Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.

I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/ghg-abatement...

View on HN

Funding road repairs, construction, and expansion from general tax revenues is similarly subsidizing a different mode of transit, and it's likely a much higher value than the 3b€ you mention (and likely more than overall railway sector subsidizing, tho I'm not familiar with Germany's budget). Also recognizing that other positive externalities exist, but pricing them at $0, seems silly.

Not to mention subsidised parking spaces. Free and even paid street parking is highly subsidised by the city and by other tax payers. There's also the environmental cost of not having that land be a park or nature and instead have it contribute to being an urban heat island with all its asphalt.

Healthcare cost also decline, and people become less sick because you have to walk some amount to get to the train.

The air quality improving should also be a factor.

Although you fall sick more often in winter when using public transportation.

Is that a rigorous statistical analysis or just your impression?

in Paris (and pretty sure that applies to pretty much any big western city, new york for instance is worse in a few of the criterias ill reference) subway increase stress, frequent delays(if you have 2-3 train as part of your commute you will experience it daily), pollution down under is high, virus/covid transmission is high, pickpockets are everywhere if not worse, bedbug, pee smell, junkies. Id take a car any day.

So I live in NYC, and constant honking and worrying about being run over by cars when I'm trying to cross the street contribute way more to my stress than the state of the subway in NYC. Driving, or being around vehicles driving, is incredibly stressful.

Also, I was in Paris last year and I found your subway system more pleasant than ours. Methinks you doth complain too much.

This is much less of a problem in large Asian cities. They're only really stressful in rush hour crowds. But in places like NY the public seems much less interested in the initial policing, maintenance, and cultural attitude shifts that would be required to make it happen. Like, you could still have the artists, street performers, and other so-called charming quirks while still making sure the problematic passengers get the help they need. What's it going to take? You could even do a trial period, like one year of safe, clean metros and see if people want to go back to the way things are now.

The Paris metro is amongst the most frequented in the world and operates near peak capacity. You absolutely can’t compare it to anything in Germany. Germany doesn’t really have a city which can be compared to Paris. Berlin has the most populated urban area and it has less than half the population of the Paris one. The only similar city in Europe is London.

Plus there is no bed bugs and pickpockets are an oddity outside of the most touristy stations.

Anyway, considering how awful it is to drive and park in Paris, you would have to be crazy to use a car instead of taking the train which is why nearly everyone does. Plus, with the mandatory employer subvention, it’s incredibly cheap at 44€ a month. The only credible alternative is biking which is indeed more and more popular.

Yes, even just 15 or 30 minutes more spent on commute every day is a significan quality of life decrease.

It has secretly become unrealistic to have cars in a city, we still do it but more out of tradition. You wouldn't build parks (tho that would be nice) 1 parked car, the road next to it and the second side walk take about as much space as an apartment and we stack those one on top of the other.

Something like this is quite hilarious if you think about it.

https://www.alamy.com/parking-in-the-courtyard-of-high-rise-...

It reminds me of grazing cows having 80 times as much space as people in some parts of my country.

You don't have to build it like that. Where I live now, the parking lot is effectively the basement under the apartment buildings and playground. You'd barely interact with it unless you're driving.

Housing is getting so expensive that people share tiny apartments while still able to afford two cars. With that ratio you need 10 floors of parking for 10 floors of housing.

I always thought it funny how popular elevators are for vertical travel. A monorail station in the basement or even a ski lift seems a lot less space consuming.

If it means you can get a home 120m2 (1300 sq ft) in stead of 60m2 (650 sq ft) it seems worth considering.

Well when you put it like that it sounds very economical!

Absolutely. Next time you see a free parking spot mentally calculate the rent of ~10m² on that part of the city to understand how much of a subsidy that is. Then multiply by 50 parking spots in a street. Then think how many thousands there are all over the city...

do you have free parking? cities are making money out of parking spots. a lot of money. so much than one would say they have an incentive to reduce parking space to increase price and reduce expenses

Yes, though all of that is more of an argument in favour of dropping car subsidies, than an argument in favour of more rail subsidies.

Road wear scales with the fourth power of weight over the axle so, even with personal cars getting heavier, I’m not sure that moving people from cars to trains makes much of a difference – I think most wear typically comes from heavy vehicles or weathering – so it mightn’t make much difference to repair costs.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t other advantages. Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy, and time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.

> time on a train can be better spent than time in a car because one doesn’t need to pay as much attention, which could be a small improvement to many people’s lives.

This is not really true on busy trains. I've commuted both on trains and in cars, and when comparing transportation methods near the saturation point, cars win when it comes to personal comfort.

A traffic jam is no fun, but you can still sit, aren't jostled about by other people, have your personal space, and keep your climate controlled to a good level.

In a full train, you will be standing up, pressed against a bunch of other people. The climate will be other people's sweat. You may be able to use your phone, but not much more.

On a longer quiet route the train can be very nice. Get your laptop out, do a little work, nice coffee or tea with you. But on a busy commuter line it's more annoying than a car.

> I've commuted both on trains and in cars, and when comparing transportation methods near the saturation point, cars win when it comes to personal comfort.

Note that if you're at the saturation point of both modes, you're moving a lot more people with (light/heavy) rail:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Passenger_Capacity_of_dif...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity

Also worth considering that while it may be personally comfortable for you in on saturated rail, you're still moving towards your destination, whereas at car saturation you may be physically comfortable, but you are not making progress towards your goal of actually achieving your goal of getting to your destination while your speed is zero.

I.... I really don't feel like driving in a traffic jam is better than being in a train in anything except the most extreme cases of train crowding. I haven't experienced massive commuter driving but even the cases I've just been stuck in stop and go traffic for 30 minutes it felt worse than any train ride I've taken except for the few times I was in "I feel like I'm going to get crushed" levels of crowded.

And like... generally speaking, the crowded train is still going to get you where you need to go. I don't know how you walk away from the 30 minute trip that took 2+ hours with any happy feelings. To each their own of course

But if the train is that busy it likely couldn’t be replaced by people travelling in personal cars anyway as they would take up to much road space and cause a huge traffic jam and there would be nowhere to park at the end of the journey in a presumably dense city centre.

Most people are likely buying this for the regional tickets. Those trains sell seats, and do not have passengers standing for the 1-3 hour journey.

> Eg reducing parking spaces (as a sibling points out) to increase urban density is probably good for the economy

Looking at most German cities, the effect of this is negligible.

I actually observe reduction of parking spaces in public spaces.

Although I don't think it could be an effect of Deutschlandticket, too little time to have an effect IMHO.

Aren’t roads necessary from a “last mile” perspective for like, all sorts of things a functioning country needs? Last time I checked trains don’t run directly from farms to grocery stores and so we need trucks and therefore roads in order to get food to consumers, among other things.

Much less roads. Humans can walk - and for health should.

a few trucks are still needed but trucks used to haul are a minoricy of traffic

> Aren’t roads necessary from a “last mile” perspective for like, all sorts of things a functioning country needs?

Yup, absolutely! But at least where I've worked on road design, the number of lanes on a local road is governed pretty much solely by the number of cars (trucks just have a larger impact on asphalt structure choices and, balance with the impacts of freeze-thaw, resurfacing schedule).

But this is about longer distance travel - trains generally being used for intercity travel vs highways. Even still, I don't argue against road subsidization, but rather in favour of more train subsidization.

They're necessary because cities are built around the idea that everything must be done through a car, so roads become necessary. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The underlying discussion is all about urban planning and how we want societies to organize space.

I do not know about Germany, but most countries have taxes on car ownership and fuel, so you need to offset those against the expenditure on roads. Road construction and maintenance also benefits other road users - transport vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians and emergency vehicles etc.

The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles.

Think of how often dedicated walking and cycling routes need to be repaved—almost never.

Car owners only pay about half of the cost of road maintenance in the US[1].

[1] https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/

> The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles.

This should read: The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by heavy trucks.

Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight. A fully loaded cement truck or transport truck is doing way more damage than a fully loaded box truck, which is doing much more damage than a Hummer EV, which is doing much more damage than a Tesla Model S or F150, which is doing more damage than a Nissan Micra or Mazda Miata. Here’s[0] a page with a neat chart showing relative comparisons. Note that it tops out at 18k lb trucks, which are ~1200x as damaging as something like a Prius; it doesn’t include fully loaded trucks, which can exceed 80k lbs in North America. The amount of damage to roads they do compared to average or lightweight cars is mind boggling.

[0] https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

How much in germany, which is what the post is about? How much in other countrie?

> The degradation of road surfaces is caused almost entirely by automobiles.

Given the fourth power law I find it hard to believe that larger vehicles, especially good vehicles , are not significant.

Even without wear, surfaces deteriorate. You cannot claim that pavements and cycle lanes are zero maintenance, or have negligible costs to build.

> Think of how often dedicated walking and cycling routes need to be repaved—almost never.

The condition of many german cycling paths would beg to differ.

German chancellor plans to put road repairs into 2% mandatory defense budget to meet NATO requirements, so not that much of a load to overall german budget.

Not trying to detract discussion, just finding it hilarious that when facing a potentially existential threat from russians who repeatedly claim they will wipe them out, they will do just about anything rather than making their military into something a bit better than an chronically underfunded joke its now.

Actually, it makes quite a bit of sense to plan ahead to make sure that your infrastructure can efficiently transport the weapon systems you already have, or you are planning to have.

What's the use of tanks if you can't get them to the battlefield? [1]

Although some infrastructure was already built taking logistics into account [2], concrete structures have a life expectancy of about 50 years, and many bridges are past that age and need urgent replacement. And that costs a lot of money.

A small reminder on the importance of bridges: [3]

[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/what-can-stop-nato-...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64664944

It is also important to make sure your military equipment can travel across rough ground after the retreating enemy has destroyed all roads, rails, and bridges. Of course in that situation you don't care much about saving the ground you are covering while chasing the enemy, but lack of roads is not fatal (there is good reason the military likes it - it makes their logistic much easier on safe ground)

A strong German military with an ascendant far right party. What could possibly go wrong.

I believe the road budget was 132.8 billion between 2016 and 2030

Germany spends some 70 billion euros maintaining the road system, only about a third of which is offset by taxes on drivers [1]. If we accept that investments in roads reduce carbon emissions by 0 million tonnes per year, then that works out to NaN € per tonne -- much worse than other carbon abatement methods!

Naturally there might be other positive externalities to owning a car, but I don't own a car and therefore wouldn't be privy to them. Instead I rely almost exclusively on Germany's public transport for my daily commutes, which I find perfectly satisfactory for this purpose and significantly more convenient than parking and maintaining a car.

---

[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...

A third can't be right. 15 billion from petrol and 18.2 billion from diesel alone make up almost half of that. 48.76 million vehicles times €100 (back of the envelope calculation) for vehicle tax puts that number above half.

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Taxes/Excise-Du...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/810662/passenger-cars-st...

https://www.zoll.de/DE/Unternehmen/Kraftfahrzeugsteuer/Steue...

From the article (sorry for the bad link before; fixed below [1]):

> The revenue from taxes and levies on road traffic amounts to around 50 billion euros annually. Around half of this is earmarked by law via the mineral oil tax, i.e. around 25 billion euros. This means that just over a third (36%) of the earmarked revenue from road traffic covers the costs of roads and other facilities such as parking lots and the like. It is therefore clear that the public sector is heavily subsidizing road traffic.

My understanding is that these two forms of taxes add to more than 50%, but then almost half of those taxes must be reinvested elsewhere by law (i.e., not into roads), hence the 1/3 figure. But even if you ignore this reallocation of taxes, you still have a deficit of around 20 billion euros.

---

[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...

I'm a bit baffled why Germany's numbers are so bad here. In the UK the government takes far more in revenue from drivers than it spends on the roads.

> 15 billion from petrol and 18.2 billion from diesel alone

Not all petrol or diesel is consumed by motor vehicles that (primarily) drive on the road.

Even if you don't drive a car yourself you depend a lot on things delivered by road. Most of the road wear is done by trucks bringing you food, construction materials and whatever else. You can't exactly replenish your local grocery store by rail or cargo bike.

Most of the need for roads though is cars. It is rare to see a multi-lane road where trucks are restricted to only 1 lane and cars allowed the rest - if though trucks wouldn't fill that single lane and in turn the other lanes could be built much cheaper. (in part because the road needed for a car isn't that much cheaper than the road needed for a truck - labor is about the same, and weather is often a large factor)

Yes if there are trucks the road maintenance is A LOT more expensive.

But we could definitely have 99% being done over rail and 1% by road.

Show your work.

Plenty of transportation is already done by rail. Even halving road delivery without degrading service is nigh impossible.

Focusing on the cost-per-tonne for carbon reduction misses the broader value of railways. They're not just about reducing emission! They facilitate daily commutes, expand job opportunities, and help drive the economy. It’s a subsidy for businesses too.

Gp said they know about these other factors but doesn't know how to price them. Do you know a way?

"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.

Nobody said that. But if you're gonna spend the public money, you need some way of determining "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing".

I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.

so how do you propose the limited public money ought to be spent on which project? Perhaps just feel good vibes?

Asthma from air pollution is calculatable.

Cancer reduction, road repairs, reduction in vehicle costs for tax payers, reduction in road fatalities, all of these can be added up.

Ok, the GP is only using carbon offsets, but the economic one are just as good. Forgoing car ownership allows for that money to then go other economic uses. Forgoing fuel costs, $20 for electric, $100 for gas, again allows that to go into the other areas of the economy. These are easy to calculate, why not use them?

Road building and maintenance avoided?

I know a way.

Politics.

Doesn't having a car do this too?

No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.

So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.

And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.

So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.

Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.

Then you've instead created sprawl which has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use, as well as disconnecting people and communities.

> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use

TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.

> Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be

I'm not convinced this is true. Because a train enables more density, it enables more places you can reach once on it. A car enables more geographical area, but there is a lot less things to do in that area, and those things to do are what matters. If you want to go camping miles from anyone else than a car will get you there, but if you want to do a city activity (restaurant, movies, live music, show, work) a train can get you to a much greater variety of those things.

Note that with both the real question is the network. A car where there are not roads won't get you anywhere. A car where there is one road doesn't get you far. Same for a train - I live in a city without a train and so obviously I can't get anywhere on it. I've been in cities with trains and I was able to get places on it - enough that I didn't need to have a car.

The term is called 'growth ponzi scheme'. Regions wax and wane in economic importance, less so when they're dense and urban.

At this rate I would be surprised if the Texas HSR is complete before 2050. Texas has not come to terms with anything. I say that as a resident for the last 10 years.

> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.

Before scaling people moving up so much, I'd question why encourage so much movement.

Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need. By eliminating the need for 95% of high-speed people moving (whether by car, train, bus, no matter), that problem becomes automatically solved. And we get a nicer life walking/biking to most places and when we need/want to drive farther, there's no congestion.

95% is way too high a target! I sometimes want to get supplies at the special Asian food store - there won't be one in my 95% neighborhood - nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood. Note that I only counted for me - in the real world most people are in a marriage like relationship, each of the pair has their own interests and different jobs.

What we should aim for is everybody is in walking distance of 5 restaurants, 1 grocery store, 1 general goods store, 1 library, 1 elementary school (but not higher level - after about 6th grade students benefit from larger schools where they can take classes different from their neighbors), 2 parks, 3 churches. Then put them in close walking distance of good public transit so they can do other things that they do in life all the time (Note in particular going to work every day is not in the above list for most!). You should of course debate exactly what should be on the list and exact numbers, but the above is a good starting point.

> nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood

Agreed. I did mistype what I was thinking though. Not 95% of destinations one might ever want, but my thought was 95% of trips. Nearly all my trips are routine, either to/from office (bikeable) or supermarkets (walkable), movies/library/restaurants/misc shops (all walkable), parks/sports (walkable), basic medical care (walkable).

I certainly have hobbies/needs I must to drive for, but those are fairly occasional trips. My thought is that if we as a society make it so that nearly all routine trips can be local (walk or bike) then the exception will be rare enough that we don't need more road capacity.

> Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need

The only way to achieve this is density. Urban areas.

When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.

The problem is that you can make MUCH more money building huge homes than affordable housing. And people, being ultra-individualistic, believe they need the huge home as opposed to denser housing. So here we are.

> When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.

What you call "not possible" is where I live, so clearly it is possible.

Trying to shoehorn all solutions into one and only one way of doing things turns people off and hinders progress.

Sure you can have dense urban areas that are walkable/cycleable. You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable. Instead of turning people away from a good cause by telling them they can't have the life they want, let's promote walkable/cycleable communities in all areas.

> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes.

The Induced Demand observed in car traffic, also known as Downs–Thomson paradox.

Induced Demand needs to DIE as a concept. It is a GOOD thing - if you build any infrastructure and people change their behavior because of it, that means your city wasn't meeting the needs of the people. The whole point of a city is all the things people can do in them - if you just want to stay you get out of the city: you can find cheap houses in Montana with nothing around that will meet your needs just was well. The rest of us live in/near a city because as romantic as the cabin sounds, we overall prefer all the options a city gives us.

Note that I didn't specify you should get ahead of induced demand, only that you should. Trains are much cheaper in the long run for most cities but it requires a large investment to make them useful.

I don’t think you understand how this concept works. Because commuting by car after increasing the road capacity gets easy again, and because it’s also the most co convenient and (for a brief moment) fastest way to commute from point A to B, people switch over from using other means and the roads get saturated again soon after. You cannot increase the capacity to accommodate everyone driving, and everyone absolutely would want to drive if possible. It has nothing to do with the city’s ability to deliver, it’s about human condition and our innate need to make lowest effort possible.

Also, this is such a wildly American take, from a European perspective. No one expects city to somehow make driving cars easy here, not anymore. Would also be wild from NYC or Chicago perspective. Having lived in NYC I would not replace Subway with a car in that large of a place. Even without traffic it would take too long to move about.

Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.

I actually do stand by my assertion in this case. The reason is because unfortunately, after a certain scale, cars are actually actively harmful to growth.

That's why I brought up Texas in particular. Interstate 45 as an example is effectively at saturation. Even if you add new lanes to it, you only get marginal throughput benefits when you actually try to get between Dallas and Houston or commute to either city from the region between them. The same goes for I-10 out of Houston.

Texas has reached the point where car ownership is actually costing the state and local governments astronomical amounts of money for marginal amounts of congestion relief (that is then immediately saturated).

I don't deny that cars have a place in low density regions and I think they are great for specific uses or areas but generally I believe that cars hinder growth in any metro environment in the long term. Doubly so because car centric infrastructure is extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't use a car which makes transition at that density threshold extremely painful for everyone involved.

Of course a car does, but does that mean you should ignore all the benefits brought by bicycles? And if we go that far, should we overlook our own muscular locomotion? It all enables the same mobility after all.

Cycling at 110F ambient temperature can be outright hazardous (speaking of Texas).

Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)

Also, cycling in a city, when you cycle for 2-3, maybe 5 miles, is fine. Cycling for 20 miles is pretty taxing and time-consuming, but in a low-density, car-oriented environment 20 miles correctly qualifies as "nearby".

Having a car also entails massive subsidies; when taking that into account the all-in costs per unit traveled are basically always cheaper with rail.

Source?

Anecdotally, I frequently take day (or weekend) trips to other European cities by rail. It is usually quicker than the roads but also crucially you can be productive on the train. If I had to drive my car there then I probably wouldn't bother.

This reminds me of this Swedish office on a train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbrI3refig , made for a company which had an hour train commute from Stockholm. It's even got 8 telephone line (4 in and 4 out)!

I guess a lot of people would use work booths/conference rooms on trains, but the price/profit has to work for both sides (the train company and users). As for trains, the old-fashioned 6 seater compartments offer more privacy for groups.

This is an aside, but I’d never seen that “Beyond 2000” show before.

Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing.

Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”

Yeah - as someone born in 1979, I find repetitions of the idea that global warming / climate change only came into public awareness 'in the last 15 to 20 years' on TV news and in documentaries deeply troubling. Global warming was constantly discussed on (British) television during my childhood. At least as much as the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. Perhaps this wasn't the case in America?

you could also work from a car if someone else is driving it like a taxi, but imagine the price difference to travel such a long distance every day over rail versus metro + rail.

Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.

I like your taxi idea. I hate driving myself.

We could bring down the cost of the taxi by putting more people in the car, to share the cost of the driver. That'll bring the costs down significantly.

If the car is sufficiently large, we can get, say, 50 people in a car with a single driver. That should make the extra cost of the driver split between the 50 lassengers significantly cheaper.

We could go further and link multiple cars together, with a single driver up front. They will be driving on one another's slipstream vastly improving fuel efficiency which will bring down costs even further.

Imagine if we can get them to run on some sort of rail or metal track, which makes rolling resistance of the wheels basically 0. No more expensive rubber tyres that need replacing and yet again improved fuel efficiency. This will bring down the costs even further!

Trains are just big cars, where you stuff in a lot of people, to make it efficient. Because otherwise it is not.

And you can only work in it, because no one wants to use this monster on a daily basis, so its empty and you dont fight for space. :)

Europe is not exactly the standard bearer for productivity though, is it? If one wants to advance an argument for emulating European style passenger rail, this is really not the right argument.

Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions).

There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.

True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.

All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).

Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child.

Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.

Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.

I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.

The other great thing about public transport is you don't have to "lug" / "chauffer" them at all after about 8 or so (what age makes sense depends on area and the kid of course). They can exercise some independence.

> Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not

I'm talking about ages 0 to 3 when parents need to use a stroller. It's a huge pain to do this in public transit. It's easier when the kids are older but if you have more than one child the car still wins.

>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).

Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.

And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.

> And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down.

At least here (California) those intersections have stoplights and pedestrian crossings, so the width and moving speed of the road are not relevant. The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.

I don't remember exact age but certainly before kindergarden age my child (and all the neighborhood friends in that age range) knew how to operate the pedestrian walk buttons and cross safely.

I fully agree it can be nicer walk when you don't have to cross a larger road. But at the same time, the difficulty of doing it is often greatly overstated. Press button, wait a bit, cross. Done. This is not in the top-100 things I'd like to see improved in society.

A law could ban those SUVs.

It's currently being discussed in Europe, since the "independent import" route to import a special vehicle has started to be exploited to import unsafe American vehicles. (The Cybertruck is one example.)

And yet I frequently see (in New Zealand), properties with oversized double garages (often built to fit oversized American vehicles) and driveways that take up half the land on the property. Cars use a huge amount of space in roads, carparks, garages, and are responsible for pushing things further and further away from the home. And then somehow cars are seen as the solution for the very problems they create. There's plenty of real world evidence that there are better ways to solve this.

I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.

Here's easier parenting: walk from your house/apartment to a close by square, and play with your kids there

Honestly, I don't want that lifestyle. I live in the burbs with a big house and yard. We travel plenty and go to places that are dense/walkable but I love coming back home to my carbrained neighborhood with an HOA.

As someone who grew up in suburban sprawl, maybe it makes parenting easier, maybe. But they also had to drive me to and from school every day, and band practice, and every single game, and whenever I wanted to hang out with my friends. I would argue my parents basically were moonlighting as my Uber driver for about 16 years until I got my own car.

Big yards are great, but empty. Mom, can you drive me to my friend's bigger backyard? That times the 5 other friends that want to go to the friend's house that has the biggest backyard. Comically the 5 cars all waiting at the same stop light before the final turn, taking up the entire residential street as we all get dropped off and later picked up.

Eh, going to my friend's house is tedious. I'll just fully immerse myself in world of Warcraft, get fat, get socially maladjusted by spending all my time on the internet and 4chan, and enter college as a practically sociopathic asshole with no social skills.

Could just be me. But if I have kids, I'm raising them somewhere where they can just get on a train to get to band practice.

Funny, I was basically mobile with bike from age 10 or so. Had some friends I needed the parents for until I got a small motorcycle aged 14.

So living outside a city is not an issue, although I often wished we’d be nearer to a city.

But society has changed a lot since and everyone is scared of the beautiful outside world.

That's a goalpost moved from my response.

The poster you responded to wrote:

> They're not just about reducing emission!

Cars increasing emissions seems to be a relevant disqualifier.

Trains scale better than cars in dense areas and offer more than just emissions reductions. Good rail infrastructure is a big part of makes a large city world-class and improves everyday lives. Subsidizing trains is better than a lot of other uses of government funds.

A car is more expensive, and clogs the roads, which causes other costs to the economy and penalizes commutes.

Germany has a pretty high population density and the metropolitan areas have evolved around medieval cities, so they are sometimes very bad a carrying a lot of traffic. Getting around by car in lots of major German cities is a major PITA and parking your car there (if you live there) is just as horrible. Inside cities, public transport is much more efficient.

How much of the increased rail use is helping increase GDP, though, rather than being purely leisurely trips with little long term value for the economy? More people going to hike in the forest on the weekend technically increases GDP but doesn't add much value to the economy overall.

Keep in mind there’s only about 50 miles of high-speed rail in the U.S. so far. With major cities like Dallas and Houston or San Francisco and LA still unconnected by fast rail, there's significant room to boost GDP and improve lives. Expanding rail isn't just about GDP growth, it's about enhancing daily living and connecting communities more effectively. As RFK famously noted, GDP measures everything ‘except that which makes life worthwhile’. Rail development does both, supporting the economy and enriching our lives.

no one has ever been able to explain who will be the daily rider for SF/LA or Dallas/Houston rail

I don't mean people trying it out once, or tourists...I mean people who will commit to riding it daily

Almost nobody will take that train daily, and it is stupid to think anyone would or should. However it is reasonable to expect the train will be crowded from all the people who take it less often. Companies send their people to other cities often for various business reasons. People take several vacations per year. Nobody is doing this daily - but the sum total of weekly, monthly, yearly, and once in a lifetime trips add up to a lot of people very day.

If I could take a train instead of a plane, I would. Doubly so if it saved me money. Savings for individuals means more money to spend on other things.

I wonder if it's possible that you have the telescope the wrong way around?

People leading more fulfilling and rewarding lives is the point of the economy, not the reverse.

For many it helps cover the gigantic rent hikes. Many workers need public transportation to commute because they can’t afford a car, which keep becoming more expensive because cheap cars don’t make profits. It was not rare before for public transport subs to cost upwards of 100 EUR

Fast travel between major cities skyrockets GDP: https://youtu.be/T3LLgzO_PrI?t=264

Why does the US have a higher GDP/capita than France then?

I find the word subsidy to be a possible weasel word here. I don't know all the details but a railway system has certain costs (fuel, personnel, water, upkeep, the trains themselves and so on) and takes in a certain amount of revenue (fares and subsidies, also food etc). It might be true that the government increased the subsidy in order to support the cheaper tickets. But that's not the same as "requires". Perhaps I'm splitting hairs but there's a strong danger of comparing apples and oranges if these things aren't spelled out imo.

Don’t forget too that the cost of proving roads is also ‘subsidised’ in most countries, but we’re tend to be a bit blind to that.

(This is not an argument against rail - I just find that subsidies are often mentioned with respect to rail but not with roads).

I remember Brad deLong did back of the napkin analysis to determine how much a bart fare should be including the cost of freeways. It was minus $2.00 or something.

People don't think of it as a subsidy because they are not charged per use a la toll road.

People also pay fuel tax, registration tax, and other taxes that fund the roads

Do you think that covers the cost of building and maintaining the road network infrastructure?

Do you think that it covers the cost of excess death caused by particle emissions and road fatalities?

We don't have the option to completely replace car infrastructure, but we shouldn't act like it isn't heavily subsidized.

That said, the positive externalities are also significant, but so are the positive externalities from rail traffic.

I think the point is that if they had to do those things every time they used a road it would be more obvious (like buying a train ticket).

At least in the US, those taxes are nowhere near enough to pay for maintenance, let alone new construction. The rest is a straight subsidy from the general fund, typically paid for by passing the debt to our children.

You don’t generally see figures from any jurisdiction (and I’ve seen numbers for a lot of countries and states) where those charges and taxes make much more than 50% or so of the actual costs of building and maintaining road networks, and that’s just the actual spend before even trying to quantify all the social and environmental costs!

In the United States, often a large amount of road funding comes from property tax, so it has nothing to do with operating a car.

I don't really follow that, a toll is a way for it not to be (or to be less) subsidised?

Calculating the subsidy associated with state maintenance of roads for private vehicles is difficult.

Some basic level of signage and hazard prevention (potholes, ice etc) is necessary for emergency vehicles and other government operations.

Thereafter, although there is some maintenance cost associated with the road wear from private vehicles and the additional infrastructure required for higher traffic volumes, we don’t have an easy way to calculate the cost.

Wouldn't the very patterns of development be different (and more amenable to rail) if the state didn't spend oodles of money building nice roads to make sprawl livable?

At a high level, urbanisation rates increased through the road building binge of the 20th century.

Perhaps those new migrants to cities would’ve chosen to stay in the countryside without roads? Worsening the economics of rail.

Or maybe they’d use their collective voting power to get more rail friendly new towns built?

I don’t think the answer is obvious.

Sprawl happens when there is available undeveloped land. Roads are just a symptom.

People build outwards first and then upwards.

I disagree that it's difficult: excepting toll roads and "unassumed" roads‡, the subsidy is 100% (and most toll roads are likely subsidized at a substantial fraction of their cost, since the tolls are rarely high enough to be self-sufficient).

It doesn't matter whether the money used to pay for road maintenance comes from property taxes (like in Toronto), income taxes (Ontario areas not maintained by cities / regions / counties), or gas taxes (much of the U.S.?). If you're not paying per use of the road, there is a 100% subsidy on the maintenance of the road.

There are definite costs to not maintaining those roads (people won't move where there aren't roads; unmaintained roads will result in more costs to the people using those roads as their vehicles are damaged more frequently—which may result in costs to the municipality for not properly maintaining those roads), but we should not pretend roads are self-sustaining or aren't entirely subsidized.

‡ Unassumed roads are those built privately by the landowners in common and are not maintained by the local government. When used for private dwellings, these roads usually fall under the sway of the local government after a period of time, even if they were built initially by a subdivision subcontractor.

Also bridges and tunnels, which seem to be very expensive to maintain.

I’m not sure if it’s the case here with Germany, but typically we refer to transit spending like this as “subsidies” but for some reason we forget that building and maintaining roads and highways and such are subsidies too.

In the case of the US and probably everywhere else, the highway subsidies are a little insidious too because not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.

>not only do you pay a boatload of money for highway expansion you have to then go and buy an expensive car and fuel too.

the federal excise tax on fuel pays for (at least in part) the "boatload of money for highway expansion "

Not much. A lot more comes from state funding, which can be anything from property tax to sales tax to additional fuel taxes. Because you pay about the same fuel tax per mile on a 60 mph road as a 25 mph road (but the 60mph road costs 100x as much), you also find driving on slow roads becomes a subsidy to building fast roads.

No it doesn't.

Fuel tax income is ~100 Billion

Road expenditures are ~200 Billion

(Combined state and federal)

Here’s another way to think about it: Germany invested N billion into shifting behavior to rail.

How many billions in subsidies has OpenAI gotten to build us a chatbot?

I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received. Did I miss something or is this one of the situations we're we are making up new definitions for words?

> I'm not aware of any subsidies openAi has received.

It is rumored that the military (and perhaps three-letter agencies) has/have special contracts with OpenAI. This can definitely be called a subsidy.

It’s important to distinguish between an operational cost and capital investment here.

If rail usage continues once the spending stops then it’s an investment. Otherwise is an operating subsidy.

paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment. An investment must have some sort of residual value, which over time, is recouped and perhaps even makes a return (hopefully).

> paying for part of the ticket is not an investment, as there's no residual value from this payment

Disagree. There is a lot of residual value in reducing congestion and road usage. Roads need fewer repairs, CO2 impacts the atmosphere less, cities move more efficiently, etc.

There’s residual value also in people spending more time on tax-paying activities and running the economy instead of being stuck alone in their cars. Etc.

If you pay $50 more in taxes because you got a $40 train ticket subsidy that’s a huge win. I don’t know if that’s how the numbers shake out, but governments are def not doing stuff like this just to throw money in the furnace.

You mean another example of apples and oranges?

Is software and transportation really a good example?

It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.

The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.

It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.

> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?

> why is rail treated so differently?

Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.

Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.

On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.

> It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation.

Because you need roads to e.g., get produce from a farm to the grocery store. You can’t have a functioning society that doesn’t involve roadways for moving people and goods the “last mile.”

> why is rail treated so differently?

roads are much cheaper per mile than rail, so you can have more roads than you can have rail.

you can also have lower grade roads, which is once again, cheaper (so you can have more of it). You cannot have lower-grade rail - the train will crash.

Therefore, to provide a massive network of transport, roads are the only option. Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers, and therefore, you can expect to make back the cost of the rail from this dense usage.

It’s not different. The same word applies to both.

>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.

Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.

The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.

> not sustainable on its own

Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.

Yes, that’s the argument for all subsidized things.

> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.

More or less all non-toll roads (and a few toll roads too). Which makes "applies" seems a bit pointless.

I don’t think you know what the word “applies” means.

> the program is not sustainable on its own

So arrest, investigation prosecution and imprisonment of anyone who steals from Amazon is a massive subsidy, since Amazon pays no tax.

Amazon collects sales tax and most certainly pays property taxes that fund the law enforcement you are talking about.

Not to mention the money spent on funding food stamps for Amazon’s underpaid employees.

Yes. The government massively subsidises owning physical property.

Ths US military is not sustainable on its own...

Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.

Yes, that is the argument for subsidies. What’s your point?

Most of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations.

You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.

I read about train infrastructure development that was privately funded and built from the profits from land speculation near the new stations.

> already substantial subsidies for the rail industry

Though to be fair, there are also substantial subsidies for the whole road network.

Road vehicles are heavily taxed in European countries. I don't have the figures for Germany, but the UK spends £12bn per year on roads, while it collects £25bn in road fuel duty and £7bn in vehicle excise duty.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298675/united-kingdom-uk...

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/...

Vehicle, gas and similar taxes are about €50bn in Germany. The cost of the road system is about €70bn.

[1] https://www.forschung-und-wissen.de/nachrichten/oekonomie/au...

According to a study by the HTW Berlin, Germany collects €50 billion in road taxes and duties, but spends €30 billion on road maintenance and €30 billion on traffic police and road accident victims. Add to this an estimated €10-30 billion in environmental damage due to air and noise pollution.

There are also deaths caused by road accidents and health issues caused by pollution.

Those have real economic impacts which aren’t being reflected in the true cost of cars.

Roads are much more efficient with fewer cars.

A German study from 2021 says road traffic created 70 billion euros costs per year. Of that 45 billion had to be paid from general taxes.

This was phrased poorly if I understand the meaning.

"If there is limited use, roads are more efficient than rail"

That's probably true as roads tend to cost less per mile than rail and you don't have transfer problems.

When heavily utilized the opposite is true: rail is more efficient than roads.

I dont know how things are in germany but in the netherlands a lot more people own cars which slows down traffic.

All over the world they keep rebuilding congestion points only for traffic to increase.

If making public transport cheaper attracts more travelers there will be fewer cars on the road. The money spend on public transport will aso make car travel more efficiënt. Roads will last longer. Fewer upgrades are needed. Cars will last longer. etc

It is hard to picture how many cars it takes to move a train full of people.

> 7.6 percent fewer kilometres travelled by car.

> German cars were recorded to have travelled 582.4 billion kilometers.

That's why motorists should always vote for more public transport, instead of increasing road lanes - road per user is improved if you reduce the number of other cars

The weather would like to have a word with you.

By what metric?

It saves the commuters the cost of buying a car, insurance, gas and maintenance. it saves building new roads and lifecycle costs of maintaining a road. Trains allow dense developments with a little bit of walking. Walking is healthy, a bit of exercise saves a ton on healthcare costs. Density makes everything cheaper. Carbon emissions are just a bonus.

The only carbon capture/sequestration method I’m aware of without significant tradeoffs outside of price is direct air capture, and last I saw, that clocked in at $600-1200/ton (Climeworks). So maybe not such a terrible deal?

Wetlands do a better job of carbon sequestration than trees.

Globally, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands since the 1700s.

Maybe we should restore them.

The startups in this space were targeting $100/ton before the recent inflation hit.

It turns out if you divide the $/ton by 100, you get $/gallon of gas equivalent.

Burning a gallon of gas emits 20 lbs of CO2 (most of the weight is in the oxygen), and a ton is 2000 lbs.

Anyway, at $6-12 dollars per gallon of gasoline, direct air capture is clearly much worse than just not burning oil. At $1-2, it’s less than the current gasoline taxes in the US.

What’s the subsidy to road and oil companies right now? Might be nice to just shift it over.

Disturbingly, your link includes Carbon capture and storage from a fossil power plant, which has never been demonstrated practically and is basically a scam at this point, pushed by oil companies.

Second, you are conflating subsidy with cost. If everyone switches to electric trucks, cost is enormous, but subsidy is zero because private sector pays for it themselves. For electrics freight trains, cost could be lower, but the government has to pay for it.

However, everyone with a grasp of physics knows that freight train is more efficient, so focusing on subsidy is stupid

The sheer amount of additional benefit means this is a gallingly reductive view of it all.

The subsidy for maintaining car infrastructure is causing _more_ co2 per euro invested, how's that fit into these calculations?

This is so useless, it sounds like propaganda.

Well it's not just a carbon credit, it also provides subsidized public transport to everyone, reduces congestion, improves city air and likely cuts road deaths. Arguably tax dollars extremely well spent.

Except that due to this cheaper ticket congestion on trains is horrible and since the infrastructure is poorly maintained it’s quite common to be late by 1-2 hours while being packed in a sardine tin.

That's a matter of train infrastructure and frequency keeping up with demand. There's a big lag there. You don't just buy 100 new trains overnight. It's a symptom of ramping up. Not of high usage.

I live in Barcelona and here the metro comes every 2-3 minutes. Even during the night it might be 7 minutes. This helps so much with congestion but also trip planning: no need to check train times before you go. Id imagine busy routes in Germany could do similar.

The big benefit of this is also not needing a car. Not having to worry about maintenance, write-off, finding parking and the cost thereof, summer and winter tyres, damage, no-claim bonus, travelling while having drunk, going back from a different place than you arrived. It's so incredibly more convenient than having a car. All at a flat rate of 21€ here.I hope never having to need one again.

€21.35 for a T-Usual card which allows unlimited travel on all public transport for 30 days, yet you still have people in here kicking and screaming to use their car and roads

Thats the end goal of the leftist dreamworld. Make everyone equal, so that everything becomes more shittier. We need to educate more!

> requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn

I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies.

I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff.

That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people. Sure - there would still be occasional maintenance - but nobody always on duty driving trains (automated), nobody selling tickets (online), nobody cleaning stuff (automated cleaning of trains inside and out) etc.

In Japan, rail companies also own the land around the station. There is often a mall or office right on top of the station. So they capture a more of the value of having public transport.

In western countries land lords benefit a lot from nearby public transport for free and maybe only contribute in taxes.

Originally, rail worked kind of like this in the US too. Alternating squares of land adjacent to tracks were ceded to railroads, so you'd have sections of public land and private land beside each other.

I learned about this when someone was trying to make a test case of "corner crossing" from one patch of public land to another a while back.

You see the same thing in Hong Kong - the rail company practically creates new towns when they add a new station or extend a rail line.

I was under the impression Hong Kong was one big urban area already, is there really empty land new towns can be built on?

A Georgist Land Value Tax would fix this!

Opening the railways to competition has utterly ruined the UK's rail network. Ticket price has skyrocketed while service quality has fallen.

In the 30s, French rail companies begged and lobbied the government to nationalize them, so they could exit the burden that was maintaining a rail network.

Rail just isn't profitable, but is vital to society, and will become even more so as gas becomes increasingly expensive/lacking. Some things should just never be opened to competition.

According to GPT, the price per kilometre for rail travel is between €0.23-0.46 in the UK and €0.13-0.20 in Germany. I'm not able to verify those numbers but from my own personal experience I wouldn't doubt it.

Rail in the UK is just so bad that I stopped using it to go to the airport. Everything is constantly delayed or cancelled like I can plan a journey to arrive 2hrs before my flight and the train will randomly pause for 1hr when I'm half way... also the luggage situation is extremely stressful as the racks are out of sight and generally full, like where else am I meant to put my large suitcase after that?

It seems like trains are much larger in Europe with a lot of double deckers.

If there's two of us it's easier and sometimes cheaper to pay £100 for a taxi to the airport door to door (we're fairly rural)

There is very little true competition on UK railways. Most services are run on Government-granted franchises which give a monopoly or at best a duopoly on specific routes.

There are a handful of open-access train operators who operate outside the franchises, but they can't just decide to compete on a route if that route is already covered by a franchise.

To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.

> To create true competition, the infrastructure and stations would need to be taken into public ownership and the train operators would run whatever services they see fit.

The problem with that is that on a mixed-traffic railway it's very easy to run out of capacity once you have a mixture of trains with differing stopping patterns (and perhaps some freight on top) running along the same line. Once you reach that point, competition stops being directly about passengers and starts being about train paths, which can have rather annoying side effects for passengers.

Plus connections don't really work well with competition, either, because a) that'd require coordination between possibly differing operators, which is anathema to unfettered competition, and b) where a regional feeder route might only run hourly or half-hourly, it's impossible to have good connections with more than one or at most two sets of connecting trains anyway.

(Also c) through-ticketing with sufficient passenger rights in case you miss a connection enroute – at least the UK kept a national ticketing system even throughout privatisation and including all open-access operators, whereas in Germany it's an incompatible free-for-all, despite a legal obligation for railway companies to ostensibly offer through-tickets.)

When installed and kept up properly with good policymaking railways are always a positive for the economy. They cause a huge amount of cheap movement that increases business activity. Little towns that become railway stops develop much faster. The bigger stations are great for shops and food. The access to education and high-value driving extracurricular activities increase for younger people too. They overall make the economy resilient against all sorts of crisis (energy, markets)

The more railways are used for commuting, the less people are on the road. So it increases the road efficiency too and reduces degradation. Railways are great drivers of innovation and the technology they generate can be backported to cars, they are initial investment drivers.

However, the first if/when is a big one. You can half ass roads. You pay compensation for a pothole every now and then and make small improvement to get votes. You cannot half ass railways. They require constant maintenance and a whole mindset built around them.

Japan does railways correctly. China is getting there. The Netherlands is nearly a paradise of bike and railways. Germany isn't. The countries with almost the same culture, Austria and Switzerland, care much more about their railways and invest them properly however their government aligns. Germans keep electing the right wing party with their ministers of ~BMW~ transport and then complain about 50% of the non-cancelled trains are late and the maintenance cost of the falling apart rail system is quadrupled.

As someone who's been to both China and Japan I'd say railway is far ahead in China than the rest of the world.

Again, according to GPT, the price per kilometre between them is €0.03-0.06 in China vs €0.15-0.26 in Japan.

I know Japan has a lot of high speed rail coverage but so does China and the difference in price is absolutely insane.

Rail between Beijing and Shanghai for example has an average speed of 300kmh. I believe their high speed network is vaster than Japan's.

Most of these numbers are probably due to differences in wages and the size of the respective countries.

That is so the wrong approach. If I’m very reductive, I could say that if we automate everything there would be no one to commute left. Staffing is good for people: for safety, information, help for the vulnerable, expertise, robustness of the system, etc.

Perhaps some public services can’t turn a profit but are still necessary. Perhaps they can turn a profit if even more people use them. Perhaps other economic models are needed for these companies, see for example Singapore and Hong Kong where the rail company owns the land at stations and are allowed to develop there which funds the network and incentivizes buildout.

I doubt that moves the needle a lot unless you're making _everything_ fully automatic, i.e. including the infrastructure creation & maintenance and streamline that extremely well.

If you take a ride from Hamburg to Berlin with the ICE, there's maybe 8 staff on board, 200-300 passengers, it takes ~2 hours and the average ticket price is 77€ according to some travel app.

Even if you get rid of all 8 of them, the price per ticket isn't going to be lowered significantly.

The staff on board also contribute to keeping the train safe and pleasant - if there’s an unruly passenger, or a washroom malfunctions, I’m happy to have paid a bit extra for my ticket for a couple of people to be on hand to deal with the problem instead of being trapped for two hours.

But there is also the ~80 staff manning stations at each end and along the route, and more staff in the control room, the cleaning staff, the people who manually do maintenance checks every single night, etc.

You can get rid of the cleaning staff right now. The terminals will become disgusting and people will stop using them. There is no way around this type of overhead. If you have larger numbers of people passing through, you need cleaning and maintenance.

Your original point isn’t even true - in California there is constant maintenance of the road network and crews of community service workers doing their sentence cleaning trash on the highway shoulder.

Why would there be 8 staff on board? Isn't there typically one train driver and one attendant?

I don't know. They have the restaurant car on some trains so that's another 2-3 people, and I really have no idea about their operation so I added some buffer. I wouldn't expect there to be more than 8 on a train unless it's some special event.

For some high speed routes there’s a limit on how many carriages one attendant can supervise (maybe to ensure timely evacuation?) so a 12 carriage ICE train needs 3 attendants to fully operate.

Yeah, it seems that "self-driving trains" are a much, much more tractable problem than self-driving cars. On the other hand, the cost of the driver is amortized over many passengers, and much of the labor isn't driving but rather serving as conductor, etc, so it may not even matter too much.

> automated cleaning of trains inside and out)

For the outside, you can imagine a carwash.

For the inside, my brain goes to scary dystopian places. Like, "what if we make the inside out of chemically-inert glass-based materials, and clean it by immersion in pirhana solution?" One would just need to recycle the solution, and recharge it with hydrogen peroxide. This would rule out the use of plastics in the interior, however.

Maybe something more like a dishwasher could also work, but I'm not sure it'd be Strong Enough for Tough Stains. It could even just make a mess. I've heard stories of Roombas that encounter dog poop; they say it goes badly...

> That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people

Simplest redesign is running longer trains - they still need just 1 driver.

Britain’s trains are sometimes comically small (3 carriages) and overcrowded. French trains are 2-3x longer, Russia/China even more so.

Second is standardisation - all of Uks train companies run different stock and it’s ovsoleye

When you rent each carriage from a rolling stock company you’re incentivized to run as short trains as possible to keep them as full as a sardine can. Renationalize the whole lot.

Longer isn’t always better for trains. Longer trains need bigger platforms and stations are often the most expensive parts of the network. Big trains also weigh more, so they accelerate slower and have longer trip times.

Weight savings can also translate into cheaper bridges and viaducts, though that’s only true for dedicated track. If you’re sharing with freight they are always going to be far heavier.

Much better is upgrading signalling, automating the train, and running far more service because frequency is king for public transit. Many short trains at high headways vs less frequent long trains has the same total capacity but the short, frequent trains provide far more value. When people don’t have to think about the schedule and can just show up and ride public transit is great.

There are also limits to the value of standardizing rolling stock. You don’t want every train set to be bespoke, but there is also danger in every train being exactly the same. If there is a parts shortage or identified design flaw your whole fleet can be grounded all at once. If you have some diversity you can limp along if one design has to be sidelined.

At some point the train is longer than the station platform. Then you need to extend the platform, or passengers have to know that they need to be in specific cars to be able to exit.

This analysis is too simple. Roads need to be maintained, road accidents are a burden on the national health service and air pollution has a long term negative impact on people's health

Germany actually subsidises fossil fuels to the tune of €20bn/year, so in that context €3bn doesn't sound so bad. Some of the latest estimates of the true cost per ton of carbon put it around $1000 USD, so in purely economic terms it's still a win.

You're not pricing in the primary impact of the subsidy - the value of the travel itself. Those tickets subsidize travel and reduce carbon emissions.

You make a very valid point.

I’d ignore unpriced other externalities, that is a large rabbit hole. (Do people increase consumption of other goods thanks to the savings of this ticket…)

I’d rather look at the project, subsidies again and the cost and realise that at this scale there are few individual projects. So this is a very large knob to dial down the emissions.

Secondly, the subsidies go into the German economy. The rail system is very domestic economy heavy, so at a time where the German economy is going into a recession, spending 3bn to subsidise transport and reduce people’s cost of living and pay for German workers and investments is not such a terrible idea.

So while the price tag is high, the money isn’t turned into trees or buried like in pure abatement projects and at this scale it is a nice leaver to pull.

Cars also have a huge subsidy in the form of roads

A more fitting complaint about cats would be the Pendlerpauschale, which is paid out to people driving to and from work in their car. It's a much larger sum than the €3b spent on the train ticket subsidy.

It used to be different, but these days that one is paid to everybody who commutes, no matter by which mode. And people who commute by public transport are actually slightly privileged, in that they can claim their actual ticket costs if that works out more advantageous, whereas everybody else is limited to the basic km-dependent allowance, even if their car commutes maybe actually costs more.

And while there are arguments to be had about negative incentives posed by it with regards to incentivising people to commute farther than necessary, the original basic principle is quite simple: Just as companies are mostly only taxed on their profits, so workers ought to pay their income tax only on the money made after deducting any work-related expenses.

And Germany hasn't solved the cost-of-housing problem, either, so a certain degree of commuting is unavoidable. In fact, recently the housing minister basically declared her defeat by announcing that her latest plan for dealing with that problem wasn't building more where people want to live and can make a living, it was subsidising people to move back to the countryside.

I think it is an invalid argument. Please inform yourself about the reasoning before you post half truths.

There are generally taxes (e.g., car or gas taxes) that cover the costs. I don't know about Germany's situation, but it is not impossible to make that net zero.

Not even close to net zero in Germany. Do you have any examples of countries where car and gas taxes do actually cover the cost of roads?

In Australia, petrol tax raises ~18bn.

Cost of road infrastructure is ~36bn.

And these comparisons often exclude externalities like carbon emissions, pollution from tires and brakes, road accident costs, noise pollution and the cost of suburban sprawl.

If you would even attempt it to make it net zero you would get truly ungodly amounts of pushback, I don't think you understand how bad it would be. Truly, for those used to a privilege, fairness is an attack.

Furthermore: you have a state of affairs where you are pretty much forced to own and drive a car to e.g. get to work or move around. You make it reflect its true cost making it impossible to afford for anyone except the rich. What now?

The system simply doesn't have more capacity right now.

Germany neglected or even removed their rail infrastructure, especially for the past 25 or so years, after privatization. These "subsidies" are a course correction.

These investments also make it a real pain to use the system right now, because a lot of lines are closing months at a time and the alternatives are already overloaded. I'd rather have a car for the next 5-10 years too - and I live very central with many connections.

Here's a map of disruptions for reference: https://www.zuginfo.nrw/map.html#!P|HimSearch!histId|1!histK...

For people less familiar. Germany privatised its national rail company in the 90s but the federal government is the only shareholder. It’s a weird model that doesn’t make much sense. DB is a monopoly so the rules of competition don’t apply (and don’t work with railways anyway) it’s led to perverse cost cutting incentives and fat bonus programs for C level employees. Combine that with a conservative government’s austerity politics since the GFC and the whole system is at breaking point at the moment. Reforms and work is happening but the amount of work is staggering and means frequent line closures. DB estimates its trains to be running reliably in 2070.

Expat in Germany since 2014. (Also, I do not own a car).

I can confirm that Dbahn service was not so great from the start, and became noticeably worse after COVID.

I live in Rostock. 2 weeks ago I landed in Hamburg at 2:30pm and tried to return home by train. Distance is 185 km, and I arrived home at 10:00pm

Reasons: works on the line that forced us to go to Lubeck first, then take two more regional trains to reach Rostock. On top of that, one train from Lubeck to the next stop was so full that a hundred passenger could not get in (me included).

The next train was canceled.

Finally we got a (packed) train at around 8pm.

All "fine" except that this is the third time in the last 12 months that the same line undergoes maintenance forcing you to move to Lubeck first and adding 1 hour to your trip.

Rostock-Berlin: similar story. For three times in the last year there were some problems between Oranienburg and Berlin, forcing you to either travel around it with a 1 hour detour or to disembark in Oraniemburg and move to S-Bahn (sort like BART).

In other words: railways are overstressed and failing repeatedly causing massive delays; Oraniemburg is 40km from Berlin Central Station. I find it unconceivable that you have to repair the same short segment thrice in 12 months.

> All "fine" except that this is the third time in the last 12 months that the same line undergoes maintenance forcing you to move to Lubeck first and adding 1 hour to your trip.

And there are even longer interruptions scheduled for the RE1 between Rostock and Hamburg in 2025. As someone who strongly prefers bikes and trains it forces me to commute by car. It's a disaster.

So it is still a state enterprise in all but in name.

The swiss federal railyway has the exact same model (a company fully owned by the federal government) and it works very well.

Blaming the ownership model for the DB's woes is just wrong in my opinion. German railways have been chronically underfunded, overburdening the company with below cost ticket and the company has some perverse incentives with respect to rail maintenance and other things.

If the state had any control over DB, they wouldn't have been invested in Arriva (a bus company) until a few months ago, and they wouldn't make most of their cargo revenue with trucks (DB Schenker).

The state is the owner of the DB company. If they didn't like where the company is going they could just fire the CEO and board and pick other people and then define any goal they want. To me it looks that the bund is not active enough in their oversight (as 100% owners) of the DB. I assume no one wants to take the blame because it is such a shitshow.

I can't answer why DB is doing certain things which Arriva and their cargo division.

The DB is losing more than EUR2 billions per year[1] so the managment is probably trying hard to get this trainwreck under control. Kinda ironic that their truck business is actually doing the heavy lifting. It's one of the only divisions besides energy that actually makes money subsdizing the other failing parts of the railway. Withouth those you would be looking at EUR2.6 billion losses per year[2]. Great thing they have DB Schenker going for them! I don't undestand the complaints about that.

Also I don't think it is possible to fix the DB without more government subsidies. It looks like they barely get any (sometimes discounts on power but thats it)[2].

If you check the SBB (a very well run operation) you can see from the public finances that about half of the operating income is from public-sector funding (aka government subsidies) without that it would be in deep red[3].

[1] https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/consolidated-interim-f...

[2] https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/fileadmin/pdf/dbk_zb24_e_...

[3] https://reporting.sbb.ch/en/finance?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scroll...

> German railways have been chronically underfunded

I already mentioned that in my comment.

The ownership model intensives cost cutting and share bonus programs.

Me and my wife are certainly considering getting a car. Cars are a pain in cities, but it would save literally hundreds of hours over the course of even a single year due to just how poor the infra is.

Everybody say it with me: “privatization of natural monopolies is dumb and wasteful!”

It's head and shoulders above all the subsidies to the car industry that just increase emissions. In terms of value it can't even be compared, one is positive and the other negative.

E.g. during the original 9 Euro Ticket, the government also reduced taxes on gas to fight inflation, and this cost as much as the subsidies for the 9 Euro Ticket. The gas tax reduction's costs were 3 billion, and the 9 Euro Ticket costs were 2.5 billion.

So I would call it exceptional value when compared to other things.

Roads, highways and gas are massively subsidized, much more per kilometer travelled than rail. I think if you factor in spared road maintenance alone, from travellers using the train instead of their cars, you might see the operation is actually saving public money.

It’s arguable that $100 per ton is a real carbon price.

It translates to about $1 a gallon tax on gasoline which is (a) not enough to change people’s behavior (at its peak gas was almost $2 more than it is now and I drove just the same) but (b) people in 2024 will complain bitterly about it anyway. That is, polities are hypersensitized to that sort of imposed solution right now: for a long time people in the US accepted fluctuations in the gas price because it was seen as a market price so we only had riots whenever a black person was shot by the cops; in “normal” countries (including France and Egypt) you have riots when the price of petroleum goes up because it is seen as being controlled by the state. I think the US has gotten more “normal” post COVID-19 and with GHG controls on the horizon. $1 a gallon is not quite going to make EVs beat gas but it certainly happens at a price below $500 a tonne.

Favorable CCS from industrial sources is quoted around $100 a tonne but that is (c) from a plant that runs 24-7 (e.g. if your natural gas plant runs 20% of the time the capital cost of CCS is multiplied 5x at least disregarding that the plant might not run well when it is starting up and shutting down) and (d) has few realizations.

The biggest positive externality of rail is suppressed traffic congestion, it is a big quality of life thing if you can avoid sitting in a traffic jam. (Reminds me of posters I saw in Germany that said Zukunft onhe Stau)

I find rail tourism to be luxurious compared to motortourism in that one gets to the center of town and doesn’t need to stress about parking, traffic and all that. Contrast that to the fight to refuel your rental car at the airport.

Not disagreeing but it’s important to point out that the US is a different beast because of the car and roadway dependency. In Europe a large part of the population lives in places easily reachable without a car. But in the US EVs are completely central to reducing CO2 from transportation, unless you’d rather rebuild the entire country. In Europe you can make meaningful changes by simply improving, expanding, investing in existing infrastructure. Most people I know who have a car in EU region are not fully dependent, but enjoy more convenience due to overcrowded or unreliable public transit, grocery stores being further away etc. Those problems are orders of magnitude easier to solve than “let’s build rail through a giant web of sparse suburbs”.

When I spent a year in Dresden I greatly enjoyed using the train instead of the plane for travel around the area as far as London in one direction and Sunny Beach, Bulgaria in the other. I lived close enough to walk to work and could do a lot of shopping on foot (great bakery 2 blocks away, a fancy chocolate store, a butcher, etc.) but sometimes used the tram to go to the city center and to further out towns.

I was maybe 3-4 blocks from a regional rail or S-Bahn station which that ticket entitles you to ride and it is a great ticket that can get you to nearby mountains or the Czech Republic or nearby cities like Leipzig. Really you could ride across Germany on the S-Bahn comfortably stopping where you want and staying overnight in a hotel occasionally. Nothing beat those sleeper trains which eliminated the hotel stay then you wake up in Dortmund and change trains for Amsterdam.

(EMEA people in 1998 seemed more inclined to use airlines than rail to go to distant domestic and international cities, they had service that was better and cheaper than the US; air service has become even more competitive in EMEA since then)

Dresdenites I knew who had cars would drive them to the appliance and furniture stores and even to nearby places like Quedlinburg and even to Berlin, Munich, Bremen, etc. with a resignation to traffic jams like that of the Los Angelino.

Delivery service is far along in the US and I would expect a truck to deliver anything larger than 7 cubic feet of sawdust even on my farm so I don’t need a truck. I have 8 horses but no trailer because we know many people who will move a horse for us for less than a month’s payment on a big ass truck.

If we look past carbon emission, we can see that the value is much bigger.

You mention that the rail industry is already substantially subsidized. What you did not mention is that the automotive industry is as well. Roads are paid by state and republic. Car purchases are often subsidized via a flat return by the republic (which primarily benefits the rich). Petrol is also subsidized.

Now all these automotive subsidiaries benefit only the people who own cars, and much more the wealthy ones. In Germany, only 43 million private households own a car. That's just roughly 50 %.

But if you get people to choose public transport over your auto, then this benefits everyone. Better air quality, less noise pollution, less streets and more space for pedestrians. Anecdotally, a close neighbourhood removed some parking spots in favour of space for local cafes and public benches with plants. Removing just two parking spots give enough places for 10 people to sit together and enjoy a sunny Sunday -- which otherwise would be dead space occupied by the cars of two or even one household.

I'm not sure you've fully accounted for the full carbon reduction here, which is not just the replacement of cars from the road but also the transition to a car-free lifestyle.

It gets people out of their cars because it's cheaper than petrol. When train tickets (in other countries) cost more than the cost of petrol for the journey, commuters who already sank the cost of buying a car + insurance ask why they should bother paying a premium for the train ticket when the cost of petrol will be cheaper.

Only after people transition to taking the train in the morning, do they then start to ask questions like "do I get value out of paying for insurance on a car I don't drive?" and start to make decisions like selling their cars. In this case the carbon reduction is not only the carbon reduction of the trips that would have been taken by train, but the carbon reduction from the use of the car altogether, and future car maintenance and replacement.

How many tons of CO2 are in 1 degree of global temperature? This idea that removing “a lot” is somehow “helping” just seems hand-wavy to me. If the goal is “reduce temperatures,” then what precisely is the goal number? And then, how much CO2 equals that? And how much is the cost per degree to reduce and what is the cost per degree to not reduce?

There is a lot of “modeling” but has anyone actually proven “reducing 8000 tons of carbon reduces temperatures by n degrees?” And is it beneficial to lower temperatures? Are there benefits to higher temperatures that haven’t been quantified?

Just seems like the plan is “spend whatever it takes forever” — when whatever it takes isn’t even quantifiable. Basically investing without ever knowing the return on the investment.

Yes, lets subsidize the aviation and car industry more instead!!

Face it, trains is the better option here.

Bike and walk is best of course but troublesome long distance.

Fewer people in cars means fewer road deaths, safer streets for walking and cycling, quieter cities, less nimby obstructionism due to parking complaints, and less inhaled tyre participates, among other benefits.

If you recognise that there are other positive impacts that you haven't allowed for, then why stating that your incomplete assessment shows that it isn't good value? Does that show bias?

> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.

That assumes that there is still sufficient potential for additional use of these cheaper carbon abatement methods. The tricky part about fighting climate change is that we have to make change in many different places. Each partial solution has only a limited capacity for deployment.

"social cost of driving" and "vehicle mile travelled" are two key phrases that will lead you to research on various costs of car travel e.g.

> The air pollution-related damage attributable to driving, therefore, can be estimated at $10.7 billion to $41.6 billion per year – an average of between $93 and $360 per U.S. household per year.

- Air Pollution and related deaths / morbidities - Road tear and wear - Congestion related loss of business and time - Can actually work on train or rest

Many of these can be calculated and measured.

Rail doesn’t significantly pollute more or deprecate faster on the infrastructure side empty or full.

> That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne.

You spelled “counterfeit carbon credit” wrong. There's no carbon sequestration technology that can fix carbon at industrial scale at that cost yet (and maybe never).

They are certainly very big. Rail is extremely safe so you reduce deaths and injuries from accidents. You reduce other types of pollution. You make towns and cities a lot pleasanter. You save individuals a lot of money.

How much does it cost to keep up the motor roads in Germany? Likewise, how much do the externalities of it (like pollution, and massive numbers of deaths and injuries) cost?

Without it this comparison is meaningless.

But the roads and cars are used less, which means they require less maintenance. CO2 emission isn't the only pollution caused by cars either. People get cheaper transport options available to them.

All those other wins for society should be counted too, there may not even be a cost left to count towards CO2 reduction.

But most importantly, taking 3 billion in taxes and handing them out as subsidised pricing to some of the people isnt really a cost (to society as a whole), it's an income redistribution.

In the short run, the trains are running anyway, so you might as well fill them up.

This is something that particularly frustates me in the case of buses the UK. They're ridiculously expensive (well, except for the temporary current £2 scheme), and empty. There seems to be a political consensus that we should have them, so it would make far more sense for them to be free in all instances, except when demand is so high they're full (e.g. rush hour)

Who said rail industry should be profitable in the first place?

I would fully support if part of my taxes would subsidize rail industry and I get cheaper prices. Imo good use of tax dollars.

Show me an effective carbon abatement method well under $100.

When you say “carbon abatement” do you mean carbon credits/cleanup or other ways of emitting less of it in the first place?

Don't forget to factor in the reduced costs of road maintenance, accidents, non-CO2 pollution, and traffic delays.

Maybe but it’s also subsidizing travel for people, possibly increasing revenue for tourist spots and restaurants, it could keep people from buying a new ICE vehicle etc. It seems like one of those things that has a lot of benefits outside the immediate situation.

One other positive externality could be this: The health effects of tire abrasion in cars are not clear yet, not least because tire manufacturers don’t disclose their ingredients. For all we know these fine particulates could be as bad as PFAS.

Many "other externalities" are priceless: Many poor people cannot afford a car.

Until 2024 the budget for German Autobahn company ("subsidy") was at 6.2bn EUR for comparison.

And this is JUST the roads. No other subsidies and incentives given to car manufacturing and car transport.

We are paying 70bn€ annually for roads. And gain 25 in taxes for it.

Not having to have to own a car is a phenomenal increase in quality of life and disposable income for the average joe though

I do recognise that "X" may have other positive externalities, but I don't know how to price any of them.

Modern policy in a nutshell.

The cost of the road deaths is also significant and I think it's safe to say it dropped as people switched to using rail.

$ 3bn is a fairly small price to pay when you consider that you get less co2 ON TOP of more people using public transport

Not everything has to be priced. Some things can be desired and pursued, even if they don't make sense monetarily.

> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry.

I'm perplexed by the way you omitted the fact that these subsidies cover bus services, both local and regional (it's in the article's leading sentence).

From there you proceeded to use that cherry-picking to single out a specific type of service while also cherry-picking the tradeoffs.

Why do you need to price them?

Also, there are countries out there where the average tax payer subsidizes car drivers a lot too.

Having such a very heavy subsidy also makes transit very dependent on the current political climate.

I suspect that's peanuts compared to all the subsidies and unaccounted externalities for car use.

Additionally the ticket has not only shifted traffic but also led to an increase of trips in total.

> Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn

and how was this number actually calculated?

https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/ne...

just around 2 billion

Where are you reading that? The 2 billion (2.3 billions exactly) figure was for 2023 and only covered the period from the ticket's introduction in May through to December, i.e. only two thirds of a fully year.

This is so wrong, I don't even know where to begin, my head is spinning. Luckily HN came to the rescue for once. But sadly this is the kind of reasoning that actually works in politics and finance.

Secret plan of car driving politicians to decrease the traffic for themselves

Health care cost decline as people walk more compared to car transit!

I love being made to forcibly pay for poor people’s transport.

A big externality is time-savings, and can be calculated.

The cost of carbon capture is not equal to the value it provides to humanity. In fact, not emitting CO2 that you could have, is even more valuable than CO2 you remove later from the atmosphere.

did carbon dioxide write this?

You're right, subsidies aren't enough. They should tax carbon, road use, and car ownership also.

Thanks for doing the math!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com