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robertlagrant

> unlimited travel on regional and local transport for €49 a month

Is this economic? Can it pay for its own repairs?

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It's public transport - does it even need to pay for itself?

You are asking this on a site where the majority would sell their soul for 1% more profit

This service isn't making a profit if it isn't even making enough to do maintenance.

Charging for use below what it costs to maintain that use is probably a bad idea.

You can also pay the deficit from other taxes. That way, rich people can subsidize transport for poor people.

Almost free public transportation helps people lead richer lives, so its also a productivity/quality of life issue.

Why? Is the military breaking even, for example? Societies can decide how to spend their resources and it can be subsidies to things people want to have exist.

The military isn't saying "pay $5 to crash a tank". They aren't creating pricing that causes a deficit.

It is costing money in return for "security" (and some more welfare like things in the US, too, for example). How that is valued is a social/political decision, not one of simple cost calculations - the same can be true for other public spending.

Instead of having to pay the military $5 to crash a tank they will even pay you to do it.

That sounds great! Unless war were declared.

Only for a completely private enterprise. For public transport the tickets are only part of the income. Often citizens already pay taxes which can be used to subsidize transport. Just like roads are really.

> Charging for use below what it costs to maintain that use is probably a bad idea.

I disagree. that's absolutely not a valid conclusion for a service (public transport, road infrastructure, healthcare, etc) that has a substantial benefit to society as a whole.

i.e. providing it at low or no cost at point of use can be a great idea.

It can be, yes. But if it has a substantial benefit, maybe it should cost more.

> But if it has a substantial benefit, maybe it should cost more.

This makes no sense whatsoever. That conclusion does not follow - that's what the above comment says.

I think the heart of the question was whether it is even a valuable service. Does it serve enough people to be worthwhile. Even if it’s tax-funded, everything has to pay for itself one way or another (i.e. tax receipts).

That is for voters/societies to decide but it doesn't necessarily have to pay for itself in any monetary sense and instead be subsidized.

Voters and societies don't decide these things very often, in my experience. No one says "we're going to give these benefits and in exchange you're going to see cost of living rise, reducing the value of your savings". If you leave it to point issues, people would want free transport run by people paid a lot of money, somehow. Subsidies make it not a simple issue.

Voters and societies are totally fine in leaving those decisions and how to balance them to their elected representatives. That is a decision, too.

Of course 49€ a month for unlimited local/regional travel is not economic. But it has nothing to do with DB. Local/regional traffic is ordered and financed by the states (Länder). The 49€ ticket is a political project.

DB has long distance, local/regional, and freight business.

How much local/regional traffic companies are harmed by the 49€ ticket I have no numbers handy. But I feel DB is impacted relatively little compared to many other operators.

The local companies are the ones where most people buy their 49€ ticket while I imagine DB gets almost no income from it. Doesn't really matter though as both DB and local operators receive subsidies anyway, including ones specifically introduced for the 49€ ticket.

I think so, yes. Just going by how many people are using the service now and going to nearby towns to visit other people or roam around, the ticket should pay a significant part of itself in taxes soon enough.

IIRC the arguments for it being economic were that all the money you lose on accelerated depreciation would be made up by less people using cars thus removing the negative externalities of pollution.

while db was (semi- ?) privatised the ticket you refer to is a project by the government with subsidies, it is not meant to be economic but to be part of positive transformation.

No. It replaced here a ticket worth at least 150€ for local commuter train. There are more and more articles in the press, that 49€ is way too low.

Isn't the 49€ ticket restricted to slower regional trains than the 150€ alternative? I still pay a small fortune traveling between west and east germany to save a few hours of travel time.

It depends on where the parent commenter is living - in Berlin I was paying over 80 EUR a month for a travel card which only applied in the state of Berlin before the Deutschland ticket () - I could believe that a monthly pass for other cities (Frankfurt?) could reach 150 EUR.

( Not directly before, there was the 9 EUR ticket in summer '22, and then BVG offered their monthly ticket for 29 EUR for a while).

Even for slower trains you could easily pay well above 49€ before. Even just a montly ticket for the city where I live cost over 60€ and that still required you to pay extra for regional trains to nearby towns. That doesn't mean that 49€ is too low as both prices are subsidized (explicitly for the 49€ ticket and indirectly via infrastructure grants before).

I'm not sure exactly which former ticket they meant, but such an approx. 150€ ticket was probably not just restricted to regional transport just like the Deutschlandticket, but also only valid in a small part of the country. Prices would have varied somewhat by federal state or region. The card that gives free travel on all trains costs €380 per month (€4550/y).

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