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.
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.