For the ones who don't live in Germany: it's just for regional trains. So for instance if you would like to travel from Dusseldorf to Frankfurt (~200 km) people usually take ICE trains (direct, around 1h 45min. and 90 euros if you don't buy the ticket in advance).
On the other hand, if you are planning to use the 49 euro ticket... well, you either can't make it for the time slot you want, or you'll spend 4h-5h (best case scenario) with multiple changes in between. Also, regional trains are not like the ones one see in the movies: they are usually crowded, noisy, not that clean, and they are not always on time... which is rather critical if you are changing trains many times (ICE trains are more like the ones you see in the movies).
Regional trains are as clean as any other trains. ICE really aren't that nice (and I find it hard to accept the price difference on that basis - the only reason why I'd ever take ICE is because I don't feel like taking 5 hours to travel from Cologne to Berlin).
They can be crowded around the times people are commuting, but otherwise they're not that crowded and it's easy to find a place to sit. If you're using the 49 Euro ticket to check out places nearby, there's no reason to believe you'll end up in a crowded train. Just make a tiny bit of effort not to take a train at peak times.
They're only particularly noisy if, I don't know, there's a big game locally and people are drinking on the trains. Even in a full train when everybody's going to or coming from work, people are really fucking quiet.
I'm not sure what your angle is, but I'm not sure why you're misrepresenting the state of German regional trains.
> Regional trains are as clean as any other trains. ICE really aren't that nice (and I find it hard to accept the price difference on that basis - the only reason why I'd ever take ICE is because I don't feel like taking 5 hours to travel from Cologne to Berlin).
I'm not saying regional ones are crap, just that in my experience ICE trains have been always cleaner than regional ones.
> They can be crowded around the times people are commuting, but otherwise they're not that crowded and it's easy to find a place to sit. If you're using the 49 Euro ticket to check out places nearby, there's no reason to believe you'll end up in a crowded train. Just make a tiny bit of effort not to take a train at peak times.
That's what I wanted to say. But again, compared to ICE, regional trains are "more" crowded (e.g., in peak times you see people standing and you can't barely move. I hardly see that on ICE)
> They're only particularly noisy if, I don't know, there's a big game locally and people are drinking on the trains. Even in a full train when everybody's going to or coming from work, people are really fucking quiet.
The more people, the more noise. Nothing particular about Germans/Germany. This is a human thing. So, taking into account the peak times, I think this is just pure common sense.
> I'm not sure what your angle is, but I'm not sure why you're misrepresenting the state of German regional trains.
My main point was that with the 49 euro ticket, one cannot travel as comfortably as one may think across Germany: mainly in terms of time.
> The more people, the more noise. Nothing particular about Germans/Germany. This is a human thing. So, taking into account the peak times, I think this is just pure common sense.
You'd think so, but they actually are really fucking quiet. Do I have to make a recording for you? People generally don't talk that much on trains, at least in Germany. Do you even live here? MOST people are on their phones, listening to music, just waiting for their next stop, or trying their best not to interact with anybody around them.
> My main point was that with the 49 euro ticket, one cannot travel as comfortably as one may think across Germany: mainly in terms of time.
If your point was about time, you would've said so and I would've agreed. Instead you went on an unnecessary and inaccurate rant because you seem to have a bug about regional trains that I don't get.
Regional trains are fairly comfortable much of the time, and the vast majority of the non-peak regional trains I take are great and the only complaints I would have are all the delays (due to flagging investment in rail infrastructure over the past 30 years), not the trains themselves. I'm not sure what else you want for 49 Euros per month for access to the entire country. Before, we got to pay 10, 20+ Euros per ticket. It's an amazing step of progress.
The experience can differ drastically between cities / regions. In Munich, most people are indeed silent except for Oktoberfest when all hell breaks loose at Hackerbrücke. In Berlin, most are also silent, but sometimes a dude with a trombone casually joins the train and starts blasting on a normal tuesday. :P
Some local networks have modern, nice trains. Others still operate designs that are from the late 60s and sound like a circular saw (e.g. the old S-Bahn trains or the Metro system in Munich). Some have nice seats and toilets in their S-Bahns, others have no toilets and super hard seats. Some have modern, high platforms with barrier-free access, others still use very low platforms and small diesel-powered carriages from the early 80s. Some operators clean the trash inside the train regularly during the day, others... don't. Some networks / lines are at (or even severely over) capacity, some are not.
There is no universal "german public transport experience", IMO. Maybe GP just lives in a region with old and neglected rolling stock. :)
Long-distance trains are (almost) all operated by DB Fernverkehr and thus there aren't such extreme differences.
I've practically lived inside German trains, had my business meetings with more people inside them (there are wagons for that btw) and wouldn't define them as noisy.
When someone is rude, others will call them to attention. Big exception is bar wagon when there is some soccer match, nevertheless that is only on that part. Elsewhere you'd find silence being respected.
Trains can mostly be quiet even if sometimes there are people who are louder than usual. It happens sometimes. I wouldn't characterize regional trains as loud.
Your point about the ICE is quite valid. ICE is nice, but if I compare price and what I get for it between ICE 1st class and the green car on a Shinkansen, it's like night and day.
If you want the 49 Euro ticket experience for long distance / high speed trains, i.e. a ticket that allows you to use all trains, this will set you back 361.58 Euros / month for a "Bahncard 100", which really includes (AFAIK) everything now.
In comparision, in neighboring Austria, the same would only cost 91.25 Euros / month for the "Klimaticket Ö". Yes yes, Germanys rail network is bigger, still hurts a tiny bit. :')
It's not cheap, but I have an acquaintance who got a Bahncard 100 with 1st class access because she works at the Bahn and it sounds quite life changing. ICEs on major routes are somewhat frequent and you can just get on the train without reservations or anything. Wanna go from Hamburg to Berlin for the day? You pretty much just walk to the train station and 2-2.5 hours later are in Berlin. You can do stuff on the train. Read a book, watch a movie, start work on your new startup's app or get a currywurst from the restaurant car. I am quite jealous of this.
It's slightly different, that was not a BahnCard 100. Those are only assigned to people outside Deutsche Bahn.
Deutsche Bahn employees can buy for 1 euro a 24 hours ticket to travel any train in German (ICE included) and bring someone else with them for free. That is the ticket for personal reasons.
If the travel is business related, then you always travel on first class to the destination. Among employees is very common/confortable to travel several times per week betwen locations.
Employees in high salary groups can opt to get a "NetzCard" which allows unlimited travel in all DB operated trains. High management gets a real BahnCard 100 for them and a second person.
The free day tickets for private use that every employee gets are limited to 16 a year (but only one a month is tax free) and don't allow to take someone with you.
By the way, not every employee can use first class for business related travel (many can).
Your best case scenario is actually a worst case scenario.
From Düsseldorf to Frankfurt, using regional trains, you have to change once in Koblenz (RE 5 to RE 2). This is a connection which takes 3 hours and 50 minutes and runs every 2 hours (with numerous other options in between).
Also rather scenic if it takes the 'left side' between Cologne and Koblenz. Escpecially in the upper floor of the 'Dostos' (Double decked coaches). The Rhine, all the old castles, the wine grows on the steep hillsides, maybe some ships...
They are not always on time, but in my experience and from what I'm hearing, the long-distance trains (IC and ICE) have more and worse delays than the regional ones.
Wait folks do you really define "on time" as "within 15 minutes of schedule"??? You are guaranteed to miss all your connecting trains while officially being "on time"...
There is two categories on the page, one for 15 minutes, one for 5 minutes.
As for losing your connecting train, it's definitely a danger if you arrive with 15 minutes delay, yes. That's also why if you reclaim parts of your ticket price, they consider the whole journey and not just the delay of some individual train. So a 15 minutes delay can in the end mean you arrived 1:30 hour late.
If you want a visualisation of the travel times on a map instead, this service can show you the destinations if there's a direct connection on an eligible (local or regional) train, e.g. from Berlin: https://direkt.bahn.guru/?origin=8011160&local=true
Man, I remember before the war, seeing a train in Berlin where the destination board was Moskau (Moscow in German). I imagined taking that train might evoke feelings of the cold war times. Sadly now there's a hot war.
To go to Russia, you needed special trains as they don't use European gauge, electricity or train control standards there. We have a few in Helsinki but now they would be useful only if donated to Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_(train)
If I were a 20-something all over again and taking weekend trips all over Germany and where money was more important than time, I would be all over this. Taking the train is an adventure in its own right, so it's ok if it takes a little longer to get there.
That said, we are hoping to take a 10 day trip to Germany in November. For a short tourist hop, it probably doesn't make sense for us to use this ticket given that time is of the essence (IE: take the ICE). We might buy the Bahn card though to lock in some discounts.
Definitely take advantage of the Banh Card and do the math. On my visits I usually only take 2-3 train rides on the ICE, but it pays off very quickly. Cancelling is a PITA though.
That was my thinking as well, especially with a family of four and intending to make a loop of the country by train.
I understand a lot of the criticism of the transit system in this thread, but when I compare the options and flexibility there compared to Washington / Oregon (where I live, and comparable in geographic size to Germany) it becomes readily apparent how superior any European nation's transit options are to our own.
Living in Oregon, I've taken the train to Seattle a few times. It's nice, but of course could be better. As much public transit-envy I have for Europe or Japan and China, I just am increasingly coming to be convinced that inter-city transit at the west coast just isn't suited for public transit. The density just isn't there. When I take an ICE from Bonn to Hamburg I pass by so many major cities all of which are served by the ICE. There isn't much to speak of between Portland and Seattle and even less if I wanted to take a train to SF. The math just doesn't work as well.
The area surrounding the Rhine Valley is the most densely populated part of Europe. I recently drove up the west coast from SF and at least from I5 it seemed like Eugene-Vancouver Canada was pretty built up most of the way.
It’s a bit more sparse on the 100 mile stretch between Vancouver WA and Olympia but it’s not really that far, two thirds of Hamburg-Berlin which is less densely populated than western parts of Germany. But just look at France or Spain to see high speed rail working well in more sparsely populated countries.
I think the bigger problem is how much you need a car within American cities which tend to be much more spread out than their European equivalents, though Seattle, Portland and Vancouver Canada aren’t terrible in that respect.
It probably makes sense to prioritise regional rail before HSR, but then if you have to build new railways to get separation from freight traffic, electrify and remove crossings so you can run 100 mph European regional rail speeds and frequencies I guess you may as well build HSR.
Yeah, I've been doing that. It just always rubs me the wrong way when I can sign up for something via website or app, but need to do something less convenient to unsubscribe. Such a dark anti-pattern!
I think we need some regulation there. Cancellation should be at most as many clicks as signing up, in the same app or website, the buttons have to be the same color, size and placement as sign up buttons.
Personally, it's been a game changer for me. Been in Munich the last couple of months and previously it was over $30 a week to use just the Subway/Bus/Trams. At ~$53 a month I can now take the Subway/Bus/Tram, suburban trains, to/from airport, as well as inter-regional trains which make certain trips and activities make significantly more sense.
Was a bit weird at first with the local Munich provider time restricting it to before the month, vs DB which allowed for the current month, but whose system was overwhelmed. This actually forced me to get an unnecessary local week pass until DB sorted out their issues and allowed for purchase. Seems as the local Munich provider MVGO also corrected their system and allow for the current month as well with no waiting period.
Honestly wish every state would implement something like this, would encourage more travel, adventures, and quality of life improvement overall.
Yes, that's what I meant - but looking through it it's pretty straightforward, so maybe it's not totally necessary. Helpful for beginners though, and also faster for anyone to learn the parts of the codebase that are important to pay attention to.
Maybe it's silly, but I guess, relevant - I also find it just exciting to read a post filled with syntax-coloured monospace boxes strewn through it. Maybe others feel the same? Possibly it's like the code equivalence to diagrams and illustrations.
Some people are being a bit negative here, but the 49 euro ticket has been a game changer in terms of how I think about public transport. I can choose to be totally spontaneous like take the metro, then local light rail to then take a train to another city and take the metro there then hop on another train to another city, hop off visit a beer garden, hop back on going this time somewhere completely random... any or even every day of the month and all for 49 euros! It's insane.
> I can choose to be totally spontaneous like take the metro, then local light rail to then take a train to another city and take the metro there then hop on another train to another city, hop off visit a beer garden, hop back on going this time somewhere completely random
This is exactly the kind of thing that made me want to build this.
I think a valid criticism is that it would still be good value at, say, 99 euros, or whatever. At some point it is a case of windfall effect: Of course people prefer cheaper and even better, free, but everything does have a cost that will be paid one way or another.
I think that your example is a good one for this: It is taking advantage of subsidies for 'luxury' by someone who can obviously afford to pay for his leisure activities.
And that's fine as long as there is nothing else left to spend public money on.
> I think a valid criticism is that it would still be good value at, say, 99 euros, or whatever
At 99€ it would have massively lower user numbers. It's already to a large degree a commuter ticket at 49€ - at 99€ alternative tickets would be the better choice for many.
To give people an idea what regional trains means:
On regional trains you can travel Germany from north to south in less than 14 hours with 5 changes as opposed 8 hours with 2 changes for 125 EUR one-way on long-distance trains.
With the 49 EUR/month ticket you can hop off the train anytime you are tired of the journey. Can't do that with the 125 EUR one-time, one-way long-distance train ticket.
I totally see young and elderly people do this on regional trains.
It is fine as long as you have or can make enough trains, busses and people who staff them. Those are finite resources. Since the external costs of car traffic are so high, even free public transport would probably make sense from the societal perspective.
I think it's actually brilliant. People aren't going to leisure trip at commuting hours, so it allows to keep a schedule outside of busy hours when you are normally way under capacity.
I meant that driving trains doesn't require oil, while people driving cars does. Hence your country is bleeding capital every time somebody drives.
The whole train infrastructure is very self sufficient in Germany and they indeed export trains and tracks and all associated technology all over the place too, hence the term "oversufficient".
Does it really free up more travel options? Is public transport so expensive in Germany?
Even if it does provide more travel options, does that provide more value than it costs? I think that this is straightforward to answer.
I ask the same questions every time the topic pops up because all the praises in the comment tend to boils down to "it's good because it's cheaper". Sure everyone likes cheaper but that is not really a convincing argument.
I'm not sure it's primarily about cheaper than fixed. Because it fixes travel costs, your opportunity to go do something else increases. Some people will travel more and some less.
People being able to move around easily would bring commerce to more areas. If 50 euros gets more people moving around and shopping at various places compared to 100 euro cutting that down by a lot.
Note that it's only up to regional transparts, which means that if you can technically travel across Germany with it, it's gonna be much slower than a car. In most cases you are still going to take an Inter City Express which is not included. But now you can go from your small city next to Berlin to your grandpa's next to Hamburg and only have to worry about the ICE. The trip would last roughly as long as it would with the car end to end, and cost you less (way less if you then completely renounce owning a car)
Having looked at the connections as they are, i think there are a handful of optimizations that could be made to the schedule and routes available that would reduce the ICE time advantage, like for example Berlin to Leipzig doesn't have a direct regional train.
The total cost to the tax payer is around 3 Billion euros, which as a subsidy is pretty cheap in comparison to the 3-5 Billion euros of subsidies for company cars.
I'm not sure on the current data but during the 9 euro ticket trial over last summer 10% of daily commuters shifted from cars to public transport, 17% overall shifted to public transport and 1.8 million tons of CO2 were saved. The company car subsidy on the other hand is definitely NOT climate friendly.
But why would you want a car? they make no sense... they're slower than a bike or public transport in a city, slower than a train between cities and you have to pay huge amounts to keep them. Maybe they make sense if you live in a village but when you live in a big city in Germany it's a bad proposition.
To find train connections, I recommend the Bahn-App by Hellany [1]. With it, you can search specifically for trains for which the Deutschland-Ticket is valid. Notice the toggle in the last line of the search form.
This is really interesting. It might draw a lot of tourism because it’s so easy to get around. It’s not even about the money. It’s about the stress-free way of traveling.
Nothing about traveling with D-Ticket is stress free. Public transportation in Germany is not as good as some might believe.
Last week I was on vacation. We missed a train because the previous was delayed. We then had to take a taxi because the last bus departed at 17:00 (sic) and we arrived at 17:30.
I rural Germany, you need a car to get anywhere. Especially at night (aka after 17:00).
most lines in Germany and other European countries are intended for commuters, not for the casual tourist, which is a pity, as only public transport is the solution to the traffic problems
Which traffic problems? People get around. It is a bit sad though, that people have to subsidize the luxury 49,- ticket for the special people in cities, while they themselves would not use it, but hey, getting free stuff on the back of others is always great. Love it!
It's actually not that easy to get the ticket. The ticket is not just a ticket that you can but at a machine whenever you want, it's actually a subscription that at the moment can only be started at the beginning of the month and the request must be received something like 4 days before the end of the month, otherwise you slip to the next month. I'm not sure if there are additional conditions not covered here but I can imagine there are are lots of other quirks.
Some of this is wrong: It can be started anytime and it is then prorated. Pretty sweet. In the HVV Switch app it's also a process of under one minute (if you already have an account). Haven't tried it in other apps.
I normally don't do that, but I felt the urge to remove that paragraph all together. It is not helpful in any way when visiting the city. And normally nobody cares about political tensions in city.
> But unlike in rural Saxony, they are countered by a strong, active Antifa community, which seldom hesitates using violence to stop far-right activities.
Sure, we have a racism problem in Eastern Germany. But I don't think a far right activist might jump out of the next bush in many cases. Leipzig should be the best of all these places.
And to be fair, that kind of daily racism is a problem all over the country.
I live on the other side of the border and from the outside it seems like an economically-left-behind-after-communism kind of problem.
We have the same issue and these people gravitate towards nationalist circles because it gives them a sense of belonging in a world that largely doesn't care about them.
Doesn't make them activists of any kind though - just hooligans looking for meaning.
Hi! I am new here.
I will be visiting Germany as a tourist towards the end of June.
Can I buy the 49€ ticket from my credit card on hvv switch app before 20th June, 2023?
What is the deadline to purchase this ticket? 10th of the previous month or 20th of the previous month?
Should the credit card be strictly in my name or can I have a family member pay for it?
Please if anyone could answer since I couldn't find relevant answers on the internet.
It would be cool if the site could show all the places on a map! As someone who has only been to Germany a few times, I have no idea where most of these places are geographically :')
I'm guessing they mean something like icons, or colour-coded tiny-font words with borders "lake", "city", "village" etc, on each title, to be able to tell at a glance what the different places are without having to expand them.
Not GP, but you have e.g. Brocken and Cologne as targets, but the former is (the summit of) a mountain, the latter a city. A categorization of the destinations (maybe based on wiki voyage metadata?) may be a good addition for your very nice web app.
BTW: You have Heligoland[1] as a reachable destination. I don't think that's actually true, those are real high sea ferries for which, AFAIK, the 49 Euro ticket is not valid. :)
Yeah, that would be a cool idea. Will put it on my ToDo list.
Nice catch on Heligoland. Thanks. The final journey is via Schiff and I had not filtered that out. However, I don't know if DB categorizes Schiff that are included or excluded from the 49 Euro ticket.
Using the DB (Deutsche Bahn) App it is easy to plan a journey through Germany using the 49euro ticket. Just make sure to select regional transport only in the journey settings. The ticket is digital only and a german debit bank account is needed. (Source: traveling through Germany using the ticker right now).
German trains are pretty much excellent. Prices go from reasonable to good. Bahn card is super. The only problem is delays which can happen regularly for many different reasons, some outside the control of DB (suicides for example). Compare this to UK trains - holy moly....
I'm spending 2 months in Germany later this summer, definitely bookmarking this. I will still probably end up taking the ICE a lot though, it's just faster and has less transfers.
I've been to Germany many times; ICE is always faster than a regional train with tons of transfers. I know Germans complain about it all the time, but it's usually very good. I've only had 1 major delay. I've had more S-Bahn delays than ICE.
It is very encouraging to see Germany working on improvements to both their train service and also the UX of the Deutsche Bahn. Simplified fee structures like this will increase ridership.
But a regulations stating that transport providers have to provide tickets for the cost of 49€ valid all across Germany (very strongly oversimplified).
This means there are many places selling this ticket which only are the same in where it's valid, how much it costs, and how it can be validate by any arbitrary public train service.
So some providers sell chip plastic cards with a NFC chip in them and some ID+Name+Date printed on it which get shipped to you.
Other provider only sell it through the App using your phones NFC chip or (I think, not sure) QR as fallback.
Similar some might only accept SEPA payment mandates (i.e. implicitly require and EU bank account) and require you to have an German address to ship the card to. Other require SEPA and hand it to you personally not caring about an address in Germany and others might accept Google Pay, Apple Pay or Paypal and are online only.
While this sounds bad, for most German people this is a complete non issue as they just buy it form the same transportation provider they used before using the same payment method they where using before. (The reason this works technically is because there already was a system for validating tickets valid in the transport net of one provider issued by another, most commonly DB long distance tickets also covering public transportation around the time of arrival/departure).
"Digital-only" = By smartphone app OR by smartcard, i.e. a card like a credit card with a chip and your personal unique ID stored on that.
In other words: You cannot get a plain old paper ticket without personal information, the ticket is like a cookie which identifies you as a user and thus allows you to be tracked.
While true, something to note is that german train and metro stations, in general, have no ticket barriers. Tickets are only checked by staff on trains, on a (very) random basis for local / metro trains.
I've had months in which my ticket wasn't checked at all while using it every single day.
Ticket control in Berlin seems to have gotten extremely centralized. 5y ago it was pretty random where they might walk a few people through scanning on the train, today it's almost always checks on the platform at major hubs / tourist centers. I don't know if this a real change of policy or a side result of the BVG changing their contractors.
> I don't think I have been checked a single time in the last 2 years.
My experience differs a lot: I go by train (in Germany) rather often and would say that it was more common to be checked than not (i.e. for me the probability of being checked was more than 1/2).
like public "city" transportation or regional trains?
in regional trains you get checked more often (longer distances, less passenger exchange and per-train personal have this as a side effect), but already it's somewhat tricky to have a regional train ticket which is not linked to your name
in public "city" transportation it's semi-random but also there are times & stations where statistically it's most likely to find someone without an ticket and in turn this places/times get checked very frequent and if you are there every day at the specific time-frames you are unlucky and also get checked very frequent. But most times and place combinations do not have this issue and some are close to guaranteed that you don't get checked.
> ticket is like a cookie which identifies you as a user and thus allows you to be tracked
local trains, underground trains, busses and ferries here in Hamburg has no regular ticket checks whatsoever. No checks -> they can't track people via the ticket.
The neoliberals insisted on that so that the very poor or those without a bank account would not be able to get it, not because of any kind of tracking. No system in Germany has gates and ticket checks are so rare, it's not really viable for tracking.
this sort of tracking is illegal and not done. berlin had to cancel its rollout of smart cards and tapping some years ago due to leaking of personal information. you just wave the card when you get on the bus, or just not at all
I'm on Android rather than Apple, but I could install the HVV app on my UK phone and buy tickets using my UK card with no particular difficulty. Maybe other transport associations are more difficult, but I'm not sure why they'd want to make it hard for me to give them money.
Yes, that's a good question why they don't want our (not living in Germany) money.
I think the background is:
* Paypal is not very common/popular in Germany so most local transport agencies don't bother
* with SEPA direct debit which is the common payment in Germany you can easily initiate a chargeback after you have already used the ticket. Of course that's fraud, but if you live abroad, the effort to sue you would be tremendous
But the same publication says that only a bit over 50% of the population even own a credit card. And debit cards usable online are still a niche product.
So in Germany, can you pay your Paypal bills any other way than by credit card? Honest question, when I lived in Germany the last time, Paypal did not exist yet.
Germans are usually very aware of hidden costs and credit cards are usually more expensive per transaction.
Germans also usually are much less in debt than for example many US citizens - for example the University education costs much much less. Young adults have 1400 Euros (plus!) on their giro account and it is typical to pay from that account.
The usual method is by SEPA direct debit (initiated by Paypal) but you can use a SEPA transfer as well to top up your Paypal balance and pay with that.
Ah, I had no idea that Paypal would do SEPA direct debit . They don't offer it to me. (I don't have a German address, although I would have a German account.)
A long time ago there used to be a "Schones-Wochenende" ("have a good weekend") ticket that you could just buy from the machines, and would allow you unlimited use of regional and interregional (no intercity high speed) trains throughout Germany for one weekend, and upto 5 people on one ticket, for a stupidly low price of something like 30 euros, and you could also sell it to someone else for the remainder of the weekend.
No, that doesn't exist anymore. (it also had gotten more expensive over the years, and only was for the full weekend until 2000 or so, only one day after that)
The closest is now the "Quer-durchs-Land" (~"across the country") ticket which is available for any day of the week and currently costs 44€ for the first person and 7€ each for up to 4 more people travelling on it.
SEPA discrimination is illegal but a fact. Many sellers don't even let you enter an account number that doesn't start with DE. At the latest the Schufa check will fail.
Easier for those who sell themselves to Google or pay the Apple premium. For people who believe in freedom it means a chipcard. Which can be a real challenge because then the number of sellers gets very small and they might be very far from where you'd like to buy it.
I literally do not know whether I have one. I switched my plan for my local provider some time ago, but I still have no indication, digital or physical, whether I actually have such a ticket...
Only if the trains are given enough budget that there is a train every 5 minutes (or less) at every station, the train routes provide reasonable ability to get anywhere, and the trains run "fast".
No train system in the world has all of that, which in turn means they need more money and so free riders harm the system's ability to get people where they want to go.
Maybe, but I've never seen anyone with such a proposal serious about giving enough money to run great transit everywhere.
By everywhere I include farms in the middle of nowhere as that farmer has a relative somewhere who wants to visit and the lack of great transit pushes that person to a car and then opposing transit subsidies. By getting some money from riders there is at least some inventive to make good compromises.
Sadly it is illegal in Germany to have a tax for a specific thing. So that’s that. But then there is GEZ which is basically the same thing just for TV :shrug:
But the fee that the GEZ used to collect (the Rundfunkbeitrag) does still exist and that's what a lot of people call it even the entity that collects it has a different name now, which doesn't make a difference to its effect.
I believe there are taxes in Germany that are zweckgebunden (legally bound to be used for a particular purpose), but the Soli isn't one: there were political justifications for its introduction, but it goes into the general fund and the government doesn't have to use it for those purposes.
I don't speak German but the tax you linked appears a tax that is /collected/ on a certain item (sparkling wine). The GP was talking about a tax whose /revenues are spent/ on a specific thing (transit).
It's especially egregious the neoliberals here insisted it only be bookable as a subscription, not as a paper ticket. Mostly so that very low income / homeless people couldn't use it. Almost like they hate the poor or something.
While I really like the German transport system, and I have been paying it for 5 years, making it mandatory seems too much. What if I don't have a need for it? Or if I barelly use it?
My taxes pays for many public infrastructures I don’t use too.
Taxes and public subsidies for infrastructures are especially powerful on networks because the output service is spread in many cross dimensional layers of the nation.
The lack of a shower and having to carry all your luggage when you leave the train. I have in the past ridden overnight trains and slept in them, reducing the need for accommodation by one night. I think if you pack lightly, you can certainly do this alternating "traveling" and "staying" every couple of days for a while, but you will quickly cover a lot of ground that way. There will be times you want to hop on a shorter train for a couple of hours and no more, because a place you want to see is close-by.
Like e.g. TOS of public transportation providers only allowing usage for transit (and having some other restrictions).
It's loud.
It's bright.
No showers.
No easy way to store food clothes or similar.
The risk of being stolen from.
Generally there are most times better options even if you don't have much money.
And I mean so what if some people try to use it like that it's in practice a combo of inconvenient enough and restricted enough to not be widely abused and in turn to not lead to much cost for the train provider or inconvenience for other passengers to matter much. (Assuming you mean something like looping round and round in some public transportation network.)
Also if you mean you take a extra long one direction trip and sleep during that time then there isn't even abuse involved, you just basically used a regional train like a night train. Nothing bad. I mean why not.
I took an overnight train from Munich to Essen (~8hrs), and it was not fun at all. No beds, full on bright lights, people are noisy, they constantly check your ticket after staff changes, and that was an ICE which is much nicer. With the 49 Euro, you're going to have to transfer more, so you have all that working against you. You would not get much sleep, even if it were legal to use it like a hotel. They were pretty good about kicking off shady people that were clearly high or something, had no ticket, and were using it as a shelter.
Is the purpose of this site to list which places you can reach at all with the 49€-Ticket? If so, that seems a bit useless: you can travel from anywhere to anywhere in Germany with local trains - it just takes long.
In practice, you just enter start and destination into DB Navigator app, select regional-only, and choose your pick.
That's simply not true. It worked for me with a spanish banking account, and I've used it several times already without anything being shipped to my home. I used the DB app.
You only need a bank account with an IBAN number (and an address).
There are transportation services that allow you to sign up, download the ticket, print the QR code and use just that, so you don’t even need to use some app for that. Make sure to cancel before the 10th of a month because it automatically extends for another month if you don‘t.
But in exchange I’d really like to know what you did for DB to show you a 400 ticket, I don’t get such a result even going first class with the most flexible ticket available and only using ICE.
The ticket is actually offered by multiple transport companies and organisations which have different forms of payment, but the coverage is the same. Some of them accept VISA also, for example the MVV (Münchner Verkehrs- und Tarifverbund).
So, first class, ICE, full flex ticket. Yeah, those will be slightly more expensive. You can then forget about the Deutschland Ticket, that’s not available for first class, nor with ICE (not even EC). The only thing it gives you is the flex option. Simply by taking 2nd class, you could already cut the price in half.
Bullshit. You can buy it via the Deutsche Bahn app without a German bank account. By the way, it is illegal to sell anything in Europe and discriminate on which EU country your bank account is from.
Try buying it through a local service. My brother just visited me here and he bought it through https://www.rheinbahn.de/ and it worked with his Mexican CC.
Thankfully some service providers noticed the awful convenience and are trying to proliferate themselves by offering a better service. For example mop.la let's you buy the ticket via credit/debit card, gives you a digital ticket and let's you pause or cancel the ticket a day before the next month. (I'm not affiliated with them)
IIRC I've payed it via Paypal (you need an account with the official national railway provider though, which kinda makes sense for a subscription service) and it was available instantly as a QR code
there are many different places selling this tickets all having their own payment systems and in turn some might have constraints others do not have for practical reasons
generally it's the 49€-ticked designed as a long term plan (through cancel-able monthly) focused on residents and the most common way to handle this in Germany (and most other EU states) is through SEPA Direct Debit Mandates which requires you to have a bank account compatible with it, which _pretty much any bank in the EU does_! (SEPA == Single Euro Payments Area)
The reason this doesn't work with a credit system is that many EU citizens do not have credit cards, but pretty much all have a bank account which is SEPA.
Similar many places selling chip card require an address, so that they can send you new revisions of the card, billing info if needed etc. and at least in Germany any citizen is required to have one official address so not really any relevant limitation for the target customer audience.
But nothing of this is required to be done, e.g. if you buy through an app payments might go through google pay or apple pay.
Generally don't expect to be able to pay with a US credit card in the EU, it often does work but there is absolutely not guarantee it will work and card payment not accepting credit cards is common (might change in the near future). I mean it's a bit strange to say this because not always being able to use your home countries payment cards aboard is pretty much normal for pretty much most of the world.
Train tickets are often tied to a name - especially when you have a reserved seat. So are bus/train cards.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anything new here.
Meanwhile cars have a lot more and a lot older surveillance infrastructure behind them with mandatory license plates, driving licenses, insurance and whatnot.
The highest anonymity is achieved through cycling and/or walking.
Most likely since you are using a newly created account, and an automated system does this. Happened to me as well and kept happening even after months. Was fixed swiftly after I contacted the site admin about it :)
I believe when people 'vouch' for your dead comments, the issue will go away eventually.
Before that ticket, everybody who isn't a full time paranoiac was digitally buying identity bound tickets for specific routes. Known to the selling entity even when the ticket wasn't checked at all. Now that same entity will only see a random location sample the moment the ticket happens to get checked, and zero information about the actual route end points. And paranoiacs can still skip the offer and get a paper ticket just like before (and like everybody who doesn't travel by train very often).
Those concerns simply don't add up: if it was a ploy by a surveillance operation hidden in the train org, they'd have just spent billions on blinding themselves. There so much less data now than there was before.
Most (all?) german train stations don't have barriers. So even though the ticket has a barcode on, there is a good chance that many journeys that barcode will never be scanned by anyone and there will be no central record you ever got on that train.
> So some people have voiced concerns about that being used to profile the movement of Germany's citizens.
How would you do that? For example my local traffic system here in Hamburg for roughly 4 million people has almost no ticket checks: there are no barriers and no other regular ticket checks. One just boards the train/bus/ferry and travel.
For example I was going from Hamburg to Stade and back, using my 49€ ticket. There was no ticket check.
If that was an evil plan to track German citizens's travel behavior, that plan was not well thought out.
It's not digital only, I have a physical version. Whether or not you can get a card depends on your locality. Nevertheless, I don't understand why it's so much more inconvenient to understand and purchase compared to the 9 euro ticket. With that you could get a paper ticket or buy on app and the rules for what it did were consistent everywhere.
But that id doesn't get transmitted anywhere as long as you are not checked for a ticket, which is rare. (And that's not saying that when you get checked it will collect personal non-ananomized data points, it doesn't.)
> Disclaimer: I don't live there, I don't know the details.
exactly
it's digital available in a app _or chip card_
in both cases it's not tracking where you go, you don't check-in/out when you enter leafe a train, their are no "gates" in (most?all?) of Germans public transportation systems. Instead it's a trust based system where sporadically randomly personal will check if passengers have valid tickets. At which point you have to show your ID and card, but that's it. And that you where checked also doesn't get recorded. But even if they would this checks tend to be somewhat rare to a point that some people decided it (was) cheaper to not buy a ticket but pay the fine from time to time.
While I'm also unhappy it's not being offered as a physical ticket, I can say from roughly 10 trips between 200 and 500km and a lot of local metro/bus riding that the frequency with which your ticket is actually checked shouldn't be enough to provide enough data for sophisticated tracking (esp. in comparison to "the normal amount" of GPS/tracking/movement data that smartphones already produce throughout the various apps we all have installed and that are being used on during trainrides)
> (esp. in comparison to "the normal amount" of GPS/tracking/movement data that smartphones already produce throughout the various apps we all have installed and that are being used on during trainrides)
Many people who are skeptical of tracking don't own a smartphone. Those who nevertheless own one (say, because otherwise their job would become more complicated) often only very selectively switch it on.
We don‘t need to wave the ticket at a card reader to use the bus. We just board and mayyybe, like just once a month, there‘s someone on the bus checking the validity of tickets and fining people if they don‘t have one.
What‘s your point exactly? Your concerns seem to be of very theoretical nature tbh.
It can't be used to track citizens as there is no need scan the ticket when boarding a bus / train / light rail / underground and it rarely is checked manually by a ticket inspector.
there is not relevant tracking there, there is no system of checking-in/out of a train
you can always just board the train without anyone checking your ticket, you are _trusted_ to have a valid ticket
then because people can not always be trusted from time to time some personal will check tickets for validity, potentially
but in practice most people get checked like once a month or so at most, it's semi-random so some are probably unlucky
Furthermore any statistic data collected from this checks is anonymized they don't remember that _you_ where checked there (if you ticked was valid).
Additionally checking costs money (personal cost) so the less likely you are to find a trespasser the less checking is done, i.e. with the 49€ ticket probably less checking will be done long term.
For longer reginal trips you are more like to be checked, but in practice this new tickets will give _less_ information to the DB and similar organziations. Because before for most regional ticket you brought either had already been explicit person bound or implicit throught he payment system with a specific start or end place listed on them. The ability to buy regional tickets with cash has been becoming increasingly more limited (e.g. because of nonsense like people trying to steal that cash by blowing up the ticket automata, creating a huge cost for a minimal profit).
Hamburg to Tonning is 2 hours 15 min by train but only 1 hour 30 min by car. The car trip is 78 miles, which is about EUR $18 of gas at current German prices. So the train pass is worth it if you plan to take more than one such trip (round trip) before the end of the year. You'll spend 50% longer traveling, but you can read so that might even be a win. You have greater flexibility of destinations with a car, but also the obligation to park it.
On the other hand, if you are planning to use the 49 euro ticket... well, you either can't make it for the time slot you want, or you'll spend 4h-5h (best case scenario) with multiple changes in between. Also, regional trains are not like the ones one see in the movies: they are usually crowded, noisy, not that clean, and they are not always on time... which is rather critical if you are changing trains many times (ICE trains are more like the ones you see in the movies).