Germany's New Crowdfunded Train

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/12/locomore-germany-crowdfunded-train/510752/

by misnamed • 10 years ago

233 155 10 years ago

nobrains• 10 years ago

"speed or price? A new, crowdfunded entrant in Germany’s passenger rail scene is betting on the former, offering low-price but slightly slower than average"

Betting ON the former or Betting AGAINST the former?

nmstoker• 10 years ago

Indeed! The article content is the important thing, but this is distracting given they missed the error right at the opening

dao-2• 10 years ago

Probably confused "former" with "latter" rather than "on" with "against" :)

patall• 10 years ago

While I like the idea and will probably try it out in January, I think this article takes it bit too easy. The price of the cheapest ticket maybe €22, but by that measure, I was also able to do the same journey for €14.25 with Deutsche Bahn this year. They are mostly cheaper but not that much as the those tickets are for particular trains which are also cheaper on DB. And other admenities like Wifi will also finally come to ICE this year, there are already family zones. Besides maybe the seat gurantee, the other features sound more like gimmiks to me, nice on the first look but not really world changing. I like the croudfunding aspect though.

cknight2• 10 years ago

Exactly.

"A €22 ($23.50) one-way ticket is less than a quarter of DB’s €115.90 ($123) standard fare." is a bit misleading, given that DB's Standard fare is far from their cheapest. I have a BahnCard 25 (so a 25% discount), and always use Saver fares instead of Standard - meaning I have to take a particular train at a particular time... like with Locomore. A "Standard" DB fare, for those who don't know, means you can take any train(s) at any time on the date for your destination, and for some that flexibility is hugely valuable.

I am travelling between Christmas and New Year this year, and even though it is along Locomore's single serviced line, the price will actually be the same. Since Locomore only stops once a day in my city at an ungodly hour of the morning, it's not so convenient. So I'm going with DB in the evening.

Now, I am glad the city I live in and the one I visit my friends in are both on Locomore's line, as I am looking forward to trying it out, but as with you, I'll probably only try it out later, at a time when DB's fares aren't looking competitive. It really depends on how far you're going, what times are acceptable, and what discounts are available. Locomore's prices are roughly doubled during the festive period while DB has a mix of regular and high priced stuff.

All that said, seeing some actual competition in this area is great.

lucb1e3• 10 years ago

DB's Standard fare is far from their cheapest. I have a BahnCard 25 (so a 25% discount)

Well the price of the bahncard should be added to the price you pay per trip, so the question is, how much is that card? Then people can figure out for themselves how often they'd commute and whether they'd save anything.

And still, 25% off of €116 vs. €22 doesn't sound too appealing.

Not criticizing the rest of your post, e.g. I agree that competition is good and available discounts should surely be included in comparisons!

morsch4• 10 years ago

The cheapest DB ticket may be as cheap as Locomore, but Locomore's maximum fare is half as much as DB's (~75 EUR).

nkkollaw• 10 years ago

Yeah, but the trains are half as good and half as fast.

Fnoord2• 10 years ago

The article is misleading the price of travel via DB, but OTOH price of DB is rather complex (its variable, and there are also options for discounts).

It is important to note the price of travel by train in Germany varies a lot depending on variables. You can order your ticket months in advance and get a specific seat (in the ICE) at a specific fare (ie. a trainseat at a specific time & date). This allows for massive discounts. However you're inflexible in your schedule and spot. Consider the following hypothetical examples:

1) You order 3 months in advance and can get a discount of 75%. 2) You order 3 weeks in advance and can get a discount of only 25%-50%. 3) You want to order 2 days in advance and can't even get on the train anymore since its full (ICE). You think you can travel by ICE and buy your ticket on the spot and can't since its full. Grumbled you buy a ticket -at full price- for the RE/IC and have to swap trains all the time which also stop more often.

Note that right now its mid december so it is going to be difficult to book cheap for end of december.

Since Germany is a large country you'll practically end up travel by ICE if you travel through the country. For example, the full price of a one way ticket from Ruhr area to Berlin is ~115 EUR.

So, it is interesting how much time in advance one has to order with Locomore. Apparently one can only order online and not via DB sale points. But how does the ticket work then? Does one have to print it out or can it be shown on a smartphone?

I don't know how pricing works in other countries apart from The Netherlands. IC in The Netherlands have free WiFi, but it requires one to log in with a web browser. No cryptography is used in the connection either.

The article mentions the following:

and a journey on a recycled (dare I say vintage) train that runs entirely on sustainably sourced green electricity.

I'd like to know which sustainably sourced green electricity. Because nuclear energy is also considered 'green' these days. Not sure if that is true in Germany.

Europe’s railways have already seen substantial deregulation and privatization—often, as in Britain, with highly negative results.

Yeah, there's a national system akin to Oyster card in The Netherlands. Easy to log in and out and once they swapped from Mifare, more secure. Yet if you swap train of a different company (and they're more rampant here than in Germany, apparently) you need to log out and in. If you don't, you are considered free riding and get a fine of 35 EUR plus the fare price. If this ever happens to you in The Netherlands know that you can appeal a fine once a year by phone or the website. So you can get your money back.

pluma12• 10 years ago

Because nuclear energy is also considered 'green' these days.

The Greens party, Greenpeace and other organizations certainly disagree in Germany and as a consequence nuclear power is considered one of the dirtiest forms of energy. The geographical proximity to Chernobyl certainly helps.

Economic liberals certainly have criticised the increased push for abandoning nuclear power after Fukushima but in the mainstream narrative coal and gas is cleaner than nuclear.

throwaway101292• 10 years ago

I'd like to know which sustainably sourced green electricity.

They use dirty energy and buy some sort of "certificates" that are supposed to guarantee that somewhere, sometime, some sort of green electricity has been produced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_Energy_Certificate_(...

It's the same in Germany and many believe it to be a scam.

daenney2• 10 years ago

It's really nice to see a project like this crop up after the rail privatisation. In the EU countries that have gone through that transition the situation for the passenger hasn't improved much and since there usually still only is a single provider for most routes the prices tend to only go up without much for it in return. That's not to say it would necessarily have been better to keep it public, just that the promise of privatisation hasn't really delivered, in my experience.

This might not be groundbreaking, it might not even work but I'm really happy to see someone try something new(ish) in this arena.

Also, trains are the best. Choo-choo!

pluma12• 10 years ago

The only thing the privatisation originally did was eliminate DB's accountability and allow them to cut costs like infrastructure maintenance. I think the mistake was to turn a state monopoly into a private monopoly.

I'm still not convinced privatising infrastructure like rail passenger transport is better than socialising it and at least on the communal level I'm convinced socialised public transport would be a better approach (i.e. treat trams and roads equivalently). But DB only really cares about their high speed trains, so it's good to see someone try to improve the rest.

lambertsimnel• 10 years ago

It vaguely reminds me of this planned cooperative British rail service: http://go-op.coop/

Go-Op aims to run passenger owned trains in competition with franchises granted by the government to conventional profit-distributing businesses.

As far as I know, its trains haven't yet started running, but I'm pleased to see that it hasn't been abandoned, especially in light of Southern Rail's troubles.

jpatokal2• 10 years ago

Way more interesting than this is the upcoming plan to liberalize rail transport across the entire EU. This should allow effectively anybody (meeting certain standards) to operate services on common infrastructure, introducing actual competition to the passenger rail market.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20160420IPR2...

carlob5• 10 years ago

See how well that went in the UK… We've had this in Italy for high speed trains for a while, and so far the only private competitor is close to bankruptcy.

kalleboo2• 10 years ago

Are there any good studies on countries where this has already been done? Looking at the situation in Sweden where there has been rail liberalization, it seems like it mostly leads to underinvestment in the infrastructure because you can always just blame the passenger train companies... I haven't heard any happy stories from the UK either.

I'm for it in principal (especially harmonization - any train border crossing in Europe can be a nightmare) but the incentives need to be engineered just right

daenney2• 10 years ago

I go between Uppsala and Stockholm regularly (it's roughly 70km, so a 38m ride) with SJ and I have to say though, most of the time I do blame SJ. The amount of times my train gets cancelled because their locomotives crap out is far larger than whenever it's because of infrastructure related reasons. Considering their latest price hike I'm not very happy with them.

MTR does provide a nice alternative to SJ though when you want to get to Göteborg, Malmö or Köpenhamn.

For a country as big as Sweden though there's a notable lack of high-speed rail to anything north of Stockholm and there doesn't seem to be any interest or incentive to improve that situation.

Fnoord2• 10 years ago

Shifting the blame between the various railway companies also happened in The Netherlands. On top of that, swapping train between different corporations doesn't work in a user friendly way (you need to log out and in, or be considered a free rider) because nobody in IT has figured out to fairly calculate and share the profit fairly. Since the government doesn't stimulate or punish this behaviour there's no incentive of corporations to fix this. They've been saying since forever that they'd fix it.

gsnedders5• 10 years ago

As a counterpoint, freight is already deregulated, and that has been massively successful in much of the EU: especially for container traffic, the market is far more competitive with road than it was twenty years ago.

vertex-four2• 10 years ago

I got shown a graph recently, when arguing for renationalisation of passenger train services in Scotland, that passenger use of the rail network started climbing significantly higher when the current franchise system came into play.

Though the franchise system isn't "liberalisation" - it's just granting near-monopolies over certain routes in most cases. As a result, we have Virgin/Stagecoach providing the only reasonable routes from Scotland to London.

And, of course, the network in England only ever seems to receive investment where it affects Londoners. But we tried to privatise the rail network itself once, and that went very, very badly.

TeMPOraL• 10 years ago

Well, Poland may be a case study, and there the privatization of rail is an utter, ugly mess - and now you never even know who to complain to if someone screws up.

mschuster915• 10 years ago

Please not. The problem is that railway cars, track fees etc. are the same for all operators (buying/renting railway cars may actually be more expensive for smaller operators due to lack of volume), so the only way to save costs (and thus be able to operate at a lower price than incumbents) is saving on employees (aka wage dumping) or safety/maintenance.

Neither is good for society.

smhg2• 10 years ago

I was thinking about this for a second. Specifically about saving on employees.

I guess it is safe to assume on-board jobs don't have a bright future. Those are up for automation.

So maintenance staff remains? But can't that be a separate entity? Just like with cars? That might solve the safety issue too. One has a bad rep? You go to another.

It's just that one public operator doesn't seem to work well either (lots of issues in countries with those too).

jpatokal2• 10 years ago

Yup, which is why airplane safety has gone down the toilet and prices have skyrocketed since that market was liberalised... oh wait, they haven't.

Trains are admittedly more complicated because tracks need maintenance, and it's easy to screw up the operating model (see: UK), but if we can solve this for air traffic control and airports, it shouldn't be too hard for track either

leadingthenet• 10 years ago

As someone living in the UK, I hope that never, ever, happens.

TillE2• 10 years ago

I'd been reading about the mess of privatized rail in the UK for a while, but what really shocked me when I was traveling around Manchester were all the diesel trains. In Germany nearly everything is electric, especially in and around cities.

specialist• 10 years ago

upcoming plan to liberalize rail transport

neoliberalize, aka Freedom Markets™

johannes1234321• 10 years ago

Currently this is mostly the case in Germany. The rail network is accesible for anybody and the subsidary running this has to give all companies the same rates and treatment, whether it is another subsidary of the same corporation or a different private rail company.

For cargo this works quite well. There are many small companies doing transports. This goes from small companies which own one engine which you can hire to pull the cars you hire somewhere else over the network to large companies which work all over Europe. There is tough competition between those companies.

For regional services this works in a way where local administrations call for bids to run specific lines. This works okay'ish and the government-owned company looses more and more of the services (one could argue whether that's good ...) Some of these biding processes fail miserably, like the current round for the commuter trains (S-Bahn) at Nuremberg which went through different court cases already.

For long distance this is complicated as for long distance it is really hard to be profitable unless you are part of a bigger network. The national company operates long-distance without (direct) subventions (well, details of finances are complicated ...) thus there is little requirement to cooperate with private long distance companies. One typical example: Those Locomore tickets are only valid on their trains and there are no combination tickets from regional to locomore trains. The passenger not living close by a station where that private line goes has to get two independent tickets and has the risk that the second ticket is useless when the first train is late and he can't make the connection. Also train operation costs are high (you need an engine, cars and then the fees for the tracks) For a cargo train you can arrange with a customer to make sure you've got a full train etc. with a passenger train you need more than 50%, maybe even more, of the seats to be taken for being profitable this is extremely hard with a single connection ... and for multiple connections investment becomes very big.

kriro2• 10 years ago

I think there's a market for a one route alternative "experience" train where the train isn't only the means to get from A to B but the journey itself provides value. I still vividly remember travelling to a Chaos Communication Congress on a privately operated "hack train". Must have been around 2000. Not the fastest connection but loads of fun :)

carlob5• 10 years ago

I think this is more of a statement to how bad DB is. In Germany traveling with blablacar or mitfahrtgelegenheit is still very very popular, because trains are slow and incredibly expensive. Even if in my own country (Italy) people love to say that everything in Germany is better, but it's incredible to see how much worse trains are, and for 3x the price!

dom0• 10 years ago

Depends. For commuting they aren't bad at all (I've been commuting for a decade now).

mschuster915• 10 years ago

Slow? Okay, we don't have as much high-speed rails as France, but e.g. Hamburg-Munich (775km, once across the whole country) is 5:40h, while traveling by car is ~8h.

Flight may be 1:15h pure flight time, but you have to add 1.5h of public transit time to get to/from the airports, plus ~1h for security and pre-boarding wait times, and luggage costs are enormous. Oh, and the security checks make you feel like a terrorist.

Buses are f...ing cheap, but take ~10-11h.

So, the train is still the fastest and most time-efficient way to travel across big distances. The only problem is that it's expensive as hell, because unlike the regional trains, the ICE trains don't get any public subsidies and have to be profitable on their own.

jmanderley• 10 years ago

But that's the same pretty much everywhere. The Austrian Railjet Vienna - Salzburg, for example, isn't subsidized at all, but still much cheaper than DB. Or check out the prices of the Austrian operator "Westbahn". They are even using brand new Stadtler train sets, not decades old DB cars like Locomore.

melling3• 10 years ago

That seems kind of slow by train. Beijing to Shanghai is 1300km and takes less than 5 hours.

http://www.seat61.com/beijing-to-shanghai-by-train.htm

carlob5• 10 years ago

Slow? Okay, we don't have as much high-speed rails as France, but e.g. Hamburg-Munich (775km, once across the whole country) is 5:40h, while traveling by car is ~8h.

You don't have real high speed at all: 775km is more or less the same as Paris-Marseille and that's 3h20.

akappa• 10 years ago

Well, yes and no.

As you know, the italian train system can be divided in two layers: "Le Frecce", fast trains that only stop in important cities and "Regionali", (relatively) slow trains that stop even in tiny towns. The former are fast, pleasant and reasonably priced (especially the Freccia Rossa, the fastest trains in Europe IIRC); while the latter are extremely cheap thanks to state subsides but the experience offered is awful: perpetually delayed, dirty and overcrowded.

People usually complain about the "Regionali", also because they are used on daily basis by commuters.

riprowan• 10 years ago

perpetually delayed, dirty and overcrowded

The regional service deserves this reputation because it has been neglected for years as Trenitalia built the Frecce but I think if you return to Italy you'll be pleasantly surprised, as Trenitalia has been quietly upgrading the regional trains to newer, double-decked cars (almost 2x capacity) and from personal anecdotal experience the ontime service seems better than it used to be, as well.

Obviously YMMV depending on what region you're in, the time of day, etc. but there's definitely been improvement on the regional front.

morsch4• 10 years ago

From a brief look Trenitalia seems about the same as DB. The express train Milano - Roma is 89 EUR. I think DB would charge something like 100 EUR for that. The travel time (2h55 for ~420 km) is impressive, I'll give you that. I wonder how many stops there are on the way -- not too many I'd wager.

johnchristopher• 10 years ago

That's insane. In Belgium I could buy a `railpass` which is a 76€ piece of paper on which I can write ten different trips from any station in Belgium to any station in Belgium. Which basically means that any train trip in Belgium would cost you a maximum of 7.60€.

carlob5• 10 years ago

Just last week I bought return tickets from Rome to Milan for the days around Christmas on Italo (the only competitor for high speed trains) and I paid under 50 euros return. Also the distance is not 420 km, but closer to 600 (it's 480 km as the bird flies). And regarding stops, you can get one that doesn't stop at all and it's 2h40 IIRC.

rukenshia• 10 years ago

If you take the ICE, definitely not slow. I commuted between Hannover and Berlin for the past weeks and it takes only 1h 40m for each trip. Driving would take close to 3 hours. I'm lucky enough to have a BahnCard 100 paid by my employer, though.

carlob5• 10 years ago

Except Hannover Berlin is more or less the same as Paris Lille. Paris Lille is under 1h and the price never exceeds 35 euros (which means you can sometimes find tickets under 20).

Now compare the prices with the price of everything else in France and Germany and you'll see why I say that trains in Germany are terribly overpriced.

beberlei3• 10 years ago

Imho DB is the best means of transportation in Germany, in my experience only people travelling with DB once every one or two years are complaining about it, because they don't understand how it works.

You cannot compare the standard DB fares with anything competitors offer, because they include an amount of flexibility no one else offers by a long shot.

Even if you only take 2-3 trips per year it already makes sense to get the 25% or 50% discount cards. A massive amount of germans have these cards (see https://infographic.statista.com/normal/infografik_3025_Besi..., over 3 million BC25, 1.4 million BC50 owners).

If you know when exactly you want to travel, which exact train and hour, then you can easily get a 62.5% discount and you are only at ~45 instead of 125€ for the trip, which given the comfort of DB vs all other means of transportation is well worth the price.

I myself prefer to be flexible and have a BC50 which includes 50% discount on every trip. But that means I can take any train on the date of my ticket or even up to 5 days later, leave at any station in between for as long as I want.

My sister had an accident with car share service, which kind of turns me off these services. She now often takes the bus that is much cheaper than DB. But then you have to have someone bring you with a car to the off site locations that bus often stop and it still takes several hours longer than DB for most destinations.

throwaway101292• 10 years ago

Even if you only take 2-3 trips ...

Yeah, and better do not forget to cancel those because the friendly DB automatically prolongs these for another year.

In case you refuse to pay, they send a friendly debt collection service -- Infoscore, which conveniently also acts as a credit rating agency.

If you still refuse to pay, the "independent" law firm Haas & Kollegen, which magically resides in the same building as the "independent" debt collection agency and credit rating agency, will take you to court.

Did I mention that these three entities are totally independent, as required by law?

pluma12• 10 years ago

Even if you only take 2-3 trips per year it already makes sense to get the 25% or 50% discount cards.

I'm not sure how you're calculating that, but when my wife did the math she ended up ditching the 25% card because it would have only been profitable for her if she took at least one trip a week.

I guess you're thinking ICE (inter-city high speed trains) not RB (regional transport)? I guess at >€100 per ride the numbers work out but most "normal people" I know think of ICE as equivalent to travelling by plane, i.e. something you may do for vacations but very much out of the ordinary for regular travel.

in my experience only people travelling with DB once every one or two years are complaining about it

I take a two and a half hour commute roughly twice a week (in addition to a daily tram commute of half an hour or so). There's no direct route and one of the two stations isn't serviced by ICE.

I could take an ICE to the interchange station but that would barely save me any time due to the long transfer wait, so instead I'm travelling by RB or RE.

The trains haven't been replaced in ages (I'd say on average at least one door is out of order on every train I've used). The RBs often don't even have working toilets. Outside periods with extremely light traffic there is generally not enough seating to accommodate all (2nd class) passengers (though 1st class is nearly empty because there's no practical difference between 1st and 2nd class service outside ICEs).

And of course trains are routinely late or delayed. Delayed trains often add insult to injury by being delayed further when they have to wait to be overtaken by an ICE. So because I know I have to switch trains I always plan for an hour longer in case I miss a connection or end up having to switch trains again.

Let's also not forget that unlike with long distance busses, "WiFi" doesn't mean "Free WiFi". There's only WiFi on the ICE and it's decidedly not free (nor significantly better than cellular) and requires you to jump through hoops if you're not already a Telekom customer (which seems anachronistic in the times of Freifunk & co).

I'm very happy that UK's National Express recently started servicing two lines in my region (RE7 and RB48). Their trains are brand new, they waste very little space on first-class seating (which is still enough for the few people travelling first-class on REs and RBs) and they provide wall outlets for charging laptops and mobile devices.

DB's ICE lines may be somewhat laudable (though still disappointing compared to the Thalys) but DB Regio's service is ripe for disruption.

Let's also not forget that DB has a track record of letting stations and infrastructure fall into disrepair to cut costs, especially the smaller stations not serviced by ICEs or ICs (which btw, look about as vintage as Locomore).

bogomipz• 10 years ago

I wish I had known about the this DB BC card earlier this year. I didn't see any mention of this at the DB office I went into.

Can I ask what you pay per year for the BC 50 card? Is it only available to German citizens?

cJ0th• 10 years ago

Prices for long distance trains are mostly okay. It's very rare that you have to pay the incredibly high standard fee when you book in advance.

Prices for short distances are making me angry, though. Here blablacar et al are indeed preferable. I once had to travel a route that was about 80k long regularily. It took me almost 2 hours and I had to pay ~ 20 € when traveling with train. Offerings on blablacar gave me the same route for 5 € and a travel time half as long.

pluma12• 10 years ago

This, exactly. It takes me at least two and half hours, though generally more like three hours (if I don't miss a connection) to travel the same distance that would take me an hour and a half by car. ICE is great if you want to e.g. travel from Cologne to Berlin to Munich, but that's not what the majority of train trips in the nation look like.

Even Flixbus etc offer a better and cheaper experience.

Kankuro• 10 years ago

In France, for a 5:30 hours ride, I pay most of the time 75€, 40€ in off-season, as sometimes as much as 100€. The most painful experience is buying a ticket for Christmas season when everybody is trying to buy at the opening of the sales: a few seconds late and you lose 10€. I once lost dozen of euros when my card was refused. It feels like these riots-like black Friday I sometimes see on tv...

lucb1e3• 10 years ago

mitfahrtgelegenheit

carpooling.

For the non-Germans on this site (I'm Dutch, the word is close enough that I understand it).

dmurray2• 10 years ago

In this case it refers to a specific website, well known to Germans but now taken over by a competitor, that pairs up carpoolers: www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de

LeanderK4• 10 years ago

Well, since pseudo-privatising we decided to stop subsidising the DB while the autobahn is still very heavily subsidised.

linohh4• 10 years ago

I own a Bahncard 100 which is a rail pass for the entire country. Unfortunately due to wtf, I cannot use it on this train. There's still a lot to be done.

sauerbraten• 10 years ago

Your BahnCard 100 is only for DB trains, and their partners like regional transport associations. Not sure why you suspect it to be valid for a competitor's service. And I doubt Locomore will ever partner with DB...

linohh4• 10 years ago

That's not how it works. There's the tariff union TBNE which covers almost every train in the country. I can use non DB trains without a problem (e.g. the HKX) - just not this one (and Thalys).

kriro2• 10 years ago

I was wondering how they crowdfunded this and expected some sort of ticket prepurchase kickstarter. It seems that you can actually loan them money instead (over five years): 1500 Euro: 3,45% (6,9% if you take tickets not cash) 2500 Euro: 3,75% (7,3%) 5000 Euro: 4,15% (8,3%)

Max. of 100k

thatfrenchguy• 10 years ago

Yeah, let's waste energy operate trains from the 1970's (or buses) and pretend it's a good thing because "look it's cheaper and you get organic food inside".

linohh4• 10 years ago

The locomotive is brand new. The only thing missing is regenerative braking in the carriages which DBs long distance carriages also don't have.

skrause• 10 years ago

I doubt modern trains are much more efficient, electric engines have been very efficient for a long time.

morsch4• 10 years ago

What makes you think those carriages are significantly less efficient than those made today? The engines[1] are fairly modern. Plus, they only drive at a leisurely (and more efficient) 200 km/h.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_ES64U2

galfarragem• 10 years ago

The 'idea' is not new, it recalls me Polish trains: old and slow but so cheap that everybody can afford them. Few years ago you could travel 500km for 15€. Despite that, there were still massive discounts (50%) for students and elders. Who cares if the trains are the fast/most comfortable if you can't afford to use them regularly.

user5994461• 10 years ago

Who cares if the trains are the fast/most comfortable if you can't afford to use them regularly.

People who don't need to travel 500km regularly.

dep_b2• 10 years ago

It kind of baffles me that the only long distance trains that are still being done on European scale are prestigious high speed trains (usually connecting Brussels to X) that are much more expensive than plane tickets or anything else really.

I wouldn't mind to take a trip to Paris from Amsterdam in a slower train for 20-30 euro, but this is really impossible unless you spend almost a day piecing badly connecting trains together.

Especially when it's slightly more entertaining with draft beer, coffee, wi-fi and such.

microtonal• 10 years ago

When I travel for work within Germany or just to a neighboring country, I want to get to get from A (which happens to be near Stuttgart) to B as fast as possible. Taking a plane from Stuttgart is even faster, but since climate change is real, I am now trying to avoid flying as much as possible. Hence, Deutsche Bahn. Going by high-speed train is also very comfortable if you reserve seats and do not have to transfer often.

I should also point out that if you book timely, you can often get German train tickets very cheaply at the 'Sparpreis', which starts at 29 Euro. When we had less money, we would often reserve tickets in the minutes after the 'Sparpreis' became available.

tl;dr you can travel cheaply in German by high-speed train. You just have to plan your trip and book tickets timely.

rublev2• 10 years ago

but since climate change is real, I am now trying to avoid flying as much as possible.

Can you go into more details about this?

LeanderK4• 10 years ago

one problem in germany is that we have many high-speed trains but not many high speed tracks. High speed trains are really competitive even when you want to travel from berlin to munich (Just look at the travelling times when VDE8 will be finished). Since pseudo-privatising we neglected our rail infrastructure quite a bit (just look at the frequent complete halts to VD8), the upside was that the DB was forced to run really efficient, but not sustainable.

gsnedders5• 10 years ago

It kind of baffles me that the only long distance trains that are still being done on European scale are prestigious high speed trains (usually connecting Brussels to X) that are much more expensive than plane tickets or anything else really.
I wouldn't mind to take a trip to Paris from Amsterdam in a slower train for 20-30 euro, but this is really impossible unless you spend almost a day piecing badly connecting trains together.

Looking on the SNCF website, the cheapest Thalys (i.e., "prestigious high sped trains") tickets are 35 EUR each way, which seems to require booking about a month or two in advance to get. The cheapest flights are 34 EUR each way, which seemingly similarly requires booking about a month or two in advance. So, uh, it doesn't seem like they're much more expensive than plane tickets—and the cost of getting to/from airports is likely far more than 1 EUR (given travel to/from airports tends to be more expensive than travel to/from city centres).

Obviously dynamic pricing as practiced by both airlines and train operates makes it hard to tell what's generally cheaper, but the fact that on many routes high-speed rail has caused airlines to drop routes due to lack of custom tends to imply they are competitive: if they started yanking up the prices after the airlines had dropped their routes, one would expect the airlines to reintroduce them and take back marketshare.

lucb1e3• 10 years ago

From experience, I can say that even if it isn't cheaper than flying, it's definitely less convenient. Amsterdam and Paris are close and popular so the trains run well, but try Echt (NL) and Meckenheim (GER) by public transport. Or Echt to Modane (FR). As soon as you cross borders it's a nightmare.

The German trains website (db.de) does a surprisingly good job (after recently having a terrible experience with Belgian and, three years ago, French public transport websites) of piecing together connections, but that also means it'll happily tell you go take a bus, e.g.: bus-train-train-bus-train-train.

dep_b2• 10 years ago

Cheapest option AMS - PAR - AMS 4th jan - 11th jan Thalys: 156 euro Transavia: 80 euro

Cheapest option AMS - PAR - AMS 15th mar - 22nd mar Thalys: 64 euro Transavia: 68 euro

I'm actually positively surprised about the second price for Thalys! I always got smacked with the very high prices like the first one and chose a plane every time.

posterboy• 10 years ago

Crowd funding the new word for financed by shareholders.

dmurray2• 10 years ago

Bondholders, according to a very interesting parent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200369

moomin• 10 years ago

I think the bus vs train analysis is missing an important dimension: travelling on the bus is unpleasant. You can't stand, your kids feel sick. The same amount of time on a train is vastly preferable.

LeanderK4• 10 years ago

i regularly travel from karlsruhe to munich and i can't work on the bus, since there is not enough space for my laptop. Working inside the train is pleasant and after christmas every ICE has free wifi (wow, that took forever for them to decide to implement it! Rolling out was rather quick)

pluma12• 10 years ago

More competition might help DB to address some of its problems, but as a commuter one of the most frustrating problems with public transport is the chaotic pricing.

Others have explained why DB's own pricing is a mess, but on a communal level public transport is even more of a mess[0]. You might think getting a "BahnCard 100" (a 100% discount card that costs ~€400/month) might be worth it if you travel a lot but if you routinely travel by train you'll also likely have to rely on public transport at your destination but bus and tram are often not part of the deal (i.e. no discount is applied whatsoever).

I live in Cologne in NRW. If I only moved around within Cologne, I could get a monthly ticket for all tram and bus transport (for ~€100/month) in Cologne from the KVB (the city's privatised transport agency). If I want to go beyond that, I could instead get a monthly ticket for the regional railway from the VRS (the regional privatised transport alliance that includes the KVB).

But although I generally stay within NRW I regularly commute to a city that's not within the boundaries of the VRS (or its parent alliance, the NVR). It's actually part of another alliance, the NWL. So I would need a ticket to move within the VRS region and then another to move within the NWL region.

But there are actually three such alliances in NRW and I need to cross the region of the third alliance to get from one to the other, which is the VRR. So I would need a ticket for the VRS, another for the VRR and then another for NWL.

But that's obviously silly, so there's also the NRW-ticket which covers the regions of all three alliances as a yearly subscription (which works out to ~€300/month).

But of course that's only for NRW (one of the sixteen states/counties in Germany) and only for busses, trams and regional rail. If you want to use the intercity or ICE trains, even within NRW, you still need an extra ticket at the full price. Likewise if you ever need to cross the borders of NRW.

As for the joys of actually using and validating the various tickets you might have to buy in addition to whichever subscription you end up with, that's what the article I linked to is about.

[0] http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/dienstleister/werner-knallhar... (German)

L_Rahman• 10 years ago

And here I thought Americans were the only ones with a chaotic set of transit agencies serving the same region

In all seriousness though, I'm very curious about the structural incentives at each of these places. Presumably, the people who run them care to some degree about customer experience. How then have they built a system that clearly doesn't?

LeanderK4• 10 years ago

the ticketing system is completely decentralised and the alliances did for to improve customer service and ease of use. Without them you would have to buy a different tickets for tramway, underground and regional trains, since they are probably completely different operators.

EDIT: it's really complicated. One ticket for all is not that easy because there are massive pricing differences depending on the needed infrastructure and subsidies.

kogepathic2• 10 years ago

You might think getting a "BahnCard 100" (a 100% discount card that costs ~€400/month) might be worth it if you travel a lot but if you routinely travel by train you'll also likely have to rely on public transport at your destination but bus and tram are often not part of the deal (i.e. no discount is applied whatsoever).

What? BC100 gets you onto every DB train and also all public transportation in Germany.

"Bei der BahnCard 100 ist das City-Ticket automatisch integriert. Die BahnCard 100 gilt in den Geltungsbereichen der teilnehmenden City-Ticket Städten für beliebig viele Fahrten."[0]

[0] https://www.bahn.de/p/view/bahncard/vorteile/cityticket.shtm...

pluma12• 10 years ago

Interesting. The article I linked to suggested that the general conditions for the City Ticket also apply with the BC100 (i.e. only for the destination city when travelling more than 100km).

The page you linked to also is a bit ambiguous about whether the BC100 follows those restrictions of the City Ticket or not. If what you say is true, that's pretty awesome.

limaoscarjuliet• 10 years ago

"Runs entirely on green electricity" - so is Deutsche Bahn at times, as Germany has been reported to produce more renewable electricity than they can consume.

iso-8859-1• 10 years ago

When the weather is nice...

See these graphs: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/news/news-2016/germanys-ele...

Why would Germany sell electricity to the Netherlands but buy it from France?

Because, when the weather is bad, Germany can't produce enough to cover its own needs.

So Germany is still involved in nuclear power.

lenni• 10 years ago

I do the Berlin-Stuttgart train journey regularly to visit my parents and quite like taking the train as it gives me a block of uninterupted time to read, work and just plain relax that I usually take for myself.

So this sounds like an excellent way of making this even more enjoyable. I think I will give this a try next time I'm travelling south.

gravypod• 10 years ago

Aren't all trains crowdfunded? Isn't that what tax is?

mrweasel• 10 years ago

I don't know if this is still a thing in German trains in general, but the main selling point for me would be the fact that it looks like the train has coupes. A coupe is so much nice than a big open carriage.

lh7• 10 years ago

The idea of having "zones" for people with different interests sounds good. Given the sort of amenities on offer and the unusual founding route, not to mention its Eastern endpoint, it would have been more accurate to refer to this as "zones for hipsters with different interests" though. :-)

Piss-taking aside, I think it's nicely representative of a certain "Germanness" trait which is perhaps not so well-known outside the country, where the stereotype of a population of humourless engineers still prevails.

jaclaz2• 10 years ago

AFAIK it is not just Germany trains that are a mess (regarding fares), it is the same all over the world.

What I really hate is that every time I take a train (in Italy) I can be sure that:

1) the lady in front of me payed 30% less than me (OK, she is elderly and some discount may be fine)

2) the guy on my right payed 25% less than me (OK, he is a student, and has one of those cards)

3) the girl on my left has payed 45% less than me (OK, she has a special discount as a woman and booked the ticket in large advance)

4) the guy in businessman suit on the seat on the other side of the aisle has paid anyething between 50%, 80% or 100% less than me (OK, because he is an employee of the railway or of the government)

5) etc.

Simplified, I am the only one that is paying the full fare.

ghaff2• 10 years ago

At least the routes on Amtrak that I take in the US don't seem to have huge variances based on booking ahead. Fares do vary and the prime slots for business travel tend to be pricier. (And the Acela carries a significant premium.)

But it doesn't seem to be like what I've both observed and been told is the case in the UK where last minute/flexible/etc. fares can easily be triple what they are if you book a month or even a couple of weeks ahead of time.

gotofritz• 10 years ago

OK, she is elderly and some discount may be fine

And who reimburses the rail company for those discounts?

the girl on my left has payed 45% less than me (OK, she has a special discount as a woman and booked the ticket in large advance)

"she has a special discount as a woman" - What? I call BS.

"booked the ticket in large advance" - better. And what's stopping you from doing the same?

(OK, because he is an employee of the railway or of the government)

And how many of those there are?

Simplified, I am the only one that is paying the full fare.

Simplified, you are someone who exaggerates to use as an excuse for whinging about non existent unfairness.

vintageseltzer• 10 years ago

Thank you for responding. The parent comment has to be one of the worst HN comments I have ever read.

It is important that people who exaggerate and lie are held accountable for their words.

jaclaz2• 10 years ago

I am obviously (and intentionally) exaggerating it, but the general idea stands.

tiatia• 10 years ago

Weird train rides in Germany?

I guess you could give this a try: http://www.un-verschaemt.de/

nathanbarry• 10 years ago

I love the idea of having a car specifically for children to play. I'd pay extra for my kids (5 and 2) to have a place to play. Just a carpeted car with basic toys like many airports have.

Germany's New Crowdfunded Train

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