Germany’s €9 train tickets scheme ‘saved 1.8m tons of CO2 emissions’
theguardian.comWhy not make public transportation free as part of the government's investment in combatting climate change (and lots of other benefits)
There's pros and cons.
On the con side:
- When people get something for free, they often don't value it as much and treat it worse. E.g. more pollution.
- public transportation being free also means that it will be used even in cases where it is both economically and ecologically a suboptimal solution. This is a problem because more usage means higher costs. E.g. someone now might take a bus instead of cycling.
- Less competition. This point is tricky, but essentially, other solutions such as private long-distance busses (which have a comparibly good ecological footprint) might go out of business. In general, market might develop suboptimal.
There are a lot of good points too, which makes it a difficult decision. But since you asked, those can be named as reasons I suppose.
> - public transportation being free also means that it will be used even in cases where it is both economically and ecologically a suboptimal solution. This is a problem because more usage means higher costs. E.g. someone now might take a bus instead of cycling.
That’s really reaching. Presumably people would do the thing that bear fits their circumstances after weighing the costs and benefits.
To back GP's point, see this study. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Free-Fares-Policies%3A...
For instance in Estonia, the majority of "switchers" were cyclists and pedestrians.
So if the cost changed to zero, and the benefit stayed the same, would that not change the "best fit"?
I have a bus pass for my city giving me unlimited use all year round, and the service is excellent, a stop right outside my house with buses every 5-10 mins, I still walk a lot, but I do like the option of jumping on the bus if the weather is bad, or I'm just lazy
Generally the barrier to using public transit is not price, but rather deficiencies in the network, so the best way to increase transit use is to invest money in expanding the network or improving frequency and consistency of transit.
This is definitely the case in North America, but still likely the case in Germany despite Germany having a much more robust transit system.
Yeah no, it’s definitely the price and the hassle of getting a ticket. I probably live in the best developed area in Germany, public transit wise. I could be in the next big city center in 10 minutes by train, but without the €9 ticket I frequently took the car (which I have to have for rural reasons), because apparently rather than paying €12.40 I preferred driving 30 minutes, finding and paying for parking, and not drinking. Because it’s not just paying 12.40, it’s figuring out what ticket to get, being shocked by the price, calculating a thousand and one fare options to try and penny-pinch myself to a clean conscience, dealing with their fucking ticket machines or their fucking app, begrudgingly committing to a time and a train… Hating every part of it and feeling hated back by Deutsche Bahn at every step of the way, knowing they’ll readily fuck me over if they find the tiniest excuse.
The €9 ticket got you around without playing stupid games. The same freedom is either unavailable otherwise, or comes at absolutely unjustifiable prices.
Upvoting and confirming your experience. Lots of commenters here sound like they haven't used the network.
I've only been here for a month and see why the 9 euro is so popular.
I've already experienced everything you mentioned in my short stay here
I have used the network plenty of times during the last 20 years.
Some routes that take me 30 minutes with the car, go up for 1h 30m or even 2h if I am unlucky, due to the amount of times I have to change public transport and waiting between connections.
Yup, you're right. I've read several articles on this topic now and none really capture the full picture nor do they explain the issues with the existing system.
Travelling on the DB is not easy for several reasons, and even with this 9 eur ticket, it's not likely to shift very time sensitive travellers.
That said, most people would be willing to forgo that inconvenience for a price, and this ticket did that.
I'd say the barrier in N.America is both deficient networks in most cities, and price (it's actually quite expensive because there's such low usage). If it were free, or close-to-free, it would ostensibly increase ridership which would increase the impetus for further expansion (which right now is hard to advocate for when so few people use it; it's just not worth the cost even if you charge people for it).
Only relatively recently some smaller scale experiments in that direction were done in a few German cities, and service improvements were indeed found more effective in gaining additional passengers.
This is only true if you can afford other options. There is a reason why the CDU wants refugees in the more rural areas. With no means of transportation they are stuck and out of the way of most if not all cities. This is obviously boring asf so crime rates go up which leads to anti refugee sentiment and plays into their agenda. This is a trend across most of Europe and free public transport would 100% ease the situation for the refugees and the people in the area.
That is quite a theory...
Luxembourg has free public transport: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-07/inside-lu...
There was a recent discussion on the topic “Should Public Transit Be Free?” on Freakonomics Podcast
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-public-transit-be-fr...
Because it takes a long time to build a public transit infrastructure, and cars made it unprofitable.
Electric bikes make public transit much better.
An important thing to understand, is that public transit cannot be faster or as fast as cars. People need to change home.
That's why sobriety is important to talk about. You can't fight climate change without some sacrifices. It often seems like most consumers can't accept it, but it's a reality.
>An important thing to understand, is that public transit cannot be faster or as fast as cars. People need to change home.
In cities of significant density metro very much is faster. Even some trams are faster in rush hours.
in my experience, subways are faster than cars in many cities; sometimes trams too to a lesser extent since they're slower and hit the red lights, or buses with dedicated lines (like the Metrobus in Mexico City)
Because it's expensive but not necessarily effective.
It also only benefits city-dwellers (see political impact of this by looking at, for instance, the yellow vest protests in France).
Making public transportation free would reduce demand for oil/gas in cities and would lower prices people in rural areas would pay relative to it not being free.
Of course, this assumes that public transportation is only available in cities, but that's not true at all. Many European countries have extremely effective rural public transportation.
Oil is a global commodity so local demand reduce won't help much. Even if rural public transportation is good, I don't think rural people don't need a car, so they would complain about unbalanced grant.
Taxes raise in rural areas to pay for these systems.
The costs are negligible to every corp bailouts in the last 50 years or the cumex scandal. With the money corps extracted through illegal means with cumex we would have free transportation for the next 30 years.
Roads are vastly more expensive than transit per trip. If having the busses and trains full avoids yet another widening then taxes go down, and the rural + urban areas stop subsidizing the suburbs.
The one time cost of widening roads go down but the additional transit line costs which are yearly outweigh those costs and continue.
You need 20 or so lanes of freeway and 200m^2 of parking per car (paid for collectively through enforced parking minimums) and on/off ramps and arterials and collectors and double the per area infrastructure (sewers, water, power, drainage) to match the capacity of a single two way train line with right of way. Once you have that you need to pay upkeep on all of it which is more than the transit costs. Then you still need to widen it because it's full so you're out even more. And that's not counting all the externalities which absolutely dwarf those costs.
The 'one time cost' is something you're signing up to do every year at ever increasing cost until you go bankrupt or give up and build transit.
I don't think it only benefits city-dwellers. Sure, on the countryside the service is much worse, but on the other hand, the money spent per person might even be higher in the countryside.
it benefits city-dwellers more, but some (many?) European countries have rural rail/bus networks that are highly effective
I think this calculation is complete nonsense and pure propaganda to support political movement.
Many people have bought tickets and made trips that they would never have made at normal prices.
The article quotes someone who travels from Bavaria to Rostock simply because it is cheap. Not because he has to. Here, CO2 is deliberately wasted out of boredom or pleasure, and then people pat themselves on the back for being so environmentally friendly.
Does anyone still remember the punks on Sylt?
https://www.24hamburg.de/schleswig-holstein/sylt-sommer-pfin...
This data comes from a survey that explicitly asked about how people changed habits [1] and the CO2 figure is "Based on the journeys shifted from cars to buses and trains" [2] not total usage.
[1] https://www.vdv.de/bilanz-9-euro-ticket.aspx
[2] https://www.vdv.de/presse.aspx?id=df893fc7-1759-497b-9488-ce...
The marginal cost for an additional person on a train is close to 0. Only when extra services(increase in scheduled trains) are added does this increase the CO2 emissions.
From my experience, because most trains are at higher capacity due to the ticket, the marginal emission per person per train is greatly decreased too.
There is also a net benefit to the economies of small towns that depend on these tourists, so id say this is an overall economic as well as environmental benefiy
The marginal GHG cost of the extra trip is almost 0.
In fact, if they were alternatively sitting at home running air conditioning the overall CO2 output would probably have reduced by them sitting in the train for those hours instead.
Savings will be quickly offset by increased car usage with the new prices...
"End of German 9-euro public transport ticket to be followed by even higher fares" - https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/end-german-9-euro-publi...
Yeah, no: https://www.ft.com/content/7a9973cd-ea91-42a9-a79f-4a8c5bf93...
> Feld said it was clear more people were using public transport “but it was almost exclusively additional demand — there was no shift in traffic from road to rail”.
> “So environmental goals were not achieved,” he said.
That's just one person's opinion - an adviser to a pro-business group - and that article clearly says it's disputed. I wouldn't take that as a firm conclusion.
The data behind the 1.8MTCO2 figure comes from a survey that explicitly asked about how people changed habits [1] and the CO2 figure is "Based on the journeys shifted from cars to buses and trains" [2] not total usage.
[1] https://www.vdv.de/bilanz-9-euro-ticket.aspx
[2] https://www.vdv.de/presse.aspx?id=df893fc7-1759-497b-9488-ce...
It's also correct to read Feld's statement and view it as a net positive.
From what I've seen, this additional demand is a net positive for the economy and environment.
Most trains in general are already scheduled. There is close to zero marginal cost for an additional person to take the train.
There are additional emissions when more schedules are added, and this has almost certainly been the case in some of the more popular routes.
If someone is to travel, you will almost always want them to take a train. In addition, emissions from a single flight a person takes basically is more than emissions on multiple train rides on additional trains.
It's possibly also overall driven up domestic tourism, which is a positive for the economy and towns that depend on it.
The best way to see this would be that this 9 euro ticket has chipped away at the margins - primarily on the factors that people use to decide what mode of travel to use.
I've written a longer reply above based on my experience. It's not just the cost, though this is the primary factor.
I think the 9 euro ticket was absolutely what was needed when it was introduced.
I would not support continuation at that price - it's not sustainable as the train network itself can't handle the demand.
Maybe the demand will taper off if people realise it's permanent but also, I guess funding the rail network at 9 euro nationwide may be a bit optimistic
> From what I've seen, this additional demand is a net positive for the economy and environment.
Economy yes. But how is it a positive for the environment? > Most trains in general are already scheduled. There is close to zero marginal cost for an additional person to take the train.
That's a good point but that's true for flights too.
I believe marginal emissions from an additional person taking the train is significantly lower than a flight. Given the option, you'd want someone to take the train [1].
The caveat here is that a lot of these travellers would not have travelled if not for the ticket. So I have to concede that any of the extra schedules were from purely artificial/incited demand.
There is also the possibility that many travelled because they knew the tickets would not last, and so they aimed to take advantage of it while they could.
If the price change was permanent, maybe most of the new demand would be more spread out.
That's why I'd argue that the outlook is not so clear-cut.
I personally view it as a successful experiment but an unsustainable one at that price.
[1]https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-the-carbon-footpr...
That's roughly one percent of Germany's CO2 emissions.
Good thing it won't be continued then, because if there's one thing Germany hates it's improvements.
They're considering replacing it with at 69 euro ticket, which seems pretty reasonable:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/germany-9-euro-ticket-end...
It's still pretty hard to defend them though; for some reason the bureaucracy is incapable of adding the new ticket in time to address this winter's energy crisis.
I want to downvote this, but unfortunately it's true. Living here, people have lost hope that the government will improve anything.
As an insider point of view, although it may not seem so, I am optimistic we’ll see a lot of changes in the near future.
The main reason is that there were many measures taken to make the government be a desirable employer and I am seeing many capable people entering the public service
But clearly, accelerating the shutdown of nuclear is the best way to combat climate change.
Not everything needs to be "climate" now as we ignored it anyway for too long..lol. It is also about not using finite resources, waste, risk, economics.. lately looking at France's and China's heat waves, didn't we all learn that all our coal/gas and first of these nuclear plants will fail more and more and not be a reliable power source during increasing heat and drought waves and the near future? And then there it is also good to have that Ukrainian example... conflucts & war will now also only increase, that is for sure.
Worst of all I cannot get rid of the feeling that everybody shouting "nuclear now" was denying or at least ignoring clinate change for the last 30 years... slowly realizing that climate change is a thing and longing for the laziest worst second option. No, that's not enough, and even all that aside would never suffice, barely help now. Be happy in your nuclear focused states and fantasies but leave this at rest here at least ..
I've been shouting "nuclear now" and "climate change" for about 30 years. I not the only one.
Wow, no what we learn is that after 60 years of dumb usage of nuclear we need to finally fucking evolve and build air cooled nuclear. Sadly most projects that could do that get killed in the political battle.
There is nothing inherent in nuclear that is bad in heat. In fact, air cooled nuclear, is perfectly fine in the hottest desert and coolest tundra.
> conflucts & war will now also only increase, that is for sure.
That is against 50 years of trend, and despite Ukraine, it not actually flipping the trend.
> Worst of all I cannot get rid of the feeling that everybody shouting "nuclear now" was denying or at least ignoring clinate change for the last 30 years..
That is a totally uniformed opinion. Lots and lots of people have been wanting nuclear for a long time.
France as an example of a green grid has been held up as an example by many technology people.
The simple problem is that those people didn't really have a political home, so they had little relevance.
> Be happy in your nuclear focused states and fantasies but leave this at rest here at least ..
Nuclear has actually managed to make grids green. Like actual large industrial countries, and did it 40 years before anybody came even close with wind/solar.
You should worship at the feet of nuclear given how much CO2 was not produced because of nuclear for the last 40 years.
And had it everybody had embraced nuclear like we wouldn't have the problem anymore.
The reality is the environmentalist with their obsession with natural energy (whatever sudo-scientific nonsense that is) have been holding back the flight against climate change almost as much as the fossil fuel lobby.
For 40 years the environmentalist failed to produce a solution for green grids and dreamed about solar and wind. Sure over the last 20 years that has started to work. But we would be done with this by now had the environmentalist community embraced nuclear.
The heatwaves also affected delivery of coal (:
And even with the heatwaves still more reliable than wind & solar
Not sure why you're attacking me, I don't agree with Germany's greater stance on nuclear. But I don't see how that's of relevance here.
It was meant to be sarcastic.
Wrong. It flooded the network with vacationers who normally could not afford travelling at all, while workers had to resort to their cars again to reach their jobs in time.
Counting everyone who "would not have travelled by train", meaning "likely not at all" as saved emission is not very convincing.
I know nobody who had to switch to their car to come to work in time.
On the hand, most coworkers tried the bus in the morning, or switched to bycicles, with the occasional bus trip when it rained. It was a huge success, people flooded the trains.
I actually did borrow my parents car because the commute got so bad. I commute from Aachen to Cologne. After 2 trips there and back which would usually take me about 4 hours total, I had accumulated over 8 hours of total travel time and kinda had enough. Was very glad i was able to WFH.
Huh, why did the 9 Euro ticket double your travel time? Did the trains get slower? Did they cancel the fast trains? Were the trains so full you had to wait 2 hours to find space in one?
They actually did, they got so full that they started to take ages in each single station, given the amount of passagers getting on/off.
As someone living in an area with abysmal intercity transit, the idea of being able to get out of my city in an hour or even two is wild.
Busses are often slower than a brisk walk.
According to the article, the study accounts for this.
Do you have some evidence that it does not?
> According to the article, the study accounts for this.
Can you please point out the part of the article supporting this claim?
> The Association of German Transport Companies (VDV), which carried out the research, said the number of people who switched from cars to public transport as a result of the €9 ticket was behind the saving in emissions.
I am assuming a large part of that influx was from people who made extensive use of it because of its limited nature. If a similar option was always available, there would be a lot less pressure to squeeze every opportunity into such a short time frame.
If the 69€ ticket came to pass, it would still be more expensive than, or in the same ballpark as most one-off trips. People would make use of it, but the urge to take advantage of it while it lasts would be gone.
Where can one find the actual method used to come up with this number?
Is it the difference in tickets sold during €9 and prior to €9 * statistical distance travelled by a statistical German assuming that every surplus ticket sold was bought to substitute a car travel?
Subsequently, it would be great to have that number put in context right next to a graph showing gasoline and diesel sales in the same time period. Those were also cheaper for the same time period.
This data comes from a survey (see [1]). The CO2 figure is "Based on the journeys shifted from cars to buses and trains" [2].
[1] https://www.vdv.de/bilanz-9-euro-ticket.aspx
[2] https://www.vdv.de/presse.aspx?id=df893fc7-1759-497b-9488-ce
A little late to this discussion but I'd like to add some of my anecdotal evidence/experience to this.
Tldr: the truth on the ground is more convoluted than simple articles can tell. While the ticket was a success and the research bears truth, the criticisms are not unfounded.
I moved to Munich a month ago and so, as a foreigner, have had an interesting interaction with this system.
The main thing that gets missed in every article is how convoluted the whole transit system is. In Munich, there are 2 providers, overseen by an umbrella cooperative made up of these 2 companies. There is also a zonal system that dictates how much you'll pay for the ride, and every state then has some version of this system.
As you get out of the metro and into regional train travel, there are also various classes of trains (run by a single provider nationwide). For example regional trains vs regional express trains plus different classes in each plus the ability to reserve seats vs not. There is not a single monthly pass, but a variable one that depends on which zones you'll travel on. Of for one day you have to go to a zone not covered (such as a satellite town of Munich, you'll have to buy a ticket)
This makes getting a ticket expensive but also confusing.
It's confusing and expensive enough that it's sometimes easier just to rent a car.
Now Germany is a car producing nation, and car rentals here are extremely cheap, with car sharing startups funded and subsidised by almost every German auto manufacturer.
In Munich at least, cycling is also quite popular(why specifically is something I'm not knowledgeable enough to speculate).
What the 9 euro ticket did was not only make rail travel cheaper than other options BUT ALSO significantly easier to navigate in terms of ticketing.
(This argument may be refuted by some as they argue no one checks ticket purchases on the metro trains and so incentives to purchase wasn't really a thing within the metro. Not sure how common checking was before the 9 euro ticket but we were never once checked while taking trains in the metro area but almost always got checked when taking regional trains).
From my experience, people in general who don't regularly commute and tend to drive when they do still have a close to normal tendency to drive.
It's also not easy or economical to park within the city, so most people who live and commute within the city wouldn't have been driving in the first place.
That said, it changed the calculus for us(and likely for people who are driving neutral). We would have preferably rented a car to travel around, mainly because we can, but also because it's cheaper and more convenient for longer distances. We've travelled to other states and even to Salzburg in Austria with the train with this 9 euro ticket. We've probably saved 60 euro on a monthly metro ticket and hundreds for regional travel.
There is a cost to this value however. We had to give up time in return, as taking regional trains requires multiple train hops as well as taking slower regional trains.
Also, express regional trains are not included in this 9 euro pass
And so this is where the narrative deviates or muddies at the least.
Firstly, to reinforce the primary point. The ticket has proven to be extremely popular, basically more than anyone expected.
As the research proves, it has changed the calculus for a large subset of people on what mode of transport to take. And the reasons for this includes both cost and ease.
But commuting using public transport does require a time commitment, and so reducing price and complexity likely maimly chips away at the margins.
It would be easier to see this as elasticity in the demand curve. A 9 euro ticket is extremely cheap and extremely easy to grok mentally, hence pushing demand up.
It's also removed all complexity in dealing with tickets in each state, so together with price, had driven up demand to travel interstate.
Unfortunately, the demand was significantly higher than capacity. Regional trains in Germany are not built for capacity and the system has at many times been completely overwhelmed.
This likely has affected people who take cheap regional trains to travel between towns. It however has not affected business travel or people who already pay for first class or express regional.
It has made more people travel but the argument that more people are travelling and thus producing more CO2 are wrong because marginal cost for CO2 for a train is close to 0. Only when they add more trains does this calculus change. They have likely had to do so for more popular routes.
Germany has many towns that are dependent on tourism, and so this has likely increased commerce in these towns. This is a net positive for Germany, as domestic tourism is almost always a net positive to the economy.
In summary, the 9 euro ticket was a huge success, but it's not sustainable for a primary reason: the train network is not able to support that demand.
I personally would not support a euro ticket at 9 euros. I would definitely urge the authorities introduce one that is pricier but more sustainable (and also eliminates these complexity).
The benefits accrue beyond just savings on price: reduction of inflationary pressures on people, reduced complexity, reduced emissions and increased domestic tourism.