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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Fuck Cars
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If only our public transport was affordable. We pay way more than other European countries (besides maybe Germany and the Scandinavian countries), especially when you consider how little distance you're really travelling. As an example, to get from Eindhoven central station to Amsterdam central station you take 1 train, it takes you 1 hour and 20 minutes and you pay €22,70 for a one way ticket. If we're looking at distance, this is about 120 km. This means that to get there and go back home you pay €45,40.
If you travel by yourself you can argue that it's worth it to take the train there since parking + fuel isn't that cheap here either. However, as soon as you have more than 1 person the car quickly becomes the cheaper option, even with parking included. As long as they don't solve this issue I don't see any success in their push to get people to use public transport. And I know the solution will probably be to make everything even more expensive but that's not going to help in the long run either...
In most countries the maintenance costs for highways are funded from the budget of the country, and thus split on the whole population. Those amounts are not included when someone makes a cost calculation for driving from A to B, unless one has to pay for a vignette for using the highway.
Also the cost of the car maintenance per kilometer is often not taken into account.
What is also annoying is that the budget allocated for the maintenance of the railway infrastructure is in most countries a lot less than that allocated for road infrastructure, further increasing the costs of train tickets (and thus the apparent cost of train travel) when compared to road travel.
A lot of people only tend to look at the fuel costs and maybe parking. However you're forgetting a big part of the costs of driving which is that every km adds to the depreciation in the cars worth as well as requiring more maintenance.
It's very easy to say just buying fuel is pretty cheap, but those costs are easily doubled if you look at the full costs. Check out https://www.anwb.nl/auto/autokosten for examples of how much variable costs/km actually are.
That said, this is for solo travelers... It's true that when you add more people the costs become much lower / person if you go by car since the costs just get multiplied with public transport. Exactly why my next vacation with 4 people will still be by car...
However I've started taking the train for work now which still comes out a lot lower (40% discount outside of rush hours helps a lot too!)
Thanks for the link, I never had a look at that before. If I look at my car, the variable costs per km (without the fuel) are €0,15 per km. The fixed costs are only interesting if you don't have a car and are looking at getting one, I have to pay those costs regardless of whether I leave it at home or not. That means that taking the car in my example above would add another €18 which does change things a little bit.
However, my main point was that people would flock to public transport if they were using the prices you sometimes see in other countries. For example, in Italy it costs me around €10 to get a return ticket from Florence to Pisa. The trains are slightly less fancy of course but they're still very serviceable. If they could make it so you pay maybe €30 for a return ticket from Eindhoven to Amsterdam, it would make it a lot more enticing to take the train.
No yeah agreed I wish they'd make it cheaper too.
Depreciation and tax and insurance is mostly a sunk cost. Once you have a car, these are mostly irrelevant when comparing to public transport.
If I were to drive my car to work I would double the amount I drive per year. If you don't think this adds a lot of costs then I don't know what to tell you. If you drive somewhere incidentally sure, it doesn't really matter.
You can save on insurance if you're not commuting for work, too. I'm classified as a leisure driver since my work is remote.
I actually do work remote but come in once a week... Which happens to be a long commute 🤷♂️
Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong but I think it's cheaper to subsidise public transport than to build and maintain car infrastructure. The way I see it is that every euro spent on making transport cheaper is 2 euros saved.
Oh I fully agree with you, it's just that it doesn't seem like they invest much in public transport. It feels like you hear more about lines closing down and capacity on the line going down than new lines being created.
Sounds like you've got public transit costs on par with America. What's a city bus ride cost?
As a New Yorker I'm deeply envious of your rail network. I'd kill for Amtrak to have that kind of coverage even at current prices.
Last month I had to pay $14 for a one stop return ticket because we got on a Long Island train instead of the metro at Jamaica. Stupid prices.
Germany has monthly local public transport passes for 49€ for all local public transport including regional trains. So if you wanted to go that kind of distance, you propbaly buy that instead and use public transport for some trips in the city or for some other trip. For groups some states have state passes, which can be very cheap as well. Lower Saxony for example has the Niedersachsenticket, which is 25€ for the first person, another 6€ for the next and then 5€ for each of the next three people. That works for a day after 9am for all regional public transport in the state. So you could get everybody within a normal sized car on a similar distance for 46€.
In other words, I am sorry, but public transport in the Netherlands is more expensive then in Germany. At least it is on time thou.
That pass doesn't cover trains you actually want to take between regions. It's basically a subway pass equivalent.
Source: I still pay €25 to go to the nearest city because it's a 1+ hour train ride and going local station to local station sucks. Yes I have been busted by the Deutche Bahn employee checking Tickets and thought the country wide pass worked.
Schwarzfahrer!
But no, that sucks. 49 pass seems a big upgrade but not ideal it doesn't work inter-region.
Ulm- München is abou 120km and it takes to 2:00 by regional train. Berlin - Magdeburg is also similar and at about 1:45. Both can be used using that pass.
Aalen to Stuttgart can't. Stuttgart to München Can't.
"using that pass" means not taking the direct train line. And stopping locally.
Don't ask me, ask a DB employee telling me that pass isn't valid for those connections.
Edit: here's the carve out
Sounds like a nice concept, I wish we had something like that here. And you might think trains run on time but there's actually quite a lot of delays recently. Because our network is relatively small and almost everything passes through Utrecht all it takes is 1 minor disruption somewhere around there and it's mayhem.
The trains and subways are already very full. Just making things cheaper will not be enough. We need to massively invest in new lines and more frequent trains everywhere.
One of the train companies here are using a 3 coach commuter train for long intercity travel. It's extremely unpleasant, people are always standing in the aisle and sitting on their suitcases by the doors.
I honestly have no idea why they can't just... make the train longer?! The 30 min frequency is not an issue for me, although it isn't great. The constant overcrowding on the other hand is horrible.
That's because NS is trying to cheap out on things for some reason. You keep hearing about them removing trains from the schedule or shortening them.
Bristol to London is about 1hr20m, ok it's 185km so a bit longer, but the cost of a peak time return is £252.80. So it could be worse if your country decided to privatise the rail services, a natural monopoly, while keeping infrastructure and strike costs public.
Oh they privatised it alright. It's just that the government holds all stocks for the company. So they have to subsidize the losses while fat CEO pigs run off with the profits.