Such infrastructure should be completely & unlimitedly free for private use.
When Germany did (twice? Forgot the details :/) the experiment with the unlimited EU monthly tickets for 7€ or whatever people were really glad, everyone could travel & see more. And they still talk about that.
The “unlimited” ticket for 9€ (then 49€, now it’s 58€, “conserveratives” hate it so who knows what it’ll be next year) is limited to regional and local transit. No long distance IC/ICE trains with some exceptions where an IC is operating as part of a regional connection.
My prediction is that (barring a heavy left shift in politics, i.e. a linke grüne spd government or similar) it will keep getting more expensive until it becomes useless enough that cancelling it is no longer political suicide.
It’s honestly insane to me that it seemingly wasn’t a huge topic in the election (at least I didn’t hear much about it), millions use it and many more benefit indirectly as it lead to better offers for local transport ticket subscriptions.
Traveling by ICE in Europe was fucking awesome. 300kph and like $10 euro to go basically anywhere…well 15 years ago it was that cheap. Dunno about now. And I say this as a gear head.
It really depends, if you take a direct line between 2 cities it is easy and cheap but the more times you have to switch trains the more expensive it gets (+ also a lot more problems when a train is delayed).
try travelling between countries. eurorail is generally 2-3x times more expensive than cheapest airline. Trains have so much capacity and yet even within countries ticket prices are around £20-30 per two hours of travel. Should be much cheaper, governments should give train lines more incentives than airlines but I feel like that is probably the opposite.
Ameribro here, I can almost guarantee that your airlines are running at a loss as part of a long term EEE strategy to monopolize long distance travel. Once they’ve got the market cornered, your tickets are going to get A LOT more expensive like ours are. Oh, and they’ll start demanding subsidies from your governments to keep from going tits up because they accidentally the whole thing to their shareholders. Don’t fucking fall for it.
Same in the US, and they’re slow. Going halfway across the country (i.e. anywhere interesting) takes ~24 hours, and the cheapest seats (not a room) cost about the same as a regular flight, more if you consider budget airlines. And that’s if there’s a train going where you want to go without ridiculous transfers.
tickets are cheaper? if you want to travel the same distance it is far from cheap to travel by train, in Europe at least
Such infrastructure should be completely & unlimitedly free for private use.
When Germany did (twice? Forgot the details :/) the experiment with the unlimited EU monthly tickets for 7€ or whatever people were really glad, everyone could travel & see more. And they still talk about that.
The “unlimited” ticket for 9€ (then 49€, now it’s 58€, “conserveratives” hate it so who knows what it’ll be next year) is limited to regional and local transit. No long distance IC/ICE trains with some exceptions where an IC is operating as part of a regional connection.
My prediction is that (barring a heavy left shift in politics, i.e. a linke grüne spd government or similar) it will keep getting more expensive until it becomes useless enough that cancelling it is no longer political suicide.
It’s honestly insane to me that it seemingly wasn’t a huge topic in the election (at least I didn’t hear much about it), millions use it and many more benefit indirectly as it lead to better offers for local transport ticket subscriptions.
Traveling by ICE in Europe was fucking awesome. 300kph and like $10 euro to go basically anywhere…well 15 years ago it was that cheap. Dunno about now. And I say this as a gear head.
It really depends, if you take a direct line between 2 cities it is easy and cheap but the more times you have to switch trains the more expensive it gets (+ also a lot more problems when a train is delayed).
try travelling between countries. eurorail is generally 2-3x times more expensive than cheapest airline. Trains have so much capacity and yet even within countries ticket prices are around £20-30 per two hours of travel. Should be much cheaper, governments should give train lines more incentives than airlines but I feel like that is probably the opposite.
yeah it’s outrageous how governments spend millions on airports and then claim that trains are too expensive
Ameribro here, I can almost guarantee that your airlines are running at a loss as part of a long term EEE strategy to monopolize long distance travel. Once they’ve got the market cornered, your tickets are going to get A LOT more expensive like ours are. Oh, and they’ll start demanding subsidies from your governments to keep from going tits up because they accidentally the whole thing to their shareholders. Don’t fucking fall for it.
Same in the US, and they’re slow. Going halfway across the country (i.e. anywhere interesting) takes ~24 hours, and the cheapest seats (not a room) cost about the same as a regular flight, more if you consider budget airlines. And that’s if there’s a train going where you want to go without ridiculous transfers.