Perhaps worth noting that the 9€ ticket was conceived as a subsidy measure to help people cope with the rising gas prices. It's supposed to motivate people to use public transportation more.

"Not available" (canceled, delayed by an hour or more, accidentally skippping your station, detour due to ongoing constructions, ...) is the default for trains anyway. :-/

I guess it's hard to predict if trains will be crowded. Personally, I believe, most stories you read about travelling to Sylt island are jokes.

@Mookuh Or, alternatively, to spend more money on public transport, the expenses of which can then "justify" raising yet more taxes on gas / individual transport.

the catch is that you have to travel with deutsche bahn

@asdfex Have you actually travvelled by train in the last few years, or do you believe the data the DB itself is giving out? The CCC has not long ago clearly shown that the DB statistics are completely detached from reality (hint: A cancelled train counts as "on time"). If you are a commuting, 80% trains on time isn't much. It means if you have to swap trains, you have a 64% chance to be on time for the whole journey. Now imagine if you have to swap trains twice. Also, 80% on time doesn't help when those are the trains that run during the night or in remote places. DB currently is atrocious.

@towe As they should! Gas and cars have been over-subsidized by governments for far too long.

@Polygnome Every day, including long-distance. Colleagues traveling by car have a much higher amount of unexpected delays. Defining on-time as "5 minutes delay after 2 hours journey" is just ridiculous. That's just 4% of the total travel time, I don't even get this precise by foot or bicycle.

@asdfex if you expect trains timetable are acceptably accurate with a threshold of +-5%, you are probably from the 19th century. Welcome to the future!

@EarlGrey It's the only means of transportation where you expect such a tight limit. You won't do that if you travel by car, plane, bike or foot. Sure, connections should work out to not get stranded for hours somewhere, but being ten minutes late after hundreds of kilometer travel should not raise any complaints.

@asfdex I strongly doubt that the majority of the 40'000 trains that run daily in Germany are travelling hundreds of kilometers, but I am quite sure they are often late :D

@asdfex Well, I'm currently commuting almost every day. According to the timetable, I should need about an hour. The DB also gives this time, so I'm not using any connections that DB doesn't themselves advertise. I almost never actually make the route in less than 2 hours, mostly longer. The problem is that 10 minutes delay on the first leg directly translates to 30 minutes delay on the 2nd leg. It gets worse the more legs you have. I'm not travelling hundreds of kilometers, we are talking about a route less than 60km. Compare that to Switzerland, where you actually make the connections.

@user253751 No, quite the opposite. Cars have never been subsidized, and have always been a huge source of both direct tax, as well as indirect money-alike benefits such as much reduced travel times. There's no alternative to individial mobility.

@towe Sounds like a macroeconomic gain to me

@towe Subsidy does not simply mean the government pays for your car. It also means the government pays for your roads, keeps non-car traffic out of your way, spends police time ensuring the smooth flow of car traffic, mandates certain numbers of parking spaces, and so on.

@user253751 The government doesn't pay for that. Ultimately, taxpayers do. Especially in Germany, which has one of the highest tax wedges in the OECD.

The catch: there's no free lunch. I mean, if you're a German citizen, it's ultimately going to be you who pays for this. Either directly, through taxes, or indirectly. The sovereign debt of Germany has surpassed the Maastricht Treaty’s reference value of 60%. It is expected to continue increasing with the recent plans to revise the constitution and boost military spending.

@towe individual mobility is sacred, sure, however it is absolutely inefficent to move >1 ton of material for a person that on average weights at maximum 1/10 of the vehicle. Yes, someone has to move hundreds of kgs of tools/goods for hundreds of kms, but that someone would benefit not sharing the road with hundreds that are not moving hundreds of kgs for hundreds of kms. And in urban dwellings the average speed using individual means of transportation is <25 km/h, not including parking time.

@user253751 I don't know about you, but for me, there is a subtle difference between someone else spending my paycheck, or me spending it.

@user253751 It was an analogy. I don't personally think my comments are in any way less relevant than, say, yours, but I'm sorry if they trigger moderation involvement; that wasn't my intention. Anyway, I rest my case, this is clearly not the right place to carry on with this argument.

@Riwen you seem to have written as if I'd said that car subsidy was a good thing.

@asdfex I expect tight time tolerance from train because it is the only mean of transport that has a rather predictable speed and path. The fact that regional train from DB are much more often late than their swiss or japanese counter part boils down to decades of underinvestments. Since both failure rate and delays correlates with investments on the rail material, I am quite critical on countries underspending, like Germany did in the past 15 years.