this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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The original plan was to make it valid both in France and Germany. Not sure what happened, but frankly the cost argument is ridiculous given how much money is spend on way worse transportation by the government otherwise.
Presumably they want to make them enthusiastic about rail travel, so having to suffer through DB would be counterproductive.
In Germany there is already a 49โฌ ticket for everyone. It was France who did not want it
European passenger rail is nation based, with very little cross-national compatibility. My guess is that DB didn't want to deal with it.
the rail companies can't even bother to create a website to buy tickets all over Europe, so it would have been quite a surprise, if they managed to create a ticket together.
Given that a very similar ticket already exists in Germany, they could have just told the DB staff to accept the French ticket as equivalent.
It's already a money issue within Germany how to distribute finances.. Some of the regional public transport companies are appareantly getting less money and more passengers. This ticket, EU-wide would have been nothing short of a '90s EU-optimism renaissance.
I'm Gen Z, do you have another example of '90s EU optimism?
and maybe not everywhere, but in belgium, i recall an very large optimism about the introduction of euro... Finally, we could travel more than 1,5 hours without having to worry about exchanging currencies. People forgot fast what a mess it all was before the unified coin and the open borders, just to go on holiday to a neighbouring country 150 km away...
Especially with the Dutch around and their insistence on 25 cents and 2 1/2 Gulden coins and 25 Gulden notes and argh. Schilling? 1:7 ratio to the Mark the maths was atrocious. Italy tended to be nice, more or less exactly 1:1000, though of course that was because I was lucky and they didn't inflate the currency between my visits.
I'm sure it's not the same in everyones memories, but I for example recall when I was a kid that some parents and teachers (the knowledge-hungry ones) were borderline crazy about the realisation that an entire encyclopedia of like 40+ big fat books could now fit on one tiny interactive CD-ROM and it being possible to search through it with key words... That's even before it being constantly up to date and you fitting the entire wikipedia catalogue incl. pictures, maps offline on your pocket calculator if you wish so. The general idea was for sure that people would become so much smarter and more efficient with all knowledge in the world at their fingertips (a desktop-pc with a dial-up at best, mind you) and all that at barely any cost at all (while it cost super much to buy a pc compared to todays low end phones or laptops).
Turns out the majority of people spend the majority of their time with super-pocket-calculators playing clickbait wait-for-your-turn-and-watch-ads-or-pay-up-now games over learning new stuff, and fake news spreads a lot easier and faster than real facts. Badum-tish.
https://yt.artemislena.eu/watch?v=CtnoK68M3Zg
So in the same spirit, and because the wall fell and all that, the idea was for sure that people would come together in peace and understanding, because you could easily learn everything about everyone anywhere in the world.
But that can be fixed on the background. To the user it should be transparent. You buy one ticket to travel from Seville to Berlin and the different companies have to split the money. Otherwise is like going to the grocery store and having 20 different ticket, one for each product.
You get 20 different tickets if you go to 20 different supermarkets. Some regional public transport companies are like aldi or kaufland, cheap, abundant, accessible... Some are like edeka or rewe, expensive. They don't all offer the same level of service and that's one of the reasons prices differ... Another is general economic differences, wages differ too. It's just not that easy to streamline it EU-wide if a Bulgarian average paycheck is 861 โฌ and a German one is 2741 โฌ. Too government supported and you get 100's of empty busses driving noone to nowhere. Too much free market and there's no service at all on non-profitable routes. Organising good public transport in a good, financially durable way, isn't as easy as it seems. Tickets like the 49 โฌ are awesome, but also risk off-balancing the public transport finances.
Who said free? You ask for a travel and you are presented with all the different times and prices. You choose one and go on. You don't care about the name of the train. That's it. Centralize the POS as if it was a supermarket and you were buying cereals.
Stuck in the pipeline, for whatever reason. Lots of the surrounding EU regulation also doesn't make sense without having a unified European ticket system as things like "a delay made me miss the connection, provide alternate transport" doesn't apply if you have two tickets.
The situation in Germany is only going to get worse in the next decade, the reason being that they're finally investing money in infrastructure which means lots of construction sites. We should be moving more cargo onto rail but fact of the matter is the rail links are already over capacity as-is. It might come to the point that Hamburg is going to build truck infrastructure at the shunting yard to get trucks off the harbour streets. At least the connection to Scandinavia is sensible, it's been carrying Denmark-length (835m) trains since 2012 and the Swedes are currently fixing their infrastructure. Meanwhile Switzerland is loudly thinking about using Italy as a port because Bavarian-run federal transportation ministers like nothing more than building Autobahnen at the expense of rail. There's a reason why "Hinterland" is not only a technical term, and not a nice one.
There is indeed a euro-express (or something like that) and switzerland has special trains for that, so that their good ones aren't ruined by German rails....