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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

As a German: It is amazing, but not just because of the price, also because of the unbelievable simplicity that it makes possible.

You pay 9€ and you get 1 ticket. The transport company then charges the government back based on usage.

Why is this a big deal? Well, try finding out how to get anywhere in Germany not using the national railroad. Here's the map [0].

Not only is there hundreds of local transport companies, they are also all part of different, partially overlapping, partially non-boundary-aligned conglomerates for which your ticket might or might not be valid.

It's insanity.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_de...

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The 'normal' system being complex is a bit exaggerated here - if you have to travel one-off via local multi-mode transportation you'd usually just get a regional Deutsche Bahn day ticket which will generally by accepted by local transport companies as well, and I believe various variants of these would also exist for longer-timespan tickets.

Still, that would not be as handy as the mostly unified billing system using NFC cards we have in the Netherlands since the late 2000s, where if you do not have any entitlement valid on a particular mode of transportation, it uses a charge card balance as such.

While this isn't as innovative nowadays as it used to be, it's still notable as it works in the entire country, which, while small, is still not a city-state.

But then you lose a lot of flexibility and pay insane prices. Where I live regional travel (what's being called complicated here and what the 9€ ticket is valid for) can reasonably cover distances of 50-100km where I live, which covers quite a lot of cities.

> if you have to travel one-off via local multi-mode transportation you'd usually just get a regional Deutsche Bahn day ticket which will generally by accepted by local transport companies as well

I believe that applies in the areas on the map marked in yellow (that are not shaded yellow+gray). So I agree that this applies widely but certainly not everywhere. I must admit I come from an area of Germany where this doesn't apply.

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