Everybody already has local regional tickets anyway. And most people can't be in more then one place at the time anyway. And most people stay in the same region most of the time anyway.
So really you are not losing much compared to having separate local region tickets in a system where the long distance trains are separated.
> who cleans and repairs the trains
The already existing organizations that have run the trains for a long time.
> who invests in infrastructure and all that
The government ...
> I always wonder how the germans can pull this off for 50 Euro. Magic.
Its not magic its just a transportation policy and taxes.
Everybody already has local regional tickets anyway. And most people can't be in more then one place at the time anyway. And most people stay in the same region most of the time anyway.
I live in Rostock. So if I want to go to Berlin or Hamburg (you know, where stuff like actual airports are) I am crossing "regional borders" even if it is a 200-250 km trip to each city
The point is, if you are in Hamburg, you are no longer in Rostock. So you are only using regional services in exactly one place.
Sure, long distances (I had to travel from Rostock to Tübingen last weekend) are typically not taken with regional trains (although you technically can; I did that as a poor student a few times, it just takes 16 hours instead of 10), but over medium distances (around 2–3 hours) you often have both options.
Germany: 0.35 million square kilometer.
On the point of the upkeep, locals know German trains are now legendary for unpunctuality and cancellations, so maybe it's not working. But the answer is obviously (trigger warning for the libertarians...) taxes.
The ticket came about because energy prices went crazy after their energy dealer Putin went crazy and warry, I think it was an attempt to motivate people to take public transport rather than have them moan about fuel prices going way way up...
Although apparently NYC subways used to be better too.
https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
see my other comment too
Personally, I think they should just abandon timetables, run trains as fast as they can, and if you need to be somewhere by a certain time, you give the planner a target reliability and it uses a probabilistic model of the entire system to tell you when to leave so you can arrive on time (0 minutes delay, or earlier) with that given probability.
the regional trains run by regional orgs rather than db get similar results, e.g. bwegt in baden württemberg or beg in bavaria
https://beg.bahnland-bayern.de/de/aufgaben/kontrollieren/pue...
https://vm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/mobilitaet-verkehr/bahn-...
> Germany: 0.35 million square kilometer.
This does not matter much, since most people do not travel across states, countries, continents, etc on a daily basis. Most people probably travel within a 50 km (30 mile) radius (travelling to and from work, daycare, school, shopping, etc.).
iirc, the average is slightly higher in the US, but this is probably more due to how the US has approached urban planning over the last century or so than to the size of the country.
> But the answer is obviously (trigger warning for the libertarians...) taxes.
I think many people forget the huge societal cost of owning and running cars, including infrastructure maintenance, crash-related deaths and injuries, health conditions caused by crashes, air and noise pollution, climate change, resource extraction, and time lost in traffic. In other words, the savings from reducing these social, health, and environmental costs could easily finance the ticket. A study estimated that a modal shift of 10% to public transit could save Germany about 19 billion Euros a year (https://foes.de/publikationen/2024/2024-04_FOES_OEPNV.pdf).