The semi-subsidized Deutschlandticket, valid on all transit that isn't a high-speed or mid-speed long distance train, is 49 EUR/mo, which I assume is less than it costs to keep someone for a day in minimum security jail.
It's a nice subsidy for those of us who were already or were considering paying 60-100/mo for commuter tickets in our regions, but is still too much for a lot of the people who couldn't afford that, much less car ownership, in the first place.
Last year there was a brief period where the same ticket cost 9€/month. It was a success but discontinued for mainly political reasons.
There is a fund however where you subscribe for 9€ and if you get caught riding without a ticket they pay your fine. Unfortunately, the threat of prison makes this idea not sustainable. But it is a nice display of hacker spirit.
That's misleading wording. The political reason for discontinuing was that it was started as a limited-time, limited-cost experiment.
I feel very strongly that states should be able to run limited-time, limited-cost experiment, even big expensive ones like this. That requires that people accept that the experiment ends, and do not expect it to be a new norm. If people expect an experiment to last forever, then it'll be too difficult to agree on what the next experiment may be.
Besides, I feel that it's stupid to think that the terms/rules which were chosen quickly for an experiment happen to be the best ones for the long-term future. If anyone says so, I think that implies that they haven't really studied what happened in the experiment.
While I generally agree with you, I think a lot of anger comes from the amount spent on cars (including for the Dienstwagenprivileg) and roads, versus how much is considered "too expensive" regarding public transport.
edit: Thought I’d add some numbers:
Dienstwagenprivileg (de-facto tax subsidies for company cars that are used privately) 3.1 - 5+ billion Euro [0]
And Dienstwagenprivileg really is a privilege: it's usually only for people whose jobs involve a lot of driving (sales or consulting) or as a perk for managers.
Imagine if DB went fully public again, and was entirely subsidized. So many other social welfare programs exist in Germany, why isn’t transport one of them anymore?
There are lots of smaller programs like Schülertickets, why not just make it universal?
> But the public transport companies take a harder line with serial offenders. They are the ones who are referred for prosecution, regardless of whether or not they've paid the penalty fare.
Worth noting that in Germany the very same companies face 0 legal repercussions for the serial offense of not meeting their duties to the regular person, whether it's DB (the national railway operator), Lufthansa (national airline), or the local public transport systems.
They repeatedly cancel trips without any compensation for ticket holders, and the default stance is that you have to chase them forever with forms sent via snail mail (!) even for the basic refund of the ticket, not even speaking of actual compensation. Or they will go on strike for days or weeks and have very low level of service or complete interruptions and in this case there is 0 recourse for any kind of refund even when a monthly public transport pass was 100+ EUR. Or the plane/train will be hours late costing you further expense, or the train stuck in the field for hours at a time due to malfunctions, they happen on a daily basis with 0 repercussions.
They are literally allowed to repeatedly lie in the information to you during the resolution of such complaints and many times the only recourse is to involve a lawyer. The absolute worst that can happen to them in this situation is to have to fulfil their legal obligation (refund/compensation). There is no concept of anyone on that side being prosecuted for such things.
At least with the new 50EUR Deutschlandticket people will suffer the same but for less money.
I went to catch a cross-country train in Berlin and was surprised to find out that it had unexpectedly left ~30 minutes earlier than planned, something I have never experienced in any mode of transport in any country, ever. I wasn't notified even though DB had my email address from my booking of a seat on that particular train. I had to get a later train and buy new tickets for my connecting Thalys trains at considerable expense.
>You have been able to file the compensation claim online for at least a decade. Since a few years, you can do it with two taps in the app
That isn't giving me back the weeks I loose each year to it. By now I travel a day early because I had 4 out of 4 trains fail on me repeatedly and I still risk getting stuck in the middle of nowhere after the last connecting train left.
> There is compensation for monthly ticket holders, but it is capped at 50% of the ticket price.
Unless they pay an "enhanced ticket price" that is a cheap cop out without consequence.
> All that is very strictly enforced by the ministry.
The ministry should enforce punctuality and not the cheap "trains that don't arrive at all aren't late" version the DB uses in its statistics.
In January this year DB cancelled all ICE trains one day because of ice (in winter, of all times), less than 1h before my departure time. Every other operator (TGV, Swiss SBB, smaller regional ones) was still running so I managed to get a combination of 3 other trains to get home 8h late. I had to mail those forms 3 times because they insisted "the replacement trains I used arrived on time so why am I asking for a refund". Eventually only refunded me the price of the new tickets after I threatened with a lawyer. No compensation for the lower quality of service though (direct ICE vs. 3 lower grade trains), for that I have to actually get a lawyer which costs more than what I can get back.
Last evening Lufthansa cancelled my flight to Florence which was supposed to be tomorrow morning (so less than 48h notice). After almost 2h on multiple calls with them, many of which unexpectedly disconnected, I found out that they can look into options but there is no commitment on when they have to come back to me, and later that I can be rescheduled on a flight 2 days later. The compensation for this? Nobody knows anything, have to file a complaint.
When I had a flight cancelled 1h before takeoff due to strike they scheduled me on a flight with 2 stops the next day. No compensation because it was one of the many strikes affecting Lufthansa.
> You just have to know your rights.
Why do you think there's a market for companies that recover your money from airlines in case of cancelled flights? Because rights mean nothing without power to enforce. If it requires a lawyer and a lot of chasing that costs money and time which you pay. So a lot of people will just give up. As an individual getting money from them is like getting blood from a stone. They increase the friction and delays to the max knowing that the absolute worst case scenario is they give you what you’re owed and nothing more. Best case you give up.
Why is it that a person can go to prison for riding the bus with no ticket (repeatedly), or be prosecuted even if they paid the fine but the company gets to at most do its job?
Why didn't EU261 apply to your flights? They seem like they should have qualified and you would have gotten a few hundred euros in addition to the new flight. There are a number of services which will pursue Lufthansa on your behalf for a part of the compensation you are awarded. Or is Lufthansa somehow exempt from EU261?
For the strike situation they are considered extraordinary circumstances and have a specific carveout that releases the company from the responsibility.
For the regular cancelled flights, I have a long trail of evidence where with Lufthansa call center we got to the point of agreeing on the refund and providing the banking details, and then they went silent. Had to go to one of the companies helpfully doing the same for just 30% commission.
Again, the strongest evidence that it's difficult to recover money from Lufthansa (airlines in general) is that there's a whole cottage industry of companies who exclusively deal with this. No customer would agree to pay 30+% recovery fee if the airlines were forthcoming with fulfilling their legal obligations.
I have filed dozens of these claims online and a few in the app. It's just not true that you have to mail them.
Otherwise, I don't know what to tell you except that it's generally unproductive to mistake one's own bad experience for an objective insight into a system. The ombudsman for rail for one finds the claims management of DB satisfactory - even if they wish that the process was automatic where it can be.
I find it baffling that you counter the actual link to the process as described by the company itself with unsupported words about your experience of doing it in some other way that somehow works. Even taking this at face value, still no word on how that applies to any of the many cases which don't involve the app. Then, even more bafflingly, you shoot down my personal experience and justify it with your own experience. Talk about unproductive and lack of insight.
Am I the only one affected? [0] [1] [2]
What do I do about a paper ticket bought outside of the app? What if I'm a foreigner just incidentally using the service? How about when, as per my example above, I bought tickets to TGV + SBB + regional line to replace the DB one which was cancelled and need a refund on those? Use the app right?
> The ombudsman for rail for one finds the claims management of DB satisfactory
The appeal to (pseudo)authority. Here's why that's not helpful: As per the article the German legal system puts people in jail for taking the bus without a ticket. So you say that's proof the practice is fine.
The effort it takes to have your legal rights respected by these companies is the abuse that you find excuses for.
I didn't think you'd assume that I lie, so I didn't bother doing the googling for you. You're welcome.
Of course you won't find mention of the app process that is only about three years old in your hastily googled article from 2018. One piece of advice: never Google for links to support your point first. First try to find evidence that contradicts you. That's how I know that the ombudsman and pro Bahn approve of the process (if not the frequency in which it is needed)
Notice how your initial claim was "compensation is only possible via snail mail" and is now "people who don't use the website or app can't use the website or app to file a claim".
The important difference is that the latter claim can only strenuously support the implication of incompetence and obstruction.
Just by the way, it has always and is still possible to go to the service center and instantly get compensated. So even when you don't have a bahn.de account you never need to mail anything.
cedilla, from my very fist example I talked about cases where your solution, even if it existed, was completely useless and despite your best efforts to back up your counterpoints you still came up short. And you continued to carry water for a company despite now knowing that there are so many cases that consist of abusing intentionally arcane and archaic systems that create just enough friction to convince the person to drop it. Are telling us that a company which has been using ML (for some definition of that) since years to do predictive maintenance of their trains can't transition from a paper form in snail mail to digital scans and an email address?
Furthermore their mistakes are absolutely not punishable, as confirmed with a lawyer. When they repeatedly make a mistake in the assessment of those paper forms they don't get referred for prosecution despite each mistake costing the customer hundreds of EUR in unrecovered ticket expenses. So when they "mistakenly" assessed 3 times (!!!) that they don't need to give me back hundreds of EUR it can no longer be accidental. That's 10 times more money than an unpaid bus fine (and many, many times more than a few bus tickets) and not only do they do their best to wiggle out of meeting their legal obligation, they are also not pushed at the end of the process. Unlike the poor lady in the article who went to prison for riding the bus without a ticket (10-15EUR in total!).
The excuse that it's not abuse unless all the customers are abused is like saying it's not rape if you just force the tip in. You are absolutely not posting in good faith at this point. I don't know if you just can't get the point, if you can't accept being wrong, or have some hidden agenda, but defending such abuse is inexcusable especially when faced with the evidence that the very same companies who abuse their customers like this have 0 tolerance for being abused by their customers. And Nazi-era remnants of the society and legal system allow a person to go to jail for unpaid bus ticket but completely shield the bus company from any repercussions from unpaid compensations to a person.
He also runs Frag den Staat, a (the) platform for freedom of information requests at the German Open Knowledge Foundation.
He's the brother of the reasonably well known Comedian / Activist / EU-politican Nico Semsrott and somewhat involved in CCC circles (I walked by him at Camp).
The Swedish planka.nu establish in 2001 collect money from members with the goal to pay fines for people evading paying subway fares, mostly as a way to protest against the raising prices.
If there's one thing worse than public transport it's the people who don't pay for it. People trying to slip through the gate behind you and then scream where's the solidarity when you don't allow them.
In Berlin I remember just two "undercover" guys getting on the subway to check tickets, here in Brussels it's a squad of at least a dozen uniformed goons with multiple attack dogs. These groups are easily spotted and there's social media channels where they leak their locations. Sometimes you'll see an entire bus empty cause someone just announced that there's checks at the next stop. Meanwhile the employees of the company just watch the whole thing laughing.
Nobody can't not afford public transport in EU, it's just that they choose to spend their money on something else and then scream poverty when they get caught.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Social tickets often cost more than the allotted money for public transportation they get on welfare: 40,01€ simply doesn't buy a ticket that costs 56€, for example.
Düsseldof and now my home state of Bremen (the smallest city state of germany) have recently asked their state owned public transport company to no longer bring these cases to the police.[1]
Sadly it's federal law so our local government can't change it, but at least this will keep people from going to prison in our small state.
This law is actualy a remnant from Nazi Germany, and the german equivalent of last week tonight also reported on it.[2]
Couldn't they change their AGBs or something to convert this to an "Ordnungswidrigkeit"?
Like, if you're caught without a ticket, you automatically buy a more expensive ticket via invoice or something and if you don't pay for it, then some debt collector will take care of it.
You already agree to buy such an ticket (at the "erhöhtes Beförderungsentgelt" price) but there is no way to avoid a criminal law specifically designed for that situation by just changing the content of a contract.
I 100% agree in principal, but I think there is something psychological about paying even a small amount of money that makes people treat public transit differently (better) than if it it’s entirely free.
Sort of related, I can think of NYC charging $1 for a subway card, you don’t see discarded subway cards on the floor of the stations.
I worked in Berlin for four months and never once bought a train ticket. There were no fair gates. No one else seemed to be buying tickets so I did not buy tickets. Never once was stopped or questioned, and it was the best public transit system I've ever seen. No public transit system in America can hold a candle to how clean, quiet, and orderly Berlin's public transit system is.
Probably you didn't see people buying tickets because they already had them, I buy tickets through the app. It seems absurd to me that you though it was acceptable to use a public transport system for 4 months and not pay for it.
You're part of the reason that everywhere eventually ends up with ticket gates. Because people can't be trusted to do the right thing.
A big part of what makes German society so nice is that it's a culture based around mutual trust. The transit system is a reflection of that, and you eroded it by never buying a ticket.
I thought it was pretty funny. An American goes abroad, abuses the system without the slightest hint of remorse, then complains how America's system is much worse.
I wonder if there's some correlation between that kind of attitude and how the system works...
Sure, I use Aurora on some devices. F-Droid is just a good proxy for libre user-respecting software, and Play Store is a decent indicator that something is full of malware.
So it doesn't really change my original point that "use an app" is not a straightforward universal answer to the complexity. If it were a trustable libre app and you squinted to ignore the table stakes inherent to any mobile computing device, that could be a different story.
_of course_ you can cancel a subscription. Einschreiben, Rückschein, Fristgerecht.
Only if you want to quit during a subscription period (say you went for annual, and after four month you go "nah"), only then you need to show you no longer live there. That's like the physical phone line. when you moved out you can cancel the contract early. if you still live there, you can cancel in the normal subscription period. and of course you can cancel an annual ticket by the end of that subscription period (one year), again: _problemlos_ (no problem)
They are not… nice. I’ve never had to deal with them, but the way some of them treat people makes you wonder how little power it takes to turn some people into mini-dictators.
I’m not taking sides in this matter. We should all pay for the services we use, etc.
I have no doubt this is the case for some of these ticket controllers. The problem however was with the "Turkish and Arabic punks" part, not the "some ticket controllers are assholes and BVG collection practices are terrible".
I agree with you, but many (most?) of the controllers are indeed from that demographic. Of course the language wasn’t the best; unless you like punk >.<
Please don't pretend that North African and Middle Eastern criminal clans do not exist in Germany and in Berlin in particular. Yes they exist and they infiltrate and corrupt various institutions.
The ticket controllers were really the worst for a while, fortunately they fired the previous company and started running their own people. There was one poor guy who got beaten to an inch of his life just because he didn't have a ticket with him. What great advertisement for the city of Berlin.
As a workaround I was buying annual ticket from the ticket machine at the platform, which then printed all 12 tickets in advance... but hell... why every alternative has to be so obnoxious.
You might want to check your online banking portal thoroughly. I stumbled by accident over a semi-hidden place in mine that listed every SEPA Mandat and let me revoke them
Yes this seems racist, but the ticket controllers with an aggressive, violent bully attitude in berlin are a real thing. These are mostly kids of Turkish and Arabic immigrant workers. Nobody in their right mind is arguing that this is a genetic predisposition. The discrimination and lack of opportunities in our country play a major part that these kids wanna be gangsters. But we also cannot ignore the fucked up patriarchal culture they grew up in. On that note you also have to realize that the people migrating from these countries back in the day were mostly workers, not intellectuals. Then of course there is also the idiotic local traffic authority, that put these delinquents in a position of power. In the end I think this is mostly a homemade problem, but we also shouldn't bullshit ourselves out of fear of seeming racist.
The typical everyday racism that is directed against black people in the USA is largely directed against Arab or North African people in Germany. Imagine he had said that black people are incapable of adequately checking tickets.
The people responsible for checking tickets of the passengers. Their culture, patience, and refinement oftentimes is inadequate towards commuters who simply left the electronic card of paper ticket back home.
Is it possible that North Germans who would quite happily submit to angry, sarcastic and rude questioning from another North German as long as he had a badge and a peaked cap, feel that it's below their dignity to be treated in exactly the same way by someone of 'Mediterranean appearance'?
He meant I think that the ticket controllers were often Turkish and Arabic punks. Which bit of that did you not understand? He could have just as easily said they were often northern European punks if they had been. Would that have been better or worse in your opinion? Racism is wrong. Political correctness is just as bad...
It's a nice subsidy for those of us who were already or were considering paying 60-100/mo for commuter tickets in our regions, but is still too much for a lot of the people who couldn't afford that, much less car ownership, in the first place.