bahnkenner
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Comment · 3 years ago
If you go from the US to Europe, you'll think European public transit is great. If you go from Europe to East Asia, your perspective will change again.
Comment · 3 years ago
There are regions where the DB app will only sell you tickets that cross the region's borders, but not tickets that are wholly inside the region. There's even at least one region I know of that straight up does not do online ticketing. You have to buy physical tickets, in person, at a machine.
Comment · 3 years ago
By "local" transit, I mean regional commuter trains (Regionalbahn, Regionalexpress and S-Bahn), not the faster long-distance trains (Intercity and Intercity-Express, the latter being Germany's high-speed trains).
Comment · 3 years ago
The biggest advantage of the new Germany-wide ticket is not the price, but rather that it simplifies things.
This is a map of German public transit companies: [0]. I've heard the current fractured system be compared to the Holy Roman Empire. Every little region has its own ticketing system. If you arrive in a new city, you have to figure out how to buy local transit tickets, often with quite complicated rules (e.g., "Is my destination in zone 1, 2, 3 or 4 of this city, and what zone am I in now?"). You can usually buy monthly cards for an individual transit company, but what if you live in one region and work in another? You may have to buy two separate monthly tickets. It's a mess.
With the new system, you just buy one monthly ticket, and you can ride on local transit anywhere in Germany. There's no more worrying about different ticketing systems, if city X is in transit region Y, and so on.
The fact that the new monthly ticket is half the price of what a typical monthly transit ticket used to cost is just the icing on top of the cake.
I should also mention that while this solves one problem with the transit system in Germany, there's another, much larger problem that is still unsolved: on-time performance is abysmal, after years of neglected maintenance. The Deutsche Bahn is not what it used to be.
0. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Karte_de...
