[ckdot]

I‘m German. The truth is, people who right now use a car won‘t switch to public transport because of that ticket. There’s already studies about that for the 9€ ticket we previously had. So it probably won’t make a difference in co2 outcome. Also, those who benefit from that ticket, they usually still complain as they like to have back the 9€ ticket. So 49€ is still too expensive for them. Also, you need to keep in mind who is actually paying for that. This is the middle class. If you are part of the middle class in Germany chances are high that you pay more than 70% taxes & charges overall (payroll/income, trade tax, 19 % vat, electricity tax, health insurance, pension fund where it’s likely you’ll never see the money again… and so much more, I don’t even start writing about the Handelskammer). So those who work have to pay a lot to keep the system running. And those who don’t, they get - compared to other countries - much help, but they still complain. There’s something in a human that makes him unhappy which money alone can’t fix. I’m not against the 49 € ticket. I like the idea. The current government is even with all it flaws still much better than the previous one. But all those who just see the bright side of the ticket should think about the downsides, too.

[Archelaos]

> people who right now use a car won‘t switch to public transport because of that ticket.

Studies circulating in the media showed deviating results in this respect. For an opposing view: The Association of German Transport Companies (Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen, VDV) published results from one of their surveys in August, claiming that 10% of those that purchased the 9€ ticket did without at least one of their daily car journeys. 43% mentioned the avoidance of car journeys as one of their reasons for purchase.[1] Of course, this is only a sample of what is happening and is based on self-reporting by clients. But for a start, I think it is not so bad.

[1] https://www.vdv.de/bilanz-9-euro-ticket.aspx (in German)

[iggldiggl]

> claiming that 10% of those that purchased the 9€ ticket did without at least one of their daily car journeys. [...] But for a start, I think it is not so bad.

I don't know – I suppose you could say any car journey avoided is an improvement, but given the quite radical reduction of fares a figure of only 10 % avoided car journeys stills seems rather disappointing and to my mind rather confirms what was already known beforehand – while ticket prices should be reasonable and not outrageously expensive, the actual key to significantly reducing daily car usage (instead of mostly having people just make additional journeys using public transport) is by improving actual service quality and not by merely making tickets cheaper.

E.g. locally there was project where after a significant improvement in services (up to three departures per hour instead of only roughly hourly at best, plus direct connections into the city centre instead of having to change partway), 40 % of the passengers on that line were former car users!

That's what I'd call an actual success story, but unfortunately it seems that everybody has succumbed to some sort of "cheap, cheap, cheap" mania, and of course for politics slashing fares is an easier win instead of actually improving the infrastructure and somehow dealing with the evolving staff shortage [1] or the increasing planning bureaucracy [2].

[1] Not just drivers, even though that might be the most immediately visible to the general public – e.g. the local state government still doesn't seem to feel any sort of urgency in finally getting the now vacant chair of the railway department at my former university filled again, even though the former professor has been pensioned off already quite a few years ago and it's not as if we didn't also have a shortage of engineers for planning and construction, too.

[2] Instead of actual improvements, we only got a "Planning Speedup Law" ("Planungsbeschleunigungsgesetz") which in practice has hardly sped up anything at all, and sometimes possibly even made things worse (e.g. by having centralised the handling of planning enquiries at the Federal Railway Agency – but without actually correspondingly increasing staffing levels there). The only bright spot from the point of view of public transport in general and the railways in particular (though on the other hand it doesn't paint that good a picture for Germany as a whole) is that the transition of maintenance and planning of motorways from the states to the new federal "Autobahn GmbH" has been similarly botched up, and apparently the new Autobahn GmbH has quite rapidly managed to make itself rather unpopular, both as an employer for individual engineers, as well as as a contracting entity for the various individual construction and engineering companies that handle most of the actual serious work.

[Archelaos]

Our assessment of the situation is probably not too far apart. When I wrote: "But for a start, ..." I wanted to hint that there are a lot of other aspects that need improvement, too.

With regard to the "Planning Speedup Law" I am extremly sceptical too. I fear that in most cases this will result in the quality of planning suffering without an overall improvement in the situation. As soon as the stakeholders have adjusted to shorter planning processes, they will very likely submit projects at shorter notice and there will be complaints about too long process times again. At the same time, there will often not be enough time to examine the problematic points of the projects in sufficient detail and to look for better solutions.

[mytailorisrich]

My understanding is that this new ticker greatly simplifies a currently very complicated ticketing system.

But, I don't think that many people need a national ticket on a daily basis, and indeed people won't switch because of the very cheap price. Cars are vastly more expensive and people still prefer to drive.

There is a lot of politics involved, I think. Some think that public transport should be very cheap or even free (which of course actually means it's paid via general taxation) but really I don't think it makes a difference on behaviour because people can afford to pay even hundreds of euros a month if they have to.

[ckdot]

Yes it’s making the ticket system much simpler. But I don’t think this was top priority. For the 9€ ticket the rule seemed to be like „you can use it everywhere locally and additionally nationally for all trains which are not ICs or ICEs“ but in reality there were still some routes where you were not allowed to use it even though the train you use is an RE. Afaik you could not know except you were looking into the terms and agreements of the Deutsche Bahn. There are two reasons why the ticket system was (and probably partially will still be) so complicated: first we have a lot of transportation companies. Each city/region has their own. And we have the Deutsche Bahn - which responsible for all the national tracks and trains. They all have their own ideas of pricing and they never appeared to be willing to work together. Also, you‘d need a good electronic system to cover all the data from all these companies to work with them but this requires some degree of digitalization which Germanys is not capable of. It’s a mess :(