Hacker News Reader

Comment by yarcob | Hacker News Reader

I still think it should be cheaper. The rail card thing is just a scheme to overcharge casual riders and tourists. It's reasonable for people who regularly go by train, but for people like me who do just one or two trips a year it feels like a rip-off.

Especially if I want to take my kids, I need to get a different rail card for families, and when you add it all up it's a lot more expensive than taking my car.

For some reason, public transport is always priced in a way that makes it really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.

If you only ride on public transit occasionally, and you have a car, then taking the car is almost always cheaper. It shouldn't be like that.

View on HN

> really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.

That probably makes sense. If your goal is to increase ridership / reduce emissions, you want to appeal tho those traveling every day. Each person you convert gives you 500+ trips a year. And of course people are most price sensitive to something they do every day.

On the flip side, if I travel a few times a year, on one hand I am "less important" because capturing my business won't lead to that many trips and on the other I am less likely price conscious. If I do something once a year, I might chose to drive regardless of train cost, just cuz I want to drive. Or, I may want to avoid driving so I am happy to pay the higher ticket cost anyway.

That's one way to look at it. Another way:

Every sunday hundreds of people drive from all over Austria to visit the zoo in Schönbrunn. They take the car because the train is way too expensive. If taking the train was cheaper then some of those people would take the train.

Yes, for each of those families it's just one trip. But in aggregate it's also a lot of people.

Why is it more important to get one person to use public transport for 500 trips rather than getting 500 people to use public transport for one trip?

> They take the car because the train is way too expensive

OEBB (Austrian Federal Railways, the state train operator) does offer a family railcard ("Vorteilscard Family"), and it's hardly expensive:

"The Vorteilscard Family offers you a particularly inexpensive option to travel together with children. For only €19 a year, up to 4 children under the age of 15 can accompany you for free."

It sounds cheap, and it's probably a good deal if you ride long distances or frequently.

But when I recently planned a trip from Linz to Vienna for our family it would have cost around 120€ for the train (not including tickets for bus or subway to get to/from train station). Driving costs around 40€ for gas (not including parking fees).

I suspect you'd get a different picture if you include the additional depreciation/wear on the car.

It's 184 km one way. German tax authorities assume 30 cents per km (~110 EUR for a round trip), Austrian tax authorities use 42 (~154 EUR for a round trip). Now, the actual marginal cost may be lower if you already have the car, but it's far from obvious once those hidden costs are considered. Especially as you have to actively drive for those 4 hours instead of reading a book, watching a movie, ...

Sure but cash in hand always trumps hidden costs for a majority of the people (if you're on HN, you're likely not working class majority - people who make below median income). If the European governments were actually serious about climate change vs mostly theatre, they'd figure out how to make public transportation cost less. The pricing of trains in Europe has always felt stupid to me

> The rail card thing is just a scheme to overcharge casual riders and tourists. It's reasonable for people who regularly go by train (...)

At least for me, one return trip at the reduced rate pays for the price of buying the railcard (which is valid for 12 months).

It's not like one has to sit down with Excel to figure out where the break-even point lies! If I don't make any additional rail journeys in Austria over the next year, I'm still not out of pocket...

If you do only one trip a year, then that trip costs 140€ (37 * 2 + 66)

If you do the trip 10 times a year then it costs 81€ per trip (37 * 2 + 66 / 10).

So in this case the occasional rider pays 59€ more per trip than the regular rider.

> For some reason, public transport is always priced in a way that makes it really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.

At €1.32/l for gas in Vienna and 10l/100km this trip would cost you €63 in gas alone with an ICE car. This doesn't account for wear and wasted time so it's actually not that unreasonable at all and actually pretty cheap if you're going by yourself. With a family, I agree, it's more expensive. Although I'm starting to see the appeal that traveling by train has with a family, being able to walk around, entertain the kids more easily, etc.

I (used to) do commuting by train, one hour door to door, and 45 minutes out of that was pure work time - reading emails and newsletters and doing documentation and such. If I did that ride by car, I would have to stay at work 1.5 hours more. How should I quantify this?

I have a family of 6, and with that it's almost always going to be cheaper to drive than to take any other form of transportation. Before kids, the math was very different.

Better to have full cars using the roads and all of the otherwise solo drivers in their largely empty cars attracted to public transport.

There'll be various reasons why a large family can't take a train, but drastically fewer reasons why a person or a commuter travelling alone cannot (or, a group of friends, or a couple, etc.)

Maybe one day that'll change again, but at least now it helps reduce the amount of pointless traffic on the road.

Do you actually live in Austria? Because I've seen comments about family tickets. I only know Switzerland - where your kids under 6yo will travel with you for free and your under 16yo half price.

Kids under 6 are free on almost all public transport in Austria.

For older kids there are a lot of discounts, but many of them are only cheap if you use public transport regularly. (eg. rail card family from the ÖBB for 19€ a year, or upper austria regional tickets for school children for 77€ a year, etc.)

One problem is that it's not just train tickets, but you also need tickets for bus/tram/subway, and every city/region has different systems, so for every trip I spend about 15min trying to figure out which tickets to buy.

Well at least in CH you only have one ticket for everything (yes including regional rail providers, buses, ships, even many cable cars), so maybe AT could follow the idea. Plus you have that nice little feat called "EasyRide" (initially from a startup) where you enter that you start the ride and who accompanies you, and it will compute your final ticket costs only when you say "checkout". 90% of the cases it comes cheaper than I would have thought when buying the tickets by myself (the rest 10% of time the price is the same as estimated)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com