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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

> - Less/no expensive accounting

Not quite. Many people (eg commuters) have monthly train passes, almost all students have a "Semesterticket" (university enrolment is about 350 EUR every half year, but that includes all public transport in the region).

Now, the 9-Euro-Ticket is cheaper than those options, so out of fairness the holders of all those tickets are getting a refund of 3 months worth of their pass minus 3x9=27 EUR, which is a huge administrative burden for the public transport providers and universities. That substantial burden would not have been reduced by having the ticket for free.

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You are right, however if it would have been made free and kept free indefinitely this would have been a one-time cost.

Farebox recovery ratios in Germany before Covid were around 75 %, so abolishing all fares would mean quadrupling the budget for operating subsidies [1]. While I am not opposed to some moderate fare reductions, you could pay for quite a large bit of service improvements with that amount of money instead, and I believe that would be rather more effective in increasing passenger numbers (and especially in getting car drivers to switch).

[1] Some of the big cities are actually even closer to break-even as far as day-to-day operating costs are concerned, so in those cases the budget would have to be increased by an even larger factor in percentage terms.

> Farebox recovery ratios in Germany before Covid were around 75 %, so abolishing all fares would mean quadrupling the budget for operating subsidies

You aren't taking into account the money saved from eliminating all the infrastructure needed for collecting and enforcing the fares like OP mentioned..

Unless farebox recovery ratio already subtracts the money spent to collect fares? That's not my understanding though.

You're right, eliminating the infrastructure for fares would save some amount of money, but I'd be surprised if it was really that much of a substantial fraction compared with the actual operation of the vehicles.

I think it's significant, there must be tons of full time employees who are checking tickets, selling tickets, doing maintenance on machines, administering subsidized fare programs etc. I don't think it's 25% or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised it it was in the double digits.

Aside from that, though, it's not as if the money not collected in fares is lost. That's money that people get to keep. It's a direct economic benefit to people using transit, and a smaller indirect benefit to everyone else.

I am going to need a citation for the substantial burden everything I read is that they are annoyed but its easy to do.

Could well be that the complaining is exaggerated, but there is definitely complaining.

> "Theoretically, all students would need to be reimbursed or credited 79.98 EUR each," says [speaker of Bochum University] Dessaul. An enormous administrative effort, because almost 43,000 young people study there.

> The AStA (student council) [of Duisburg-Essen University] would have to initiate 40,000 bank transfers [for the refunds]. "This would be an incredible effort, especially given the limited number of people we have in treasury, finance, and on the board, that would be extremely difficult to manage and would probably also take considerable time"

https://www.businessinsider.de/politik/deutschland/trotz-ber...

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