I'm not here enough (and not travelling around enough) to be interested in the Klimaticket, but here's how public transport vs car stacks up:

Innsbruck to Vienna is 476km (~300mi) by road.

It takes about 5 hours to drive, assuming no delays. The way the world is right now, there will certainly be delays.

On the fastest route you exit Austria just after Kufstein and enter Germany at Kiefersfelden, drive through Germany on the A93, then on the A8 towards Salzburg, then cross back into Austria.

Pre-2015 you'd typically have crossed both those international borders at standard motorway speed(!), but since the refugee crisis, and even more since Covid, it's checkpoints (=delays) galore.

By train the journey is scheduled at ~4h15m. The train also enters Germany but doesn't stop there, so no border checks.

A standard ("2nd class"/economy) walk-up train fare is €74 ($85), but if you buy an annual railcard for €66 ($76) that's halved, so €37 ($43). This is a completely flexible ticket valid on any service that day, so if you are late (or early) you just get on the next train, and there's basically one every hour pretty much throughout the day. The railcard pays for itself in the first return trip.

Maybe it's just me, but €37 for a 300mi journey, with a completely flexible ticket, just seems like amazing value.

Especially if I want to take my kids, I need to get a different rail card for families, and when you add it all up it's a lot more expensive than taking my car.

For some reason, public transport is always priced in a way that makes it really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.

If you only ride on public transit occasionally, and you have a car, then taking the car is almost always cheaper. It shouldn't be like that.

That probably makes sense. If your goal is to increase ridership / reduce emissions, you want to appeal tho those traveling every day. Each person you convert gives you 500+ trips a year. And of course people are most price sensitive to something they do every day.

On the flip side, if I travel a few times a year, on one hand I am "less important" because capturing my business won't lead to that many trips and on the other I am less likely price conscious. If I do something once a year, I might chose to drive regardless of train cost, just cuz I want to drive. Or, I may want to avoid driving so I am happy to pay the higher ticket cost anyway.

Every sunday hundreds of people drive from all over Austria to visit the zoo in Schönbrunn. They take the car because the train is way too expensive. If taking the train was cheaper then some of those people would take the train.

Yes, for each of those families it's just one trip. But in aggregate it's also a lot of people.

Why is it more important to get one person to use public transport for 500 trips rather than getting 500 people to use public transport for one trip?

OEBB (Austrian Federal Railways, the state train operator) does offer a family railcard ("Vorteilscard Family"), and it's hardly expensive:

"The Vorteilscard Family offers you a particularly inexpensive option to travel together with children. For only €19 a year, up to 4 children under the age of 15 can accompany you for free."

But when I recently planned a trip from Linz to Vienna for our family it would have cost around 120€ for the train (not including tickets for bus or subway to get to/from train station). Driving costs around 40€ for gas (not including parking fees).

It's 184 km one way. German tax authorities assume 30 cents per km (~110 EUR for a round trip), Austrian tax authorities use 42 (~154 EUR for a round trip). Now, the actual marginal cost may be lower if you already have the car, but it's far from obvious once those hidden costs are considered. Especially as you have to actively drive for those 4 hours instead of reading a book, watching a movie, ...

At least for me, one return trip at the reduced rate pays for the price of buying the railcard (which is valid for 12 months).

It's not like one has to sit down with Excel to figure out where the break-even point lies! If I don't make any additional rail journeys in Austria over the next year, I'm still not out of pocket...

If you do the trip 10 times a year then it costs 81€ per trip (37 * 2 + 66 / 10).

So in this case the occasional rider pays 59€ more per trip than the regular rider.

At €1.32/l for gas in Vienna and 10l/100km this trip would cost you €63 in gas alone with an ICE car. This doesn't account for wear and wasted time so it's actually not that unreasonable at all and actually pretty cheap if you're going by yourself. With a family, I agree, it's more expensive. Although I'm starting to see the appeal that traveling by train has with a family, being able to walk around, entertain the kids more easily, etc.

There'll be various reasons why a large family can't take a train, but drastically fewer reasons why a person or a commuter travelling alone cannot (or, a group of friends, or a couple, etc.)

Maybe one day that'll change again, but at least now it helps reduce the amount of pointless traffic on the road.

For older kids there are a lot of discounts, but many of them are only cheap if you use public transport regularly. (eg. rail card family from the ÖBB for 19€ a year, or upper austria regional tickets for school children for 77€ a year, etc.)

One problem is that it's not just train tickets, but you also need tickets for bus/tram/subway, and every city/region has different systems, so for every trip I spend about 15min trying to figure out which tickets to buy.

I'd love to have that $85 full walk-up fare you're getting. I really wish we cared about rail travel here, it's far preferable for me to flying or driving on trips at this distance.

But yes that is amazing value and travel by train is just nicer.

Unstaffed, or actually gone? :)

Last time I drove into Austria from Germany there were no border guards there to actually check anything, but all the traffic calming measures, warning signs and speed restrictions were still there ("cars use left-hand lane, larger/freight vehicles right hand lane").

As one might expect from Homo sapiens behind the wheel, the frantic changing of lanes by vehicles approaching the (unmanned) checkpoint caused an enormous queue and resulting delay almost as bad as if there had been border guards actually checking every single vehicle.

Locals avoid it whenever possible, even thought this is the most direct way for many connections.

Avoid taking a bus over that border, and if you do don't panic when they enter with dogs and machine guns and expect a 2 hour delay

Cost may be a bit higher though. You’re liable to burn through 30ish liters of fuel at a price of around €50.

Anyone who rides public transport instead of expensive and polluting cars is doing a service for the environment.

If you're going to make it free for all residents, you might as well just make it free for everyone.

That is, without mentioning that controllers have to be paid without providing any service. If you additionally take into consideration the social cost of the criminalization of something as banal as using public transports when you don't have money, the benefits of doing away with these systems of control arguably are even more evident.

Fun fact from history: here's a photo of former French president Jacques Chiraq jumping the metro https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2019/09/904...

Ass soon as you see a human it costs a fortune.

Also around here i've never heard railway unions ask for better compensation, because as you have pointed out they already have a good pension and some transport-related privileges [0]. However, they have been relentlessly asking for better working conditions in order to provide a better service, and that the government stop to try and privatize railways.

Of course the managers, directors and private contractors earn a lot more and that's how our corrupt overlords get away with siphoning much public money into private pockets. But these people, we could well do without, and unions would certainly support a move like that.

[0] Personally, i would strongly approve better compensation for those people we now call "essential workers". It appears in a capitalist system, those who work the most and provide the most services (railway/construction/food/cleaning/health workers) are those paid the less and with the most grueling working conditions. That's a shame.

You get your money for nothing and your travel for free

Just increase that bed tax by 2-3 eur daily and use those 2-3 eur towards the public transport budget. Then let anyone use public transport for free, locals or not.

You will miss some people who will seek out couchsurfing opportunities at their friend's home, but you will still earn a lot from all the hotels, pensions and legal AirBnBs.

(Still, however, not a UBI fan in general).

The appeal of free public transportation, to me, is that it allows more people to take advantage of public spaces and works and, marginally, allows people to bring home more money for the same amount of time worked.

Free public transportation fare incentivizes participation not tuning out like I feel many UBI proposals do. No one is going to look at, effectively, a free metro card then think "Sweet! I don't need to work!"

I like it but the more you think about the more disturbingly it sounds like communism :|

I do like the system better, it's faster in every way. But lost fares would definitely be a concern.

Also not sure how that has anything to do with making public transit free honestly.

The lax rules and clearly uniformed agents were seen partly as progressive price discrimination, giving free access to public transport to those who really need it.

I would hate to live in a society formed by that ethos...

So completely abolishing fares would mean a considerable, definitively non-trivial increase in spending requirements on public transport for cities – and if you're seriously prepared to spend that much money (or create some sort of additional tax to raise that money, or whatever), I'd rather prioritise spending it on service improvements first, because even in big cities there are enough examples of service offerings that are only borderline attractive.

They actually did some (admittedly smaller-scale) experiments in that direction recently, and as I understood it, the takeaway was that service improvements were indeed somewhat more effective in generating additional passengers than lower fares.

I think both of those factors push most people in Berlin to buy a ticket. With a fine of 60 EUR the staff already pays for itself if they pick up ~2 people/hour, which sounds very realistic. If they then on top also have the effect of increasing the percentage of paying riders by a tiny amount, the whole program is quickly turning a profit.

Edit to add some context:

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/haft-nach-schwarzfahren-u...

Consider this article from Berlin where a sizeable number of people in jail are there for riding without a ticket. The cost of that needs to be taken into account here.

With the way the MAX stops are designed, it's still very possible to just hop on without paying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCQPD9DSOA

This also means the bus driver doesn't have to worry about checking tickets. There aren't guards to check if people are jumping over turnstiles, etc. Moving to 'totally free' eliminates all kinds of overhead.

There is no reason it couldn't scale.

And the question of scaling hides an interesting assumption: what is the purpose of charging fares?

If it is to reduce usage (to thus ensure that the system isn't used past capacity), then why do you want to limit the usage of public transport? If people don't take public, they will take private transport (cars, etc) which have much higher social cost (you can move many more people by bus than by car).

If it is to 'raise revenue to pay for the system', does the same argument apply to use of roads? What is a fair road tax, given that this method of transport has such high social costs?

This ignores two elements:

- congestion differs by time of day, and

- capacity is constrained differently by mode

In London:

- it's cheaper to take a bus than to take an underground train, and

- there are ticket types that are only valid after the morning rush hour

Both of these decrease peak congestion on the transport system.

The differential pricing would not push people to private transport, but might push them to buses (whose capacity can more easily be increased) or to postpone their journey to later in the day.

You know what might push people to private transport? Severe congestion on the underground. If you are not fit and aggressive, then trying to get on a Central Line train in the morning might mean waiting for 2-3 full trains to pass before you can get on one.

Increasing bus capacity might not be easy either. That requires more busses, more staff, more service, more whatever the source of power is for the busses. It all costs ££££.

In theory population size 12x of the population of Luxemburg would make it easier to distribute the cost of free transport. But this glosses over the fact that London is huge and only zone 1 and maybe 2 are a pain to drive. Not everyone in London works in zone 1 / 2.

I wonder if there’s anyone here able to give an answer if free transport in London would be financially realistic.

Mayor vetoed it, on the grounds that "it would be too popular and overtax muni's capacity". I'm not sure I buy that, my guess is that the local tour bus/tourist bike rental industry disapproved, but that's just speculation on my part. I would personally use Muni about 50% more but I have a chicken-and-egg problem; I don't use it enough to justify a monthly pass, and since I don't have a monthly pass, most times I'd rather just walk than catch a bus.

Which honestly is probably the best outcome any way, at least from an environmental and personal health perspective.

Honestly they rarely bother even to ask for fares. The problem with SF Muni is that the buses are dirty, smelly, and travel along at an average speed of about 8 miles per hour. This, combined with the fact that the buses always appear at random times and can never be ontime creates a very unpleasant experience that is only marginally better than walking.

But it might have exacerbated the problem.

For poorer households, the yearly ticket will still be subsidized, but the public transport companies (fully owned by the state) will still have direct income to maintain a corporate-like structure.

Earlier this year, there were rumors of a cheaper "Homeoffice-Ticket" which would only be valid on certain days, and in the end nothing came out of it either.

Commuters were angry as anything that they couldn't get on the buses any more that were picked with children.

Societies are very different around the world and I'm not sure how much this is factored into ideas that could work really well in some places and not so much in others.

Instead NYC spent $250 million to crack down on fare evasion [1] and installed huge ticket machines at a bunch of bus stops that probably cost >300K each to install.

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-o...

If people still need to use their cars, it doesn't really work.

Which is why part of the "funding" for such systems comes from the reduction in the cost caused by private vehicles (on the roads, on the atmosphere, on the neighborhood and more).

Our economic system ensures that we keep the gas pedal to the floor both figuratively and literally.

I think you mean being subsidized by the fuel cost of the cars?

At the end of those 50 years public transportation could be free and the stubborn car owners or businesses would simply help subsidize more efficient ways of transportation.

Maybe allow reduced taxes for electric vehicles at the same time.

In the end, it wouldn't be much different than the subsidized meat production with artificially lowered meat prices in the US, nor would anyone care much about small increases like that on a year by year basis.

I agree with the other commentir: let's stop talking let's start doing.

But here's the more important point: cars are already subsidized to a huge degree pretty much everywhere through roads, parking, etc.

Let's also start by removing free street parking from any area reasonably serviced by public transport. Or just removing it entirely.

London Underground usually runs at a profit. Not entirely from tickets, but also including other sources like advertisement. But ticket revenue is an important part of the income.

Public transport also includes privately-owned transport that is run for profit, like private buses and trains, which also make a profit (or go bust).

Sometimes the fares are also higher than costs to discourage using public transport, because capacity is limited and increasing it is effectively impossible. London zone 1 is a good example of this. People who won't use public transport will walk/cycle or not take the trip at all. They won't switch to driving in any significant numbers, because that would be physically impossible.

It's why public restrooms are always disgusting.

Not really. It's not a question of value that causes public restrooms to be less pleasant, but simply one of cleaning frequency.

Most people clean their own private restrooms/bathrooms/toilet (or have them cleaned) reasonably frequently. Increase the usage load for a public facility and you'd expect it to need to cleaning more frequently than a private one.

And so, one does indeed find public facilities with sensible cleaning intervals that are often no worse and sometimes better than private ones.

Most humans also have a somewhat instinctive distaste for urinating or defacating in a context where they can smell another human being (even one's own family!). Without very good ventilation, it's hard for a well-used public facility to avoid this, and that adds to the sense of "eergh, it's disgusting!" This is an issue, but again not one of "valuing free things".

The worst public restrooms I can think of tend to be the most lightly used, where it's hard to justify the cost of sufficiently regular cleaning, and things just get unpleasant, again without any question of values or cost-of-use.

Some places offered free electric car charging, and there was always someone parked there abusing it.

Meanwhile with only the most nominal cost, people would make better use of the resource allowing it to become available to others.

Because by subsidizing public transport, you are discouraging people from options that save the resources used by transportation even more: for example partial home-office, riding to work by bike, or moving closer to work || working closer to home.

See this video for what government provided housing could be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DBKoWbtjE

Better things are possible if we stop standing in the way with selfish cynicism.

With this ticket you can hop into any public transport now from long distance rail to local city trams.

https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditi...

EDIT: I can't find info on whether the German one covers city transportation... maybe it doesn't! - EDIT2: It does according to reply!

> The BahnCard 100 is also valid within the City-Ticket zone of all towns and cities covered by the City-Ticket offering

City ticket coverage: https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/tickets-for-local-transport

Given, I have a "car dude" that repairs and sells me used cars in good condition (I don't drive much at all), but even if you would spend a bit more, it isn't as competitive as it needs to be.

But other than that, cars are almost essential today. Have family you need to take care of? Good luck doing that with public transport. Doable perhaps if you quit your job...

Then why are you comparing your €1000 expense to this €4000 ticket? This ticket is for people who travel multiple times a week by train.

There are still normal tickets available in Germany, you don't have to pay 4000 a year for the privilege of taking a train once in a while.

Even city tickets are for people who travel every day.

There were also steep discounts for students and youth for almost everything -- I got a public transit pass for 50% off because I was under 23 at the time.

Products ain't that much more expensive here, human time is.

If your daily commute is a handful of bus stops for instance in the Vienna metro, then you can buy a yearly ticket just for the Vienna public transport for 365€.

https://www.wienerlinien.at/web/wiener-linien/jahreskarte

The problem is, living in a large place and sparser environment has a HUGE social cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl#Effects which is a major contributor to the ongoing biodiversity collapse (which is at least as big of a threat as climate change).

"We are in this together" but not just to get people to drop private cars. We must commute much less (however clean your mode of transport) so how is it compatible with cheap transport in the long term?

Or we put hard limit on urban sprawl but that will increase the cost of living in suburban/rural places even further than having people pay for their commute distance.

The only "fix" would be to never offer fixed-rate pricing.

It's a strange complaint, to me.

The idea here is that you have one ticket that can be used everywhere in the country, so you probably would only get it if you travel more than a local commute on a regular base.

In that case you would not buy this pass, instead opting for a local or regional pass or one tailored to that specific commute.

https://live.staticflickr.com/1096/1427525859_9f6fcf046f_k.j...

This was a really big deal for me because the French government had just reneged on their commitment to pay my ~650 euro/month rent just a week or two before I arrived and consequently I chose to skip meals to save up a bit to make a couple of trips to Austria to Austria to visit my then-girlfriend-now-wife (I went from 175lbs to an unhealthy 140lbs over my 5-month stay).

As a parenthetical, when I was planning to fly to Austria from Paris, I put my luggage in a 24-hour locker in Gare du Nord the evening before the early-morning flight, but the room the locker was in was closed from 10pm to 6am and the flight left CDG at 7am, so I was devastated when I had to eat the cost of the flight ticket. I begged the staff to unlock the door for me in my best, most polite French, but they would invariably say "c'est impossible" (in my experience, this is what almost all French employees would say to any request which wasn't strictly in their job description, including asking for directions which made it all the more shocking when I would ask an Austrian employee in English for some help and they were positively eager to assist, even if their English was not very good).

Hm, was in a very similar situation at a Greyhound station in Merced when I returned from a hike through Yosemite. I had parked half of my luggage in a locker at the bus station when I took the shuttle serve to the park (which ended up with me having to put the snow chains on the shuttle bus since the driver had never performed that task...). When I returned to the station and wanted to retrieve my luggage to take the Greyhound which would eventually take me to the airport so I could catch my flight back to the Netherlands the station was closed, and would remain closed until past my bus department time. There was a cleaner in the station who I eventually managed to persuade to open the door... otherwise I would have missed the bus, which would have made me miss my flight. Since then I have made sure to check opening times on buildings containing luggage storage to avoid these problems.

One of my first experiences when moving there was before I got my travel card and was using the paper tickets, but all the ticket accepting machines on a metro entrance where closed. I asked a staff member what to do, he looked up and down the barriers and just shrugged and said "jump".

This captures my experience as well.

But Paris have the reputation to be pretty hostile, even to the rest of french population. Our other cities are much more open and friendly. Our countryside is also pretty friendly but don't expect anyone there to understand you but at least they'll friendly try to fake that they can.

To be clear, I was speaking French, and by that time my French pronunciation was good enough that everyone could understand me without extra effort (probably no longer true). In my experience, the French were quite warm when they weren't "on the job". For example, my French classmates (even those I didn't know well) were happy to help me navigate campus and answer questions and so on.

> But Paris have the reputation to be pretty hostile, even to the rest of french population. Our other cities are much more open and friendly.

It could definitely be regional, but most of my experiences were actually in Rennes and Nantes (not Paris)--although on one visit to Nantes, there was a big protest by farmers over the construction of an airport which probably had people a little more aggravated than normal: the farmers were deliberately blocking traffic with their tractors, including dumping large piles of dirt in certain intersections which was an interesting sight to behold until some anarchists came and started setting fires and otherwise behaving dangerously.

> Our countryside is also pretty friendly but don't expect anyone there to understand you but at least they'll friendly try to fake that they can.

My school was actually in rural Rennes (ENSAI) near the village of Bruz--I only spoke French because I had quite a few experiences where people would be angry or annoyed if I asked if they spoke English. Almost every time I tried to call and order a taxi in English (when I first arrived, before my French was very good), we would make the appointment, but the taxi wouldn't show up (very stressful because I was poor and very worried that I would miss a train or flight because the taxi didn't show up). One of my English classmates suggested I start making the appointments in French, and then the taxi showed up every time!

But in general I didn't mind having to speak French--I know if you walked up to an American and started speaking French they would probably be annoyed as well, and generally I feel like if you're living in a country you should make every effort to speak the language (and I wanted to learn the language better anyway--that was one of my goals for studying abroad).

Even though I had bad experiences, I still like France and the French, and my wife and I have since gone back and visited Paris once because we now have "fuck you" money (which is to say, we don't have to beg and plead for help, we can afford to miss a flight here and there). We also ate breakfast at a charming little cafe near our AirBnB in the 17th every morning, and contrary to my other anecdotes, the staff were very friendly. :)

Note that I said local. For trips to other cities it might (or might not) make sense to charge a different price - such trips are not as common.

Why not make it free? It's a public service after all, and it's hard to "abuse" transportation like one can use "too much" free water/electricity.

Famously, french social security (healthcare), unemployment and pensions are more or less self-funded (they all have their own line/column on taxes papers), yet the previous 3-5 governments have been relentlessly reforming those essential public services in order to render them useless. It's also important to note that in most instances of such reforms, the government will point out some money is missing to fund the service, which :

- is only partially true, as insane amounts are spent for their disserving bureaucracies, managerial class, and control apparatus, all of which we would do better without

- is still partially true, but benefits fraud represents in all cases less than 1% of participation fraud, where the biggest companies are the ones evading to pay their dues... so if law enforcement were to crack down on big corporations fraud instead of political dissent, the problem would be solved very easily

There is no great answer here, but I still believe that self funding of operating costs is the best answer.

All of this combined indeed almost covers the expenses of building and maintaining roads. Unfortunately, it does not cover any negative externalities, such as the environmental ones.

Unfortunately, we don't live in a democracy so there's not exactly a choice beyond what brand/color of corrupt overlord we'd like to see ruin our lives for the next 5 years.

French law already has obligation for your employer to pay (at least parts of) your travel fees. You could also have a tax on hotel rooms and airbnbs for tourists to help finance it. There's already cities across the globe practicing free public transport and so far i haven't heard any complaining or finding unexpected difficulties.

Also, specifically about quality of service, we could argue having a service orientation driven by workers and users (a sort of coop if you like) would yield better results than what David Graeber refers to as "manageurial feudalism" sucking public services dry through dehumanizing micromanagement techniques, absurd salaries for the higher-ups, and various forms of corruption such as "private-public partnerships".

Hold on, this is a pretty odd way to frame a public service. By this logic, you could equally say:

- Most road systems are already bankrupt and have to be propped up by taxes collected from other services.

- Most schools are already bankrupt and have to be propped up by taxes collected from other services.

- Most fire departments are already bankrupt and have to be propped up by taxes collected from other services.

For smaller areas the situation is very complicated. Almost all local transportation associations have yearly tarifs of their own. Sometimes they are valid in adjacent destinations, sometimes not or only for a limited time (such as during the summer school holidays). More consistency would be desirable here.

[1] For a list see: https://www.bahn.de/angebot/bahncard/vorteile/verbuende (in German)

It was expensive-up front, but ended up saving so much money, especially as I could buy it via salary sacrifice before tax. Definitely recommended.

It's absurd and caused by fragmentation of services between Flanders, wallonia and Brussels with no coordination between them.

That's brutal. But I just visited (out of curiosity) www.belgiantrain.be and it says 3286 Euro for an "Unlimited Season Ticket" that "can be combined with other transport networks (STIB, TEC and De Lijn)" (I guess those are the local transport networks).

Stib is the Brussels bus service, de lijn is Flanders, TEC is Wallonia.

On a trip basis, i.e. no fixed costs included, no reduction; public transports are often the most expensive form of transportation (when compared to car or plane for longer distances). However, few people pay the full price, especially not those taking the train regularly, and cars have massive fixed costs. So if you can do everything with public transports and don't have a car, you can save a lot of money. If you still need a car for whatever reason but want to use public transports for some trips, then it can become the worst of both worlds (high fixed costs of the car plus high per trip cost of public transportation).

The car has one big advantage (in term of price), is that it can scale to a few people with basically no extra costs, whereas public transportation is usually linear. If you put four friends in your car and drive a few hundred kilometres to go on holidays abroad, the price of public transports will be ridiculous in comparison.

With "usually" being an important proviso: In Germany, there are weekend tickets for up to 5 people. A student ticket (covering the entire state, included in the tuition fee of around 700 EUR/year) often allows the holder to take someone along after 7pm or on weekends.

In Belgium, it's obscenely expensive. In some others, it's super cheap. It depends how much the country cares about making their public transport accessible. Either way it's very inconsistent across Europe but yes there are countries where public transport is highly subsidized and truly cheap and accessible. Which IMO saves a lot of costs elsewhere, it's the right way to do it.

Sadly when there was a plane option instead - that always tended to be way cheaper (London to Scotland for example).

Personally I'd subsidise it more on less used routes just to push people out of cars more, sadly London commuter routes have kinda hit the wall in capacity ad legacy limitations of the old layout/station platform lengths, rail gauge, bridge heights etc of which much was planned for in an era 100 years ago.

EDIT: Ok, found out myself, thanks Wikipedia! All but one (Kärnten) states already have a yearly public transportation ticket, with prices ranging from 365€ (Vorarlberg and Vienna) to 695 € (Oberösterreich). I guess these will be called "Klimaticket" too in the future. Might have made sense to mention this in the FAQ though...

BTW the introduction date, 26.10.2021, is the Austrian National Day.

They had a 50% discount if you were under 26

And a (cumulable) 50% first-time only discount if you already had a driver license

I ended up paying €100 for a card that allowed me to ride any train or bus in the region for one year, whenever I wanted. I ended up biking most of the time, but I did commute by train for a while. In the end I didn't use it that much, but buying it was a no-brainer.

I should also mention that some of the train lines you could take crossed the Swiss and German borders.

They just renamed the "3" ticket to climate ticket when they introduced it, meanwhile work on "1" and "2" is still ongoing in some places afaik.

>but when I was working in a city near me, the monthly ticket for the two cities was more than this

I commute between Cologne and Aachen, and the monthly ticket would have been around 288 (per month) euros if I had to fund it myself. My employer got me a "job ticket" that made the cost of this commute to around 98 euros per month. However, for your employer to apply for a jobticket they should employ a minimum number of people who would avail that offer (15 in Aachen, if I remember correctly). I have no idea why a regular person can't apply for this ticket if they really do commute the same route daily.

[1] https://www.bahn.com/en/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-conditi...

But anyway that's one of the things that annoy me, all these options that I need to know. I went with my son, we got normal tickets and then somebody told me to get ticket X instead which is more expensive, but I can take kids for free.

So this type of a ticket would solve a lot of problems and make it real easy for people to just ride.

Austria is 1/10th the size of Germany. By this logic, the ticket price should be 300 EUR, not 1095 EUR.

In practice it's not much different from a yearly local transport ticket plus the occasional long distance trip included

Not sure if the cost should scale with size of counrty, but I guess 4x is roughly reasonable between Austria and Germany. Austria probably is more expensive to build railroad in, since it's mostly mountains.

We're trying to incentivize public over private transit because the former emits less carbon (in general).

However, public transit still costs carbon, so taking less trips total seems to be better for the environment (the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" - kind of). If the marginal cost to a public transit user per trip is zero, then that incentivizes taking small, useless trips (e.g. "I could wait until the weekend to pick up a few small groceries, but transit is free, so why not go now").

Wouldn't it be better to add a *small" fee per trip, e.g. 1 EUR (much smaller than private transit), to incentivize people to make fewer trips in the first place?

If there's an increase in utilization of public transport, to the point where they need to run each route more often, or introduce additional routes, that'll be seen later on, when the impact of the ticket is evident. At that point, it can be weighed against any changes in private transport behavior.

It's probably premature to take upfront action against overutilization of public transport.

Then increase train fare so it’s at least as expensive per-carbon-emitted as driving. Since trains emit much less carbon, it will end up being cheaper to get from point A to point B by train.

Driving or taking the train has another cost, congestion. (more drivers means it takes everyone longer to get to where they’re going, more riders means some people might not be able to fit on the train. that second one used to be a common occurrence to me.)

Now that might seem hideously unfair to poor people. The solution is to take all the revenue collected this way and redistribute it throughout the jurisdiction where the law is enforced. The poorest would actually see an increase in their purchasing power. That’s because poor people emit less carbon on average, so if e.g. a poor person emits 1 ton per day and the average is 2 tons per day (making up numbers), they would pay the tax cost of emitting 1 ton but receive the tax cost of emitting two tons. The money would come from wealthy people who emit 3 tons but only receive the cost of emitting 2. That way everyone is incentivized to emit less without it unfairly burdening the poor.

At the end of the day the total number of trips are probably not very elastic, because the price (if it isn't a very high one) usually isn't even a consideration if you want to go somewhere (if it's not that far away anyways).

In fact, having lived both ways, I'd say you're far more incentivized to do this in a suburban setting with a car, since you're sitting in a private bubble with your own music and climate for every part of the trip except the store itself.

I think this really depends of the network you are talking about. In some European cities, public transit networks are a blast to use. If frequencies are high enough, and modalities are well connected, you can "ride" the city as easily and naturally on a metro/tram/bus as you would have done by walking. I've took a lot (a damn lot) of bus/trams just because they were there, passing by, and allowed me to save 3 or 4 minutes (with my annual ticket, price was never my mind).

(But I'm lucky enough to live in one of the lowest CO2 emitting countries in terms of energy mix.)

I do remember an UberPool trip I took. We got another passenger along the way. The driver ended up having to go 8 blocks out of our trip's path to pick up the passenger. She went 1 block and then got out. At least when you take a bus or tram out of convenience you are not being so wasteful.

Aside: for "unnecessary" trips, I'm setting aside the possibility of other options, such as "I already own a car and will now use that instead of paying 1 EUR".

NOW you are correct though, better for all would be for people to walk to their local shops and stuff and only grab transit when they need to go beyond the 2-4 mile radius that is considered walkable, and that would pull some of the public transit off the road/rails.