First time it ever occurred to me, but now that I’ve read it, of course! Why wouldn’t every city make this free?! Solving transportation woes is a surefire way to stoke your economy, and removing payments is going to make public transportation more efficient and cheaper to maintain (no ticket kiosks getting vandalized, no payment processors to pay). Seems like a win win for any congested city.
Too bad Germany, Switzerland, France etc don’t have the “financial stability” to make our public transit free. Or so the neo-liberal politicians say.
Germany just raised the nationwide ticket from 49 to 58€, awesome.
D-ticket was well intentioned but a bad idea from the start. Discalimer: not a German and I only used it once (well twice because it was impossible to buy just one month)
The administrative overhead of centrally gathering all the funds and then portioning them to individual agencies must be hell. And according to what criteria? It makes the responsibility for funding even more murky than it is. Regional tickets also have to keep existing so it means the entire old ticketing system must remain functional even though few people are using it.
Germany led the way on tariff integration with it’s “Verkehrsverbund”. The difference being that service planning and ticketing were done by the same agency. Involving the central government doesn’t seem like a good idea, sooner or later national politics will start influencing local transit.
For a year? Still seems cheap!
Per month.
And it already was so expensive before that most customers were those who had (more expensive, regional) tickets before.
It seems like they want to drive up the price until hardly anyone uses it anymore and then drop it for lack of demand.
It certainly attracted me as a tourist to Germany. I travelled a lot in Germany in the last few years, probably wouldn’t have (as much) if train rides had cost as much as before the Deutschlandticket.
That’s how it was done in US. Also created a strong car brain that is nearly impossible to argue with. Just need to upgrade the trains until they are the better option then they will start understanding.
They do like EU trains but some how it doesn’t connect that we could have them here outside of NE
NE being New England?
North East, but really ne to mid Atlantic. Ie Boston to DC
ah yeah fair, I used to live near Boston and while it was MUCH better than where I am now (near Atlanta) it wasn’t even close to European standards
Facts but that’s about the best we got lol
It ain’t much but corruption destroys any investment
honestly when it comes to holidays the best part is having a cheap and easily navigable public transport system so you can get around to do all your cool shit painlessly. Serbia had suddenly become an interesting prospect!
This is a thing in several municipalities in Europe.
Although I like this in principle, I have reservations based on the story I’m sharing below.
The story:
There was a system where women could come and get clothes for free in special women’s shelters.
However, they would just either discard clothes, as being thrash, or not good enough, or grab way more than they needed.
So the fix was to put each bit of clothing at .15 or .50€. And suddenly, people fell back to an actual value for each item.
And the interesting thing is that free things are always worthless.
To give worth to (most of) people, you have to add a price (which can be tiny).There have been many studies about this. It’s a strange thing
Meenwhile, Nato europe about to make people into soylent green.
This is not only an efficient path to decongestion, and assiciated productivity improvement, plus poverty benefit, it us also social harmony instead of pig fucker liars vs nazi divisiveness.
