In other words: You cannot get a plain old paper ticket without personal information, the ticket is like a cookie which identifies you as a user and thus allows you to be tracked.
Disclaimer: Not a resident of Germany.
While true, something to note is that german train and metro stations, in general, have no ticket barriers. Tickets are only checked by staff on trains, on a (very) random basis for local / metro trains.
I've had months in which my ticket wasn't checked at all while using it every single day.
I don't think I have been checked a single time in the last 2 years.
My experience differs a lot: I go by train (in Germany) rather often and would say that it was more common to be checked than not (i.e. for me the probability of being checked was more than 1/2).
in regional trains you get checked more often (longer distances, less passenger exchange and per-train personal have this as a side effect), but already it's somewhat tricky to have a regional train ticket which is not linked to your name
in public "city" transportation it's semi-random but also there are times & stations where statistically it's most likely to find someone without an ticket and in turn this places/times get checked very frequent and if you are there every day at the specific time-frames you are unlucky and also get checked very frequent. But most times and place combinations do not have this issue and some are close to guaranteed that you don't get checked.
they check the place/time combo they are most likely to find a person without ticket most often
local trains, underground trains, busses and ferries here in Hamburg has no regular ticket checks whatsoever. No checks -> they can't track people via the ticket.
In London meanwhile, you can a weekly PDF statement showing exactly where you were and when! :)
The different providers can differ in what payments they accept and how they send you the ticket. Some also include extra benefits.
According to their website, Mainz, for example seems to sell them in their app and accepts credit card, as well as PayPal payments.
* the default payment method used by 99% of the sellers requires a German bank account
* most sellers request a German credit score (Schufa)
* many apps are not available in the app stores outside of Germany and of course none is available in a FOSS store
Haven't followed it recently, but I have still to see a success story that someone not residing in Germany has actually bought it successfully.
I think the background is:
* Paypal is not very common/popular in Germany so most local transport agencies don't bother
* with SEPA direct debit which is the common payment in Germany you can easily initiate a chargeback after you have already used the ticket. Of course that's fraud, but if you live abroad, the effort to sue you would be tremendous
So in Germany, can you pay your Paypal bills any other way than by credit card? Honest question, when I lived in Germany the last time, Paypal did not exist yet.
I assume you are talking about https://www.bundesbank.de/de/publikationen/berichte/studien/...
> But the same publication says that only a bit over 50% of the population even own a credit card
Because many cashless transactions are done with girocards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girocard
Germans are usually very aware of hidden costs and credit cards are usually more expensive per transaction.
Germans also usually are much less in debt than for example many US citizens - for example the University education costs much much less. Young adults have 1400 Euros (plus!) on their giro account and it is typical to pay from that account.
no SEPA compatible bank account AFIK, that means most EU bank accounts would work
I don't know if they do that anymore?
The closest is now the "Quer-durchs-Land" (~"across the country") ticket which is available for any day of the week and currently costs 44€ for the first person and 7€ each for up to 4 more people travelling on it.
As usual a complete technical disaster.
The 49€ ticket is to be precise not a ticket.
But a regulations stating that transport providers have to provide tickets for the cost of 49€ valid all across Germany (very strongly oversimplified).
This means there are many places selling this ticket which only are the same in where it's valid, how much it costs, and how it can be validate by any arbitrary public train service.
So some providers sell chip plastic cards with a NFC chip in them and some ID+Name+Date printed on it which get shipped to you.
Other provider only sell it through the App using your phones NFC chip or (I think, not sure) QR as fallback.
Similar some might only accept SEPA payment mandates (i.e. implicitly require and EU bank account) and require you to have an German address to ship the card to. Other require SEPA and hand it to you personally not caring about an address in Germany and others might accept Google Pay, Apple Pay or Paypal and are online only.
While this sounds bad, for most German people this is a complete non issue as they just buy it form the same transportation provider they used before using the same payment method they where using before. (The reason this works technically is because there already was a system for validating tickets valid in the transport net of one provider issued by another, most commonly DB long distance tickets also covering public transportation around the time of arrival/departure).
This post doesn't seem to be an official press release, but this confusion seems notable.