dense and urban.
At this rate I would be surprised if the Texas HSR is complete before 2050. Texas has not come to terms with anything. I say that as a resident for the last 10 years.
> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
Before scaling people moving up so much, I'd question why encourage so much movement.
Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need. By eliminating the need for 95% of high-speed people moving (whether by car, train, bus, no matter), that problem becomes automatically solved. And we get a nicer life walking/biking to most places and when we need/want to drive farther, there's no congestion.
> Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need
The only way to achieve this is density. Urban areas.
When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
The problem is that you can make MUCH more money building huge homes than affordable housing. And people, being ultra-individualistic, believe they need the huge home as opposed to denser housing. So here we are.
> When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
What you call "not possible" is where I live, so clearly it is possible.
Trying to shoehorn all solutions into one and only one way of doing things turns people off and hinders progress.
Sure you can have dense urban areas that are walkable/cycleable. You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable. Instead of turning people away from a good cause by telling them they can't have the life they want, let's promote walkable/cycleable communities in all areas.
> You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable
You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
If you have a store and you have to service, say, 1,000 people to make it profitable you might have a store every .5 miles in the city. Maybe that then translates to 5 miles in the suburb. Well... it's not very easy to walk 5 miles. It's trivial to walk .5 miles.
Stores are one example, but this really applies to literally everything. Besides things like parks, which don't need to turn a profit.
Sure, you can have walkable suburbs in that you can walk in the suburbs. But, to me, that's not what walkable means. Walkable means I should be able to do ALL of my tasks, whatever they may be, without a car. That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever. But it's very possible, and even trivial, in cities.
"Walkable" infrastructure only really matters if there's somewhere to walk to. Sure, it's nice having sidewalks that lead nowhere, but people won't turn to them like they would in Chicago.
> You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
Agreed, but you don't actually need the same amount for the suburban demographic.
For example where my friend lived in Manhattan (and I spent most weekends) we could walk to tons and tons of bars, multiple clubs, music venues and such, in addition to stores for food/medicine/etc. The sheer volume of that can't be replicated in a suburb.
But.. it is also not needed. Ones moves to the suburb when being a bit older, less single and more parent. So I don't need to be able to walk to dozens of bars anymore.
> That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever.
Sure it's possible. Like I said in original comment, that's where I live, a walkable suburb. I can walk/bike to the office, two supermarkets, theater, daycare, middle school, movies, at least 3 banks, library, pharmacies, clothing stores, restaurants and many other specialty stores I'm not listing. Also a couple city parks and a state park. The only thing in short supply are bars (one brewery within walking distance) and music venues (one bar/restaurant/live music hall within walking distance). But given the older married parent demographic, that's plenty for me.
95% is way too high a target! I sometimes want to get supplies at the special Asian food store - there won't be one in my 95% neighborhood - nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood. Note that I only counted for me - in the real world most people are in a marriage like relationship, each of the pair has their own interests and different jobs.
What we should aim for is everybody is in walking distance of 5 restaurants, 1 grocery store, 1 general goods store, 1 library, 1 elementary school (but not higher level - after about 6th grade students benefit from larger schools where they can take classes different from their neighbors), 2 parks, 3 churches. Then put them in close walking distance of good public transit so they can do other things that they do in life all the time (Note in particular going to work every day is not in the above list for most!). You should of course debate exactly what should be on the list and exact numbers, but the above is a good starting point.
> nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood
Agreed. I did mistype what I was thinking though. Not 95% of destinations one might ever want, but my thought was 95% of trips. Nearly all my trips are routine, either to/from office (bikeable) or supermarkets (walkable), movies/library/restaurants/misc shops (all walkable), parks/sports (walkable), basic medical care (walkable).
I certainly have hobbies/needs I must to drive for, but those are fairly occasional trips. My thought is that if we as a society make it so that nearly all routine trips can be local (walk or bike) then the exception will be rare enough that we don't need more road capacity.
> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes.
The Induced Demand observed in car traffic, also known as Downs–Thomson paradox.
Induced Demand needs to DIE as a concept. It is a GOOD thing - if you build any infrastructure and people change their behavior because of it, that means your city wasn't meeting the needs of the people. The whole point of a city is all the things people can do in them - if you just want to stay you get out of the city: you can find cheap houses in Montana with nothing around that will meet your needs just was well. The rest of us live in/near a city because as romantic as the cabin sounds, we overall prefer all the options a city gives us.
Note that I didn't specify you should get ahead of induced demand, only that you should. Trains are much cheaper in the long run for most cities but it requires a large investment to make them useful.
I don’t think you understand how this concept works. Because commuting by car after increasing the road capacity gets easy again, and because it’s also the most co convenient and (for a brief moment) fastest way to commute from point A to B, people switch over from using other means and the roads get saturated again soon after. You cannot increase the capacity to accommodate everyone driving, and everyone absolutely would want to drive if possible. It has nothing to do with the city’s ability to deliver, it’s about human condition and our innate need to make lowest effort possible.
Also, this is such a wildly American take, from a European perspective. No one expects city to somehow make driving cars easy here, not anymore. Would also be wild from NYC or Chicago perspective. Having lived in NYC I would not replace Subway with a car in that large of a place. Even without traffic it would take too long to move about.
Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.
I actually do stand by my assertion in this case. The reason is because unfortunately, after a certain scale, cars are actually actively harmful to growth.
That's why I brought up Texas in particular. Interstate 45 as an example is effectively at saturation. Even if you add new lanes to it, you only get marginal throughput benefits when you actually try to get between Dallas and Houston or commute to either city from the region between them. The same goes for I-10 out of Houston.
Texas has reached the point where car ownership is actually costing the state and local governments astronomical amounts of money for marginal amounts of congestion relief (that is then immediately saturated).
I don't deny that cars have a place in low density regions and I think they are great for specific uses or areas but generally I believe that cars hinder growth in any metro environment in the long term. Doubly so because car centric infrastructure is extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't use a car which makes transition at that density threshold extremely painful for everyone involved.
Of course a car does, but does that mean you should ignore all the benefits brought by bicycles? And if we go that far, should we overlook our own muscular locomotion? It all enables the same mobility after all.
Cycling at 110F ambient temperature can be outright hazardous (speaking of Texas).
Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
Also, cycling in a city, when you cycle for 2-3, maybe 5 miles, is fine. Cycling for 20 miles is pretty taxing and time-consuming, but in a low-density, car-oriented environment 20 miles correctly qualifies as "nearby".
> Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
1. Shower at home.
2. Have a change of clothes.
In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work five days a week and never showered there (even though available). (And believe me: people I worked with would have told me if it was a problem. )
Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
Also:
3. How much you sweat depends on your exertion level: take it easy and you don't sweat as much, at least in the morning when it's cooler. (I'm in Toronto, where summer afternoons are sometimes >30C, and I've cycled home in 35C weather; high-ish humidity too.)
> Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
As much as I agree with your general point, this isn't strictly true.
For a sizable chunk of the population, sweat doesn't contain high concentration of compounds that when digested by bacteria produce body odor.
However, despite being a sizable population, people lucky enough to have this trait are in the minority. I don't know the actual percentage but among European populations it's as low as 2% and among east Asian populations it's as high as 50%. Either way less than half the population.
The rest of the population has variations of that trait and their sweat produces moderate to extreme amounts of amino acid based compounds that when digested by bacteria produces the VOCs that make up the infamous body odor smell.
Having a car also entails massive subsidies; when taking that into account the all-in costs per unit traveled are basically always cheaper with rail.
Source?
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Almost every road project is paid by public money.
$200B/year spent on roads in the USA (federal, state, and local) for passenger vehicle miles driven in the trillions, plus truck miles.
$4B/year spent on Amtrak for passenger miles in the billions.
Roads are an order of magnitude cheaper
You can't just compare the entire multi purpose road network of the US to a single rail company. That's just not a serious comparison.
Besides, you didn't include the cost of the vehicles or the cost of fuel for the cars. I presume the number for Amtrak include all operating costs.
The truth is that different modes of transport have different strengths and weaknesses. In densely urbanized areas trains and trams are typically more efficient than cars.
There are definitely places where rail is awesome, a great example is New York to DC. Better than driving or flying by a mile.
But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive. It just more expensive for the government to build an operate rail than it is for them to build and operate roads. You’re right that part of it is because some of the cost is shouldered by the car owner. But, even in Europe, car ownership is very common outside of city centers. You can’t really expect there to be a rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub.
> But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive
I'm not sure that's true, and I don't see any obvious reasons why that would be the case. Do you have a source to back that up?
Of course we need roads. But the question is how many and how big they need to be.
I gave data showing that the hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on roads supports trillions of miles traveled, while billions of dollars spent on Amtrak (largest rail system in the US) leads to an order of magnitude less miles traveled
Yes but like I said the comparison is totally flawed since you counted all costs for Amtrak but only a subset of costs for car traffic.
If you are convinced roads+cars is an order of magnitude more efficient than rail, maybe you can explain what you think is the cause of that difference. Does rail require more land? Does it require more maintenance hours? Does it require more expensive materials? Does it require higher insurance fees? What's the reason?
operating and capital costs for transit in the USA are absolutely sky-high compared to the rest of the world. It doesn’t cost Japan billions to extend their subway a couple miles, but it does in NYC. The “why” is complex but well documented.
> rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub.
The specific people pushing this form of development also want you to live in ultra-high-density housing in an urban center - that's the whole idea and eventuality of this type of development.
You WILL raise your family in an apartment, they WILL ride a bicycle everywhere they aren't using mass transit. You will own nothing and like it.
I don’t really need to jump to that conclusion. I think there’s a certain naïveté that if high-speed rail is ever built in America, it’ll be this wonderfully efficient, cheap system that takes me exactly from where I am to where I wanna go faster than flying. When the reality is that high-speed rail really only makes sense for certain very dense corridors then things like the Philly to Pittsburgh high-speed rail wish is the kind of thing that would be an economic disaster.
The idea isn't to "force" people to do anything, it's to stop PRIORITIZING those people.
Suburbs are on heavy welfare from city centers, who pretty much provide all the money. Roads are prioritized to such an insane degree that everyone suffers. The people you may identify with - low-density huge homeowners - don't realize it, but they're being heavily subsidized by everyone. Particularly those in denser areas.
People would like to live in denser areas and have it, you know, not suck ass. They would like to be able to go anywhere without 1 hour of traffic. They would like to be able to bike without risking their lives. That means SOME money given to urban sprawl and roads needs to be diverted to public transit. Boo hoo.
Anecdotally, I frequently take day (or weekend) trips to other European cities by rail. It is usually quicker than the roads but also crucially you can be productive on the train. If I had to drive my car there then I probably wouldn't bother.
This reminds me of this Swedish office on a train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbrI3refig , made for a company which had an hour train commute from Stockholm. It's even got 8 telephone line (4 in and 4 out)!
I guess a lot of people would use work booths/conference rooms on trains, but the price/profit has to work for both sides (the train company and users). As for trains, the old-fashioned 6 seater compartments offer more privacy for groups.
This is an aside, but I’d never seen that “Beyond 2000” show before.
Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing.
Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”
Yeah - as someone born in 1979, I find repetitions of the idea that global warming / climate change only came into public awareness 'in the last 15 to 20 years' on TV news and in documentaries deeply troubling. Global warming was constantly discussed on (British) television during my childhood. At least as much as the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. Perhaps this wasn't the case in America?
The funny thing is that people were calling for protecting the future of the children - and now we've just moved the goalposts to those children's children.
you could also work from a car if someone else is driving it like a taxi, but imagine the price difference to travel such a long distance every day over rail versus metro + rail.
Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.
I like your taxi idea. I hate driving myself.
We could bring down the cost of the taxi by putting more people in the car, to share the cost of the driver. That'll bring the costs down significantly.
If the car is sufficiently large, we can get, say, 50 people in a car with a single driver. That should make the extra cost of the driver split between the 50 lassengers significantly cheaper.
We could go further and link multiple cars together, with a single driver up front. They will be driving on one another's slipstream vastly improving fuel efficiency which will bring down costs even further.
Imagine if we can get them to run on some sort of rail or metal track, which makes rolling resistance of the wheels basically 0. No more expensive rubber tyres that need replacing and yet again improved fuel efficiency. This will bring down the costs even further!
And if we put those rails in a tunnel or on a elevated structure we can automate the whole process and get rid of that driver. (we cannot automate anything where humans or animals might get in the way - it remains to be seen if we ever will)
Trains are just big cars, where you stuff in a lot of people, to make it efficient. Because otherwise it is not.
And you can only work in it, because no one wants to use this monster on a daily basis, so its empty and you dont fight for space. :)
Europe is not exactly the standard bearer for productivity though, is it? If one wants to advance an argument for emulating European style passenger rail, this is really not the right argument.
Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions).
There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.
True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.
All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child.
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
The other great thing about public transport is you don't have to "lug" / "chauffer" them at all after about 8 or so (what age makes sense depends on area and the kid of course). They can exercise some independence.
Do Lyft/Uber not grant the same independence?
Maybe that's true in small, peaceful countries like Denmark, but in the US children "excersising some independence" would likely be kidnapped, raped or killed.
This has never been significantly true, and becomes less true every year.
The probability that any given child will be kidnapped or otherwise threatened by a stranger is minuscule compared to the chance that they will be abused, kidnapped, or killed by a family member.
People don't like to think about this harsh reality. Stranger danger is much easier for them to accept.
It's a low probability, high impact event in a country with limited public access to affordable health care and very limited access to therapists.
By that thinking, looking at the data, you should prevent kids from seeing their family… Understand the nonsense? But nonsense gets often commonsensical when everyone in your circle believes it. Going outside has more benefits than risks. Like biking, yes you are at risk of accident, but in the average you’ll be fitter and live longer.
>> in the average you’ll be fitter and live longer
That's sort of the point about low probability events though, it doesn't affect the average but it has a significant impact on the individual.
The US has much better access to mental health care than any European country. Not to mention everyone who lives in a walkable city there lives in a state where healthcare access is good.
That is simply not true.
Are you sure that's true? How do you know?
How much does it depend on where in the US you are?
> Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not
I'm talking about ages 0 to 3 when parents need to use a stroller. It's a huge pain to do this in public transit. It's easier when the kids are older but if you have more than one child the car still wins.
Both my kids were born in Berlin (now 6 & 8 years old) and we never owned a car. In some ways transit is even easier with a stroller as you can just roll into the subway/train instead of having the disassemble the stroller and put it into the trunk. Buses require a bit more effort to board with a stroller but newer busses allow the driver to lower them near the curb to make boarding with stroller easier. We’ve done that for the entire time our kids used strollers.
>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.
And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.
> And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down.
At least here (California) those intersections have stoplights and pedestrian crossings, so the width and moving speed of the road are not relevant. The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
I don't remember exact age but certainly before kindergarden age my child (and all the neighborhood friends in that age range) knew how to operate the pedestrian walk buttons and cross safely.
I fully agree it can be nicer walk when you don't have to cross a larger road. But at the same time, the difficulty of doing it is often greatly overstated. Press button, wait a bit, cross. Done. This is not in the top-100 things I'd like to see improved in society.
> The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
You live in a place with some combination of far more traffic enforcement or far more conscientious drivers than me.
All I see when I look around is a sea of people glancing up and down between the road and their phone. It would be negligent to let my kids cross an arterial road, especially after dark.
Not sure about far more conscientious, but people do stop at red lights. Seeing someone run a red light is very rare, maybe once every 3-4 years. And even those aren't blatant, they are people trying to get through before the red but failing. So what I do (and teach the kids) is that when the pedestrian crossing goes green (or white, technically) then wait a second, look left & right, and if everyone is stopped, then cross. That eliminates the risk of someone trying to rush through in the last second, and at that point it is perfectly safe to cross.
A law could ban those SUVs.
It's currently being discussed in Europe, since the "independent import" route to import a special vehicle has started to be exploited to import unsafe American vehicles. (The Cybertruck is one example.)
And yet I frequently see (in New Zealand), properties with oversized double garages (often built to fit oversized American vehicles) and driveways that take up half the land on the property. Cars use a huge amount of space in roads, carparks, garages, and are responsible for pushing things further and further away from the home. And then somehow cars are seen as the solution for the very problems they create. There's plenty of real world evidence that there are better ways to solve this.
I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.
Here's easier parenting: walk from your house/apartment to a close by square, and play with your kids there
Honestly, I don't want that lifestyle. I live in the burbs with a big house and yard. We travel plenty and go to places that are dense/walkable but I love coming back home to my carbrained neighborhood with an HOA.
That's really too bad: your lifestyle does not support maximal economic output of the land you are using and tax dollars you're paying.
HOA? Hah!- those shouldn't be allowed, neither should home ownership generally. You really need to live and raise your family in an apartment.. taxes should be raised enough that we can phase out private home ownership.
Your children will attend a public school and understand and implement equity from an early age. They will learn to use and love mass transit, only the approved destinations are necessary.
The Party may decide that the 50% of your income you are generously allowed to spend on approved items is too much. Social programs aren't free, you know, you need to pay "your share."
More like
“That's really too bad: your lifestyle is only possible by indebting future generations for your luxury today.”
That’s great for those who have ridden the economic momentum from high fertility rates before the 1970s, but not so fun for those being born now.
Wouldn't low fertility rates make land less valuable? I don't get how my lifestyle indebts the future generations.
As someone who grew up in suburban sprawl, maybe it makes parenting easier, maybe. But they also had to drive me to and from school every day, and band practice, and every single game, and whenever I wanted to hang out with my friends. I would argue my parents basically were moonlighting as my Uber driver for about 16 years until I got my own car.
Big yards are great, but empty. Mom, can you drive me to my friend's bigger backyard? That times the 5 other friends that want to go to the friend's house that has the biggest backyard. Comically the 5 cars all waiting at the same stop light before the final turn, taking up the entire residential street as we all get dropped off and later picked up.
Eh, going to my friend's house is tedious. I'll just fully immerse myself in world of Warcraft, get fat, get socially maladjusted by spending all my time on the internet and 4chan, and enter college as a practically sociopathic asshole with no social skills.
Could just be me. But if I have kids, I'm raising them somewhere where they can just get on a train to get to band practice.
Funny, I was basically mobile with bike from age 10 or so. Had some friends I needed the parents for until I got a small motorcycle aged 14.
So living outside a city is not an issue, although I often wished we’d be nearer to a city.
But society has changed a lot since and everyone is scared of the beautiful outside world.
This was the life of my farmland friends in Wisconsin. In Houston if I had ridden my bicycle the mere 2 miles to my friend's house (half mile to leave my neighborhood, half mile to enter his, one mile or so on actual roads), I would almost certainly have one day been killed by a car or truck that failed to expect a kid on a bike.
We didn't have sidewalks. That area is still missing sidewalks actually.
In some ways our beautiful outside world is safer than it was 60 years ago, in others perhaps it's more dangerous.
That's a goalpost moved from my response.
The poster you responded to wrote:
> They're not just about reducing emission!
Cars increasing emissions seems to be a relevant disqualifier.
Trains scale better than cars in dense areas and offer more than just emissions reductions. Good rail infrastructure is a big part of makes a large city world-class and improves everyday lives. Subsidizing trains is better than a lot of other uses of government funds.
A car is more expensive, and clogs the roads, which causes other costs to the economy and penalizes commutes.
Germany has a pretty high population density and the metropolitan areas have evolved around medieval cities, so they are sometimes very bad a carrying a lot of traffic. Getting around by car in lots of major German cities is a major PITA and parking your car there (if you live there) is just as horrible. Inside cities, public transport is much more efficient.
How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.
Keep in mind there’s only about 50 miles of high-speed rail in the U.S. so far. With major cities like Dallas and Houston or San Francisco and LA still unconnected by fast rail, there's significant room to boost GDP and improve lives. Expanding rail isn't just about GDP growth, it's about enhancing daily living and connecting communities more effectively. As RFK famously noted, GDP measures everything ‘except that which makes life worthwhile’. Rail development does both, supporting the economy and enriching our lives.
no one has ever been able to explain who will be the daily rider for SF/LA or Dallas/Houston rail
I don't mean people trying it out once, or tourists...I mean people who will commit to riding it daily
Almost nobody will take that train daily, and it is stupid to think anyone would or should. However it is reasonable to expect the train will be crowded from all the people who take it less often. Companies send their people to other cities often for various business reasons. People take several vacations per year. Nobody is doing this daily - but the sum total of weekly, monthly, yearly, and once in a lifetime trips add up to a lot of people very day.
If I could take a train instead of a plane, I would. Doubly so if it saved me money. Savings for individuals means more money to spend on other things.
I wonder if it's possible that you have the telescope the wrong way around?
People leading more fulfilling and rewarding lives is the point of the economy, not the reverse.
For many it helps cover the gigantic rent hikes. Many workers need public transportation to commute because they can’t afford a car, which keep becoming more expensive because cheap cars don’t make profits. It was not rare before for public transport subs to cost upwards of 100 EUR
Fast travel between major cities skyrockets GDP: https://youtu.be/T3LLgzO_PrI?t=264
I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but there's a strong danger of comparing apples and oranges if these things aren't spelled out imo.
Don’t forget too that the cost of proving roads is also ‘subsidised’ in most countries, but we’re tend to be a bit blind to that.
(This is not an argument against rail - I just find that subsidies are often mentioned with respect to rail but not with roads).
I remember Brad deLong did back of the napkin analysis to determine how much a bart fare should be including the cost of freeways. It was minus $2.00 or something.
People don't think of it as a subsidy because they are not charged per use a la toll road.
People also pay fuel tax, registration tax, and other taxes that fund the roads
Do you think that covers the cost of building and maintaining the road network infrastructure?
Do you think that it covers the cost of excess death caused by particle emissions and road fatalities?
We don't have the option to completely replace car infrastructure, but we shouldn't act like it isn't heavily subsidized.
That said, the positive externalities are also significant, but so are the positive externalities from rail traffic.
Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail. No business can run without access to road, most businesses can run without access to rail.
There is basically no way to compare rail vs roads and making some arguments based on that.
Everyone who don't own a car have significantly less access to roads than someone who do.
Of course it's possible to compare the advantages and drawbacks of different modes of transport. No society can function without roads, but it's still a question of priorities.
> Everyone who don't own a car have significantly less access to roads than someone who do.
Most weeks I spend more hours cycling on these roads than driving.
Imagine how much less maintenance cost your biking causes than driving a car.
A lot less! So we (society) should be promoting cycling as much as feasible. Also bike parking, which is often forgotten. My town is very bike friendly in nearly every way, except there's no secure bike parking which limits which stores I can bike to.
> Everyone has access to a road. Not everyone has access to rail.
Similar argument can be made about highways to which not everybody has (direct) access, they are not a matter of life and death for most businesses and are heavily subsidized.
I think the point is that if they had to do those things every time they used a road it would be more obvious (like buying a train ticket).
They do have to do it every time, through the fuel tax. Driving costs fuel. I guess people just don't think of it though.
it's not a subsidy if it's a user-pays system.
A subsidy is only a subsidy if users don't necessarily pay the full cost, and the rest is borne by some other group of people who _don't_ use the service.
One issue is that people often benefit from infrastructure without explicitly using it.
Example, road network isn't paid by car owners. But non-drivers clearly benefit from the road network, is the road network subsidized?
Other example, people who rarely take the train still benefit from rail infrastructure (freight, reduced congestion etc). Is the rail network subsidized?
Oh to clarify on that point, the majority of roadwork is paid for by property taxes in I believe everywhere in the USA. Certainly in Texas.
At least in the US, those taxes are nowhere near enough to pay for maintenance, let alone new construction. The rest is a straight subsidy from the general fund, typically paid for by passing the debt to our children.
You don’t generally see figures from any jurisdiction (and I’ve seen numbers for a lot of countries and states) where those charges and taxes make much more than 50% or so of the actual costs of building and maintaining road networks, and that’s just the actual spend before even trying to quantify all the social and environmental costs!
In the United States, often a large amount of road funding comes from property tax, so it has nothing to do with operating a car.
I don't really follow that, a toll is a way for it not to be (or to be less) subsidised?
Calculating the subsidy associated with state maintenance of roads for private vehicles is difficult.
Some basic level of signage and hazard prevention (potholes, ice etc) is necessary for emergency vehicles and other government operations.
Thereafter, although there is some maintenance cost associated with the road wear from private vehicles and the additional infrastructure required for higher traffic volumes, we don’t have an easy way to calculate the cost.
Wouldn't the very patterns of development be different (and more amenable to rail) if the state didn't spend oodles of money building nice roads to make sprawl livable?
At a high level, urbanisation rates increased through the road building binge of the 20th century.
Perhaps those new migrants to cities would’ve chosen to stay in the countryside without roads? Worsening the economics of rail.
Or maybe they’d use their collective voting power to get more rail friendly new towns built?
I don’t think the answer is obvious.
Before the road building binge there was the rail building binge, though limited to the largest cities.
As an example, see the history of the Metropolitan Line in London.
Sprawl happens when there is available undeveloped land. Roads are just a symptom.
People build outwards first and then upwards.
There is plenty of undeveloped land that people don't move to because there are no roads to get to.
We have more than a century of data showing that roads are subject to induced demand. If you build more roads, people move and sprawl (and take more trips in general) until traffic is once again unbearably bad.
If you build more lanes, more people move further out. Roads create sprawl.
And active urban planning avoids sprawl.
I disagree that it's difficult: excepting toll roads and "unassumed" roads‡, the subsidy is 100% (and most toll roads are likely subsidized at a substantial fraction of their cost, since the tolls are rarely high enough to be self-sufficient).
It doesn't matter whether the money used to pay for road maintenance comes from property taxes (like in Toronto), income taxes (Ontario areas not maintained by cities / regions / counties), or gas taxes (much of the U.S.?). If you're not paying per use of the road, there is a 100% subsidy on the maintenance of the road.
There are definite costs to not maintaining those roads (people won't move where there aren't roads; unmaintained roads will result in more costs to the people using those roads as their vehicles are damaged more frequently—which may result in costs to the municipality for not properly maintaining those roads), but we should not pretend roads are self-sustaining or aren't entirely subsidized.
‡ Unassumed roads are those built privately by the landowners in common and are not maintained by the local government. When used for private dwellings, these roads usually fall under the sway of the local government after a period of time, even if they were built initially by a subdivision subcontractor.
Also bridges and tunnels, which seem to be very expensive to maintain.
I’m not sure if it’s the case here with Germany, but typically we refer to transit spending like this as “subsidies” but for some reason we forget that building and maintaining roads and highways and such are subsidies too.
In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
>not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.
the federal excise tax on fuel pays for (at least in part) the "boatload of money for highway expansion "
Not much. A lot more comes from state funding, which can be anything from property tax to sales tax to additional fuel taxes. Because you pay about the same fuel tax per mile on a 60 mph road as a 25 mph road (but the 60mph road costs 100x as much), you also find driving on slow roads becomes a subsidy to building fast roads.
No it doesn't.
Fuel tax income is ~100 Billion
Road expenditures are ~200 Billion
(Combined state and federal)
Here’s another way to think about it: Germany invested N billion into shifting behavior to rail.
How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?
I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. Did I miss something or is this one of the situations we're we are making up new definitions for words?
> I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received.
It is rumored that the military (and perhaps three-letter agencies) has/have special contracts with OpenAI. This can definitely be called a subsidy.
A contract isn't a subsidy... A subsidy would be giving them dollars without any particular strings attached except perhaps to use those funds to develop the product. If the contract is to provide money in exchange for services, that's called a transaction.
I see it differently: for example the fact that the US government spends a lot of money on military can in my opinion clearly be called a subsidy for the military-industrial complex.
So then if the government buys pens and reams of paper, then it's the government subsidizing office supply stores? But it's not a subsidy if a corporation spends money on the same supplies?
My employer does business with the DoD and with private corporate entities. Both the government and the private sector spend the same money and receive the same products and services. I appreciate that you have a different perspective, but I have a hard time considering my employer "subsidized by the US government" just because the government purchases our product.
> So then if the government buys pens and reams of paper, then it's the government subsidizing office supply stores?
If the government is a particularly important customer: yes.
It’s important to distinguish between an operational cost and capital investment here.
If rail usage continues once the spending stops then it’s an investment. Otherwise is an operating subsidy.
paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment. An investment must have some sort of residual value, which over time, is recouped and perhaps even makes a return (hopefully).
> paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment
Disagree. There is a lot of residual value in reducing congestion and road usage. Roads need fewer repairs, CO2 impacts the atmosphere less, cities move more efficiently, etc.
There’s residual value also in people spending more time on tax-paying activities and running the economy instead of being stuck alone in their cars. Etc.
If you pay $50 more in taxes because you got a $40 train ticket subsidy that’s a huge win. I don’t know if that’s how the numbers shake out, but governments are def not doing stuff like this just to throw money in the furnace.
You mean another example of apples and oranges?
Is software and transportation really a good example?
It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?
> why is rail treated so differently?
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer.
These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.
And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.
> why is rail treated so differently?
roads are much cheaper per mile than rail, so you can have more roads than you can have rail.
you can also have lower grade roads, which is once again, cheaper (so you can have more of it). You cannot have lower-grade rail - the train will crash.
Therefore, to provide a massive network of transport, roads are the only option. Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers, and therefore, you can expect to make back the cost of the rail from this dense usage.
You have invented this.
Rail can absolutely be made to different standards. High speed rail vs a tramway, and everything in between.
Exactly as with roads, the more you pay the faster the vehicles can go. Except with close to zero accidents.
This looks like a strawman. Nobody advocates for replacing roads with rail, it's about complementing.
> Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers
Yes, so the idea is to build rail for those use cases (which is somewhat the case in Europe, but not in US).
In the US, we see many places where rail has been abandoned. In the place I live (upstate NY, Finger Lakes) there are multiple walking trails that were previously locations of rail lines, which shut down more than half a century ago. The rails themselves are long gone. In some places you can see where earth was moved and concrete structures were installed to allow drainage. Maintaining these lines made no sense with the existence of a road network carrying motor vehicles. There are also abandoned canals from an even earlier time.
Yes, US had a more built-up rail system in the past. But it's naive to think it died because of fair economic competition.
People certainly didn't complain about having paved roads, or being able to buy their own automobiles. I understand it's frustrating when the public goes charging off in a direction you don't want them to.
It’s not different. The same word applies to both.
> It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation.
Because you need roads to e.g., get produce from a farm to the grocery store. You can’t have a functioning society that doesn’t involve roadways for moving people and goods the “last mile.”
>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.
Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.
The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.
Oh please, far-right? It is leftists, that sees everything beside them as far-right. I would call it conservative. Something the 'left' forgets, that there are also some real people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld. Yuck.
> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld
Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.
Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.
Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.
Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.
What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.
The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.
Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.
I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.
Then let's stop subsidizing cars and fossil fuels.
Good luck!
I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".
Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.
An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.
If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.
The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.
Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.
Sure if you define terms in your own strict way you can write a long comment on how everybody else is using the term wrong. Why should people use your definition though?
That isn't "my definition".
Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism, minimal to no taxation, minimal to no government spending, and privately-controlled infrastructure.
That's just the fundamental nature of a two-dimensional political spectrum. It has nothing to do with me.
Anyone claiming that a government exhibiting decidedly left-wing traits is somehow "far right" is simply making a wrong analysis.
> Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Incorrect. Left-wing ideologies promote downward distribution of power from established elites; one particular subset of left-wing ideologies (socialism) promotes labor control of the means of production, and one particular subset of socialism promotes a situation in which the working class controls the state which then acts as the vehicle through which control of the means of production is exercised (but libertarian socialism, for instance, also exists.)
Right-wing ideologies instead promote systems which concentrate power in narrow elites; different varieties of right-wing ideology justify this based in various mixes kf views of inherent merit, whether based on sex/gender, race, individual bloodline, “revealed merit” in notionally competitive environments where capacity at time t is heavily influenced by success at t-1, or whatever else.
You are confusing the left-right axis with the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is a different axis of ideological (or sometimes merely praxis) variation.
> Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism
Right wing promotes authoritanism, which is pretty much the opposite of individual rights. Right wing governments stand for strict laws and strong enforcement, where the people must obey or else.
This is observably false. One observation is that the US government debt grows more quickly when the Republican party is in power.
What is true is that left-wing ideology promotes taking a bit from everyone to give a lot to everyone, while right-wing ideology does not promote giving a lot, or anything, to everyone, but often still promotes taking a bit, or a lot, from everyone and funneling it to places that do not benefit very many people.
Leftists will promote plans like: tax carbon emissions and use the money to subsidize clean power plants. Rightists will enact (without promoting) plans like: give a lot of taxpayer money to this company for unclear reasons, and don't worry about how to raise the money - make it the next government's problem to deal with the debt pile. The latter is, of course, individualist.
Unfortunately right wing parties throughout the West have been taken over by grifters, and anything like traditional conservatism has been tossed by the wayside.
You're absolutely right that some political parties wrongly use a term like "conservative" in their party name, or otherwise incorrectly portray themselves as being "right wing".
Ultimately, though, they're still left-wing parties in practice, pushing left-wing ideologies, regardless of the facade they might try to put up.
A party doesn't just become "right wing" because they claim to be, especially when their actions and policies are decidedly left-wing.
Pray tell, was Adolf Hitler left or right wing?
Destroying "degenerate" cultural institutions is very much right wing; so is giving taxpayer money to cronies; so is overloading the government with debt.
This entity you're describing clearly isn't "right wing" if it uses left-wing practices like taxation, public debt, and government-funded "cultural institutions" (whatever that actually means).
Taxation is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there would not be any taxpayer money to give "cronies" because such funds never would be collected from taxpayers in the first place.
Public debt is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there wouldn't even be any government entity capable of incurring debt.
"Cultural institutions" involving the government are inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, the government simply wouldn't have the resources to create "cultural institutions" and any such entities that did exist would be created, funded, and operated by the private sector alone.
If you're truly upset about the things you just described, then it's because you dislike left-wing ideologies, even if you don't recognize it.
US debt increases much faster when the right wing is in power. This is an empirical fact which trumps theory.
> not sustainable on its own
Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.
Yes, that’s the argument for all subsidized things.
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
More or less all non-toll roads (and a few toll roads too). Which makes "applies" seems a bit pointless.
I don’t think you know what the word “applies” means.
If I tell you that the air is clear, and you respond "That applies to all air on earth", you've provided no additional information.
If I tell you that humans are generally between zero and 120 years of age, and you respond "That applies to most humans", you've provided no additional information.
If I tell you "most comments on HN are well-written and thoughtfully constructed" and you respond "That doesn't apply to yours", you've provided some additional information.
> the program is not sustainable on its own
So arrest, investigation prosecution and imprisonment of anyone who steals from Amazon is a massive subsidy, since Amazon pays no tax.
Amazon collects sales tax and most certainly pays property taxes that fund the law enforcement you are talking about.
Not to mention the money spent on funding food stamps for Amazon’s underpaid employees.
Yes. The government massively subsidises owning physical property.
Ths US military is not sustainable on its own...
Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.
Yes, that is the argument for subsidies. What’s your point?
There seems to be, implict in the term "subsidy," the notion that it is government largesse. My notion is to rebut that pointing out we do not expect a positive ROI on most government expenditures.
Most of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations.
You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.
I read about train infrastructure development that was privately funded and built from the profits from land speculation near the new stations.
> already substantial subsidies for the rail industry
Though to be fair, there are also substantial subsidies for the whole road network.
Road vehicles are heavily taxed in European countries. I don't have the figures for Germany, but the UK spends £12bn per year on roads, while it collects £25bn in road fuel duty and £7bn in vehicle excise duty.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...
Vehicle, gas and similar taxes are about €50bn in Germany. The cost of the road system is about €70bn.
[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...
According to a study by the HTW Berlin, Germany collects €50 billion in road taxes and duties, but spends €30 billion on road maintenance and €30 billion on traffic police and road accident victims. Add to this an estimated €10-30 billion in environmental damage due to air and noise pollution.
There are also deaths caused by road accidents and health issues caused by pollution.
Those have real economic impacts which aren’t being reflected in the true cost of cars.
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Roads are much more efficient with fewer cars.
A German study from 2021 says road traffic created 70 billion euros costs per year. Of that 45 billion had to be paid from general taxes.
This was phrased poorly if I understand the meaning.
"If there is limited use, roads are more efficient than rail"
That's probably true as roads tend to cost less per mile than rail and you don't have transfer problems.
When heavily utilized the opposite is true: rail is more efficient than roads.
I dont know how things are in germany but in the netherlands a lot more people own cars which slows down traffic.
All over the world they keep rebuilding congestion points only for traffic to increase.
If making public transport cheaper attracts more travelers there will be fewer cars on the road. The money spend on public transport will aso make car travel more efficiënt. Roads will last longer. Fewer upgrades are needed. Cars will last longer. etc
It is hard to picture how many cars it takes to move a train full of people.
> 7.6 percent fewer kilometres travelled by car.
> German cars were recorded to have travelled 582.4 billion kilometers.
That's why motorists should always vote for more public transport, instead of increasing road lanes - road per user is improved if you reduce the number of other cars
The weather would like to have a word with you.
By what metric?
It saves the commuters the cost of buying a car, insurance, gas and maintenance. it saves building new roads and lifecycle costs of maintaining a road. Trains allow dense developments with a little bit of walking. Walking is healthy, a bit of exercise saves a ton on healthcare costs. Density makes everything cheaper. Carbon emissions are just a bonus.
Disturbingly, your link includes Carbon capture and storage from a fossil power plant, which has never been demonstrated practically and is basically a scam at this point, pushed by oil companies.
Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.
However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid
The only carbon capture/sequestration method I’m aware of without significant tradeoffs outside of price is direct air capture, and last I saw, that clocked in at $600-1200/ton (Climeworks). So maybe not such a terrible deal?
Wetlands do a better job of carbon sequestration than trees.
Globally, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s.
Maybe we should restore them.
The startups in this space were targeting $100/ton before the recent inflation hit.
It turns out if you divide the $/ton by 100, you get $/gallon of gas equivalent.
Burning a gallon of gas emits 20 lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is in the oxygen), and a ton is 2000 lbs.
Anyway, at $6-12 dollars per gallon of gasoline, direct air capture is clearly much worse than just not burning oil. At $1-2, it’s less than the current gasoline taxes in the US.
What’s the subsidy to road and oil companies right now? Might be nice to just shift it over.
The sheer amount of additional benefit means this is a gallingly reductive view of it all.
The subsidy for maintaining car infrastructure is causing _more_ co2 per euro invested, how's that fit into these calculations?
This is so useless, it sounds like propaganda.
Well it's not just a carbon credit, it also provides subsidized public transport to everyone, reduces congestion, improves city air and likely cuts road deaths. Arguably tax dollars extremely well spent.
Except that due to this cheaper ticket congestion on trains is horrible and since the infrastructure is poorly maintained it’s quite common to be late by 1-2 hours while being packed in a sardine tin.
That's a matter of train infrastructure and frequency keeping up with demand. There's a big lag there. You don't just buy 100 new trains overnight. It's a symptom of ramping up. Not of high usage.
I live in Barcelona and here the metro comes every 2-3 minutes. Even during the night it might be 7 minutes. This helps so much with congestion but also trip planning: no need to check train times before you go. Id imagine busy routes in Germany could do similar.
The big benefit of this is also not needing a car. Not having to worry about maintenance, write-off, finding parking and the cost thereof, summer and winter tyres, damage, no-claim bonus, travelling while having drunk, going back from a different place than you arrived. It's so incredibly more convenient than having a car. All at a flat rate of 21€ here.I hope never having to need one again.
€21.35 for a T-Usual card which allows unlimited travel on all public transport for 30 days, yet you still have people in here kicking and screaming to use their car and roads
Yeah this is true but it's a minority. And some people come from outside the city where it's more understandable.
I think Ada Colau did really great pedestrianising streets like Consell de Cent, unfortunately Collboni doesn't seem to care as much.
Thats the end goal of the leftist dreamworld. Make everyone equal, so that everything becomes more shittier. We need to educate more!
> requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn
I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies.
I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff.
That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people. Sure - there would still be occasional maintenance - but nobody always on duty driving trains (automated), nobody selling tickets (online), nobody cleaning stuff (automated cleaning of trains inside and out) etc.
In Japan, rail companies also own the land around the station. There is often a mall or office right on top of the station. So they capture a more of the value of having public transport.
In western countries land lords benefit a lot from nearby public transport for free and maybe only contribute in taxes.
Originally, rail worked kind of like this in the US too. Alternating squares of land adjacent to tracks were ceded to railroads, so you'd have sections of public land and private land beside each other.
I learned about this when someone was trying to make a test case of "corner crossing" from one patch of public land to another a while back.
You see the same thing in Hong Kong - the rail company practically creates new towns when they add a new station or extend a rail line.
I was under the impression Hong Kong was one big urban area already, is there really empty land new towns can be built on?
You can be smack in the middle of Central, and then walk up a path behind the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and be on Old Peak Road hiking up to Victoria Peak. Or be in Wan Chai, take the stairs next to the Rolls Royce car dealer, and be on Bowen Road Fitness Trail and in Aberdeen Park within minutes.
HK island, New Territories, the outer islands and even large parts of Kowloon are predominantly green, parks and forests.
As GP mentioned, occasionally the subway operator MTR will build a new station, build a shopping mall on top, and housing for 50,000 people.
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong#Geography, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_of_Hong_Kong.
Most of the new territories is not highly developed. Kowloon and hk island are both entirely urban.
A Georgist Land Value Tax would fix this!
Opening the railways to competition has utterly ruined the UK's rail network. Ticket price has skyrocketed while service quality has fallen.
In the 30s, French rail companies begged and lobbied the government to nationalize them, so they could exit the burden that was maintaining a rail network.
Rail just isn't profitable, but is vital to society, and will become even more so as gas becomes increasingly expensive/lacking. Some things should just never be opened to competition.
According to GPT, the price per kilometre for rail travel is between €0.23-0.46 in the UK and €0.13-0.20 in Germany. I'm not able to verify those numbers but from my own personal experience I wouldn't doubt it.
Rail in the UK is just so bad that I stopped using it to go to the airport. Everything is constantly delayed or cancelled like I can plan a journey to arrive 2hrs before my flight and the train will randomly pause for 1hr when I'm half way... also the luggage situation is extremely stressful as the racks are out of sight and generally full, like where else am I meant to put my large suitcase after that?
It seems like trains are much larger in Europe with a lot of double deckers.
If there's two of us it's easier and sometimes cheaper to pay £100 for a taxi to the airport door to door (we're fairly rural)
There is very little true competition on UK railways. Most services are run on Government-granted franchises which give a monopoly or at best a duopoly on specific routes.
There are a handful of open-access train operators who operate outside the franchises, but they can't just decide to compete on a route if that route is already covered by a franchise.
To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.
> To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.
The problem with that is that on a mixed-traffic railway it's very easy to run out of capacity once you have a mixture of trains with differing stopping patterns (and perhaps some freight on top) running along the same line. Once you reach that point, competition stops being directly about passengers and starts being about train paths, which can have rather annoying side effects for passengers.
Plus connections don't really work well with competition, either, because a) that'd require coordination between possibly differing operators, which is anathema to unfettered competition, and b) where a regional feeder route might only run hourly or half-hourly, it's impossible to have good connections with more than one or at most two sets of connecting trains anyway.
(Also c) through-ticketing with sufficient passenger rights in case you miss a connection enroute – at least the UK kept a national ticketing system even throughout privatisation and including all open-access operators, whereas in Germany it's an incompatible free-for-all, despite a legal obligation for railway companies to ostensibly offer through-tickets.)
When installed and kept up properly with good policymaking railways are always a positive for the economy. They cause a huge amount of cheap movement that increases business activity. Little towns that become railway stops develop much faster. The bigger stations are great for shops and food. The access to education and high-value driving extracurricular activities increase for younger people too. They overall make the economy resilient against all sorts of crisis (energy, markets)
The more railways are used for commuting, the less people are on the road. So it increases the road efficiency too and reduces degradation. Railways are great drivers of innovation and the technology they generate can be backported to cars, they are initial investment drivers.
However, the first if/when is a big one. You can half ass roads. You pay compensation for a pothole every now and then and make small improvement to get votes. You cannot half ass railways. They require constant maintenance and a whole mindset built around them.
Japan does railways correctly. China is getting there. The Netherlands is nearly a paradise of bike and railways. Germany isn't. The countries with almost the same culture, Austria and Switzerland, care much more about their railways and invest them properly however their government aligns. Germans keep electing the right wing party with their ministers of ~BMW~ transport and then complain about 50% of the non-cancelled trains are late and the maintenance cost of the falling apart rail system is quadrupled.
As someone who's been to both China and Japan I'd say railway is far ahead in China than the rest of the world.
Again, according to GPT, the price per kilometre between them is €0.03-0.06 in China vs €0.15-0.26 in Japan.
I know Japan has a lot of high speed rail coverage but so does China and the difference in price is absolutely insane.
Rail between Beijing and Shanghai for example has an average speed of 300kmh. I believe their high speed network is vaster than Japan's.
Most of these numbers are probably due to differences in wages and the size of the respective countries.
If they aren't completely fabricated.
That is so the wrong approach. If I’m very reductive, I could say that if we automate everything there would be no one to commute left. Staffing is good for people: for safety, information, help for the vulnerable, expertise, robustness of the system, etc.
Perhaps some public services can’t turn a profit but are still necessary. Perhaps they can turn a profit if even more people use them. Perhaps other economic models are needed for these companies, see for example Singapore and Hong Kong where the rail company owns the land at stations and are allowed to develop there which funds the network and incentivizes buildout.
I doubt that moves the needle a lot unless you're making _everything_ fully automatic, i.e. including the infrastructure creation & maintenance and streamline that extremely well.
If you take a ride from Hamburg to Berlin with the ICE, there's maybe 8 staff on board, 200-300 passengers, it takes ~2 hours and the average ticket price is 77€ according to some travel app.
Even if you get rid of all 8 of them, the price per ticket isn't going to be lowered significantly.
The staff on board also contribute to keeping the train safe and pleasant - if there’s an unruly passenger, or a washroom malfunctions, I’m happy to have paid a bit extra for my ticket for a couple of people to be on hand to deal with the problem instead of being trapped for two hours.
But there is also the ~80 staff manning stations at each end and along the route, and more staff in the control room, the cleaning staff, the people who manually do maintenance checks every single night, etc.
You can get rid of the cleaning staff right now. The terminals will become disgusting and people will stop using them. There is no way around this type of overhead. If you have larger numbers of people passing through, you need cleaning and maintenance.
Your original point isn’t even true - in California there is constant maintenance of the road network and crews of community service workers doing their sentence cleaning trash on the highway shoulder.
Roads still have far fewer staff per mile than railways, however you measure.
In turn, that makes them cheaper.
Lol, that depends heavily what you consider staff. E.g. look at freight, if you move cargo by trucks you need 1 staff member (sometimes called drivers) per truck. Train on the other hand needs only 2 people per hundreds of meters of train...
Even worse for individual car transport. You need one staff (driver) per vehicle...
Is there a source for this? Is this source heavily context-dependant?
Why would there be 8 staff on board? Isn't there typically one train driver and one attendant?
I don't know. They have the restaurant car on some trains so that's another 2-3 people, and I really have no idea about their operation so I added some buffer. I wouldn't expect there to be more than 8 on a train unless it's some special event.
For some high speed routes there’s a limit on how many carriages one attendant can supervise (maybe to ensure timely evacuation?) so a 12 carriage ICE train needs 3 attendants to fully operate.
Yeah, it seems that "self-driving trains" are a much, much more tractable problem than self-driving cars. On the other hand, the cost of the driver is amortized over many passengers, and much of the labor isn't driving but rather serving as conductor, etc, so it may not even matter too much.
> automated cleaning of trains inside and out)
For the outside, you can imagine a carwash.
For the inside, my brain goes to scary dystopian places. Like, "what if we make the inside out of chemically-inert glass-based materials, and clean it by immersion in pirhana solution?" One would just need to recycle the solution, and recharge it with hydrogen peroxide. This would rule out the use of plastics in the interior, however.
Maybe something more like a dishwasher could also work, but I'm not sure it'd be Strong Enough for Tough Stains. It could even just make a mess. I've heard stories of Roombas that encounter dog poop; they say it goes badly...
> That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people
Simplest redesign is running longer trains - they still need just 1 driver.
Britain’s trains are sometimes comically small (3 carriages) and overcrowded. French trains are 2-3x longer, Russia/China even more so.
Second is standardisation - all of Uks train companies run different stock and it’s ovsoleye
Longer isn’t always better for trains. Longer trains need bigger platforms and stations are often the most expensive parts of the network. Big trains also weigh more, so they accelerate slower and have longer trip times.
Weight savings can also translate into cheaper bridges and viaducts, though that’s only true for dedicated track. If you’re sharing with freight they are always going to be far heavier.
Much better is upgrading signalling, automating the train, and running far more service because frequency is king for public transit. Many short trains at high headways vs less frequent long trains has the same total capacity but the short, frequent trains provide far more value. When people don’t have to think about the schedule and can just show up and ride public transit is great.
There are also limits to the value of standardizing rolling stock. You don’t want every train set to be bespoke, but there is also danger in every train being exactly the same. If there is a parts shortage or identified design flaw your whole fleet can be grounded all at once. If you have some diversity you can limp along if one design has to be sidelined.
When you rent each carriage from a rolling stock company you’re incentivized to run as short trains as possible to keep them as full as a sardine can. Renationalize the whole lot.
At some point the train is longer than the station platform. Then you need to extend the platform, or passengers have to know that they need to be in specific cars to be able to exit.
This analysis is too simple. Roads need to be maintained, road accidents are a burden on the national health service and air pollution has a long term negative impact on people's health
Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.
You're not pricing in the primary impact of the subsidy - the value of the travel itself. Those tickets subsidize travel and reduce carbon emissions.
You make a very valid point.
I’d ignore unpriced other externalities, that is a large rabbit hole. (Do people increase consumption of other goods thanks to the savings of this ticket…)
I’d rather look at the project, subsidies again and the cost and realise that at this scale there are few individual projects. So this is a very large knob to dial down the emissions.
Secondly, the subsidies go into the German economy. The rail system is very domestic economy heavy, so at a time where the German economy is going into a recession, spending 3bn to subsidise transport and reduce people’s cost of living and pay for German workers and investments is not such a terrible idea.
So while the price tag is high, the money isn’t turned into trees or buried like in pure abatement projects and at this scale it is a nice leaver to pull.
It’s arguable that $100 per ton is a real carbon price.
It translates to about $1 a gallon tax on gasoline which is (a) not enough to change people’s behavior (at its peak gas was almost $2 more than it is now and I drove just the same) but (b) people in 2024 will complain bitterly about it anyway. That is, polities are hypersensitized to that sort of imposed solution right now: for a long time people in the US accepted fluctuations in the gas price because it was seen as a market price so we only had riots whenever a black person was shot by the cops; in “normal” countries (including France and Egypt) you have riots when the price of petroleum goes up because it is seen as being controlled by the state. I think the US has gotten more “normal” post COVID-19 and with GHG controls on the horizon. $1 a gallon is not quite going to make EVs beat gas but it certainly happens at a price below $500 a tonne.
Favorable CCS from industrial sources is quoted around $100 a tonne but that is (c) from a plant that runs 24-7 (e.g. if your natural gas plant runs 20% of the time the capital cost of CCS is multiplied 5x at least disregarding that the plant might not run well when it is starting up and shutting down) and (d) has few realizations.
The biggest positive externality of rail is suppressed traffic congestion, it is a big quality of life thing if you can avoid sitting in a traffic jam. (Reminds me of posters I saw in Germany that said Zukunft onhe Stau)
I find rail tourism to be luxurious compared to motortourism in that one gets to the center of town and doesn’t need to stress about parking, traffic and all that. Contrast that to the fight to refuel your rental car at the airport.
Not disagreeing but it’s important to point out that the US is a different beast because of the car and roadway dependency. In Europe a large part of the population lives in places easily reachable without a car. But in the US EVs are completely central to reducing CO2 from transportation, unless you’d rather rebuild the entire country. In Europe you can make meaningful changes by simply improving, expanding, investing in existing infrastructure. Most people I know who have a car in EU region are not fully dependent, but enjoy more convenience due to overcrowded or unreliable public transit, grocery stores being further away etc. Those problems are orders of magnitude easier to solve than “let’s build rail through a giant web of sparse suburbs”.
When I spent a year in Dresden I greatly enjoyed using the train instead of the plane for travel around the area as far as London in one direction and Sunny Beach, Bulgaria in the other. I lived close enough to walk to work and could do a lot of shopping on foot (great bakery 2 blocks away, a fancy chocolate store, a butcher, etc.) but sometimes used the tram to go to the city center and to further out towns.
I was maybe 3-4 blocks from a regional rail or S-Bahn station which that ticket entitles you to ride and it is a great ticket that can get you to nearby mountains or the Czech Republic or nearby cities like Leipzig. Really you could ride across Germany on the S-Bahn comfortably stopping where you want and staying overnight in a hotel occasionally. Nothing beat those sleeper trains which eliminated the hotel stay then you wake up in Dortmund and change trains for Amsterdam.
(EMEA people in 1998 seemed more inclined to use airlines than rail to go to distant domestic and international cities, they had service that was better and cheaper than the US; air service has become even more competitive in EMEA since then)
Dresdenites I knew who had cars would drive them to the appliance and furniture stores and even to nearby places like Quedlinburg and even to Berlin, Munich, Bremen, etc. with a resignation to traffic jams like that of the Los Angelino.
Delivery service is far along in the US and I would expect a truck to deliver anything larger than 7 cubic feet of sawdust even on my farm so I don’t need a truck. I have 8 horses but no trailer because we know many people who will move a horse for us for less than a month’s payment on a big ass truck.
Cars also have a huge subsidy in the form of roads
A more fitting complaint about cats would be the Pendlerpauschale, which is paid out to people driving to and from work in their car. It's a much larger sum than the €3b spent on the train ticket subsidy.
It used to be different, but these days that one is paid to everybody who commutes, no matter by which mode. And people who commute by public transport are actually slightly privileged, in that they can claim their actual ticket costs if that works out more advantageous, whereas everybody else is limited to the basic km-dependent allowance, even if their car commutes maybe actually costs more.
And while there are arguments to be had about negative incentives posed by it with regards to incentivising people to commute farther than necessary, the original basic principle is quite simple: Just as companies are mostly only taxed on their profits, so workers ought to pay their income tax only on the money made after deducting any work-related expenses.
And Germany hasn't solved the cost-of-housing problem, either, so a certain degree of commuting is unavoidable. In fact, recently the housing minister basically declared her defeat by announcing that her latest plan for dealing with that problem wasn't building more where people want to live and can make a living, it was subsidising people to move back to the countryside.
I think it is an invalid argument. Please inform yourself about the reasoning before you post half truths.
There are generally taxes (e.g., car or gas taxes) that cover the costs. I don't know about Germany's situation, but it is not impossible to make that net zero.
Not even close to net zero in Germany. Do you have any examples of countries where car and gas taxes do actually cover the cost of roads?
In Australia, petrol tax raises ~18bn.
Cost of road infrastructure is ~36bn.
And these comparisons often exclude externalities like carbon emissions, pollution from tires and brakes, road accident costs, noise pollution and the cost of suburban sprawl.
If you would even attempt it to make it net zero you would get truly ungodly amounts of pushback, I don't think you understand how bad it would be. Truly, for those used to a privilege, fairness is an attack.
Furthermore: you have a state of affairs where you are pretty much forced to own and drive a car to e.g. get to work or move around. You make it reflect its true cost making it impossible to afford for anyone except the rich. What now?
The system simply doesn't have more capacity right now.
Germany neglected or even removed their rail infrastructure, especially for the past 25 or so years, after privatization. These "subsidies" are a course correction.
These investments also make it a real pain to use the system right now, because a lot of lines are closing months at a time and the alternatives are already overloaded. I'd rather have a car for the next 5-10 years too - and I live very central with many connections.
Here's a map of disruptions for reference: https://www.zuginfo.nrw/map.html#!P|HimSearch!histId|1!histK...
For people less familiar. Germany privatised its national rail company in the 90s but the federal government is the only shareholder. It’s a weird model that doesn’t make much sense. DB is a monopoly so the rules of competition don’t apply (and don’t work with railways anyway) it’s led to perverse cost cutting incentives and fat bonus programs for C level employees. Combine that with a conservative government’s austerity politics since the GFC and the whole system is at breaking point at the moment. Reforms and work is happening but the amount of work is staggering and means frequent line closures. DB estimates its trains to be running reliably in 2070.
Expat in Germany since 2014. (Also, I do not own a car).
I can confirm that Dbahn service was not so great from the start, and became noticeably worse after COVID.
I live in Rostock. 2 weeks ago I landed in Hamburg at 2:30pm and tried to return home by train. Distance is 185 km, and I arrived home at 10:00pm
Reasons: works on the line that forced us to go to Lubeck first, then take two more regional trains to reach Rostock. On top of that, one train from Lubeck to the next stop was so full that a hundred passenger could not get in (me included).
The next train was canceled.
Finally we got a (packed) train at around 8pm.
All "fine" except that this is the third time in the last 12 months that the same line undergoes maintenance forcing you to move to Lubeck first and adding 1 hour to your trip.
Rostock-Berlin: similar story. For three times in the last year there were some problems between Oranienburg and Berlin, forcing you to either travel around it with a 1 hour detour or to disembark in Oraniemburg and move to S-Bahn (sort like BART).
In other words: railways are overstressed and failing repeatedly causing massive delays; Oraniemburg is 40km from Berlin Central Station. I find it unconceivable that you have to repair the same short segment thrice in 12 months.
So it is still a state enterprise in all but in name.
The swiss federal railyway has the exact same model (a company fully owned by the federal government) and it works very well.
Blaming the ownership model for the DB's woes is just wrong in my opinion. German railways have been chronically underfunded, overburdening the company with below cost ticket and the company has some perverse incentives with respect to rail maintenance and other things.
> German railways have been chronically underfunded
I already mentioned that in my comment.
The ownership model intensives cost cutting and share bonus programs.
If the state had any control over DB, they wouldn't have been invested in Arriva (a bus company) until a few months ago, and they wouldn't make most of their cargo revenue with trucks (DB Schenker).
The state is the owner of the DB company. If they didn't like where the company is going they could just fire the CEO and board and pick other people and then define any goal they want. To me it looks that the bund is not active enough in their oversight (as 100% owners) of the DB. I assume no one wants to take the blame because it is such a shitshow.
I can't answer why DB is doing certain things which Arriva and their cargo division.
The DB is losing more than EUR2 billions per year[1] so the managment is probably trying hard to get this trainwreck under control. Kinda ironic that their truck business is actually doing the heavy lifting. It's one of the only divisions besides energy that actually makes money subsdizing the other failing parts of the railway. Withouth those you would be looking at EUR2.6 billion losses per year[2]. Great thing they have DB Schenker going for them! I don't undestand the complaints about that.
Also I don't think it is possible to fix the DB without more government subsidies. It looks like they barely get any (sometimes discounts on power but thats it)[2].
If you check the SBB (a very well run operation) you can see from the public finances that about half of the operating income is from public-sector funding (aka government subsidies) without that it would be in deep red[3].
[1] https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/consolidated-interim-f...
[2] https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/fileadmin/pdf/dbk_zb24_e_...
[3] https://reporting.sbb.ch/en/finance?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scroll...
Me and my wife are certainly considering getting a car. Cars are a pain in cities, but it would save literally hundreds of hours over the course of even a single year due to just how poor the infra is.
Everybody say it with me: “privatization of natural monopolies is dumb and wasteful!”
It's head and shoulders above all the subsidies to the car industry that just increase emissions. In terms of value it can't even be compared, one is positive and the other negative.
E.g. during the original 9 Euro Ticket, the government also reduced taxes on gas to fight inflation, and this cost as much as the subsidies for the 9 Euro Ticket. The gas tax reduction's costs were 3 billion, and the 9 Euro Ticket costs were 2.5 billion.
So I would call it exceptional value when compared to other things.
Roads, highways and gas are massively subsidized, much more per kilometer travelled than rail. I think if you factor in spared road maintenance alone, from travellers using the train instead of their cars, you might see the operation is actually saving public money.
I'm not sure you've fully accounted for the full carbon reduction here, which is not just the replacement of cars from the road but also the transition to a car-free lifestyle.
It gets people out of their cars because it's cheaper than petrol. When train tickets (in other countries) cost more than the cost of petrol for the journey, commuters who already sank the cost of buying a car + insurance ask why they should bother paying a premium for the train ticket when the cost of petrol will be cheaper.
Only after people transition to taking the train in the morning, do they then start to ask questions like "do I get value out of paying for insurance on a car I don't drive?" and start to make decisions like selling their cars. In this case the carbon reduction is not only the carbon reduction of the trips that would have been taken by train, but the carbon reduction from the use of the car altogether, and future car maintenance and replacement.
If you recognise that there are other positive impacts that you haven't allowed for, then why stating that your incomplete assessment shows that it isn't good value? Does that show bias?
Fewer people in cars means fewer road deaths, safer streets for walking and cycling, quieter cities, less nimby obstructionism due to parking complaints, and less inhaled tyre participates, among other benefits.
Yes, lets subsidize the aviation and car industry more instead!!
Face it, trains is the better option here.
Bike and walk is best of course but troublesome long distance.
"social cost of driving" and "vehicle mile travelled" are two key phrases that will lead you to research on various costs of car travel e.g.
> The air pollution-related damage attributable to driving, therefore, can be estimated at $10.7 billion to $41.6 billion per year – an average of between $93 and $360 per U.S. household per year.
> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
That assumes that there is still sufficient potential for additional use of these cheaper carbon abatement methods. The tricky part about fighting climate change is that we have to make change in many different places. Each partial solution has only a limited capacity for deployment.
They are certainly very big. Rail is extremely safe so you reduce deaths and injuries from accidents. You reduce other types of pollution. You make towns and cities a lot pleasanter. You save individuals a lot of money.
> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.
You spelled “counterfeit carbon credit” wrong. There's no carbon sequestration technology that can fix carbon at industrial scale at that cost yet (and maybe never).
- Air Pollution and related deaths / morbidities - Road tear and wear - Congestion related loss of business and time - Can actually work on train or rest
Many of these can be calculated and measured.
Rail doesn’t significantly pollute more or deprecate faster on the infrastructure side empty or full.
But the roads and cars are used less, which means they require less maintenance. CO2 emission isn't the only pollution caused by cars either. People get cheaper transport options available to them.
All those other wins for society should be counted too, there may not even be a cost left to count towards CO2 reduction.
But most importantly, taking 3 billion in taxes and handing them out as subsidised pricing to some of the people isnt really a cost (to society as a whole), it's an income redistribution.
In the short run, the trains are running anyway, so you might as well fill them up.
This is something that particularly frustates me in the case of buses the UK. They're ridiculously expensive (well, except for the temporary current £2 scheme), and empty. There seems to be a political consensus that we should have them, so it would make far more sense for them to be free in all instances, except when demand is so high they're full (e.g. rush hour)
How much does it cost to keep up the motor roads in Germany? Likewise, how much do the externalities of it (like pollution, and massive numbers of deaths and injuries) cost?
Without it this comparison is meaningless.
Not having to have to own a car is a phenomenal increase in quality of life and disposable income for the average joe though
Who said rail industry should be profitable in the first place?
I would fully support if part of my taxes would subsidize rail industry and I get cheaper prices. Imo good use of tax dollars.
Show me an effective carbon abatement method well under $100.
Don't forget to factor in the reduced costs of road maintenance, accidents, non-CO2 pollution, and traffic delays.
One other positive externality could be this: The health effects of tire abrasion in cars are not clear yet, not least because tire manufacturers don’t disclose their ingredients. For all we know these fine particulates could be as bad as PFAS.
When you say “carbon abatement” do you mean carbon credits/cleanup or other ways of emitting less of it in the first place?
Many "other externalities" are priceless: Many poor people cannot afford a car.
Maybe but it’s also subsidizing travel for people, possibly increasing revenue for tourist spots and restaurants, it could keep people from buying a new ICE vehicle etc. It seems like one of those things that has a lot of benefits outside the immediate situation.
Until 2024 the budget for German Autobahn company ("subsidy") was at 6.2bn EUR for comparison.
And this is JUST the roads. No other subsidies and incentives given to car manufacturing and car transport.
We are paying 70bn€ annually for roads. And gain 25 in taxes for it.
I do recognise that "X" may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.
Modern policy in a nutshell.
The cost of the road deaths is also significant and I think it's safe to say it dropped as people switched to using rail.
Having such a very heavy subsidy also makes transit very dependent on the current political climate.
Not everything has to be priced. Some things can be desired and pursued, even if they don't make sense monetarily.
$ 3bn is a fairly small price to pay when you consider that you get less co2 ON TOP of more people using public transport
> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry.
I'm perplexed by the way you omitted the fact that these subsidies cover bus services, both local and regional (it's in the article's leading sentence).
From there you proceeded to use that cherry-picking to single out a specific type of service while also cherry-picking the tradeoffs.
Additionally the ticket has not only shifted traffic but also led to an increase of trips in total.
This is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin, my head is spinning. Luckily HN came to the rescue for once. But sadly this is the kind of reasoning that actually works in politics and finance.
Why do you need to price them?
Also, there are countries out there where the average tax payer subsidizes car drivers a lot too.
I suspect that's peanuts compared to all the subsidies and unaccounted externalities for car use.
> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn
and how was this number actually calculated?
https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/ne...
just around 2 billion
Where are you reading that? The 2 billion (2.3 billions exactly) figure was for 2023 and only covered the period from the ticket's introduction in May through to December, i.e. only two thirds of a fully year.
Health care cost decline as people walk more compared to car transit!
Secret plan of car driving politicians to decrease the traffic for themselves
A big externality is time-savings, and can be calculated.
The cost of carbon capture is not equal to the value it provides to humanity. In fact, not emitting CO2 that you could have, is even more valuable than CO2 you remove later from the atmosphere.
did carbon dioxide write this?
Thanks for doing the math!
If we look past carbon emission, we can see that the value is much bigger.
You mention that the rail industry is already substantially subsidized. What you did not mention is that the automotive industry is as well. Roads are paid by state and republic. Car purchases are often subsidized via a flat return by the republic (which primarily benefits the rich). Petrol is also subsidized.
Now all these automotive subsidiaries benefit only the people who own cars, and much more the wealthy ones. In Germany, only 43 million private households own a car. That's just roughly 50 %.
But if you get people to choose public transport over your auto, then this benefits everyone. Better air quality, less noise pollution, less streets and more space for pedestrians. Anecdotally, a close neighbourhood removed some parking spots in favour of space for local cafes and public benches with plants. Removing just two parking spots give enough places for 10 people to sit together and enjoy a sunny Sunday -- which otherwise would be dead space occupied by the cars of two or even one household.
You're right, subsidies aren't enough. They should tax carbon, road use, and car ownership also.
I love being made to forcibly pay for poor people’s transport.
How many tons of CO2 are in 1 degree of global temperature? This idea that removing “a lot” is somehow “helping” just seems hand-wavy to me. If the goal is “reduce temperatures,” then what precisely is the goal number? And then, how much CO2 equals that? And how much is the cost per degree to reduce and what is the cost per degree to not reduce?
There is a lot of “modeling” but has anyone actually proven “reducing 8000 tons of carbon reduces temperatures by n degrees?” And is it beneficial to lower temperatures? Are there benefits to higher temperatures that haven’t been quantified?
Just seems like the plan is “spend whatever it takes forever” — when whatever it takes isn’t even quantifiable. Basically investing without ever knowing the return on the investment.
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Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Additionally, there are so many apps that resell the ticket as some white label system, so it was very confusing to purchase (you cannot buy them at the machines).
The price hike is the wrong direction here if we are reducing that much time on the road. Kudos though for the great rail systems. The USA has a lot to learn here and it’s baffling how terrible it is here. I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient. In the USA I spend 10-15 mins trying to park any time I go anywhere
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
It influenced the idea to come up with a permanent ticket: the "Deutschlandticket". It started 1. Mai 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschlandticket
The Deutschlandticket costs max 49 Euros (next year it will cost 58€ per month) and is valid for one month for mostly all local®ional public transport systems (plus a few selected non-regional trains) in the whole of Germany. The subscription will renew automatically.
Companies often support employees by paying some of the costs. Then it typically costs 34.30 € per month. From next year on, employees pay 40,60 € per month max.
Here in my home city already 94% of the 213000 pupils use the Deutschlandticket for 0 € per month. Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
I have the ticket in my iPhone's wallet and thus also in the Apple Watch wallet. Additionally I need an ID card. Which at some point in time will also come to the smartphone. https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/new-mob...
> Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local®ional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.
We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these effect is they far outgrow the attention span of polititians as they take years to come to full force.
It was only valid for the state in which the university is, and not all universities offered it.
Most students now get the nationwide ticket for effectively about 30€/month.
When I started studying at university it was an optional additonal fee paid with the Semesterbeitrag and the ticket was only valid in the city (not even the state) and its close surroundings. A bit later they didn't allow us to opt out anymore but lowered the price a bit.
So for students in my region this was never free and still isn't, you are forced to pay for it and can't opt out: https://www.studentenwerk-leipzig.de/mobilitaet/semestertick...
> Studierende der sieben Leipziger Hochschulen im Zuständigkeitsbereich des Studentenwerkes Leipzig zahlen den Beitrag von 176,40 Euro verpflichtend mit der Immatrikulation bzw. Rückmeldung zum Wintersemester 2024/25.
It varies a lot by university. In Osnabrück the Semesterticket basically allowed to travel as far as Hanover, Münster and Bremen, which was pretty far as that goes. In Rostock on the other hand it only covered the city and a few of the surrounding villages (back in 2011, though).
I think there was a provision of opting out if you needed a regular public transport ticket anyway to get to the uni (because you lived too far outside) but that varies by uni as well.
I only pay 20 EUR a month because a 25 EUR subsidy by my employer. It is a total nobrainer although, I often even use it less, just because I can jump on any local train, tram, bus without worrying about a ticket (particularly as we don't have NFC payment). Actually the 9 EUR will effectively mean a 50% raise for me, so I am not sure if the raise even makes sense economically because people like me just would cancel.
It sounds amazing. All these prices seem crazy low. A significantly zone limited monthly commuter ticket here in Denmark costs over 500€
That sounds too high, even Switzerland isn't that expensive
They are indeed crazily low. The real prize is just hidden by subsidy. But more and more the true cost will be revealed. There is no free lunch.
But hey, germany could never really decide, are they living in an authoritarian, left or right utopian la-la-land or in a free country. For some time the american influence was huge, but i fear, the influence will diminish and the pendulum swings again.
And if I am not mistaken, as a university student you get also that ticket for free and you just need to show your student card.
So students basically never have to pay for the public transportation which is really awesome.
EDIT: by public transportation I mean whatever is included in the D-Ticket (no Intercity or similar types of trains).
Where I live, students pay for it, 29.40 €. It's a part of the semester fees, IIRC.
For those not familiar with how this works/worked: At most universities, a similar fee was collected from all students. That was then used to finance a regional "public transport flatrate".
N.b.: mk89 is technically not quite correct, it wasn't free (nothing in life is). It's usually bundled with the tuition/enrollment fee.
Implementation details differed per University, but for us the fee (80 or 100€, can't recall) was socialized across all students and payed together with the tuition fee; opting out was not possible (with some exceptions, like disabilities). The money went from the University administration to the AStA - the "general students council" (the executive section of the elected student self-government). The AStA then negotiated with the local public transport company/companies as well as with the Deutsche Bahn (e.g. to get access to certain inter-regional train connections - we still have cooperations with 3 or 4 nearby universities, and students somehow need to get there). Those negotiations can be a royal pita, and often the students were in a weak position.
Source: I was in the AStA (~12 people), but not involved with that task.
Thanks for the detailed answer. I guess uni students don't know or don't care so it's "for free" (in the sense it's part of the tuition fee) :)
"I LOVE the German transit system"
I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.
The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.
I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.
The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.
"They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF."
I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)
"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."
You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.
What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.
I agree that the booking experience of the DB-SNCF cooperation trains sucks from the DB end, but the underlying blame arguably lies with SNCF which insists on compulsory reservations which is against the philosophy of trains in Germany. On the other hand, in my experience DB offers cheaper tickets for these cooperation trains, most of the time.
But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.
This is not primarily a problem of the cooperation trains, I have the same situation with trains within Germany. DB-Navigator only tells you if a train is bookable right at the end, right before payment. Before that, it might show "there is high demand", but this is rather useless, especially when you have a school kid and want to book a train a the beginning or end of school holidays, when every train is in high demand. Your only chance with DB-Navigator is to play the whack-a-mole game where you run all the steps repeatedly until the very last step until you find a train you actually can book.
In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.
So much this. I often use DB navigator to plan trips within france. As soon as you're not going to or from Paris, the sncf offer and app are just terrible. Often, sncf-connect will refuse to offer me TER-only (regional train) trips, because one of the legs can also be done by TGV. Basically impossible to plan this kind of thing with the SNCF apps.
But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.
"But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station."
This is just your preference and not terrible UX. In fact I find this the more intuitive way.
It might be more intuitive if this was the first travel app every developed. But I don't personally any other transit UI that uses this pattern, and that makes using the sncf search "the weird one" and not in a good way.
Google maps and Apple maps all work like SNCF. The first thing you enter is your destination and then you can optionally change the point of departure if it is not your current or default location.
I would say this is a pretty familiar and useful pattern in general: Necessary and mandatory info first, optional data which has sensible defaults later.
I don't know about apps (only used the HVV app, for holding a ticket), but in terms of websites SNCF (at least the English version, the French one is a bit better) is an absolute mess. There is like 3 different ones for starters, one to find a connection, one to buy the ticket and one to find current status/delays.
bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).
That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.
The EU should create a standardised system for tickets in Europe, similar to the New Distribution Capability for flights or SEPA for payments.
There should also be a unified system for passengers to claim their money back if their train is delayed.
EU has asked the rail companies to do so or else they will force their hand if they don’t.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes,
It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable, resilient technology!
I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget that helpful clerk.
Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.
For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
> For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.
I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.
They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!
I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!
There simply has to be a web page about this somewhere...
> The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.
While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).
No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.
They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours
There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips
That is something we can agree upon.
reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want
SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
> There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.
The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do the same on bahn.de or in DB Navigator (which is mostly equivalent to a canned version of the site plus a few extras). Not all trains allow seat selection, sometimes seats are assigned automatically. Other trains - e.g. Dutch Intercity trains - do not offer reservation at all. The Swedish/Danish Öresundståg (a service running mostly in the south and west of Sweden) theoretically allows reservation but this hardy ever works, at least when booking through DB. Do mind that I use DB to book trips crossing several countries using different operators, in this case SJ (Swedish state railway), Öresundståget, DSB (Danish state railway), DB, Eurobahn and NS (Dutch state railway). All in a single booking with a single payment and a single point of contact using a single ticket.
"The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated."
For the last compensation I tried to get it took Deutsche Bahn 15 days to send an automated acknowledgement that they had received my request. I took another 20 days until they processed it.
I would not call that quick, but was it easy? Here is the procedure for the form translated from their site:
Procedure in the digital application in the customer account:
To do this, first select the main ticket for your journey in your customer account and start the online application.
If you had no other disruptions (e.g. delay), enter "Delay of less than 60 minutes". In the next step, a new message box will appear with the following sentence: "I had additional expenses due to the delay | I was unable to use my reservation". Click on the appropriate box and follow the next steps.
Alternatively, you can also request a refund of the reservation fee in writing (informally). Please send your request to the following address:
DB Dialog GmbH Passenger Rights Service Center 60647 Frankfurt am Main Germany
Needless to say that the form had me fill in a lot of useless stuff they either don't need to know or should know already. And of course you can send paper...
That description of the process is quite concise I'd say? Here's how it goes for me:
1: I'm delayed by more than 20 minutes somewhere along the trip upon which a new section 'request compensation' appears in the travel schedule.
2: If upon arrival I'm delayed by more than 60/120 minutes I select that option or log in to bahn.de where I select the option from the relevant itinerary.
3: it asks me when I arrived, if this ends up being more than 60/120 minutes later than the intended arrival time it asks me if I was able to use the booking for the whole trip or whether I needed to arrange alternative transport. It also asks me whether I had extra expenses like a hotel, in the latter case it tells you to submit proof of payment - a hotel bill, a taxi bill - so they can reimburse those costs. I have never done this but my daughter has had 4 hotel stays paid by DB by now. Proof can be submitted digitally, i.e. a photo of the receipts.
4: I need to fill in the details on how I want to be reimbursed - voucher or bank transaction. I always select bank transaction and fill in my bank details (IBAN - a single bank account number which works in most of Europe).
5: I confirm the submission, get a receipt via mail and one via snail mail a few days later. It usually takes about a week or two for the money to appear in my bank account, the quickest it has ever been was 5 days.
I don't consider this to be a bad process, it works and can be completed in a few minutes at most. Yes, you can send in paper as well - this is Germany we're talking about, they love paperwork - but I've never bothered with that. I do get all those confirmations via snail mail but those don't bother me, I can watch my bank account to see when the reimbursement has been completed. I have never had any problems getting reimbursed, they always paid.
> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.
You can do all that in the DB app. You can manually select which seats you want or just say the types of seats you want (e.g. compartment or open area, isle or window, table or no table, quiet area or not, family area etc).
One fun experience, arriving in München and trying to buy ticket for the airport train online. The app requires your birthdate. The date selector starts from present and only allows to go back one month at a time. So if you're 40 years old, you would need to click 480 times... We bought paper tickets from a machine . Machines work well compared to other countries though.
I thought the same thing first, but if you click on the year you can choose from a list.
I couldn't disagree more. You can say a lot of bad things about Deutsche Bahn, but of all the travel apps I have used, DB Navigator and bahn.de were the best.
SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.
I can't tell for other countries, but SNCF digital solutions have been a great example of everything you should not do for as long as I can remember. Actually bahn.de used to be a far better interface to consult french train hours than whatever fancy new name SNCF would come every few months or so.
The DB navigator app is actually decent. The one downside is it kicks you out to a website to book many international tickets, but you can still plan and track your journey delays etc. in the app.
It kicks you out to a website if you are lucky (I had this when traveling through Austria), but often it just says: "Sorry, I cannot book this for you.".
In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.
It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.
I just used the DB Navigator for extensive travel in Germany without any problems. It doesn't provide quite as much information about how to deal with connections for a delayed train, but that is minor compared to the very transparent function for buying and displaying tickets.
>Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes
I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Paper based offline processes forever, please.
I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.
Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.
Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.
If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.
You can use a card on every ticket machine.
lol you know websites exist right. what a luddite approach. Paper is expensive, wasteful, environmentally harmful, and time consuming.
I don't carry a phone around with me at all times. Phones are expensive, wasteful, socially and environmentally harmful, time consuming, and they erode our freedoms.
I’d love to see an in-depth analysis of the overall production costs for paper and ink vs electronic. Tree to processing to ticket vs smartphone, grid, network, software, and so on. I imagine the paper process is exceptionally cheaper but I could very well be wrong.
Sure. And how do you pay? I mean, really. You're forced to create an account, then link a payment method (PayPal and/or Visa/Mastercard may or may not be supported, Apple Pay almost never is). Sometimes you also have to link a mobile phone number or the number is the account identifier.
How is that an alternative?
Paper is fine for the environment. Paper takes an absolutely tiny portion of a tree (and burning the pulp waste tends to result in a net energy surplus from the pulp mill!), whereas the amount of energy to create one computer (even a phone) is massive.
As a tourist I agree, and the Deutschland Ticket App is Region locked, so you are bound to the complexity of the system, which seems unnecessary and way too expensive as opposed to the ticket locals get.
There are many different vendors with different apps.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
> The DB Navigator is so terrible
It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
I couldn't pay for my ubahn with a credit card on the bahn, and the app required me to use some kind of a paypal derivative. I did not pay.
Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.
Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.
Pay before. That's how the transport systems generally work in Germany. In many trains you need to have a ticket BEFORE entering the train and also BEFORE entering the platform in the train station.
> Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email.
I can do that in the DB app.
The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that. Granted, we are europeans, not Germans living in Germany.
Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
If you don't pay before, and the train doesn't have a ticket machine on it (most don't, but some e.g. trams in Berlin do) you are riding illegally. That's how it works in Germany.
> The DB app? Definitely was not an option for the people who did that.
Yeah, it's in the app.
> Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.
That's how it works. Typical here for local trains: there are no barriers in train and bus stations. One can just enter the train and bus without any ticket check. But you have to make sure that you have a ticket. The local trains have no installation to buy a ticket anymore. Typically one would buy them online or have a subscription ticket. How does the system make sure that people pay and don't game the system? There are random checks.
If you want a ticket, buy it before entering a train. Train stations have either ticket systems or a ticket office. But most people by now do it online either per website or app.
For long-distance trains I would always book in advance (it's often also cheaper) and book a seat, too.
That's how it works.
That's how it works in Germany. Everywhere else I just swipe my mobile and I am done.
I don't even need to swipe a ticket. All my local public transport has zero ticket checks, just random&rare controls.
In a long distance train I check in on my booked seat via the app. That's it. No additional ticket check.
German people have an understandable historical revulsion to the government tracking their every move.
Yes, that is why, instead of using a payment network, they choose to use an app, which still needs one to transact within the financial system and lets the government adjacent company run arbitrary code on one’s phone.
It's why they use paper tickets most of the time.
Yeah, cool, I understand, it is how it is done. I am not arguing that, and I already conceded that.
Why are you bringing the same argument back up again?
Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And it asked me to use a paypal account. I do not carry my papyal credentials with me.
I have never gotten on long distance trains and expected to pay on them, not what I am arguing about.
And when I mean that the app was not an option, I mean that in our case, we couldn't use the app to submit a return. I was not the one submitting those forms, I was too lazy. The people who did told me the app did not work for their case. Given that you've told me 2x that "you can just do it in the app", what else can I say besides the fact that when tried, it did not work? Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
> Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?
The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too.
> All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?
You can buy with credit cards (and a few other options) using the usual payment terminals. Again, you usually have to pay outside of the train. The terminals are at the train station.
The DB app is absolute hot garbage. God forbid you don't have internet or it randomally updates logging you out. All of his previous arguments are valid.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
> With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
They also have an extensive web-based ticket shop.
You don't need to print PDF tickets. One can also show a PDF ticket on an electronic device, without printing it. I used the DB ticket PDFs for several years, without printing it. Nowadays a load the long-distance train tickets onto the phone and have it in the DB app, I have also a PDF version via mail.
> For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
I have that here also in my city. The reality: most people have a subscription, that's the by far dominant model. Simpler and less tracking needed.
> It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
Larger cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, ... are central for large traffic regions. For example the traffic region here in Hamburg serves roughly 3.7 million people.
> That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
We now have a Germany-wide affordable subscription-based ticket for local®ional public transport. That's my understanding of public transport gone digital, nation-wide. The basics were operational after only a few months of planning.
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized.
That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.
I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.
Was there really not even a pdf and/or matrix code option ?
I agree with the part about complicated tariffs/tickets but not much else. Although not sure how many countries make it simple, the only one I am aware of is Switzerland which conveniently solves the problem by making everything expensive.
I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.
The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.
> I doubt I’d ever need a car in Germany given the rail system was much more convenient
Sure, if you live in a larger city and you never leave… I lived in Munich for years and never needed a car, just comfortable shoes, a bike and occasionally a transport ticket.
Try to get to a smaller town or village, you are lucky if you only spend twice as much time getting there as with a car.
The trains get randomly cancelled, delay is basically guaranteed, the workers go on strikes relatively frequently, so you can never rely on trains working for anything remotely important.
Surprised how positive you're writivg about the German public transport. The Deutsche Bahn doesn't have a good reputation in central Europe.
I guess my frame of reference isn't average, given I live in Switzerland.
Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!
Of course your frame of reference is biased because you have the best railway system out of ~30 European countries.
Germany’s system gets a lot of hate but it still in the top ~8 or so.
I agree. Let's grant that SBB is more organized than DB. But given that Germany is 8 times as big as Switzerland and with 33,000 km has a significantly larger train network than Switzerland's 5,300 km, it's no surprise that trains accumulate more delays in Germany.
As a UK citizen living in Berlin, I assure you that for all the cancellations and repair works, there's many places which look up to the German system.
(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).
I visited the UK, which is my home, and the UK train system was amazing. Got multiple tight connections with zero delays. Far better than I’ve experienced living in Germany
Interesting, i am in the opposite situation. Using the deutsche bahn for long distances is often horrible so I never thought I would miss it but omg I really didn't have a good experience with Uk trains. The ticketing is complicated and the trains were often so unbelievably dirty and run down. Never had this experience in an ICE. Okay there are sometimes issues like the toilet boing out of order or the restaurant closed but the train is usually clean and fairly nice. And while the delay wasn't massive I still had delays. It's also sooo slow, there's no high-speed train. Last time I took the train from southampton to edinburgh and it really took forever and I was soo slow.
Even Edinburgh-London is slow! It's a similar distance than munich-berlin, a train I often take. In germany these are sleek, clean trains that take just over 3 hours, with only one or two stops with the sprinter. The train in the UK takes around 5 hours, significantly longer. I can do 3 hours on a friday evening work and arrive not too late to then meet friends for drinks, you can't do that with 5 hours.
And not only ICE, it's the same experience with regional trains. I used to live in Baden-Württemberg and took a lot of regional trains. I didn't think I would miss it with the delays from the new central station that they've been building for what feels like forever but now I do.
There are many things that the UK does better than Germany but trains they manage to do even worse (or maybe its not that bad?)
Even when I lived in the UK, I never had that experience.
End of term, Aberystwyth to Birmingham trains were regularly terminated on route at Wolverhampton.
Loose connections generally worked.
The UK is so expensive though. I thought I was looking at airplane fares.
Fair. I've had one flight to the UK that cost less than the train ticket from the UK airport to my actual destination. Air tickets got a lot more expensive after the pandemic, but it's still close.
(OTOH, I've also had one case where it was cheaper to take the ferry and trains back from the UK to Berlin than fly, presumably because of massive demand as that was the day Stansted airport was closed by 1cm of snow and I had an 8 hour queue for a replacement flight that was itself also cancelled).
I recently needed two tickets from NYC to LA, and was astonished to find air tickets for $80 and rail tickets for $2200. It's so unbelievably expensive (not counting that the flight was a few hours and the train was 56 hours).
Very disappointing! How is it so expensive?!
Competition, I suppose. Still, that seems extreme. A few years (might have been eight) back, I traveled Amtrak's Zephyr from Chicago to California. The roomette for two (coach would have been cheaper) was some $450, about the same as 2nd class air fare for one then. But yes, the train isn't in a particular hurry, expected travel time is some 50h, but 1.5h in, it was already 20m late for no apparent reason. Most passengers were tourist, but I also talked to a fellow who was going to California to pick up a used car for his daughter.
I like the idea of long distance train traveling, as one can get off and back on later (check the fine print of your ticket though). Apparently, that's not customary however and earned me an interview by a TSA agent (a very polite fellow, odd as it may sound) who approached me (with a local Sheriff in tow) at a scheduled stop.
> Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!
As a Swiss person you want appreciate German tax rates that subsidize that 49-euro tickets. The money has always got to come from somewhere.
> If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Just in case this is helpful to someone, you can buy the ticket from one of those different transport organizations you mentioned and avoid that time limit to cancel. The one to use for that is https://www.mopla.solutions/, it's a simple app (alternatively web site) that worked really well for me (no affiliation).
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
The €9 ticket was a 3 month temporary offer, which was not originally intended to continue permanently at all.
> I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
The ticket is subsidised by the German government(beyond the amount that all rail infrastructure and most services are subsidised) for the purpose what is covered in the article - encouraging permanent modal shift of regular travellers(primarily commuters) from road to rail. If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Airtravel is also subsidised by the German tax payer. Much more than the 49 EUR ticket. No matter if you are a tourist or not. (Arguably mostly for tourists actually.)
What's the method of subsidy there? Contributing to Airbus shares?
Commercial aviation fuel is tax exempt in the EU, I would already count that as a subsidy (yes, I count not taxing something that's normally taxed as a subsidy, even if it isn't done by directly paying out money).
Subsidising airports and fuel, presumably.
How is it subsidized while a local flight costs more than an international one?
The idea is to push people to use the train, but a train isn't an alternative if it takes 9 hours compared to the 2 hour flight.
ICE from Hamburg to Munich is about 5 hours. That's basically the other end of the country. Not sure where 9 hours come from.
And your 2 hour flight easily goes to 4-5 hours if you add the security theatre and the extra overhead that transport to/from the airport entails. They are far outside the city whereas central stations are usually in the city center.
> If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.
Tourist&foreigners can use the Deutschlandticket, too.
But: it's a monthly subscription automatically renewing every month, so one has to cancel it early enough when planning to leave the country. You'll also typically need a smartphone for the ticket.
Well, on mobile they make you think you need the app, but it's region locked. I happened to email them about how this is annoying for tourists yesterday and got a very German response,
"Downloading the Deutschlandticket.de app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store is only possible in certain countries." (ikr, it's THE problem)
The problem may be that if they offer the app in foreign regions, they are liable to the jurisdiction of those foreign regions.
Is a response repeating the thing you just concluded in your mail to them very german?
A factual, but entirely unhelpful response to a customer service query is very German.
The ticket is available by other apps, too.
> You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.
Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)
It started with 9€, is 49€ now, and will be 58€ starting 2025.
You can buy for a single month when booking through the right company. "mo.pal" is a good one, for example. However, I agree that it is a bit predatory.
All of these tickets are only for local/regional trains, not the faster/long-distance trains. You can get from one end of the country to another by changing trains a few time, but e.g. getting from Munich to Berlin would be 6h (direct) with fast trains and 10+ h (changing 3 times) with the regional ones.
The subscription model is intentional - this isn't meant to help tourists or to be bought when you need it, it's meant to make sure people have already pre-paid the cost when making a decision whether to take a train or a car (by being cheap enough that people subscribe even if they don't use it all the time).
As a tourist, the cost was well worth it. Used buses and rail to get everywhere, booked one DB train from Berlin to Bamberg but otherwise travelled all over Germany during my time there.
Just had to remember to cancel.
It’s not really made for tourists from outside the country, you already have special tickets for people who visit for a short time. It’s for the local population. The price hike is from 49€/month to 58€/month next year. It’s the opposite of predatory IMHO, you have it on your mobile app in a few tap and can cancel easily
Yep, it's not really meant for tourists. They really want everyone to stay in the subscription model, because it's heavily subsidized, so they need to hit a high enough LTV anyways.
Cancellation terms vary by vendor. With some better ones, you can cancel 24 hours before the end of the month to avoid being billed for the next month.
> is a bit predatory
what bugs me the most is that i can only book it for a specific calendar month. that is _so_ stupid ...
True, significant only because offered for 9 EUR initially.
Not only — when I visit friends in the UK, I've had single rail tickets cost more than the increased next years' cost of a monthly nationwide ticket here in Germany.
I'm a big fan of public transit, but it's not entirely "baffling" why the US lags European countries (and Japan) - the US is a MUCH larger country.
> the US is a MUCH larger country
with much of the population in a few denser areas, where public transport would make a lot of sense.
The size "excuse" is often brought up, I don't think that's valid though, e.g. Sweden with a significantly lower density has much better public transport. Or if we talk absolute size I think even Russia has a better rail transport system than the US for example. Like usual I think it can largely be attributed politics and to the strength of the car lobby in the US (as well as a weird desire to "stick it to poor people"), which caused a complete focus on individual travel.
There’s a happy medium somewhere though and the US doesn’t meet it at all. I can’t even take a bus from my neighborhood in a California city to the grocery store in a timely manner and it’s often cancelled
Oh, I know - I live in Oakland. I think even here the population density is lower than in European cities. (It's definitely lower than in Asian mega-cities.)
But yes, I do wish California did better. People are used to bad transit, and have never visited Tokyo or even NYC, so expectations are low.
The EU is only about half the land area of the USA; Germany is roughly equivalent of the fourth largest US state, Montana, and only CA, TX, and AK are bigger.
Do any states have something equivalent to this?
And Germany has a population of 83 million. Montana has a population of 1.1 million.
I don't get your point.
You said the USA was big. Now you're saying population is the important thing. Combined that's population density, so does Maryland have this? Connecticut? etc.
On the density front, NYC is famously high density, and yet so far as I can tell a monthly pass for just there is double the raised price this ticket will be next year: https://new.mta.info/document/118601
Most adults should be able to figure out that IN THIS CONTEXT "big" refers to land mass relative to population.
Yes, NYC has a dense population, and yes, it also has the best public transit in the country.
And your best is twice the price for something strictly worse. (I've used NY public transport, it's much worse than anything I've seen in Germany).
One thing adults often also do, and which you just did by continuing to ignore the point, is treat arguments as soldiers.
Somehow that wasn't as much of an obstacle in 1920!
But the DC to Boston line isn't
I don't have the details, but every single time I have heard the mention of Deutsche Bahn in the last few years it has been accompanied by comments of how broken it has become, with constant delays and cancellations, to the point where for many people it is no longer a viable option for commute or for anything where you cannot risk to be up to several hours late.
I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.
There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.
>There is a big reporting bias though. You won't see in the news "of the 40,000 railway connections today, most were on time". You only read about some train having had an AC issue or the like.
I feel most know about Japan's shinkansen being run well.
For those who don't, the average delay is 1.1 minutes on average.
For comparison, the DB long distance trains are considered on time if they're less than 6 minutes late, and still only 64% are considered on time.
> Japan's shinkansen
They have dedicated tracks. In Germany all train lines (freight, local trains, long-distance trains) share the same tracks and especially at different speeds this causes delays and problems.
Building new track or even adding more lanes is extremly difficult because of NIMBY's and from 1995 to 2005 switches and extra lanes for overtaking where build back to save costs.
Additionally signalling is in large parts still very labour intensive and smaller tracks are often still running with technology from the early 20th century and late 19th century.
So the problem Deutsche Bahn has to solve is quite a bit harder than shinkansen.
among intercity trains run by Deutsche Bahn, the on-time rate hovers around 2/3. it's technically true that "most were on time", but one third being late is really terrible, especially since you often need to make a tight connection.
even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck.
https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2023/en/combined-management-re...
Long-distance trains are worse statistically because they travel longer Router and therefore have more opportubities to gain delay. Across all trains, puncuality is like 95%.
that is true, but tons of highly frequent on-time commuter trains doesn't help anyone who wants to travel long distances.
right now if you want to go between two cities you always have to plan on missing your connection.
I wouldn't call a 7 minutes delay "terrible".
It is if you miss a connection that only runs hourly or so. (Even with a half-hourly connection it'd be annoying.)
Long distance trains are getting more unreliable (ICE, IC) due to repair works on the tracks - regional / local trains are mostly fine (at least in my place here) and I can't remember the last time there was an delay longer than 10 minutes here. However lately I've saw that trains are cancelled due to manpower shortages and due to the nature the local trains are organized (there is a tender and a railway company wins that tender for 5 years with the same rolling stock) peaks in capacity like on the weekend are not dealt with.
It was broken long before the offer though so the reduction in driving being moderate probably reflects fewer shifts in daily commute and mostly more leisure usage.
Last time I frequented Boston Amtrak it would delay about 28% of travel.
> Didn’t this start as unlimited anywhere for 9 euros no strings attached?
No, you could never use it on IC or ICEs
>I LOVE the German transit system
What? How? I have the ticket and despite that I never use any regional train because they're generally awful. (Local busses and trams on the other hand work pretty well)
Regional trains are really okay compared to long-distance trains. These are so bad that it's unlikely that you reach your destination on time now.
Germany is smaller than California. The United States is very, very large place, mostly unpopulated. It’s hard to apply whatever Germany, a small, densely populated country does to the US, which is largely empty land.
Why do we have to pretend that routes between Montana and South Dakota have to come up when discussing ways of improving rail usage in the US? We could treat routes between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis like Germany. We could treat high speed rail in California or the Northeast like Japan. Choosing to live in an extremely rural area shouldn't just be a "well it doesn't help" me trump card to defeat things that will help most of the population.
We also have a similarly frustrating kind of arguments in germany itself.
Like, focus on public transport won't work. Because in some tiny towns of 30k people living there, there is never a bus around so why care? Like... dude. In Hamburg, we have subway stations that move more people in minutes than people live in your town. Yes, it may not work on your case. Your case is however a side note. It needs consideration, but not focus.
Or electric vehicles. There are interesting questions about electric vehicles in uncontrolled situations, emergency services and long-distance situations. As well as regions without a good charging infrastructure. Yes. These are problematic. Except, most likely, more unique cars drive past my window in an hour on a workday than exist in that tiny town. Just keep your ICE car for the trip to spain you never take by car, but we should optimize the vehicles in cities. Again, it needs consideration, but not focus.
Exactly. Always somebody trots out invalid arguments about size and population density. There are smaller states in the USA that are about as dense as Germany, like Maryland and Connecticut. So, why don't those states have great state-wide public transit systems?
The politics at the national level are likely to be that states not helped by this vote against it.
Yep, federal income tax is a big reason. For states to fund this on their own requires additional taxation. Some places like FL don’t even have a state income tax, so they are stuck trying to get tourists to fund transportation projects somehow or increasing sales taxes or higher tolls. And of course higher tolls have the unfortunate side effect of reducing demand for the thing to begin with.
Maybe we should work on making one vote to be equal in the nation.
This is a boring trope. Whether it’s a group of United States or a single State is a debate as old as the country. You’re going to need really compelling reasons for states to give up their representation and participate in the state vote required to amend the constitution to remove their rights.
> states to give up their representation
> their rights
You talk about states as if they are people. But they are not. States are a fiction invented by people (and let's be honest, by rich and powerful people), and so they can be torn down by people (likely not the rich and powerful).
"State representation" and "states' rights" are not compelling to most people, other than via some vague appeal to "isn't it great that New Mexico can do one thing and Maine can do something else?", which by itself does not require "state representation" or the current ideas of "states' rights".
States are organizations of people. Boosted representation isn’t compelling to people who don’t care, but the people in smaller states do care. It means more fed govt consideration when it comes to regulatory decisions and funding.
Your post of “bUt thEYre nOt pEOple” is pointless. When people talk about the rights of governments nobody is saying that the government is a person.
If federal rules provide some version of equal treatment, then "boosted representation" for small states is about nothing but a desire for local power.
There's no reason for smaller states to get less money per capita for schools, or less money per mile for US highways, or less money per million dollars of damage from a natural disaster. And indeed, they do not, because we have historically believed in fairness.
However, the idea that the 300k residents of Wyoming should be able to exert outsize power of regulatory decisions just because "they are a state" is anti-democratic. We put the things we don't want majoritarian decisions on into the constitution; the rest is up for a vote, and a handful of people shouldn't be able to veto the decision of the many just because they happen to be clustered in one place.
It was a valid debate back when travelling to the capitol took months by horse. Nowadays everyone uses services from other states on a daily basis, and possibly work in another state (with WFH) on a daily basis. It's pretty darn clear that the USA simply could not exist as a bunch of separate states anymore.
And frankly, states are already giving up their representation in the current system. If you're not a swing state, you're irrelevant. If you live in a populated state, you have a second-class vote.
If the USA had a modern voting system and anyone proposed the current pile of junk, they would be laughed out of the room.
> And frankly, states are already giving up their representation in the current system. If you're not a swing state, you're irrelevant.
You’re talking about presidential elections, which are a tiny slice of the picture. Wyoming has 2 senators and so does California. That’s huge for Wyoming.
> It was a valid debate back when travelling to the capitol took months by horse. Nowadays everyone uses services from other states on a daily basis, and possibly work in another state (with WFH) on a daily basis. It's pretty darn clear that the USA simply could not exist as a bunch of separate states anymore.
None of this is relevant because crossing states to work has been a thing since the founding of the country. The only meaningful difference between the founding and now is the massive expansion of the duties of the federal government
> None of this is relevant because crossing states to work has been a thing since the founding of the country
Obviously not to the same degree.
The thing is if your business is multi-state, which is almost all of them, you need to comply to the lowest common denominator.
So no, states don't really have much of any autonomy. Companies these days are globalized and multi-national, let alone multi-state. That ship sailed.
Because those states are part of the same federal government and they have a say in what the federal government does. These rail systems almost always require federal government level investments.
Another significant issue is that the USA wasn’t built for rail, and to do so now requires sign off by land owners, municipalities, and so on. The amount NIMBY-oriented policies in California, for example, is a serious impediment. Oddly, people cite rural areas as an issue, but rural areas aren’t typically an issue. It would be comparably inexpensive to run high speed rail over undeveloped land, while tearing up buildings, roads, water, sewer, and power would be tremendously costly. For much of Europe, rail transport was put in place long before automobiles became commonplace. For much of the USA, the cities didn’t even exist at that time, and they were mostly built around automobiles.
Rail was famously first in the USA, and you can still see politics focused around rail as the main long distance transportation merely a century ago.
But yes, there was a lot of car-centric buildup (and maybe even some new cities??) since then.
For places like NYC, Chicago, Boston, yeah. And we see rail in those locations. We do not see rail in towns and suburbs around those areas. In Atlanta, for example, MARTA exists, but NIMBY policies in Northern suburban counties keep it from expanding. This is especially bad considering more people live in those counties than in the city proper. Further, even if one could get sign-off, the cost to acquire the property required would be incredibly costly. Land prices are historically high, and after acquisition would need to be cleared and then rail would need to be laid. Unless the USA wants to get rid of compensation for imminent domain seizure, I don’t know how this kind of rail development would ever be done.
"Ever" is a very long time.
Considering how the wasteful cars / trucks / planes are on their way out in a short time frame (decades), while buses / rail / barges are much less so,
I expect that transition to happen naturally as economic pressures make the position favoring the minority able to still afford cars / trucks / planes as less and less politically tenable.
And how many people regularly commute across the United States? The absolute majority of the journeys people make regularly is still quite short, so why not start by optimizing for them? Then continue with building high speed intercity connections between the urban areas with <500 km distance to create valuable alternatives to being stuck in the highway traffic and dealing with the airport security nonsense.
Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?
Also even if you're worried about going cross-country, that requires what, two fast lines between the coasts to get good routes? So even though those areas don't have many people per square mile, passing through would need an extremely small amount of track per square mile.
Look, nobody is talking about Nebraska. the density of the east coast is easily high enough to support high speed high quality rail.
That's why they call it "flyover country". Not "railover country".
1. CA is the 3rd largest state in the USA. Do any of the 47 smaller states have something like this?
2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.
It was one of the most intelligent ( and rare) decision the government took. Off course, there are parties loosing money like car manufacturers and oil producers.
It's also a decision where the federal government tries to take the credit, but in case of any financial shortfalls, for now municipalities and counties (and as far as regional railways services are concerned, the states, too, to some extent) will be left holding the short end of the stick, because the federal and state revenue support for the reduced fare comes with a hard cap.
While currently even the federal government is subject to the so-called Schuldenbremse ("debt brake"), municipalities and counties are under much stronger legal obligations to balance their budgets, and in a lot of states, public transport is an entirely voluntary matter for municipalities to provide (and even where it isn't, the mandated minimum obligation probably won't entice anybody to take public transport if you don't have to), which starts mattering in a budget crunch.
Already the first major cities have threatened future service cuts. For now that may just be political posturing, but it's still not what you would want to hear in that context, and certainly doesn't serve to encourage people getting rid of their cars, either.
That's a double win in my book.
I agree. I still have to rely on my car for basically everything because the same government also fucked up the rail system so severely that it barely works in my region. When I moved from a small village to the city, I sold my car and wanted to use public transportation for everything. I'm not fond of driving, especially in cities, so this looked like a no-brainer. I had my first bad experiences quickly when I learned that public transportation wasn't anywhere as reliable as I previously thought.
I had to choose between going to work 45 minutes earlier (of course, unpaid and without the possibility of leaving earlier) or risking being too late half the time. I had to travel further for my next job, but I thought it would be better because it was another connection. I was wrong. It was usually better in the mornings, but my way home usually took between 1,5 and 3 hours instead of the planned 45 minutes.
The next job I chose only because there, at least, I could take the S-Bahn instead of the Deutsche Bahn Trains, and it was a direct connection, which was way more reliable. But it was very loud, very smelly, cold in winter, and very hot in summer (I remember having a working AC twice in the four years that I traveled that line), and there were (not always empty) beer bottles rolling around the floor almost all the time. I always paid for the entire year in advance, so the 90-minute daily drive did cost a little more than 220 Euros monthly. Otherwise, it would have been even more expensive. So, the current ticket would have improved that, at least financially. Now, I barely take the train anymore.
I broke my ankle so badly in my youth that the doctors told me that they had to completely cut it open from both sides to see if they could improve it in any way. They also said that there was a strong possibility that I would wake up with a fused ankle after the operation. They recommended I only do that when the pain becomes unbearable, which I am now waiting for. So, I am permanently in pain, and walking is terrible for me. Still, when I have to go to the nearby city center, I prefer walking for 45 minutes instead of taking the 10-minute trip by train. That is what relying on German public transportation for more than ten years did to me. I tried that train connection multiple times before and stopped after it took me over an hour twice (after about five trips total).
Disclaimer: It is not that bad everywhere in Germany. That's why I wrote "in my region" in the beginning. Within Berlin, for example, I had good experiences with public transportation. Well, at least regarding its availability. There were still junkies in there. And homeless people who smelled like they were living on that train for at least a few weeks. But well, that's another topic.
A broken clock is correct twice a day. Don't attribute something that you can to intelligence what can be explained by chance.
It's pretty awesome, but it gets more expensive all the time.
First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months.
People loved it, and the government talked about doing a permanent 29€ ticket.
But now we pay 49€ and it's already planned to become 59€.
Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Remember that it cost a small rent to get this subscription until the 9€ experiment. Flat fee national transport, I don't remember the exact price but it's multiple hundreds a month in both the Netherlands (NS altijd/trein vrij) and Germany (Bahnkarte 100). Even my local subscription to go ~10km between two cities in Germany (NRW) cost 90€ a month until that experiment
A nationwide subscription for 60 euros is a steal, even when the long distance trains are excluded
Except for people who simply don't have 60€ a month easily, so they're left out. Also, it will absolutely not stay at 60€, it will become more expensive each year until the local tickets are cheaper again - defeating the whole purpose (if it won't be reverted outright after the next election, which the conservatives will win).
I'm not saying it shouldn't be free like in Luxembourg, just made the comparison with how it has been for decades until the recent 9€ experiment and now ~60€ subscription. It's already a lot better than it used to be, even if it's not perfect
Do you know how it works, actually, if you need to get to work but can't because of the cost? If you can't afford 60€ then you also won't be able to afford a car that costs probably >3x times as much for a barebones old model when you include the necessary insurance, road tax, and fuel. Bürgergeld pays your rent afaik but do they front e.g. costs when you get a job to actually get there until your first paycheck? Can one apply for a public transport subscription in low income situations?
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Depends. In my city "poor" people pay less. Just 19 € per month. Pupils don't pay at all. Students pay 29.40 €.
For a developed country, 59 EUR is not all that expensive if it helps you get to a job. Having it be too cheap would probably degrade the quality of service for busier routes and make it harder for future projects to pay themselves off.
In a highly developed and wealthy country it should be free.
> highly developed and wealthy
That's not Germany
It seems the problem might be that pricing is judged independent from externalities. Same with cars and roads.
On the other hand, if price was set to zero, you would get weird over-usage patterns (like people using it for housing or other nonsense)
The Swiss ride anywhere ticket is 4000 CHF annually [1]. (330 CHF/month -> 350 EUR/month)
That's still less than an average car. A commonly quoted figure is 10'000 CHF per year. [2]
[1] https://www.sbb.ch/de/billette-angebote/abos/ga/ga-preise.ht...
[2] https://www.comparis.ch/carfinder/autofahren/auto-kosten
I find the comparis estimate an overestimate. Take their VW Polo example. You would definitely not insure it for 1207 Fr a year and an annual service is not 3000 Fr a year. You take their estimate for VW Polo, put numbers a layman folk pays for, and you will get a number around 5000 a year. If you buy a second hand car, then you get a very competitive price to the GA, but also get more flexibility.
I am not saying anyone should by a car, quite the contrary, just stating the fact that 4000 Fr/yr is not competitive enough to car.
The German one is 4550€
https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/bahncard100
Quite comparable. The ticket discussed in the article in contrast only includes local transportation but no high speed rail.
They earn A LOT more money in Switzerland than in Germany.
Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
Well you'll usally have 563€/month as a single or 506€/month if living with a partner. State pays health insurance and rent (up to a certain limit in size of the flat). In most cities it's further subsidized (25-29€ for the 49€ ticket).
If that's enough depends a lot where you live, if you have family or not and your livestyle.
You have to pay your energy bills (40-70€/month) and internet / cell-phone (40-50€/month) for yourself.
If you are a healthy single it's perfectly fine if you life a simple life. But you can't really put aside any savings.
> Doesn't Germany have an extremely large social safety net?
Yes, but people will still be greedy and complain about every little thing.
> Who are these poor people that don't have 49€ for a month of transportation, and how are they possibly surviving without that much money - given the cost of everything else in Germany?
Germany can actually be quite cheap on the basic goods. I mean, it's the country who invented the concept of discount-market and is now spreading Aldi&Lidl to the world. There are also many shops and programs for supporting poor people, selling stuff for lower prices or second hand, and such things. And of course this includes offering a lower price for the ticket.
The safety net also provides people with cheaper tickets. At least in my city, the ticket costs much less for people who depend on the social safety net.
It's still super affordable for the average worker using these tickets to commute.
> First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months.
That was a different Ticket. A highly subsidized time-limited offer. It was never meant to be economical. The 49€ is the economical viable solution, after a long discussion, which still is subsidized. And the 59€ is just the rise to fine-tune the price to actual usage and inflation.
> Really sad, as it isn't affordable for poor people anymore.
Poor people, as also students, get a lower price. Usually around 19-29€. And many workers can get it through their company, or can get something back from taxes. The amount of people who are really paying the full price themselves is probably not that high.
€59 is a steal. The goal is to move people to public transport and strengthen economy, not to be a charity to folks that want unlimited (!) transportation but don’t have € 60/month to show for it.
Even so, cities subsidize this ticket for the “poor”, so practically their costs are even lower.
> First it started as 9€ ticket for 3 months
Someone said in other comment that that 9 ticket was one time only
> That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket
It's meant to be an alternative to car drivers which are still gonna save over driving even with multiple hikes ahead.
I really really would like to see Labour in the UK to use their sizeable majority + Parliamentary sovereignty to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure, including more train subsidies, but they seem very cautious and also terrified of raising taxes. Such a waste that the UK is one of the few places where Parliament could just ram shit through and yet building anything in the UK is so hampered by self-imposed red tape.
15 years of all major parties supporting hs2 and it couldn’t be rammed through
Want to improve things for people in the UK, ram through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago.
> through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago
New towns will just be full of commuters and have no life in them. We need to build high rises in cities, and give people living in apartments real rights - the leasehold system is feudalism.
And give Manchester and Birmingham real metro/tube systems!
HS2 was an ongoing project, it was threw. It was simply cancled by a fucking asshat person who tried to appeal to the far right in a series of stunts to save his sorry ass.
New housing has to be built along transportation corridors. If you want to efficiently build housing, you have to extend transportation infrastructure into areas and then grow towns around that.
This isn't actually hard and has been done for 100 years but somehow in modern day many countries are to stupid to understand this.
HS2 spent years and billions trying to keep the moaners in the chilterns happy. The number of tunnels is insane.
The M40 didn’t have this problem.
Yes transportation goes without saying. Places like Telford and Milton Keynes and the likes. There are tons of places on the WCML that could have MK style communities.
Terrified of raising taxes? I dunno, they are planning to raise taxes and introduce new ones. Cautious? Not in the least. Walking into one PR disaster after another.
There is no way to fix the UK railways, because it would require expensive engineering projects and purchase of private land/properties at low prices. People would vote them out as soon as they could. So no chance of that happening anytime soon.
Lots of people seem surprised that the new government apparently have no desire to improve the dire state of the UK. But that was never on the cards and the idea that they might have done so is pure projection. The current leadership of the Labour party are from the right-wing Labour First faction who have always been very clear that their aims are not to improve the country but to keep the left out of power. They will govern in the same business-as-usual nothing-can-ever-get-better vein as the Tories and their Blairite predecessors.
However I don't blame the public for not knowing this fact. There was (and to some extent still is) a media lockdown on reporting who is behind the Starmer project. (Because if it had been reported on it might not have succeeded).
I made an argument for making my local public transportation free: https://boehs.org/node/free-the-t
Some of the arguments is based on similar German research, which is cited.
The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people.
I took public transit all the time living in Melbourne since it was clean and silent nearly 98% of the time. Same in the Netherlands.
Hundreds of thousands of people use public transit daily in America. Long headways, poor coverage, and lackluster maintenance budgets are a much more important problem than what you're describing.
I take your point but the reality is millions use it daily. Also where it is better more use it. Which is the important point lost to many.
I was in San Francisco recently, and, okay, maybe San Francisco is special or something, but the public transport seemed basically fine? Insofar as it existed; coverage wasn’t great, but it didn’t seem particularly threatening where it existed.
BART is different than most systems. Generally people are talking about buses in my experience. Most trains/subways are relatively tame compared to buses. I was carless for a couple of years in college and had to live off campus to afford rent and riding the bus I encountered more than a few times that made me nervous.
If you ask some particular demographics about San Fran they'll tell you you'll get stabbed with a fentanyl coated super knife the second you step on the subway. And then they'll parade your body up and down the streets and dump you in the communal body bonfire.
Naturally, those people have never been to San Fran. They live in an ugly home in North Texas, where they commute 2 hours a day to their shitty office job and they know at least 5 people who have died in a car accident.
I wish public transit served homeless people as well as a lot of folks like to imagine it does.
A lot of homeless aren't "transients." They aren't just passing through.
If we had excellent public transit to make it easier for homeless people to travel at will, maybe they would be. And maybe their lives would be overall better and they would get less open hatred for being poor and unhoused in a world making it increasingly challenging to get housing for far too many people.
80% of homelessness in the USA is transitional, i.e. someone lost a job or had an injury and needs time to get back on their feet.
Transient: a person who is staying or working in a place for only a short time.
I don't think most people mean someone is only temporarily homeless when they call them transients.
In the same spirit, I never really associate the meaning of "transient" as "someone passing through," rather it's just a word for "homeless person" for me.
> The reason nobody uses public transit in America is it's always packed with transients or dangerous people.
That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
>That's a lie told by people who sell fear as a product to people who always want new reasons to live in fear.
They don't just sell fear. They sell confirmation bias too.
The man who lives in an ivory tower in the suburbs is happy to read the news about a stabbing on the subway as it makes him feel less bad for not putting his money where his mouth is and riding it himself.
And he pays no attention to the reports about car crashes on the road because those aren’t even reported.
This platitude doesn't make the back seats of a greyhound bus any more palatable.
God they were cheap tickets though..
I used to live in Toronto in 2019 to 2020 and used the transit exclusively.
I return as a visitor of Toronto every quarter for work and there are many times where I Uber instead of TTC because of these comments. Even slightly busy at 4-5 PM there's always folks who have hit the gym and skipped showering and most days there's "something" happening on the TTC.
Motorists in Toronto have killed 34 people so far this year and seriously injured an additional 146 [0].
Meanwhile the TTC, with daily ridership in the million people range [0] has seen one homicide [2].
Which one is safer?
[0] https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-tra...
[1] https://www.ttc.ca/transparency-and-accountability/Operating...
[2] https://www.blogto.com/city/2024/06/outrage-person-murdered-...
Noted, while I appreciate the citation it isn't entirely correct.
How many of those are Uber specifically with passengers? Why this specific? Because Uber has a ranking system and my gut feels says anything with a ranking system that has tons of feedback weeds out bad drivers.
The other portions of my comments is psychological safety, how many times do individuals get in an Uber and feel unsafe vs being in the TTC?
How many times do individuals take an Uber service, are crammed and with a driver that smells? Even if I got a ride like that I know the market system will remove that driver.
If you told me the TTC required an identification card to enter onto and TTC could suspend/revoke access I'd go back because there would be a regulating system to remove behavior that riders don't want.
I mean... this is a huge stretch. Car accidents are, more or less, completely out of your control as a driver. You can be an amazingly defensive driver and die. And you can drive like an ass and get lucky.
In fact, I'm sure a lot of those Uber drivers are rated well because they get there fast. Well, you have to drive like a maniac for that. In the city you need to drive bold if you want to get there with limited BS. That means risking your life.
Noted, the TTC website did not appear to cover all incidents and injuries related to all vehicle incident as compared with the motorists stats.
It looks to just focus on homicide safety stats.
I spent years riding public transit in Portland, NYC, Seattle, SF, San Diego, Chicago, and other US cities. I can tell you anecdotally that public transit in the US is dangerous and meant for the poors who don’t have their shit together to level up and commute via car.
Ride 8AM and 5PM every workday for a year and tell me that it’s safe when you roll through the bad parts of Long Island/ brooklyn/Queens or the south side of Chicago. Tell me that you don’t have to take the inconvenient early train because of nTh handicap ramp pickup or last-mile cyclist that slows down your commute. Security on transit only cares about fare collection. The US is not like Europe where there is some latent pride in your ancestors accomplishments.
European here. Spent a week in NYC with a 9 month old. Traveled all over 4 of the 5 boroughs and never felt in the slightest threatened. The only major issue was the lack of elevators. Fortunately NYC people are really friendly and helped us with the stroller every time.
Maybe you came at the right time?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-deploy-750-nationa...
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/05/02/new-tea...
It was back in 2013. Oh god… feels like only yesterday but it’s been 11 years :(
Remember folks, if someone says they don't want to ride transit with a hobo smoking meth, they're lying and they're a bad person. Even if they've previously experienced it firsthand.
I know half a dozen people who have died in a car accident. I'm in my 20's.
I don't think those people are lying. I think they're 100% telling the truth... about 5% of the picture. Some consider that dishonest.
The current government in Queensland Australia announced 50c fares for 6 months trial. There is an election this month, the gov declared it will be made permanent, the opposition which is tipped to win has so far maintained they will also keep it. It has boosted PT travel significantly.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/11/the-b...
This is a vast oversimplification. Lots Angles Metro keeps posting month over month increases in ridership despite the perceive danger and unsavory experience.
I'm sure cleaner cars would help at the margins. Speed, convenience, comfortable, and cost all matter.
This is just false. In the US, when public transport is good by the same measures as other countries use, such as frequency, coverage and so on, Americans use public transport just fine.
The real reason, rather then looking at the most basic surface level is actually the horrible land use planning and the horrible transportation and city engineering. This includes things like zoning, building regulation, environmental regulation and many other things.
I think this is one reason why it is rarely expanded, people associate the stops as a way for criminals to get around; but I think usage is not great largely because it hasn't expanded...it's a self-feeding cycle.
That is pure BS. At least as some general sweeping statement.
The main reason is because Americans are unbelievably wealthy and can afford large homes that require multiple cars for the family to get around. It’s a positive sign of American prosperity and the envy of the world hence the massive immigration demand and relative lack of expatriatism.
If America gets to a point where that’s no longer possible and people have to live in smaller and more densely populated areas not by choice but by necessity then the country is truly in decline.
Let the Germans cram themselves into smaller homes and trains. I truly hope Americans can continue to prosper and acquire comfortable homes with more utility and private transport powered by cheap energy for all.
That’s a nice but false narrative. The Swiss are wealthier than the Americans and yet they use public transport extensively.
Good public infra is wealth with much higher utility than private infra.
Roads are public infra. I agree they should be kept in good order.
In general yes. In particular some roads provide negative utility and should be closed or not built.
This reads like satire, but I'm not sure that it is and it's frightening me a bit.
What’s satirical about it? Why would people want a world where they are forced to live on top of each other in small places if they don’t have to due to plentiful energy and vast material wealth?
If some new age Protestant needs to live worse to fulfill some spiritual hole then they can do it. But everyone else wants a large yard, comfortable home with many rooms, nice cars, and well maintained infrastructure to drive and park.
Because living further apart means more driving, which sucks? And it means less community, which sucks? And it means you'll be fatter and die earlier, which sucks?
I'm not saying those are 100% true. I'm saying those are reasons and I can think of much, much more.
There's pros and cons to everything.
The real puzzle imho is to get people to use public transport for the mostly empty route and time combinations. There are many of those for different reasons.
Trains are so heavy it doesnt really cost or save anything if there are people inside or not.
Its like restaurants throwing away food.
The UK offers aggressive discounts for advance purchasing tickets on long distance routes at quiet times, which works well.
Which are used to justify expensive non-Advance tickets.
£80 if I have the audacity to go to greater London today without having planned ahead (3 hour journey + tube). And the same cost coming back - off peak of course. £160! Vs £55 in petrol
Travel at quieter times to benefit from cheaper off peak tickets they used to say. Hah.
And with strikes, weather related closures, maintenance closures, etc I end up having to rebook my ticket at the last minute.
I'd say half of the advanced purchased journeys end up costing me more than just booking the train the day of.
Yes! Now we are getting on to the true cost of advanced tickets.
Fines for making mistakes, rebooking fees, rebooking and having to pay a higher fare, lost tickets because sometimes it's just easier to book a new ticket, losing out when unwell etc...
I bet they make a tidy sum from unused advance tickets
(Great Britain specific):
Although worth noting when it's out of your control the railway does have to offer you options. You don't have 100% of the liability.
And if your train is cancelled you're entitled to take the one before/after for example or get a refund
Though they do make this difficult these days
Does it though? Trains are almost empty most of the time.
My favorite part of this deal is how you can use the same ticket in every city in Germany. Before you had to learn which app to install and then go through the (usually) broken registration setup. And you needed to learn the zones too.
Now I just arrive to a city and hop into the transport method of my choice.
This is my favorite thing about transport in Switzerland. If you have a general subscription you can use trains, buses, even ships. There are exceptions such as privately ran gondolas going up to mountains but mostly you can just go anywhere without worrying about it.
Even at 58€/month, it's great value for me, as my employer pays half the price and I live in a big city.
If you live in a smaller town or in the countryside, then your problem really isn't the price of public transport, but the quality.
Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.
Germany is a dense country with a developed rail network, you are never far from a train station. Bear in mind that this includes also city transportation, which makes it a great deal.
My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a lot...)
> you are never far from a train station
What exactly do you mean by that? "never far" as in "always within walking distance"? That would be very wrong.
The other factor is that frequency of service is low outside of major cities. At the need to change and a small-distance trip can take a couple of hours.
The density is not that great, its not good enough if you don't have a car.
I wonder, would a foldable bike be a solution ?
Yeah, but doesn't make the Bahn more punctual, or reduce those comute times from 3h down to the 1h that is possible by car, not having to jump across four connections, with related delays and dropped connections.
The 49 Euro ticket is about local transportation, when you are talking about 3h you are talking about intercity transportation not covered by this ticket.
Intercity travel has lots of punctuality problems but many of the local train operations and S-Bahn are often much superior. At least in places where I have been, like Karlsruhe, Berlin, Hamburg the local transport has been very good.
Not everything in live is about long distance communing.
> 3h down to the 1h
That completely depends on the details of your route and ignores lots of possible aspects. As a universal statement its just outright false.
No, they're talking about the local connections that are covered by the ticket. They're that bad.
I've had similar experiences commuting into Cologne where it's 40 minutes by car or 2 hours by train, and that's without delays. In the rush hours it's 60 minutes by car. A missed train connection adds another half hour.
In that case, you better take the car. I have 40min car commute or 1h30 by train, of course i'm taking my car in that situation.
3h, that’s like Hamburg-Berlin, and would not be covered by the Deutschland ticket anyway
I wish, more like 80km, with the luck to jump between bus, two connecting trains, plus bus on the destination, and better not lose any of those connections.
This helped those people too. There is considerably less traffic cutting commute time significantly.
What's your definition of 'big train station hubs'? There are plenty of places that have small train station that connect to bigger hubs. The claim that its only useful for people close to 'big hubs' is simply false.
Yes there are places where cars are better in some aspects, but that is the case no matter how the ticket is structured. You can't magically extend the train network by reducing ticket price.
And if cars are the only viable option is questionable, as there are many people even in those places who don't own a car. They just have to live with subpar bus system or other local transport.
It helped anybody and everybody that wanted to travel for any reason. It meant I could go to the nearest big city to catch a movie at an IMAX theatre, something that was significantly more expensive before. You don't need a big train station hub to have trains, and you only need a few trains or buses to make up for the cost and make it worth it. Since, you know, it applies to buses as well. I live in a small shithole town, and it's extremely convenient to have the Deutschlandticket because it means I can take the bus to anywhere in the area, including the nearest train station, and I can take a train to anywhere I want from nearby towns to cities hours away. Even though I own a car again, I still have the ticket because of how useful it is and how much money it saves.
I don't understand how anybody can paint this as a bad thing. Are you also against universal health care by any chance?
> Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs
Every city has public transport.
There is a large density of public transport throughout the country: trains, local trains, underground trains, busses, ferries, ...
The ticket is valid there, too.
There is a big difference between doing 1h with car, and 3h with public transport.
maybe 3 hours in the car and 1h with public transport.
if you are in the rushhour and a traffic jam (not an unusual problem), then the train will be faster. Plus one can work in the train or relax.
My regional train here 20km going into the city center is impossible to beat by car.
77.77% of the people live in cities. 55% live in cities with >20k people. Generally Germany is a decentralized country with a lot of regions with local center cities. There are 15 cities with >500k people. France has only four.
Nope, it suffices to live 80 km away from workplace, and not being lucky to live in places with direct connections, where at least three changes are required, with local connection bus, two train changes, plus additional bus/metro/tram on destination.
You don't need to be lucky to live in places with good connections. There are many such places.
That car traffic has generally less problems than the train system is a myth. Check the ADAC traffic event overview on a random workday.
And yet Bahn manages to outdo the Autobahn chaos without much effort, and better not lose those hourly regional bus connections.
You mean the other way around.
It really depends on a lot of factors but I generally agree that many people vastly overestimate the time savings of taking a car.
And that's before we get into questions like "How many of your hours of paid work are required to make car payments, insurance payments, tag, title and maintenance?"
Not at all, it is that bad in many areas, not everyone lives in Berlin.
There are a lot more cities with good public transport...
For the lucky ones living up to 30 km from city center they are supposed to commute, without having to ever change transport.
Just yesterday I hit jackpot, as my train got delayed 10 minutes delaying my connection to the following 30 minutes later train, as it turns out, the previous connecting train was delayed for 1h blocked at the station, so I got to jump into the 1h delayed train, instead of the one that would be coming in 30m later, which got to depart 5 minutes after I jumped into it.
The poor souls on that 1h delayed train weren't so happy as me.
True, but that's how trains work.
As a counter example I live in Rome where city trains are the best public transport available and house prices are heavily linked to closeness to subway or train station, yet we still are the city with most cars per capita in Europe and probably in the whole west.
If only those living close to train stations used trains it would massively reduce the need for cars and consequently the heavy traffic we usually experience.
I live 15 minutes walking from the closest station and it's so much better to go to work by train than by car, the trip is shorter, I don't have to drive, find a parking spot, a legal one, where I can't be fined and don't have to pay for it, while on the train I can read and air conditioning actually works and train cars are usually not crazy full like subway ones.
TL:DR that's how trains work they are not supposed to solve every commuting problem but the solvable ones
Well, no, it's primarily about regional travel, so it clearly helps folks near to smaller stations.
Plus: your point, caller? Investing in roads only helps folks with cars. There are plenty of people for whom public transport is the only option.
1h car, 3h public transport, that is the point.
[dead]
Just about all of which used to have train service, right?
I mean, in the US I've been to a lot of small towns where there is no train service, but the old station is still there, with the rails all torn out and replaced with houses, or roads, or bike paths.
And in the UK, the infamous Beeching cuts in the 1960s removed lines based on a profitability model which wasn't applied to roads, causing many communities to lose rail service and essentially require everyone there to shift to cars (replacing trains with bus service failed.)
How much of Germany is like that, where the people in the country insisted on good roads for their cars, causing the rail system to be decommissioned, and now they are stuck with that decades-old decision to prioritize the more environment destroying option?
People talk a lot of nonsense about 'Beeching cuts' without really understanding the history. 'Beeching' has simply become a political buzzword anybody who knows even a little about rail likes to bandy about.
Lines started closing around the 1930s and after WW2 this continued. Beeching was only working on this topic a short time and produced a report that suggested lots of things. Some of those things were done, others weren't. Cuts happened before Beeching and after him. And they happened during various different railroads organization schemes.
That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost. They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities. At that time bus services were often government run.
And Beeching was actually correct in many cases. The British rail system was simply not rationally build. It was basically built by partly speculation driven rush. While this is not a bad and certainly gave Britain a great rail system, once you have centralized control it does actually make sense to reevaluate. Lots of lines didn't make rational sense to continue.
Now of course I agree that to many lines were closed that shouldn't have been closed. But that is only a small part of the issue with the rail system. Britain still has a pretty high rail density.
> Beeching
The Beeching report of course cut no lines. It was just a report. By "Beeching cut" I mean the systemic policy of the time of prioritizing roads over rail, using the report as synecdoche.
> They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities.
That belief is the core of my comment, not the specific details of which lines were cut.
Once the lines are torn up, and the land not banked for future possible reuse, it's very hard for a car-centric area to switch away from cars.
How much should the sore feelings of those consigned to live in a car-only area affect the decision to promote rail service in order to reduce CO2 emissions?
In my opinion, zero.
> That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost.
When I wrote 'profitability model' I wasn't saying it was strictly about profitability. The report clearly uses profitability as one of the driving factors, but not the only factor.
My point is that the model which lead to statements like "As soon as the required procedure permits, it is desired to withdraw those passenger train services which are clearly uneconomic" was not applied to roads. Outside of a few toll roads and bridges, the direct earnings of a road is zero, resulting in an expected loss in total gross revenue.
The environment impact to the cuts clearly wasn't included, but neither was the implied increased demand for new roads, nor the higher road maintenance costs, much less concepts of induced demand that Leeming was just then formulating.
Most beeching stations were of no use- the service wasn’t there. The village my son’s school is at had a station, a mile out the middle, with 5 trains a day. You would have to change to another train to get to a station with a regular service to London, and increasing services wouldn’t be possible without significantly increasing terminal capacity.
Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station.
Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.
That's really not my point.
Okay, now the village has no train service, so they are required to use cars or buses to get around.
Then the UK introduces a "UK ticket", £50/month for local train service anywhere in the UK.
If those villagers protest against the ticket, because it's funded by their taxes while they can't use it, how should we understand that complaint?
One way is to use their anger to justify shutting down the new ticket scheme. This is typical us-vs-them politics.
A second is to say "suck it you car-addicted freaks", as if they had a choice in the matter and were not stuck with the results of decisions made during their grandparents' time.
A third is to re-connect train services, an option made much more expensive by the decision to not bank the rail lines for possible future expansion; a hidden debt which must now be paid.
But then who will pay those costs?
Simply saying 'only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option' is entirely too simplistic to be meaningful.
My village - which is far larger nowadays - never had a station.
Subsidising buses like the £2 fare makes far more sense for most people than subsidising trains. Not that we get a bus which goes anywhere useful like a train station there’s 6 a day but you then need to change to another bus to get to the station.
Offering free parking at stations would help with a “living close to station” lot. I went to Birmingham a few weeks ago, choice is drive 30 minutes to station, pay £12 to park, then pay £17 for the train fare. Instead I just drove the extra 40 minutes and paid £10 to park in Birmingham.
> Offering free parking at stations
From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station.
Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buse... and you'll see why you need to bribe people with cheap parking to use the trains:
> The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.
You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?
> But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels
Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down
As someone that avoids the german rail at all costs I applaud this move, the freer the roads and airports are for me, the better.
Exactly. I don't understand why most car owners are so opposed to public transport.
the same reason omnivores are sometimes highly critical of veg*ns: there's a moral claim going on, so their identity/ moral standing is threatened.
Vegans? Veg[a..z1..9A..Z]ns? Are there any vegyns out there who object to being put on the meat/no-meat spectrum? Are you afraid HN will censure you if you spell out the complete word?
Really now. It's obviously veg.+ns: vegans and vegetarians.
Oh aha thanks for pointing that out. Now that you mention it that does seem obvious. I definitely didn't catch that from the first use though. There should be a better word to capture both those meanings that doesn't confuse my poor regex sensibilities like that. :|
My regex sensitivities only warned me about the persecution of veggggggggns.
I was more concerned about the vens
It's a regular veganza in here. (I'm sorry)
I didn't get that either; not that obvious after all! I thought they were making a joke about vegan being a swear/taboo word, given the context of saying people don't want to hear of it because it allegedly threatens their morality
veg(etari)?ans
I suppose I really should use veg.*ns
It's not a question of moral standing or identity but rather that public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do. Those things gaining too much popularity threatens the way you do things.
We have examples of this happening, eg smoking. It has become unpopular enough that governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes or just making it entirely illegal for only a certain year cohort (literal age discrimination).
> public transport (and vegan) advocates would like to force you to live like they do
Is there a citation for this claim?
> governments pass nonsensical bans like banning flavored cigarettes
Is it nonsensical? There is research[1][2] showing that flavoured tobacco is one of the primary factors used to attract younger users. We know that tobacco is bad, and also that flavoured tobacco increases its usage, so unless you are against public health policy measures themselves, it follows logically that flavoured tobacco should be covered by public health measures.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9007155/ [2] https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/26/6/709
When public health measures turn into "hello, we're now making your life worse" then yes, I am against them.
Imagine you drink coffee your whole life. You rely on it. Now your government comes in and goes "coffee is now illegal, you're welcome!!!"
It changes your life against your wishes and you can't do anything about it. The only action that realistically works is preemptive - don't let coffee become disliked enough to enact such a ban. That's why people argue against it. Principles such as "people should be free to make their own choices" aren't values our society cares about. (Important to remember: it's popular to hate on things everyone else hates on, so you gotta keep it under a critical mass.)
>Is there a citation for this claim?
Asking for a citation doesn't make sense. You know damn well there isn't one. Nobody is going to credibly announce that their goal is to ban something popular, because that would make it harder for them to force that change on you. It's done piece by piece. Maybe the people that start it don't even want a ban, but it eventually escalates.
But logical reasoning can explains it too: people support public transport for climate reasons. Why would they not want you to make 'the right choice' like them?
> would like to force you to live like they do
Okay, so it's exactly a question of moral standing and identity.
yes, another successful example is slavery. another unresolved one is abortion. in all of these cases the freedom in question is arguably immoral. laws are downstream of moral convictions.
Personally I'm not opposed to public transport, in fact I want to like the railway. I tried. But the German railway is in such a poor state that I never use it. Not for small trips (with regional trains that are covered by my 49€ ticket) and especially not for longer trips (long distance trains like ICEs).
Every time you enter an ICE just remember that its a coinflip on whether or not you'll arrive on time to get your connecting train. Or maybe you won't arrive at all, happened enough times to me that I frankly don't trust it anymore. And considering how expensive ICE tickets have gotten... yeah I'd rather take the highway, despite that I don't like driving much.
I don't know where you drive for long car trips, but going south from e.g. Hamburg on the A1, or through the Ruhrgebiet by car is a much bigger coin flip with respect to arrival times (while always being significantly slower even on good days). So why the complains about punctionality for trains, but somehow it's fine for car travel?
Can't speak for Hamburg since I'm from the south. And frankly, even if a car trip ends up in congestion and you need 6 hours instead of 4, its still somewhat preferable to being dropped off at some random station in the middle of nowhere in the night and hoping the last regional train at 23:48 will actually make it to its destination. (Yes this happened to me)
The Autobahn is like a Mad Max movie nowadays. Turn signal? What's that? I'm just gonna pop into your lane when you're going 50 kph faster than me.
It takes forever compared to driving in most cases, catching the transit often involves a walk, and a lot of public transit is kind of grungy. This doesn't apply or matter as much in some cases (e.g. the NY subway) but in general it's not great, at least not in the USA.
>catching the transit often involves a walk
Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.
Does transit not always involve a walk, even a small one? It's not like everyone lives next to a subway station, and most destinations aren't right next to a subway station either.
He implied that Americans are not used walking places, no matter how short the distance.
Walking is good for you.
Doesn't that depend on one's weight? Or was that jogging/running
Having a "walkeable" weight is also good for you.
A old friend used to make the same argument for doubling the price of gasoline (in Germany)… something like “it will keep the rabble off the road”.
As someone who uses the German rail any time I can, I also applaud this move.
Why do you avoid the rail system?
Because waiting im Stau (traffic jam) is so much better.
Because missing important appointment (Termin) that you have arranged 3 fucking months before by waiting in a phone queue for 30 minutes because your Sbahn was cancelled because of a nonsense signal-related reason is so much better.
I kind of agree and disagree with you. My main train lines in Berlin are U8 and Ring and it can be annoying sometimes.
And I will still probably never get a driver's license. Been going without for 40 years already. Just being able to jump into any train, bus, tram or ferry anytime is really nice. I could pay double the monthly price for this privilege.
I'm not denying that rail service quality has gone down the drain in Germany.
The foolproof transportation is to take a bicycle.
Sadly related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI8PlJkqvc0
Not exactly hard to nowadays in Germany
Using the rail system? Now that’s a trick and a half.
Only 62,7% of the trains were in time (and by in time they use a rigged system to count what is in time and what is not). So it's basically a 50% chance if you will be delayed at your destination or in time. Also note, that if you have to change trains mid travel you have that chance again. That means you will be late very very often. If you travel as an individual and you don't value your time at all this is a great deal, if you travel for business purposes good luck to you.
Apart from that, it's a lot more stressful (and time consuming) to go to a train station and leave at a train station instead of just driving by car.
Punctuality of local trains is much higher than the long distance ones whose stats you’re quoting here. For rapid transit, punctuality is less of an issue, compared to frequency.
Congrats, now you just need to be on board when tax money is used for that infra. I bet that latest there your opposition starts.
I can fully relate. No one wants to travel in these unreliable, piss-stinking trains full of drunken criminals and islamists.
I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason, why DBahn can’t get the trains to run on time. This isn’t Italy after all. The Swiss and Japanese manage to do it. Can someone explain?
DBahn was privatized in a way that combines the worst of both worlds: private but 100% owned by the state. Opaque labyrinth of 600 subcompanies.
Also, some textbook examples of bad incentives. For example, repairing bridges is paid by DB. If a bridge is beyond repair, then the tax payer pays. Predictable result: doing hardly any maintenance until the bridge fails. (That example is by now fixed, but shows the clear lack of planning)
Finally, the system is just over capacity. Many more trains but same infrastructure as decades ago. If you got rid of half the schedule and used a swiss-like system of stopping several minutes at every station, the trains could be on time. But the trains already are overcrowded, so then what do you do with all the passengers?
It's the classical combo of poor budget and conflicting budgeting with aging infrastructure and bad management. DB was privatized 20, 30 years ago, but parts of the infrastructure is public property and managed by the state. So DB willingly let rot them until the state will start renewing, which does take ages of course. At the same time, DB also started saving significant money, because that's what private companies are doing, so they removed parts of the infrastructure, which later started harming the planing on a nationwide level. And on top of this, there are parts of the infrastructure which are literally up to 150 years old, but still in use for whatever reason.
Or in other words: classical underfunded, overused legacy system showing its age.
> At the same time, DB also started saving significant money, because that's what private companies are doing, so they removed parts of the infrastructure
As strongly encouraged by their regulators (the Bundesnetzagentur and the Eisenbahnbundesamt), though, too, because for a long time the main political mandate regarding the railways was mainly to save money.
Makes sense. Is SBB also privatized, or is it state-owned?
Mismanagement. Years of cutting maintenance and personell to make profits.
It's money. If you look at investement into the railway system per capita, Italy actually spends more on their railway system than Germany: https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/presse/pressemitteilungen...
Because it's a cliche that's untrue since at least the 90s.
> I don’t understand why, given that Germans are generally quite precise - German engineering and manufacturing is world-famous for a reason
Yeah, that reason is propaganda and myth, it might have been true in the 1800s and early 1900s but now it's the same shit as everywhere else
Even Spanish trains are faster and more punctual on average than German ones, and Spaniards are world world-famous for siestas
Germans are generally quite precise, which can be both good and bad. It can mean that things are done correctly, but it can also mean that people waste endless time obsessing over how to exactly implement every minute detail of a rule.
Just to give you an example of the latter: a Vietnamese-German woman (a German citizen who speaks German natively) was recently in the news because the local authorities have refused to issue her baby a birth certificate for over 6 months.[0] When she went to get a birth certificate, the authorities told her that her last name, Le Nguyen - which already appears on all of her German documents - does not meet their standards. They refuse to issue a birth certificate for her baby until she changes her last name to something the German regulations allow.
To make the situation even more absurd, the problem is that the German regulations state that double family names do not exist in Vietnamese (surprise: they do).[1] If the mother had a French double name, it would be no problem.
The problem is not even the baby's last name - it has the father's last name. The problem is that the birth certificate has to list the mother and father, and the authorities refuse to write the mother's name.
Instead of just giving the mother a bit of leeway and issuing a birth certificate, the authorities insist on inflexibly following some completely incomprehensible interpretation of the regulations. Suddenly, after thirty-something years of living in Germany, this lady has to suddenly change her last name, and until she does that, her baby - a German citizen - has no official documentation and cannot receive any government benefits.
Repeat this daily across many aspects of daily life, and you can see how it would become a problem.
0. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/berlin/rbb-keine-g...
1. https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/10/interview-berl...
I have to admit the ‘all access’ ticket system was pretty awesome when I visited. Note that this did not include trains going into Austria (even if you road them only in Germany). Nearly every city is joined by rail and it’s incredible.
Sadly in the US Midwest we just don’t have there population density to do this sort of thing.
Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies?
EDIT: Oh and hospitals!
Otto von Bismarck introduced much of the social safety net in Germany, incl. health insurance (in 1883). He definitely was not a communist. He once called it "practical christianity" ("praktisches Christentum").
After all Jesus was a proto-socialist, wasn't he?
Yes, he doesn't exactly come across as an Airpods-wearing Wall Street yuppie.
> Am i a communist
Even if you were, is that really a bad thing? Why do we demonize communism (and socialism ) so much ?
Poor implementation in Soviet Union or in PRC that is only seen through the color of propaganda with the inherent cultural and ideological biases is hardly a good basis for judging a movement that was a response to centuries of extreme worker exploitation in direct result industrialization and raise of machines.
Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
We learn and try to take to best from all economic systems not demonize any of them.
> Even if you were, is that really a bad thing?
I noticed, that it sounded like that after i submitted the comment. Was not intended.
> Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
I totally agree.
No. That's not even socialist.
Ah, socialism. Well, that's what we call it.
I just returned from a trip in Germany back to the UK and I find it frustrating that we don't have such a ticket in this country.
I moved some years ago from Dresden, Saxony, Germany to Rheintal, Switzerland - looking for some bigger mountains. In Dresden-area there was a nice 4-people day ticket for the whole area - <20EUR for 4 people total. Switzerland? Every guest spends at least 50CHF per person per day, wild.
> It statistically evaluated mobile phone and car movement data for Germany
How do you obtain car movement data if not by tracking cell phones?
Their accompanying website [0] says mobile phone data comes from teralytix while car movement data is sourced through inrix [1], which appears to gather data through navigation apps of some sort (vague as can be expected but the linked paper [2] claims that).
[0] https://mcc-berlin-ariadne.shinyapps.io/dticket-tracker/
[1] https://inrix.com/
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4526796
Would be interesting to see if the subsidy is covered by additional economic activity to cover the shortfall. If not it won’t last long, money doesn’t grow on trees
Someone in the comments mentioned this costs 3B per year when in comparison Germany spends 20B per year on Oil/Gas subsidies/tax benefits.
Arguably if more people are using rail it can become palatable to shift that money away from the tax benefits and subsidies for Oil which (equally) artificially lower fuel prices from real market prices (and which people seem to have no problem with).
It does when maintaining roads, apparently.
On the other hand the Bundeswehr burns through 50 billion a year to do fuck all, so apparently it does indeed grow on trees.
Military spending is a bit of an odd one. It's basically expensive by design and ideally doesn't have any real effect.
It's not far off from a proof-of-work system. Especially given how there are many cheaper options to get rid of an enemy, but those have been outlawed such that the only options remaining are costly in people, money and goods.
> there are many cheaper options to get rid of an enemy, but those have been outlawe
I'm curious. What are these options?
Nukes, I think they mean nukes. Though "cheaper" is kind of debatable there, a fleet of SSBNs isn't cheap by any measure.
How many people used the tracking app for how long? How were they chosen?
The study would be flawed if the group is not chosen to represent correctly the entire population. E.g., if they called for volunteers using the app, mostly people will apply that are engaged in climate change mitigation anyway and / or are in the target market for the 49 Euro ticket.
The data are based on cellphone tower data and app tracking data which, according to them [1] "is based on millions of app tracking movement patterns […] [and was shown by] Koch et al (2023) to be representative for the population of car-owners"
[1] https://mcc-berlin-ariadne.shinyapps.io/dticket-tracker/
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Is it a good practice when you give out blanket subsidies? Does targeted subsidies work better and are cost effective? I am researching this topic applied to taxation field.
Targeted subsidies entail explicit extra administrative costs and implicit costs (or benefit omissions) when some eligibles do not receive the subsidy due to e.g. paperwork friction. The alternative is universal benefits + taxes. See https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/11/universal-be...
Which I as a German simply fail to fathom. The quality of our Deutsche Bahn is so bad I would never drive by train. The worst thing is that they are incapable to have their trains be on time. Whenever you travel there is an extremely high chance you will not arrive at your destination in time.
It's still more punctual than going by car. I can't remember any long distance car trip where I wasn't stuck in traffic and my trip was much longer than predicted by the navigation system.
Not every trip is time sensitive, most trains do run on time, and not all trains are operated by your nemesis. If you still refuse to "ever" take a train anywhere, that's on you rather than the system
The regional trains (which the ticket applies to) are much better than the long-distance trains: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
Because it is a regional problem and some areas work mostly fine. I also fail to fanthom why people drive in rush hour, queuing every day for hours. Yet people do that. And people love to complain, especially those that only take trains on public holidays. But hey, here in Sweden the trains are worse than in Germany, but people complain far less and trains are full anyways.
No amount of subsidy will make me give up my car. Obviously I also use trains but having a car is just too convenient in some situations and in some places not having a car is just disability.
The ticket achieves most of its goal even if you keep your car for the more annoying edge cases but move a significant fraction of your trips from car to rail.