[iggldiggl]

The problem is that not a single one of those 10 billions buys neither a single additional vehicle-kilometre being operated [1], not a single metre of additional infrastructure, nor deals in any way with the impending maintenance backlog on the national railway network.

[1] Actually right now often the difficulty is even actually operating the currently scheduled timetable due to a lack of staff.

[solarkraft]

What they buy is a larger user base, especially of people with enough capital that they're able to make the often financially sensible decision to buy a car instead, leading to a much higher motivation to finally fix the things you mention.

[iggldiggl]

So far it seems that the biggest passenger growth happened within the leisure traffic segment, and indeed it was already known from previous studies (including some smaller scale recent-ish experiments in Germany) that commuting traffic in particular is more sensitive to reliability and journey time and not that extremely price sensitive.

I'd think that commuting is simultaneously the biggest driver behind the decision to purchase a car or not, so all in all that leaves me rather sceptic on whether you'd really get people to abandon their cars en masse that way.

I'm also sceptical on the political willingness – silently and behind the scenes, some states (Hessen, I'm looking at you) have actually right now reduced their public transport budgets in order to make up Corona-induced budget holes. So the "true national through-ticketing for all public transport"-aspect of the 9 €-Ticket was nice, but beyond that I'd personally still rather see any money that can be scrounged together beyond that to be spent on service and infrastructure improvements. (And what with the staff shortages and energy price increases and possibly a recession on top we might even have to worry about even maintaining current service levels…)