That was a time limited earlier ticket. "The tickets were valid for June, July, or August 2022. The offer aimed at reducing energy use amid the 2021–2022 global energy crisis." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-Euro-Ticket

It influenced the idea to come up with a permanent ticket: the "Deutschlandticket".

The Deutschlandticket costs max 49 Euros (next year it will cost 58€ per month) and is valid for one month for mostly all local&regional public transport systems in the whole of Germany.

Companies often support employees by paying some of the costs. Then it typically costs 34.30 € per month.

Here in my home city already 94% of the 213000 pupils use the Deutschlandticket for 0 € per month. Every pupil has free access to all of the country's local&regional public transport system... I find that kind of mind-blowing.

We've had this since the 1990s for higher education students. One of the known effects is that students who got it, used the public transport systems more often after wards as they were more familiar with it. I would not be surprised if Germany has a simmilar effect. The problem with these effect is they far outgrow the attention span of polititians as they take years to come to full force.

Most students now get the nationwide ticket for effectively about 30€/month.

So for students in my region this was never free and still isn't, you are forced to pay for it and can't opt out: https://www.studentenwerk-leipzig.de/mobilitaet/semestertick...

> Studierende der sieben Leipziger Hochschulen im Zuständigkeitsbereich des Studentenwerkes Leipzig zahlen den Beitrag von 176,40 Euro verpflichtend mit der Immatrikulation bzw. Rückmeldung zum Wintersemester 2024/25.

I think there was a provision of opting out if you needed a regular public transport ticket anyway to get to the uni (because you lived too far outside) but that varies by uni as well.

But hey, germany could never really decide, are they living in an authoritarian, left or right utopian la-la-land or in a free country. For some time the american influence was huge, but i fear, the influence will diminish and the pendulum swings again.

So students basically never have to pay for the public transportation which is really awesome.

EDIT: by public transportation I mean whatever is included in the D-Ticket (no Intercity or similar types of trains).

N.b.: mk89 is technically not quite correct, it wasn't free (nothing in life is). It's usually bundled with the tuition/enrollment fee.

Implementation details differed per University, but for us the fee (80 or 100€, can't recall) was socialized across all students and payed together with the tuition fee; opting out was not possible (with some exceptions, like disabilities). The money went from the University administration to the AStA - the "general students council" (the executive section of the elected student self-government). The AStA then negotiated with the local public transport company/companies as well as with the Deutsche Bahn (e.g. to get access to certain inter-regional train connections - we still have cooperations with 3 or 4 nearby universities, and students somehow need to get there). Those negotiations can be a royal pita, and often the students were in a weak position.

Source: I was in the AStA (~12 people), but not involved with that task.

I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization.

The DB Navigator is so terrible that I try to book the German leg of my international travels from one of the other countries apps whenever possible.

For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.

> For a counter example look at the French SNCF Connect app. It is not perfect but it is a pretty workable solution.

I am extremely surprised that you would write this. The SNCF Connect app has a lot of problems. Just for starters, it can't cope with any journey with more than 2 changes. SNCF shut down there international ticket sales computer system - because it was too old. They no longer sell any international tickets, unless it's on a train actually run by SNCF.

The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required.

I booked ICE trains run by Deutsche Bahn via SNCF successfully in the past, the last time three days ago. I had them even send me Deutsche Bahn paper tickets for no additional cost. (Not because I wanted them in paper, but because DB insists on their app or paper if it is not an international train)

"The DB App has train services for the whole of Europe. It can plan a journey from Oslo to Sofia if required."

You can plan that in DB Navigator just fine, but have you ever managed to successfully book such a journey. I admit that my attempts were always in the east-west direction, but I can confidently say that the DB Navigator app bails at the last step of the funnel for these journeys every time, when I can book the same trains via SNCF Connect just fine.

What I love about SNCF connect is that it shows me exactly if a train has free seats and is bookable in the inital step, where DB-Navigator lets me happily compose a whole itinerary only to tell me in the last step before payment one of the trains is booked out. Then I have start the whole process from the beginning, manually steering DB-Navigator to avoid the trains I now know are booked out but DB-Navigator still pretends were available.

But these trains are a special case; in other cases DB is clearly far more pleasant.

In the SNCF app I have this information right away, that is what makes the difference for me.

But even the basic UX is terrible. The most blatant example of this is the choice to make the first text input on the search the target station. If you do limit yourself to a single text input as the entry point to the search, I see the intuition. but the result is that they are the only transit search mask I know where I have to first type where I'm going, and then where I'm coming from. I hate it.

This is just your preference and not terrible UX. In fact I find this the more intuitive way.

I would say this is a pretty familiar and useful pattern in general: Necessary and mandatory info first, optional data which has sensible defaults later.

That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.

> The DB Navigator is so terrible

It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.

Regardless of whether it is digitized or not, regional trains suck. To pay on the train, I think I was forced to use cash.

Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email. Or was it snail mail? I didn't attempt it, I just saw that my train was delayed for hours with no explanation for what can I do about it, realized I'm missing my connection and then booked a plane ticket and got home faster than if I had traveled by rail without any delays. 10/10, will fly whenever possible from now on.

> Further, the process for getting refunds when you miss a connection requires one to fill in forms on paper and scan them in and then send in via email.

I can do that in the DB app.

Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.

Yeah, it's in the app.

> Paying before just isn't always practical, but I understand that such limitations are often a non-issue for locals.

That's how it works. Typical here for local trains: there are no barriers in train and bus stations. One can just enter the train and bus without any ticket check. But you have to make sure that you have a ticket. The local trains have no installation to buy a ticket anymore. Typically one would buy them online or have a subscription ticket. How does the system make sure that people pay and don't game the system? There are random checks.

If you want a ticket, buy it before entering a train. Train stations have either ticket systems or a ticket office. But most people by now do it online either per website or app.

For long-distance trains I would always book in advance (it's often also cheaper) and book a seat, too.

That's how it works in Germany. Everywhere else I just swipe my mobile and I am done.

In a long distance train I check in on my booked seat via the app. That's it. No additional ticket check.

Why are you bringing the same argument back up again?

Have you considered that people who travel through your country will not install another app on their phone? I do not need another quarter of a gigabyte app to pay for something that could've been paid for via VISA or Mastercard. Oh wait, I did install the app. And it asked me to use a paypal account. I do not carry my papyal credentials with me.

I have never gotten on long distance trains and expected to pay on them, not what I am arguing about.

And when I mean that the app was not an option, I mean that in our case, we couldn't use the app to submit a return. I was not the one submitting those forms, I was too lazy. The people who did told me the app did not work for their case. Given that you've told me 2x that "you can just do it in the app", what else can I say besides the fact that when tried, it did not work? Are you dismissing the lived experience of the person you are talking to? Why?

All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?

The DB App has this option, now. That's all. If this information does not help you, there are other readers here, too.

> All of that notwithstanding, why not decrease the friction from needing to use an app (phone needs to be supported, charged and have an internet connection) and instead use contactless payment terminals?

You can buy with credit cards (and a few other options) using the usual payment terminals. Again, you usually have to pay outside of the train. The terminals are at the train station.

That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now.

I did a more complicated trip with multiple legs. Booked via SNCF, bc DB-Navigator would not let me book some of the border crossing legs, I tried. The only leg that required a paper ticket was in Germany. In 2023, not last century.

SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.

With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.

For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.

You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.

That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.

They also have an extensive web-based ticket shop.

You don't need to print PDF tickets. One can also show a PDF ticket on an electronic device, without printing it. I used the DB ticket PDFs for several years, without printing it. Nowadays a load the long-distance train tickets onto the phone and have it in the DB app, I have also a PDF version via mail.

> For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.

I have that here also in my city. The reality: most people have a subscription, that's the by far dominant model. Simpler and less tracking needed.

> It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.

Larger cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, ... are central for large traffic regions. For example the traffic region here in Hamburg serves roughly 3.7 million people.

> That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.

We now have a Germany-wide affordable subscription-based ticket for local&regional public transport. That's my understanding of public transport gone digital, nation-wide. The basics were operational after only a few months of planning.

I want to buy a ticket every now and then. I want that process to be straight forward: cash money for one-time ticket. I don't want your app on my phone, I don't want a subscription, and I don't want to be tracked.

Paper based offline processes forever, please.

Exactly, no one wants that, no one needs that, but you should recognize that most people don't want to handle cash money either, nowadays.

Just let me swipe my card or phone and done.

If you insist on privacy we should be able to use a pre-paid card or temporary credit card (like Revolut), but I have not tried that and I doubt it works.

How is that an alternative?

It is for that reason I'd love it. Accessible, universal, sustainable, resilient technology!

I once got stuck in Nuremberg overnight. The ticket office was open all night and an official looked up all my options from memory and timetable books and wrote me a diagram with pen and paper that perfectly showed me how to get to my destination. I'll never forget that helpful clerk.

Not saying you can't have your apps, but systems that lose touch with reality and human involvement are part of the emerging problem.

For my mind the smartest ticket technology I ever saw was Hungarian and used on the Budapest transit system in the 1980s - some devious discrete mathematics that coded the journey stops, used status, and allowed routes all in a matrix of hole punches on a small paper ticket. The punches (that you had to use when getting on trains, buses and trams) were purely mechanical, and so was the validating machine used by inspectors/conductors to see if you had punched your ticket. Simply genius.

I think you're giving a little too much credit. In the nearby Czech Republic we had a system where there'd be eight (or perhaps 10?) places for a hole. Your ticket would get marked with a combination specific to the vehicle.

They'd periodically change which vehicle has what holes. With 8 holes, 256 tickets would be enough to give you a valid ticket for any vehicle. With 10 holes, 1024 tickets. I think some people carried around all the tickets to be able to ride for free. Others kept tickets with small number of holes for later reuse in a vehicle which had a superset of those. Good times!

I find it very hard to believe the Hungarians has something smarter than that, but would love to be proven wrong!

While DB Navigator does leave something to be desired the sheer width/breadth of the DB booking system makes it my go-to choice for international train travel. They're also quite forthcoming in paying back 25% to 50% of the ticket price when delayed more than 1 or 2 hours which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips - from Sweden to the Netherlands - which I make about every other month. I can get prices directly without having to go through some silly booking agency, I can book tickets, reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want (something which doesn't always work). They did have some problems about a year ago when they moved to the 'new' DB Navigator and the price I was quoted suddenly quadrupled, this turned out to be an omission in the booking system which I submitted a bug report for. They fixed the problem and prices returned to where they should be (about 5% higher than before the change, they used the opportunity to raise prices...).

No, the problem with DB is not to be found in their app or the booking system, those are at least on par and often better than their foreign equivalents. The problem lies in the unreliability of the long distance network, especially the ICE service which often sees long delays due to a lack of personnel, defective equipment, maintenance work, etc. Regional services tend to be more reliable, in part due to the higher frequency which makes it less of a problem if a single train does not run. All in all I can live with the problems and have switched over to rail travel whenever I can in Europe. The advantages - more space, more comfort, no security theatre, the ability to hack away while travelling, usually lower prices, I can take as much luggage as I can carry (which is a lot) - outweigh the disadvantages - longer travel times, need to change trains, delays which compound due to missing connections.

There is nothing forthcoming about that, they are required to to that by regulations. No bonus points for DB here whatsoever.

which is a frequent occurrence on the longer trips

That is something we can agree upon.

reserve seats and sometimes actually choose which seats I want

SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.

The way they implemented this process makes it easy and quick to get compensation while other carriers - who are supposed to follow the same rules - make it quite a bit harder to get compensated.

> SNCF-Connects lets you specify the exact seat configuration. You can choose single, double (window or not), quadruple (next to each other or face-to-face). In addition to that you can express your preference for family area and if you do not want to sit facing against the driving direction.

You can do the same on bahn.de or in DB Navigator (which is mostly equivalent to a canned version of the site plus a few extras). Not all trains allow seat selection, sometimes seats are assigned automatically. Other trains - e.g. Dutch Intercity trains - do not offer reservation at all. The Swedish/Danish Öresundståg (a service running mostly in the south and west of Sweden) theoretically allows reservation but this hardy ever works, at least when booking through DB. Do mind that I use DB to book trips crossing several countries using different operators, in this case SJ (Swedish state railway), Öresundståget, DSB (Danish state railway), DB, Eurobahn and NS (Dutch state railway). All in a single booking with a single payment and a single point of contact using a single ticket.

For the last compensation I tried to get it took Deutsche Bahn 15 days to send an automated acknowledgement that they had received my request. I took another 20 days until they processed it.

I would not call that quick, but was it easy? Here is the procedure for the form translated from their site:

Procedure in the digital application in the customer account:

To do this, first select the main ticket for your journey in your customer account and start the online application.

If you had no other disruptions (e.g. delay), enter "Delay of less than 60 minutes". In the next step, a new message box will appear with the following sentence: "I had additional expenses due to the delay | I was unable to use my reservation". Click on the appropriate box and follow the next steps.

Alternatively, you can also request a refund of the reservation fee in writing (informally). Please send your request to the following address:

DB Dialog GmbH Passenger Rights Service Center 60647 Frankfurt am Main Germany

Needless to say that the form had me fill in a lot of useless stuff they either don't need to know or should know already. And of course you can send paper...

1: I'm delayed by more than 20 minutes somewhere along the trip upon which a new section 'request compensation' appears in the travel schedule.

2: If upon arrival I'm delayed by more than 60/120 minutes I select that option or log in to bahn.de where I select the option from the relevant itinerary.

3: it asks me when I arrived, if this ends up being more than 60/120 minutes later than the intended arrival time it asks me if I was able to use the booking for the whole trip or whether I needed to arrange alternative transport. It also asks me whether I had extra expenses like a hotel, in the latter case it tells you to submit proof of payment - a hotel bill, a taxi bill - so they can reimburse those costs. I have never done this but my daughter has had 4 hotel stays paid by DB by now. Proof can be submitted digitally, i.e. a photo of the receipts.

4: I need to fill in the details on how I want to be reimbursed - voucher or bank transaction. I always select bank transaction and fill in my bank details (IBAN - a single bank account number which works in most of Europe).

5: I confirm the submission, get a receipt via mail and one via snail mail a few days later. It usually takes about a week or two for the money to appear in my bank account, the quickest it has ever been was 5 days.

I don't consider this to be a bad process, it works and can be completed in a few minutes at most. Yes, you can send in paper as well - this is Germany we're talking about, they love paperwork - but I've never bothered with that. I do get all those confirmations via snail mail but those don't bother me, I can watch my bank account to see when the reimbursement has been completed. I have never had any problems getting reimbursed, they always paid.

You can do all that in the DB app. You can manually select which seats you want or just say the types of seats you want (e.g. compartment or open area, isle or window, table or no table, quiet area or not, family area etc).

SNCF Connect, on the other hand, not only had a terrible UX, but also crashed randomly, forcing me to use third-party apps to buy SNCF tickets.

bahn.de is actually one of the more decent websites in my opinion (definitely better than most rail sites I have encountered).

That said, the biggest problem with rail in Europe atm, is the lack of an integrated ticketing system. Going between places by train is a so much nicer experience than taking the plane, but the ticketing experience is such a mess. As others have pointed out, on SNCF you can't find any international connections any longer (IIRC SJ.se in Sweden still shows connections to Norway and Denmark), on Bahn.de you can find the connections, but can't actually see a price or book a ticket (you are told to go into a station). Train travel in Europe could be a surely awesome otherwise.

There should also be a unified system for passengers to claim their money back if their train is delayed.

In any case you will have to start from scratch, which is in my opinion the worst UX.

It is good that the app allows to research all theoretically possible connections, but I want the info if I can practically book a connection right there in the process and not just at the end. The SNCF-Connect app shows that this is possible, and even possible for Deutsche Bahn trains.

I use the app and bahn.de and things are generally pretty easy and just work. I haven't used paper in a while, recently once because my phone battery ran out, but that's it. Finding connections, adjusting options like transfer time, where you want to transfer, buying tickets, checking in through the app, getting notifications about changing trains, and even recently some things I never did like getting an invoice for my employer are all a breeze. It fails rarely and is in general slick. Recently I bought tickets through Hungarian railways and this was a pain in the ass.

The one annoyance I have is buying regional tickets, where you have to buy them one at a time which can be a hassle if you travel with e.g. three people and you want to buy tickets for all of them.

The €9 ticket was a 3 month temporary offer, which was not originally intended to continue permanently at all.

> I LOVE the German transit system (although Denmark wins in cleanliness). However, Germany is a bit predatory with this new system. You can ONLY purchase this ticket as a subscription model. If you’re a tourist, you must cancel before the 10th of the month or you get auto rebilled.

The ticket is subsidised by the German government(beyond the amount that all rail infrastructure and most services are subsidised) for the purpose what is covered in the article - encouraging permanent modal shift of regular travellers(primarily commuters) from road to rail. If you're a tourist, it's not meant for you. Sorry.

The idea is to push people to use the train, but a train isn't an alternative if it takes 9 hours compared to the 2 hour flight.

And your 2 hour flight easily goes to 4-5 hours if you add the security theatre and the extra overhead that transport to/from the airport entails. They are far outside the city whereas central stations are usually in the city center.

Tourist&foreigners can use the Deutschlandticket, too.

But: it's a monthly subscription automatically renewing every month, so one has to cancel it early enough when planning to leave the country. You'll also typically need a smartphone for the ticket.

"Downloading the Deutschlandticket.de app from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store is only possible in certain countries." (ikr, it's THE problem)

What? How? I have the ticket and despite that I never use any regional train because they're generally awful. (Local busses and trams on the other hand work pretty well)

You can buy for a single month when booking through the right company. "mo.pal" is a good one, for example. However, I agree that it is a bit predatory.

I guess it's all relative. If you come to rely on an excellent and omnipresent rail service for many years as a society, the impacts are quite big when it stops working well. If the service itself is built assuming reliability, where transferring between trains is common, then issues can get substantially amplified if that choreography gets somewhat disrupted.

I have family in Germany and they never go by train but tell me regularly about how bad the train has become. They have literally not been in one for 15+ years. But they watch the news every day.

even if your family has no justifiable basis for believing what they do about DB, they happen to be correct by luck.

https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2023/en/combined-management-re...

right now if you want to go between two cities you always have to plan on missing your connection.

I feel most know about Japan's shinkansen being run well.

For those who don't, the average delay is 1.1 minutes on average.

For comparison, the DB long distance trains are considered on time if they're less than 6 minutes late, and still only 64% are considered on time.

They have dedicated tracks. In Germany all train lines (freight, local trains, long-distance trains) share the same tracks and especially at different speeds this causes delays and problems.

Building new track or even adding more lanes is extremly difficult because of NIMBY's and from 1995 to 2005 switches and extra lanes for overtaking where build back to save costs.

Additionally signalling is in large parts still very labour intensive and smaller tracks are often still running with technology from the early 20th century and late 19th century.

So the problem Deutsche Bahn has to solve is quite a bit harder than shinkansen.

And frankly, states are already giving up their representation in the current system. If you're not a swing state, you're irrelevant. If you live in a populated state, you have a second-class vote.

If the USA had a modern voting system and anyone proposed the current pile of junk, they would be laughed out of the room.

You’re talking about presidential elections, which are a tiny slice of the picture. Wyoming has 2 senators and so does California. That’s huge for Wyoming.

> It was a valid debate back when travelling to the capitol took months by horse. Nowadays everyone uses services from other states on a daily basis, and possibly work in another state (with WFH) on a daily basis. It's pretty darn clear that the USA simply could not exist as a bunch of separate states anymore.

None of this is relevant because crossing states to work has been a thing since the founding of the country. The only meaningful difference between the founding and now is the massive expansion of the duties of the federal government

Obviously not to the same degree.

The thing is if your business is multi-state, which is almost all of them, you need to comply to the lowest common denominator.

So no, states don't really have much of any autonomy. Companies these days are globalized and multi-national, let alone multi-state. That ship sailed.

> their rights

You talk about states as if they are people. But they are not. States are a fiction invented by people (and let's be honest, by rich and powerful people), and so they can be torn down by people (likely not the rich and powerful).

"State representation" and "states' rights" are not compelling to most people, other than via some vague appeal to "isn't it great that New Mexico can do one thing and Maine can do something else?", which by itself does not require "state representation" or the current ideas of "states' rights".

Your post of “bUt thEYre nOt pEOple” is pointless. When people talk about the rights of governments nobody is saying that the government is a person.

There's no reason for smaller states to get less money per capita for schools, or less money per mile for US highways, or less money per million dollars of damage from a natural disaster. And indeed, they do not, because we have historically believed in fairness.

However, the idea that the 300k residents of Wyoming should be able to exert outsize power of regulatory decisions just because "they are a state" is anti-democratic. We put the things we don't want majoritarian decisions on into the constitution; the rest is up for a vote, and a handful of people shouldn't be able to veto the decision of the many just because they happen to be clustered in one place.

But yes, there was a lot of car-centric buildup (and maybe even some new cities??) since then.

Considering how the wasteful cars / trucks / planes are on their way out in a short time frame (decades), while buses / rail / barges are much less so,

I expect that transition to happen naturally as economic pressures make the position favoring the minority able to still afford cars / trucks / planes as less and less politically tenable.

Like, focus on public transport won't work. Because in some tiny towns of 30k people living there, there is never a bus around so why care? Like... dude. In Hamburg, we have subway stations that move more people in minutes than people live in your town. Yes, it may not work on your case. Your case is however a side note. It needs consideration, but not focus.

Or electric vehicles. There are interesting questions about electric vehicles in uncontrolled situations, emergency services and long-distance situations. As well as regions without a good charging infrastructure. Yes. These are problematic. Except, most likely, more unique cars drive past my window in an hour on a workday than exist in that tiny town. Just keep your ICE car for the trip to spain you never take by car, but we should optimize the vehicles in cities. Again, it needs consideration, but not focus.

Why do you always think that you need to reinvent a tried and true solutions that have been proven to work across the world?

2. As the unpopulated bits necessarily don't have many people or things to do in them, the cost of subsidising a public transit ticket in those places is necessarily small.

with much of the population in a few denser areas, where public transport would make a lot of sense.

Do any states have something equivalent to this?

I don't get your point.

On the density front, NYC is famously high density, and yet so far as I can tell a monthly pass for just there is double the raised price this ticket will be next year: https://new.mta.info/document/118601

Yes, NYC has a dense population, and yes, it also has the best public transit in the country.

One thing adults often also do, and which you just did by continuing to ignore the point, is treat arguments as soldiers.

But yes, I do wish California did better. People are used to bad transit, and have never visited Tokyo or even NYC, so expectations are low.

Just in case this is helpful to someone, you can buy the ticket from one of those different transport organizations you mentioned and avoid that time limit to cancel. The one to use for that is https://www.mopla.solutions/, it's a simple app (alternatively web site) that worked really well for me (no affiliation).

I guess my frame of reference isn't average, given I live in Switzerland.

Edit: the 49-euro ticket is great though!

(I've also been to the USA, and (IMO) Amtrak makes the UK look good).

Very disappointing! How is it so expensive?!

I like the idea of long distance train traveling, as one can get off and back on later (check the fine print of your ticket though). Apparently, that's not customary however and earned me an interview by a TSA agent (a very polite fellow, odd as it may sound) who approached me (with a local Sheriff in tow) at a scheduled stop.

(OTOH, I've also had one case where it was cheaper to take the ferry and trains back from the UK to Berlin than fly, presumably because of massive demand as that was the day Stansted airport was closed by 1cm of snow and I had an 8 hour queue for a replacement flight that was itself also cancelled).

End of term, Aberystwyth to Birmingham trains were regularly terminated on route at Wolverhampton.

Loose connections generally worked.

Even Edinburgh-London is slow! It's a similar distance than munich-berlin, a train I often take. In germany these are sleek, clean trains that take just over 3 hours, with only one or two stops with the sprinter. The train in the UK takes around 5 hours, significantly longer. I can do 3 hours on a friday evening work and arrive not too late to then meet friends for drinks, you can't do that with 5 hours.

And not only ICE, it's the same experience with regional trains. I used to live in Baden-Württemberg and took a lot of regional trains. I didn't think I would miss it with the delays from the new central station that they've been building for what feels like forever but now I do.

There are many things that the UK does better than Germany but trains they manage to do even worse (or maybe its not that bad?)

The trains are better in the UK than in Germany

Would have been bearable if they would be at least fast, but they are not

Germany’s system gets a lot of hate but it still in the top ~8 or so.

As a Swiss person you want appreciate German tax rates that subsidize that 49-euro tickets. The money has always got to come from somewhere.

what bugs me the most is that i can only book it for a specific calendar month. that is _so_ stupid ...

Sure, if you live in a larger city and you never leave… I lived in Munich for years and never needed a car, just comfortable shoes, a bike and occasionally a transport ticket.

Try to get to a smaller town or village, you are lucky if you only spend twice as much time getting there as with a car.

The trains get randomly cancelled, delay is basically guaranteed, the workers go on strikes relatively frequently, so you can never rely on trains working for anything remotely important.

Pro tip: some websites offer to start the subscription later in the month and you only pay for those days. So if, for example, you were to attend a certain hacker conference in Hamburg at the end of December, you could buy the ticket for the last 5 days of the month for 49/31*5 euro. Just have to cancel before 10th of December so that it doesn't renew. ("HVV Switch" App)

Just had to remember to cancel.

No, you could never use it on IC or ICEs

The subscription model is intentional - this isn't meant to help tourists or to be bought when you need it, it's meant to make sure people have already pre-paid the cost when making a decision whether to take a train or a car (by being cheap enough that people subscribe even if they don't use it all the time).