Especially if I want to take my kids, I need to get a different rail card for families, and when you add it all up it's a lot more expensive than taking my car.
For some reason, public transport is always priced in a way that makes it really expensive for occassional usage. If you go everday, then an annual pass is a good value.
If you only ride on public transit occasionally, and you have a car, then taking the car is almost always cheaper. It shouldn't be like that.
That probably makes sense. If your goal is to increase ridership / reduce emissions, you want to appeal tho those traveling every day. Each person you convert gives you 500+ trips a year. And of course people are most price sensitive to something they do every day.
On the flip side, if I travel a few times a year, on one hand I am "less important" because capturing my business won't lead to that many trips and on the other I am less likely price conscious. If I do something once a year, I might chose to drive regardless of train cost, just cuz I want to drive. Or, I may want to avoid driving so I am happy to pay the higher ticket cost anyway.
Every sunday hundreds of people drive from all over Austria to visit the zoo in Schönbrunn. They take the car because the train is way too expensive. If taking the train was cheaper then some of those people would take the train.
Yes, for each of those families it's just one trip. But in aggregate it's also a lot of people.
Why is it more important to get one person to use public transport for 500 trips rather than getting 500 people to use public transport for one trip?
OEBB (Austrian Federal Railways, the state train operator) does offer a family railcard ("Vorteilscard Family"), and it's hardly expensive:
"The Vorteilscard Family offers you a particularly inexpensive option to travel together with children. For only €19 a year, up to 4 children under the age of 15 can accompany you for free."
But when I recently planned a trip from Linz to Vienna for our family it would have cost around 120€ for the train (not including tickets for bus or subway to get to/from train station). Driving costs around 40€ for gas (not including parking fees).
It's 184 km one way. German tax authorities assume 30 cents per km (~110 EUR for a round trip), Austrian tax authorities use 42 (~154 EUR for a round trip). Now, the actual marginal cost may be lower if you already have the car, but it's far from obvious once those hidden costs are considered. Especially as you have to actively drive for those 4 hours instead of reading a book, watching a movie, ...
At least for me, one return trip at the reduced rate pays for the price of buying the railcard (which is valid for 12 months).
It's not like one has to sit down with Excel to figure out where the break-even point lies! If I don't make any additional rail journeys in Austria over the next year, I'm still not out of pocket...
If you do the trip 10 times a year then it costs 81€ per trip (37 * 2 + 66 / 10).
So in this case the occasional rider pays 59€ more per trip than the regular rider.
At €1.32/l for gas in Vienna and 10l/100km this trip would cost you €63 in gas alone with an ICE car. This doesn't account for wear and wasted time so it's actually not that unreasonable at all and actually pretty cheap if you're going by yourself. With a family, I agree, it's more expensive. Although I'm starting to see the appeal that traveling by train has with a family, being able to walk around, entertain the kids more easily, etc.
There'll be various reasons why a large family can't take a train, but drastically fewer reasons why a person or a commuter travelling alone cannot (or, a group of friends, or a couple, etc.)
Maybe one day that'll change again, but at least now it helps reduce the amount of pointless traffic on the road.
For older kids there are a lot of discounts, but many of them are only cheap if you use public transport regularly. (eg. rail card family from the ÖBB for 19€ a year, or upper austria regional tickets for school children for 77€ a year, etc.)
One problem is that it's not just train tickets, but you also need tickets for bus/tram/subway, and every city/region has different systems, so for every trip I spend about 15min trying to figure out which tickets to buy.
I'd love to have that $85 full walk-up fare you're getting. I really wish we cared about rail travel here, it's far preferable for me to flying or driving on trips at this distance.
But yes that is amazing value and travel by train is just nicer.
Unstaffed, or actually gone? :)
Last time I drove into Austria from Germany there were no border guards there to actually check anything, but all the traffic calming measures, warning signs and speed restrictions were still there ("cars use left-hand lane, larger/freight vehicles right hand lane").
As one might expect from Homo sapiens behind the wheel, the frantic changing of lanes by vehicles approaching the (unmanned) checkpoint caused an enormous queue and resulting delay almost as bad as if there had been border guards actually checking every single vehicle.
Locals avoid it whenever possible, even thought this is the most direct way for many connections.
Avoid taking a bus over that border, and if you do don't panic when they enter with dogs and machine guns and expect a 2 hour delay
Cost may be a bit higher though. You’re liable to burn through 30ish liters of fuel at a price of around €50.
I'm not here enough (and not travelling around enough) to be interested in the Klimaticket, but here's how public transport vs car stacks up:
Innsbruck to Vienna is 476km (~300mi) by road.
It takes about 5 hours to drive, assuming no delays. The way the world is right now, there will certainly be delays.
On the fastest route you exit Austria just after Kufstein and enter Germany at Kiefersfelden, drive through Germany on the A93, then on the A8 towards Salzburg, then cross back into Austria.
Pre-2015 you'd typically have crossed both those international borders at standard motorway speed(!), but since the refugee crisis, and even more since Covid, it's checkpoints (=delays) galore.
By train the journey is scheduled at ~4h15m. The train also enters Germany but doesn't stop there, so no border checks.
A standard ("2nd class"/economy) walk-up train fare is €74 ($85), but if you buy an annual railcard for €66 ($76) that's halved, so €37 ($43). This is a completely flexible ticket valid on any service that day, so if you are late (or early) you just get on the next train, and there's basically one every hour pretty much throughout the day. The railcard pays for itself in the first return trip.
Maybe it's just me, but €37 for a 300mi journey, with a completely flexible ticket, just seems like amazing value.