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Comment by Archelaos | Hacker News Reader

> I would argue making it free and keeping it free would have been a cool move.

Here in Germany, there were many voices in favour of making the ticket completely free. What I heard about the reason for not doing so is that the government wanted to easily measure the actual demand in different regions for such a "free" ticket. So the price is low enough that anybody who wants to ride practically "for free" is buying it, but so high that most people who do not really use it won't buy it.

I expect that if the ticket is a success, it will be replaced by real free rides in the future. And the results of the test period could help determine how the costs should finally be shared between the different regions and local governments.

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We had cities with free public transport in Germany.

One example was the city of Templin in Brandenburg.

The project was eventually abandoned because lots of people were just riding the busses out of boredom and busses were permanently full with costs exploding for the city.

See: https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/artikel/nahverkeh...

It seems like an almost-free, unlimited-use ticket would suffer the same way.

Well, they can distinguish homeless people without ticket from others. And therefore throw some homeless out (until people realize that is happening and donate tickets ....)

Speaking only for myself, my laziness is really the only reason that I've not been doing whatever things I could be doing. And that has been consistent throughout changes in my economic situation.

That’s actually what’s expected to happen in Germany with the 9-Euro-Ticket.

Nothing you said was factually wrong, but the last sentence makes it sound like "bored bums" were the reason it was abandoned. Here's the relevant part from the article you linked:

> And not every trip seems to have been truly necessary for the passengers. "On rainy days the kids would take the bus out of boredom" says Templin's mayor Detlef Tabbert (Die Linke ["The Left" political party]) to manager-magazin.de. Groups of men with a crate of beer were also not uncommon. "If something is for free, it will be used - whether it makes sense or not", says [marketing responsible of the local transit provider][marketing responsible of the local transit provider] Pohlan

In the end they went back to paid tickets, but charged 44EUR for an annual ticket that can even be transferred between people as needed. That still leaves them subsidizing public transit, but that's a political decision based on what the alternatives would be: pollution, road infrastructure (another form of subsidy), better quality of life, ...

A decision that, as you might be able to tell, I personally happen to strongly agree with.

Edit: forgot to paste the translated paragraph :P

> Nothing you said was factually wrong, but the last sentence makes it sound like "bored bums" were the reason it was abandoned.

No, that was just your fantasy reading words I never said.

I said people were riding out of boredom, not homeless people sleeping on the bus.

It doesn’t matter anyway who was riding. The point is simply that people were riding the bus without actually needing to.

First thing I thought of even though I never heard of this example: It's a terrible idea if you think about it with an economic mind. There are very few scenarios where making things "free" can actually provide a long term benefit for the public. The reason Communist economies don't work isn't because there's not enough wealth in society to guarantee a modest income for everyone. It's because once you take the incentives away people behave differently than they would normally. In the case of a guaranteed workplace with no profit sharing for example you get rampant corruption at the top and workers who don't see the point in doing their job properly because they neither get rewarded for working hard nor can they get fired. So they just show up and do the bare minimum.

> there's not enough wealth in society to guarantee a modest income for everyone

One should notice that there a no Communist economies anymore in Europe for more than 30 years. Democratic wellfare states provide in my opinion the best balance between individual incentives and social responsibility.

I would argue that a lot of state-managed sectors in various European countries work a lot better than in the US (health care, higher education, correction, ...). One has to look into the details to see what works better in which sector.

Extent and details are, of course, something that needs to be permanently evaluated. But in general there is enough wealth produced each year to provide everyone with an at least modest standard of living. However, the differences between the countries are still very large: GDP per capita in the EU is aprox. EUR 32.000, ranging from Luxemburg's EUR 114,000 to Bulgaria's EUR 10,000.

(This may be an aside, but I want to add this)

While it is true that there is quite a difference in GDP per capita between different EU countries, please consider that Luxembourg has a very particular standing and as an outlier is not representative of the "wealthier" EU members. Most of those are in the range of 40k-50k, with only three above this: 114,370 Luxembourg 83,990 Ireland 57,140 Denmark

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

Also Ireland is another outlier, making a lot of "income" due to being the EU corporate tax heaven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...

China.

There are many free goods people don’t seem to (usually) overconsume.

Primary school is free, libraries are free, parks are free, etc. To know whether public transportation is more like free libraries or more like free parking, you have to run the experiment.

So, how exactly would you overconsume school, libraries or parks?

Presumably the same way you’d overconsume public transportation according to OP: staying too long, crowding out other users that want/need to use public goods more than you.

What is the difference to normal paid tickets? Once the ticket is paid I can ride busses out of boredom the whole day.

No you cant because the ticket is scoped with time and/or destination/direction

Many places offer a "one day" transit pass that lets you ride anywhere you want, for that day.

Random example, MTS: https://www.sdmts.com/fares/fare-chart - the 1-day pass is priced just above a round-trip ticket cost.

Yes you can with an annual ticket. That's why it's called "annual".

Indeed you can but appearantly just that slight inconvenience is enough to offset the truly bored ones.

The difference is that you have to pay for it and money is usually a limiting factor.

If you can afford buying a ticket to ride the bus for no reason every day, no one is going to stop you.

However, most people won’t spend money on things they don’t actually need.

The term 'Schutzgebühr' comes to mind. No idea what the english term is. Basically a price people have to pay, for the sole purpose to prevent people wasting it if they don't really need it.

"anti-abuse fee" sounds fitting. Not a direct translation obviously.

I think the reason is that actually it wasn't meant to be germany-wide. The initial idea was 9€ per public transport network, but they quickly figured out that this will lead to many problems, as some areas have huge networks, others have many small networks and this would be one really complicated. But by then the 9€ message was out of the box and making it Germany-wide on a single ticket was the only way forward.

Consequence of late night negotiations on top level of the federal government, without involving respective experts from states, who are running public transport. ("Wait, we're subsidizing fuel, so we should subsidize public transport as well! Any quick idea?")

Fuel isn’t subsidized in Germany.

They are planning to reduce energy taxes on fuel for June though August, after they imposed CO2 taxes starting in 2021.

The German government tried to force people to use more renewable energies and electric cars by introducing the CO2 tax.

Since both are not adequate replacements, costs for heating, electricity and transportation exploded.

When the German government realized that was a problematic development and could push people into poverty, they hastily came up with the 9 Euro ticket and the fuel rebate (which is just reducing the energy taxes to a minimum) in the hope that the problems would resolve themselves alone sometime in the future.

However, the problems will be back in September when the rebate period is over.

> The German government tried to force people to use more renewable energies and electric cars by introducing the CO2 tax.

Since both are not adequate replacements, costs for heating, electricity and transportation exploded.

This is total nonsense. The subsidy for fuel prices were introduced due to rapidly rising costs for fuel shortly before the war started.

Those costs didn't rise because of the CO2 tax.

The fuel subsidy also doesn't reduce energy taxes, but explicitly fossil fuel taxes for cars only.

>I expect that if the ticket is a success, it will be replaced by real free rides in the future.

What’s your confidence level here? Because if you can make me believe that the ticket is effectively a vote for ticketless/free ÖPNV I will buy them for everyone I know.

There is support for this idea across MPs of multiple parties, from Conservatives, Liberals, Greens and Labour/Left. It appears to be a comparatively cheap measure to reduce CO2 footprint (I am not an expert here, though, so this might be incorrect, but one hears this argument a lot) and at the same time an easy measure to improve mobility for the poor. (Thousands of people went to jail in Germany every year because they repeatedly travelled without a ticket and could not or prefered not to pay the panalty fee.) So the zeitgeist is very much in favour of it, and ecological topics (in the wider sense) are becoming more and more important for people's decission what party to vote for. So what initially were niche topics of the Greens are becoming increasingly popular and more so, when they coincide with goals of other parties, such as social policy ideas from Labour/Left and the trade unions or the administrative simplifications ideas of the Liberals. Note also that Germany is already heavily subsidising its local puplic transport, with the effect that everyone pays taxes for tickets that only a minority uses.[1]

[1] At a moment's notice, I could only find old estimates from 2008 that amount to 25 billion Euros per year (more than 300 Euros per inhabitant per year) for local and regional transport (not including long distance transport) as of which only 9 billion Euros (35%) were paid directly from tickets or similar. This means 16 billion (65%) were already payed by the public (aprox. 200 Euro per inhabitant per year) -- see: https://www.zukunft-mobilitaet.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/0... (in German).

Maybe that number includes grants for capital expenses (building new routes and stations, step-free remodelling, public transport priority, etc.) as well? According to https://www.vdv.de/vdv-statistik-2019.pdfx#page=35, for day-to-day operations farebox recovery ratios are rather around 75 %.

Edit: Looking at your link, it seems the difference might be accounted for to some extent because the 75 %-figure - might possibly not include heavy rail

- like I said definitively doesn't include grants for major capital projects and only looks at day-to-day operating expenses

- is looking at things from the perspective of the local transport operators, respectively counties/cities that mostly are directly responsible for financing any shortfalls, so the compensation payments for the state-/federal-level mandated fare reductions for pupils and handicapped people are included as part of the regular farebox income

Show me a _single_ MP from CDU or CSU in favor of free regional transport.

Even Bavaria's CSU/Free Voters government voted for the ticket in the Bundesrat today.

If the ticket is a success (both in number of tickets sold and in people taking transit instead of the car) I'd expect the program to be continued. The exact implementation will be subject to much debate, but once you have a cheap monthly nationwide ticket established it's much easier to talk about the costs and benefits of actually charging for it.

What's the difference between this and completely free rides? AFAIK, making it "almost free" is usually preferable, as it prevents some abuse ("it's free so I'll take it even when I don't really need it", which depletes the resource), while still making it effectively free.

We've also seen the opposite being true. In Germany, oddly enough. It was called "Praxisgebühr" and it was a 10€ fee that you had to pay once per quarter year (if you went to a doctor in that quarter). Turns out, once people paid the 10€ they got into a all-you-can-eat frenzy and visited more doctors than they normally would have done, because "well, I paid for it, so might as well take advantage of it".

That's not so much the opposite, but I agree. If it were 5€ per visit, you'd probably see a lot less of this.

We have a system where you're going to pay about 350 per year for those little things if you use them. Going into a frenzy using all of that is just going to waste your own time as it takes quite some effort to use up that 350 already.

Then again, regardless of the rules and processes we make, there will always be people misusing/abusing it.

The point is, it's rodonculous.

Remember that even if the journeys are 'free' in the sense of money, they still take time. And for most people sitting on a bumpy bus isn't as comfortable as sitting at home or sitting in a park (also free ways to spend time).

You should always think of the cost of public transport as ticket price + hourly wage * time spent - value of anything you might get done on the bus.

This is true for busses, but train rides can be quite enjoyable on their own to some people, depending on the train and the view. You still have the opportunity cost of everything else you could be doing, but some people might prefer to read the newspaper on the train, enjoying some shopping a couple towns over and reading on the way back.

> easily measure the actual demand in different regions

A ticket for $0 would have done it.

Still have to book for it, and probably should have rate limits like other pseudo free services (Google don't charge you for search, etc).

Do you have any kind of source for this? I heard of complaints regarding this ticket already, I do not see this coming back, let alone for free.

For example, last month in an interview of Deutschlandfunk the German Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing (Liberals), said (my translation):

"We now have a one-time promotion that represents a field trial. At the end, we can analyse the data and know exactly what we need to improve in order to get people to switch to public transport."[1]

[1] Original: "Wir haben jetzt eine einmalige Aktion, die einen Feldversuch darstellt. Wir können dann am Ende auch die Daten analysieren und wissen genau, was müssen wir verbessern, um Menschen auf den ÖPNV umsteigen zu lassen." -- https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/verkehrsminister-zum-neun-eur... (in German)

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