I rode that train (Munich to Berlin) after I got stranded in Munich during the 2014 Bardarbunga, Iceland volcano eruption. It was kind of slow for an ICE at the time, and quite expensive (IIRC like 150 EUR in second class).
It was one of the nicest train rides I've ever taken though - you got to see so much of Germany. The onboard restaurant was awesome.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that. Seems like it's 3h 55m now; when I did it was at least six hours, I think.
I hope you don't miss out on seeing the incredibly scenic Bavarian landscapes and villages. I could do without looking at the mostly industrial landscape further up north though.
Yeah so the line from Munich to Berlin is new. There aren't any industrial landscapes as such on the direct way, so I kinda wonder what way via ICE you ended up taking ;D
For ICE trains, if you buy within one week for that distance you pay 120-150E. But if you buy 2 weeks or more ahead of time there are steep discounts. Prime time likely 80E, I did similar distance for midnight or the 4-5am trains for 30-60E.
I thought train systems were heavily subsidized by the state across Europe. Why are tickets so expensive? The distance isn't far at all, by American standards I'd expect to pay roughly $20-30 for a train ticket across that distance. 150 EUR you should be able to fly for that price.
German/UK/French trains are less subsidized than in the U.S. That is to say, the government subsidizes the capital costs, but not the operating costs. 150 euro is not expensive for that distance. That's almost as long as DC to Boston, which is a $200+ Amtrak ticket (Northeast Regional, not even Acela) during business hours on a weekday.
The systems in Germany, Switzerland and Austria are only cheap if you get a discount card or book tickets ahead of time. Once you have a discount card they are very cheap though.
Taking the train between major cities is often more expensive than flying in Europe. People choose the train because it's comfortable and convenient, not because it's cheap.
Also 150 EUR is a full price ticket. If you book a few weeks in advance, and are willing to take the 'slow' train you can probably get a ticket around 30 EUR.
The question is Does it make money? Every high speed rail system in the world I'm aware of loses money hand over fist. Buses and airplanes have obviated most of these systems.
Yes. Regular ticket prices for trains are horrible expensive in Germany. You can pay a yearly fee (called Bahncard) to get 25% (62€) or 50% (255€) off. There is also a flatrate for everything called Bahncard 100 (4.270€)
It's difficult. They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company. They probably want to make some profit where it's possible. They need to invest a lot of money in the coming years because their infrastructure is crumbling and running on attrition.
However the price for a certain track depends on a lot of things and this new high-speed track has lot's of buisness customers that avoid a flight this way - so it's priced higher.
It's a complicated system with lot's of subsidies, subcontractors and so on. There is a price to pay for using the track to a different company that runs the train...
Another problem is that freight train traffic is even more expensive and they simply forgot to invest in the system for 30 years - now the Autobahn is clogged with trucks...
>"They privatized everything in the early 90ies and even attempted to go to the stock exchange - this resulted in cuts and bad long-term decisions - now most of the Deutsche Bahn is public owned but a private company"
Can you say how it is "public owned" if it is not a publicly traded stock? It sound like their bid to list it on the stock exchange failed?
It's an AG (a stock company), not a GmbH (a limited company). But yeah, all the stocks are still owned by the federal government, and therefore all profits get credited into the federal budget.
This is interesting. I am curious what is the upside to a stock company if all the shares are owned by the same entity(the government)? Are there some classes of the DB stack that are allowed to be publicly traded then?
The original plan was to somehow make the whole thing profitable and publicy trade a large partion of shares - so they bought a lot of companies and hoped that they can refinance the train operations. Turn's out it's not so easy...it was just typical management failure, neoliberal politics and pipedreams - so they stopped it in 2005 - Hartmut Mehdorn the CEO at the time is now infamous for basically destroying everything he touches.
It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.
> They probably want to make some profit where it's possible.
Deutsche Bahn is infamous for extracting as much profit as possible, especially when they had no competition (long-distance buses were mostly outlawed until 2012 because of a Nazi-era law). A particularly well-known instance were the local express trains ("S-Bahn") in Berlin where they outright closed many depots and ignored mandated maintenance schedules until:
> On May 1, 2009 an S-Bahn train of the class 481 in Kaulsdorf derailed due to a broken wheel. According to S-Bahners, the scheduled general inspection of that train had been postponed for two years. This accident led to the S-Bahn chaos of 2009, since the Federal Railway office mandated shortened test intervals and therefore at times only 165 out of 552 required quarter trains were available. Eventually, all axes had to be replaced because they were generally considered to be inadequate.
Train infrastructure is a lot more expensive than you'd think. This line cost about 10 billion Euros. If you want to recoup that money over twenty years at 4 million passengers a year that's 125 Euro per passenger. This doesn't include maintenance or the cost of the trains.
as silly as it sounds it's true. Deutsche Bahn AG needs to get 850 million € a year back to the state. The rail tracks and local lines are heavy subsidized but there are different companies.
They really made a mess with this attempt at privatization. It went so far that Deutsche Bahn AG destroyed their own (payed with public money in the 80ies) working and good rolling stock in an attempt to keep the market prices up? https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880
Getting tickets for 20 – 60 € is not so uncommon, even international ones. I also highly recommend this website to find cheap connections instead: https://bahn.guru/
There's also the Eurail and Germanrail (for non-eu residents) and Interrail (for eu residents) passes that give you several days of travel within a month. I paid 230 Eur for 5 full days of travel within a month, and there's twin tickets that are a bit cheaper per person.
Also there's the summer special, where you can get 4 trips for 96 euros.
As an American expat living in Munich, I honestly don't know which choice you made. For me the easy choice would have been the train... Large, comfortable seats, room to get up and walk around, no traffic, and no need to focus on driving. You're right, it's not a hard choice.
Well, yeah. You live in Germany so the novelty of a no speed limit highway has worn off, if there was one. Most tourists visiting Germany probably haven't experienced a road way with no speed limit so to them it is novel.
that IS definitely the most painful thing about driving in the US. People drive in any random lanes, not related at all to the speed they go at.
It makes it so much more dangerous and inefficient for everyone.
Last time I drove (well I was a passenger) on the 'no speed limit' Autobahn I think we averaged ~70 km/h for the whole trip, and spendt the last 90 minutes of our trip never getting above 30. I'll take the train every time.
Honestly driving on a long straight crowded highway is just as dull no matter what the speed limit.
Most actually have a limit and even on those that don't you should not exceed 130km/h unless you know the road: the next speed limit will come and just afterwards a speed trap....
Well aware. I’ll also point out that Mercedes’ GPS was awful at the time. It would send us through these “shortcuts” that it thought were 80km/h, but was actually posted at 30.
We gave up on it when it said this 1-lane railway underpass, for 2 way traffic, was an 80km/h road...
I just checked my reservation and it was a C-class.
I’m not that familiar with the models, but I know that Mercedes and BMW have lower-level models in N. America because they don’t want to “dilute their brand”. So entry/mid class definitions will differ between Germany and Canada.
As probably most people have heard, we in Europe think that Americans are a bit silly to want such large vehicles. Driving an A class or 118 would be both more fun and use much less fuel than an SUV that you really only use on highways and streets.
Things have changed a lot the last years, because of companies like Flixbus and now Flixtrain, which finally offer a real _price_ competition to the train. Now you can get from Stuttgart to Berlin for 10 Euros on Flixtrain, if you book early. I expect the same for Munich to Berlin, when Flixtrain starts to service this route next year: https://www.flixtrain.com/
There does seem to be a general trend with hotels--which are often my biggest expense--to offer material discounts for advanced purchase/no cancelations.
So given the choice of a comfortable, safe, environmentally responsible mode of transportation, you chose to go for the option where you get to burn lots of fossil fuel and move at a speed in a metal box at which you cannot control it any more if anything happens and which you had no experience in, putting your own and other lives at risk.
As a German, I wish we would impose strict speed limits on the Autobahn to avoid tourists, or anyone for that matter, do such wasteful dangerous joyrides.
Note: have been in a car accident so appreciate I am very very biased against how offhand and casually people go about such behaviour, how lives are destroyed for no reason.
I’m a believer in the cost of something being a representation of the resources used up in providing that product/service.
Even if the train itself produces less CO2 than a car, somewhere along the line those extra EURs are being used to buy things that produced CO2. And Germany’s gas taxes keep that in mind.
Or maybe the car company just needed to relocate cars out of Munich (no surprise during Oktoberfest) and there weren’t many train tickets left.
Deutsche Bahn operates their own grid and gets about two thirds of their energy from power plants directly connected to that on long-term contracts (the rest is fed in from the public grid with some inverters).
Funny how two people can face exactly the same problem, both quickly conclude that the obvious choice is so obvious you don't even have to mention it and then both make the exact opposite choice.
If renting a car and taking the train was the same price I'd take the train without even blinking.
Yeah, in the US, for me driving to NYC is probably both the cheapest and the fastest option--even given expensive parking. But I essentially always take the train as I hate driving into Manhattan.
With Sydney house prices 12.9 times the median yearly household income [1] second only to Hong Kong (SF is 9.1, Hong Kong is 19.4, San Jose is 10.3 and Vancouver is 12.6) would value capture make a similar high speed project work in Australia? Is the cost in the infrastructure or the rolling stock?
Something like Newcastle <-> Sydney <-> Wollongong?
Even though the rolling stock is technically more advanced and loaded with sensors (sometimes resulting is degraded service aka. lower speed for security reasons) the main cost definitely lies in infrastructure. You basically need to rebuild the whole track for highspeed trains. And with Australia being a litigious nation it will also take a while to acquire and execute the land rights.
There’s some enormous developments happening in gosford at the moment.
Talk of building a medical research hub over the station (sort of like how the shopping centre is over Chatswood).
Now if only there was a half hour train to the CBD you would be laughing
It would change things a lot - really spread the city that direction (and hopefully reverse some of the social problems that occur on the coast from having a lack of young professionals). I think it would also need a light rail connecting gosford - erina - terrigal - the entrance - wyong as well. Then you'd have a real transport system.
Sydney to Wollongong seems pretty close (about 70 km) for HSR in the style of the Berlin - Munich train being talked about here.
The way the Spanish are doing it (and they've got a ton of high speed track) is to roll out slower / cheaper rolling stock on the shorter lines (RENFE Avant). The longer distance routes get the faster, fancy tiling trains.
RENFE Avant isn't older rolling stock IIRC. It's just a cheaper version of the RENFE AVE equipment. The idea is that the higher speed trains are more expensive to run and that they take a while to accelerate / decelerate. On a 70 km route the time saved by running a full-on tilting 300 kph train set is probably insignificant and not worth the cost.
SF to San Jose is a similar idea. No sense in having Caltrain run HSR train sets.
They had a "High Speed" line before, but it was on old tracks, and they had to use tilting trains. I took it a few times when I lived in Berlin. It was somewhat slower than driving. Still, the ICE is an excellent train. It's very punctual (Germans will complain when it's five minutes late), it's smooth, it's clean, the seats are comfortable, you can get a seat with a table if you want, there are power outlets, and if you get hungry, you can go get a snack, a beer, or a full dinner. It's just just a civilized, pleasant way to travel. The Internet, either through the DB system, or my normal 3G/4G tethering was a bit spotty, but I was nearly as productive on the train as I would have been at the office. At six hours Berlin-Munich, it was much nicer, less stressful, and more productive en-route than an airplane, but somewhat slower. At four hours, the train is a no-brainer.
Air travel is the king of hidden time fees. They say that it's an hour from Berlin to Munich, but you have to show up at the airport an hour before the flight, it takes 15 minutes to get off the plane and get out to the curb, even if you didn't check a bag, it takes 40 minutes to get to the airport, and another 40 minutes to get from the airport to the city center. By the time you add it all up, 4 hours is how long it takes on the plane, and most of that is annoying stressful walking from one place to another, waiting in one line after another, cooped up in a tiny seat, and for maybe 30 minutes of the whole 4 hours, you can use your laptop and do something useful.
Glad it works for you, but I feel really nauseous after an hour or so of coding or reading while in a moving train, bus or car. I think this is quite common.
What kinds of trains are you talking about? Coding on the bus or in a car makes me nauseous as well, but the train routes I usually take are an incredible smooth ride and don't induce nausea at all. (I'm in Austria, and we have the Railjet, which is similar to the German ICE)
It was a tongue-in-cheek comment. Thankfully, the internet is here, everready to explicit things for those who might have, heaven protect us, misread it :)
True about hidden time fees, though if you don't depart from center and arrive at center (where train stations are), you'll also add substantial hidden time when travelling by train.
I've got <20 minutes by car to airport, about an hour by public transport to central train station - even though the train station is closer as the bird flies, and this is Europe with "good" public transport.
True, for me in Berlin its about 25min to go to the Train Station and 30-40Min to either Airport, so not a big difference.
But, considering i would arrive at the airport 90Min before take-off and it takes another another hour (including walking) to get from the Munich Airport back to the City Center (where the Train Station is), the difference is still small and I fully agree that a train (as long as its not overcrowded) is the more pleasant way to travel.
In Germany you now take the bus, which is about 20 eur for this direction, and with the same speed as the "high-speed" train, and faster than the plane. Only with the car is faster, but you cannot work in the car.
A ticket to Amsterdam is even 14 eur, but this takes 10hrs, compared to a 2hrs flight.
How would a Bus do Berlin - Munich in under 4 hours like this highspeed train ? Even by car it is over 5 hours.
Bus is an okay low cost alternative, but just very slow.
Flixbus takes around seven hours, traffic jams on that heavily-travelled route notwithstanding.
Another example: Hanover -> Munich is ten hours by bus last I checked and 4.5 hrs by train. Bus is only usable for the price-conscious, i.e., no business travellers.
There are buses that travel at night, but they're not comfy. i.e. they are not designed to be comfortable night-mode travel. In general, distances are too small to consider overnight trips. Since there aren't many good roads in Myanmar, trips take forever, which makes overnight travel sensible.
I used a bus to go from Dresden to Wien (and back) overnight a few years ago. This experience convinced me to never ever do something like that again.
1. I absolutely could not sleep on a bus that makes frequent turns on country roads.
2. On the way back to Germany, we got stuck for 2 hours in a passport check, because customs found a Bulgarian family on the bus that had previously been extradited, and there was a long argument before they left the bus.
Most people don't drive the kind of car that can comfortably average 180 km/h over such a long trip. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't always do it because of the fuel cost. Driving fast can easily double the cost of your trip compared to driving efficiently. At which point I'd rather just spend the money on a train ticket (given the choice). Driving that fast is hella stressful
Isn't arriving one hour before the flight already pretty tight since boarding closes 30-40 Minutes before. If there is some kind of queue at security you will have trouble getting in. For me it's usually 1 hour before boarding closes.
And for the regular travelers among us it’s 40min before departure - using the fast lane and knowing that boarding won’t close earlier than 15min before take off
Depends how much you trust the trip to the airport. I used to be a 7 minute taxi/30 minute walk away, so I'd leave home at t-45, if the taxi didn't turn up I'd still have time, if it did turn up I had time for a coffee in the lounge.
Now I live further away it's much more variable. If I'm travelling from Heathrow T5 you have to be into security at t-35, so off the train at t-40, so out of Paddington at t-62, add a bit of leeway means leaving Paddington at t-80 to t-90 depending when the trains are due.
If it's a long haul where there only one flight a day I may well push it out to plan to arrive at an airport as early as t-75, which while excessive, is just in case there are problems like punctures or whatever.
Boarding closes 10 minutes before. If you only have your carry-on luggage, and if you're lucky with lines at metal detectors, it takes ~20-30 minutes from the time you enter the airport to get to the plane (YMMV for some of the larger and busier airports).
Myself living in Berlin I'd still take the flight (and I did usually).
First of all, it's nearly legendary how unreliable the trains can be here during winters and hot summers. Second, flying is actually cheaper (I rarely fly with a big luggage).
Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there. I usually leave my flat around an hour to the boarding time.
Then the flight to Munich is an hour or less. In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.
On the other hand I wouldn't mind taking a long distance overnight international train provided I had a bed there.
You speak as if you were a toddler. Every intelligent person should be expected to do the right thing. And the state should help us by making the right thing easy.
But this goes in the other direction, too. In democracies you need to build majorities (or at least growing minorities) first before you get policy. If enough of us decide it's a good idea to behave ethically it makes it a lot easier to pass laws that mandate ethical behaviour.
So no, you do not get a free pass by voting green.
I'm simply being pragmatic. If that worked, if every intelligent being did the right thing we wouldn't have any problems at all, would we? Most people know that driving a single occupant car to work every day is silly. But what can they do? Completely change their lifestyle while everyone else continues to operate as normal? Make a personal sacrifice for the benefit of those making no sacrifice at all?
It will never work from the bottom up even if everyone agrees what the right thing is.
You are responsible for what you do in your life. What other people do you have no responsibility for at all.
Today, a lot of people don't take responsibility for their actions because nobody external is telling them to. This is being a toddler. You wait for some parent figure to tell you that you have to do something when you dont want to.
Today, most of the western world are toddlers and its being programmed into us through movies and games as well. Because this is a state of mind that is super easy to control. You end up in consumer mode, wanting things that make your life easier. :)
Unfortunately, we also live in a capitalist society where if you do something less “productive” than the next person, guess which person will have more opportunities?
> What other people do you have no responsibility for at all.
I might have no responsibility for it, but it affects me. If I choose to cycle to work I'll be a second class citizen on the road while people in cars pass me with little regard to my life. Why would I choose this? Why would anyone choose this? The answer is there is no reason to choose it, so people don't.
You're just ignoring the second half of my statement entirely. Changing your behaviour and taking political action to change the context of our behaviour are two sides of the same coin. If you're not willing to change your own behaviour, how are you expecting to change the states?
This just ends up with you declaring: It's someone else problem to make me.
That's not pragmatic. Unless you personally invest time and effort into political change to address these issues, it's just lazy and irresponsible.
Just own that. I have adjusted some behaviours and still fall short in many other areas. Never said it was easy. But here is actually an example where it is easy. Take the train and little cost in time and money, while gaining comfort and productive time. And you're saying you can't even be expected to do that? That's just cynical and irrational.
I am willing, but only if everyone else is too. I think that's how most people feel.
When it comes to what transport mode is best for the environment I basically am a toddler. I don't actually know what's best. I need to be told what's best by one having a prohibitively high price.
I don't even need to claim that it won't work, I can just point to evidence and you can see: it does not work. People are taking the plane because they can afford to.
I respectfully disagree. The specific part quoted by you is substantial, not ad hominem, and not name-calling. I accept that it's confrontational but not more so, (and not more offensive to me) than the statement it is in response to:
> Nobody should be expected to make a personal sacrifice to do the right thing.
A toddler can't be expected to do the right thing, but you wouldn't let your ten year old get away with this, would you? "I can't be expected to clean my room when it's sunny outside!".
I am calling out the normalization of irresponsibility here with a re-contextualization. I am not calling the person I respond to a toddler, nor treating them as one.
In the four lines I wrote, I talk about the states responsibility and about the importance to pass stronger legislation to change things.
I never claimed that you can fix structural problems by individual behaviour. I claimed that you can't fix them without (some) changes to individual behaviour.
Political change never just happens without activists pushing for it. And in order to understand the space they are pushing for, you need both, leading by example and credibility in asking people to pass laws that mandate behavioural changes.
Finally, I see no evidence for the idea that pushing outside the political sphere can not also lead to societal and behavioural change. Meat consumption is way down among younger people. Car ownership is down, too. This is in all likelihood to slow. But if we ever hope to change laws in cities to get rid of cars where they are not needed, well then having a large chunk of the population cycling and using public transport, and having had a gradual build out of alternative infrastructure due to this chunk of the population is going to make things politically a lot easier.
The same logic applies to divestment. If a large enough number of individual actors divest from carbon extraction, the politics of it change dramatically. And once enough people signal by divesting that they believe that the political change will come (thereby making carbon stocks worthless), they can trigger others into such behaviours.
Arguing for political action always has my vote. It's probably one of the best ways to use your time. But arguing against adjusting your behaviour is cynical and lazy. And arguing against people on here advocating for others to change their behaviour is actively arguing against political action. Because that is what political action actually looks like on the ground.
Everyone "should be", but the reality is that everyone isn't. A fairly small proportion of us have the time, energy and motivation to research the best decision for any given situation.
So it is totally reasonably to argue for making the right choice the obvious one, e.g. by externalising the costs of bad choices. It doesn't help until there's a majority for it, as you point out, but one way to build public support is to build awareness and criticise the current situation.
If only we had a uniform, slowly ramping global $100/ton carbon tax. From the models I've seen it would fairly abruptly correct all of these "two methods are vastly different in carbon emissions but otherwise fairly comparable" situations.
abdolutely. Industry is known to lie about its ability to cope with even slight changes in price structure when asked. Even though things like tripling of oil prices mostly change if people buy v4 or v6 engines. A small yearly increase that that companies can price into their plans will absolutely not destroy our economy
In Norway there's taxation on drinks containers that is set high enough that it's cheaper to participate in a return scheme. The audited return/recycling/reuse rates are then used to provide a discount against the per-unit tax.
I've always liked this scheme, because assuming you set the tax high enough for society to - as a fallback - take action to rectify the problem (e.g. hiring more people to clean up in this case), with a punitive margin on top, the tax provides a financial incentive to innovate to drive down the cost of acting responsibly.
There is a collective return service you can participate in, but if you find a better alternative you're free to use it as long as you can demonstrate what your return rate is. Or you can pay the tax and leave it to the government, but your margins will be worse than the competitions, as the return scheme is cheaper.
The general mechanism feels like it'd be adaptable to a lot of situations where you want to make sure it gets rectified, but also don't want to trust the government to dictate specific solutions - in this case it doesn't matter if e.g. the fallback solution is severely cost-ineffective; the more costly the fallback is, the stronger the financial incentive to find a better solution is.
I would love to make the carbon friendly decision every time, but unfortunately price comes into it. I’m travelling to London this weekend. For two of us the flight, including a bus to the airport and the tram on the other side is less than half the price of the train for the same journey. The train is more expensive than our accommodation in London!
I'm looking for a good way to offset the carbon emission from the 20+ flights I take a year.
Anyone has good recommendation of a reliable charity for this? Also, so far all calculators I've seen usually count the carbon emission for economy, but for longhaul flights in business class, I'm sure the actual emissions are significantly higher... I cannot avoid flying but I do think that I should at least pay the actual cost of the carbon emissions I cause.
Its calculation also includes the flight class, aircraft type, flight type (charter, scheduled) and they documented it as well (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/standards/emissions_calculation/...). We use it to offset our business flights. It's a charity and donations are tax deductible under German law.
> In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.
But for only one hour of that can you be working, reading, or just relaxing. For the rest you'll either be on your feet or at the very least aware of your next connection.
Huh? I really don't understand why people don't read and comprehend entire sentences. You got to the word "work" and just stopped reading and left a reply?
Partially why I believe short haul city-to-city flights should have more taxes applied to them if viable alternatives exist. And ways to further ease the tax burdens more for the alternatives if possible. (A stick for using flights and carrot for alternatives)
Penalising medium and long haul, and flights to minor towns or remote towns excluded of course as alternatives are rarely viable. And of course, alternatives can't immediately handle all the passenger load so scaled approaches are needed.
Thinking more of the Paris-London, New York-Boston, etc. Seems it worked with Barcelona - Madrid already, which might be more due to convenience than price?
Though don't think it will happen as the opposition will be too much, and making the taxes/fee rules work easily without complicated red tape will also doom it.
>Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there.
Maybe it's just Tegel airport, but every time I have to pass security in Frankfurt Flughafen (last time a few days ago), I feel violated. I travel quite a lot and it's the strictest security I've seen in an airport.
The ICE trains in Germany are not that great either. I remember buying a ticket from Hanover to somewhere in the south and to save money I bought a non-registered seat ticket. Imagine my shock when upon entering the train there were dozens of people sitting on their suitcases or on the floor, and I proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in similarly miserable conditions.
Regarding Frankfurt airport's strictness: It's Germany's biggest hub with the most international connections, some of them more "targeted" than others (say El-Al flights...).
Regarding ICE's: That's one of the trade-offs. Either guaranteed (cramped) seating after being "violated" or un-violated uncertainty.
Every time I use one mode of transportation, I'll damn myself and vow to always use the other mode from now on.
For some people, sure, it's faster to get to Tegel. If you arrive by car, Tegel is an awesome airport, built before airports were designed as shopping malls with a small aviation division attached, and without a strong eye towards making sure that low-paid security personnel's time wasn't wasted.
Unless you live north of Tegel though, it's going to be faster to get to either Hbf or Südkreuz, and when you get there, you just walk to the platform, wait for the train, walk on, and sit down.
As a frequent MUC-TXL traveler, I’d say that now the train connection is finally en par with flying. It’s has now become a real alternative.
The hidden times you mentioned depend heavily on where you live and what your destination is. Going to the train station can be painful in the first place.
Another thing to consider: I regularly feel sick when I work on trains not so when flying. That’s why I prefer a long plane flight to a train ride.
I experience exactly the opposite, never sick in a train when reading/working and from what I’ve heard it is the same among the people I know. Flying is way more bumpy and the pressure changes don’t help. Lack of space in planes makes some people uncomfortable also.
They tested the difference between flight and train from city center to city center on German television (sorry clip is in German: https://youtu.be/KyYNqndtCSk).
The flight ended up being 3 minutes faster.
But because I‘m super paranoid about missing my flight I would never show up at an airport „just in time“. So I‘d definitely go by train for this route.
Why aren't you super paranoid about missing a train?
Arriving at an airport - even last week in Moscow where's there's convoluted immigration, security, and I was checking a bag, more than an hour before take off seems crazy. An extra hour a flight adds up to days of wasted time hanging round at airports.
1) The trains go every 30 minutes to Munich, so I don't have to wait that long.
2) The price structure of trains vs planes. The standard DB train ticket is flexible, i.e. you can use any train at the given date. Booking a flight on the same day is very expensive (and might be impossible if all seats are taken). There are discount tickets that are not flexible, but the price of the flexible ticket doesn't increase to enormous sums just because I book it on the same day - it's always the same.
On the other hand, in my experience the cheaper inflexible advance tickets stay cheap for longer for flights than for trains. I guess it depends on whether you travel for business or leisure.
Here in London my biggest concern is getting to the airport on time. Once I'm there I know that getting through security and to the gate is going to be roughly the same each time.
I regularly take flights that only fly directly from Luton or Stansted, both of which take around 1 1/2 hours of travel time from our office in Central London. But that involves multiple connections, each of which could be missed or held up.
Some folks here are misinterpreting paranoid in this context; perhaps it's a language thing. Read paranoid about being late for a flight as wanting not to cut things close. In my case, it's a significant stress reducer. Get to the airport 30+ minutes earlier than I probably have to and relax/have a coffee rather than cut things close and be potentially looking at my watch constantly in traffic/in the security line/while rushing to the gate.
Arriving just 60 minutes before takeoff seems rather crazy in a lot of airports. For example in CMN and AGA that gives you 10 to 12 minutes per security check (assuming you check in online and have only cabin luggage).
The problem is with plans you don't know how long it will take to get from arrival to bring at the departure gate. There are multiple opportunities for large queues and delays, and the cost of missing a plane is much higher than that of missing a train.
With a train it basically never takes more than 10 minutes from arrival to walk to your platform, so you don't need to waste so much time just in case there is a delay. Also if you miss it you might be able to get the next train for free depending on your ticket.
You have to account for a buffer, I always plan to be at the airport at least an hour earlier than the flight for unknowns such as: slow traffic on the route of the airport bus (or delays for train service, traffic for taxis, etc.), slow/long security and/or luggage drop lines, etc.
With trains I just factor how long takes for the subway right across the street to take me 8 stations to the center.
Apart from the fact that being „paranoid“ or more general being afraid of something has no rational basis there are a couple of things that make me feel more comfortable going by train.
Even an inner german (or inner Schengen for that matter) flight has a lot more unknowns than a train:
1. public transport times are often a lot longer to airports. So you usually have to factor in more buffer.
2. what‘s the waiting time at luggage drop?
3. what‘s the wait at security?
4. how long do I need to go through security (I travel with lots of electronics which I usually have to take out)
If any of these things don‘t go as I expected my stress level increases because my calculated time buffer goes down. That‘s why I factor in an insane amout of time before boarding and usually end up hanging out at airports for hours.
For trains: The only unknown is the time that it takes me to get to the station. Every other time is practically zero.
And as someone else pointed out in this thread: the cost (in terms of money and time) for missing a train is a lot smaller.
That is actually not true, train prices (in Germany) are fluctuating based on demand as well. But you are not tracked individually and generally the prices are simply rising the closer the travel date gets. So the situation is better than with air travel.
Except they don't fluctuate, there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date and depending if all tickets of that category were booked already). This is know in advance, and the maximum price is always fixed. So quite different.
> Except they don't fluctuate, there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date and depending if all tickets of that category were booked already).
This isn't true, or at least that's not true in a general sense. IIRC ticket prices of all high-speed services offered by Spain's high-speed train operator, Renfe, increase as we get close to the travel day. In some cases, I assume due to low demand, sometimes prices drop a couple of weeks to the travel day. I assume all prices follow a predetermined progression accompanied by ad-hoc adjustments depending on demand levels.
Source: I've scraped price data out of Renfe's site for fun.
Well I take almost every week the ICE from Frankfurt to Paris and it always costs the same: 125,40€. No matter how in advance, no matter the day I travel. Try that with a flight... Even if this is not true for all trips, for those that it is, it is another advantage.
I don't understand how that's "the real question". It's a Sparpreis. They fluctuate. You can buy a full price ticket that doesn't fluctuate if you want to.
The main reason I'm paranoid about missing a flight is the unpredictability of the length of the queues before security. This is partially because I seldom take a plane[0], so I simply don't have enough experience and data to go on.
[0] for all the reasons cameldrv mentioned, plus the impact on the environment. It may be noted that high-speed trains are worse on the environment than classic ones, although still in a different league from air travel.
> I seldom take a plane[0], so I simply don't have enough experience and data to go on.
I fly frequently but I'm also unable to predict how much time I need. It varies greatly. Security/check-in can take anything between a few minutes and 30+ min each. Usually, late passengers can cut the line, but I wouldn't take the risk.
I flew from Geneva to London City Airport the other day. Check in closed 45 minutes before the flight, and it's so convoluted to get through the airport that after checking in right at the deadline, I had a brisk walk through the airport for 30 minutes to arrive halfway through boarding. I would not want to arrive any later, and anyone who didn't want to rely on short lines at security moving fast would be well off to arrive at least an hour before takeoff.
City centers are ideal for trains though, but on the other hand I'd gladly trade 3 minutes in exchange for the same 4 hours of travel but with the lower stress you get on the train.
This came just too late for me to benefit from. I was doing a project in Munich last year and traveling back and forth when Air Berlin went bankrupt (I was on their second last flight) and Lufthansa flights became a combination of stupidly expensive and unavailable. Door to door the plane took about 3.5 hours, which is pretty good. Most of that is waiting, dealing with security, and public transport, etc. The flight itself is less than an hour typically.
So, I took the old ICE a couple of times which took over 6 hours and indeed never really gets anywhere near it's maximum speed. They had a particularly slow variant taking nearly 7 hours. The new one should be a bit under 4 hours. So, the new line is very competitive with air travel and I'd prefer it over taking a plane. It's a much more relaxed way of traveling. German trains are pretty comfortable.
They could improve things further by eliminating stations from the route and improving the track. https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ has a nice visualization of the speed limits on different routes. There are only a handful of segments where trains can go full speed in Germany. If you look at the Berlin-Munich track, it only goes full speed about half of the route. IMHO, Berlin-Munich could get to about 2.5 hours but it requires a lot of investment. Faster if they get proper high speed trains. Compare this to France, which has proper high speed tracks and trains ride at 300 km/hour there.
Eliminating stations is nearly impossible, for political reasons. There are ICE stops that are widely known to be just because an influential politician lives in that town.
That‘s also what happened with this new Berlin-Munich connections. The route makes little sense when you want to connect both cities as fast as possible. The detour only makes sense if you understand that the route needed buy-in from the states in goes through, and it was galling to state governments not to have their biggest cities connected, as well.
But it‘s not just influential elites. When Deutsche Bahn recently mulled killing the IC stop (not ICE - a category lower) stop in my town I was very unhappy. Fortunately they decided against it. But just from the plain numbers I can believe that it shouldn‘t have an IC stop.
Yeah, because Flixbus knows that they can only compete on price. Trains tend to be more comfortable, and connections tend to be way faster because a train can enter and leave cities faster than a bus can. Bus really only wins for me when it's a rather short and direct connection, otherwise the long journey times kill it for me.
I agree that the ICE is an excellent train, but people in Germany are looking at the French counterpart, the TGV with envy. Where a ICE rumbles quite consiberably at speed 300kph the TGV is still as smooth as the ICE at 100kph. Not to mention the greater overall comfort and better food.
The cool thing about the ICE trains and NS trains (Netherlands) is that you can get to the station and just walk on the train. Unlike in Spain where there are long security X-ray lines.
Especially if you're flying into Berlin. I spent an hour in the air from Munich to Berlin, and then an hour waiting for my baggage to be unloaded and placed on the conveyor...
On a scale from 1 to 10 (being the best), airplane food ranks -5. ICE restaurant brings home a solid 0.
ICE's bigger cooking compartments (relative to the everything cramped airplanes) allow for better options. Plus, you have real tables to eat from and elbow space.
The ratio of "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other" vs. "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other because of the ridiculousness of the food" is way higher in ICEs than in planes.
Long story short: In an ICE you have to know what to order. Most meals will be optimized for their type of kitchen (stews; the most ordered item must be Chili con Carne). At least ICE meals don't shy away from their humble origins of being heated-up like airplane food does ("Sansibar Airplane Currywurst...").
Also, three times per day. You'd have to plan as you would with air travel so that you were at the station to catch these specific trains even if you weren't price sensitive enough to book a seat in advance. Three per day isn't enough for it to make sense to just show up and catch the next one.
The faster ones that only need 4h are indeed going only three times a day but there is a connection every hour that takes 4.5h (on workdays from 6 am to 7 pm). Seems fine, I think?
(Source: www.bahn.de, the official website of Deutsche Bahn)
As a frequent Berlin-Munich traveller, it’s such a joy to now be able to make this route in less than 4 hours directly from and to the city center.
Last month I had to instead take a flight (direct ~1h) but it ended up being more stressful and pretty much taking the same time since you have to add the time it takes to get to the airport and go through security.
Not to mention that the trains are quite comfortable and there’s lot of room to walk or even sit down at the on board bistro for a beer or some food.
Well, that took very long... it's 2018 and finally a real high-speed connection between Berlin and Munich. In France they had that since forever, and also Spain and Italy have a much better high speed network than Germany.
Big mess of privatization of the rail operator and then decades of non-investment in infrastructure maintenance while overspending on badly planned flagship megaprojects (this one was completed 17 years behind schedule)
Germany was divided - Munich in West Germany, Berlin in the middle of the eastern/socialist DDR. So there was the unification to do, with huge costs.
Also there is no high-speed rail in the UK (except for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link).
while that's true, intercity trains in the UK run at 125mph, which I believe falls into the "high speed" category in the U.S.
Also frequency wise the Uk wins over this link.
London to Edinburgh, 534km, takes 4h20 and runs every half hour.
HS2 is under construction which is a true high speed line and will knock an hour off trips to Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and allow more frequent trains (the WCML can only support one train an hour to Glasgow for example as the lines south of Rugby are crammed - over 40tph in each direction, or one every 3 minutes on each track)
HS2 will arrive in 15 years optimistically (20 years realistically) and will only get you from London to Leeds - the other half of the distance to Edinburgh or Glasgow will still be on slow tracks... Better than the US for sure but two decades behind FR, DE, IT or ES.
Sure it's slow, but there will be big savings in 8 years time when London-Crewe opens up.
The UK doesn't really have a great market for long distance trains in the same way that Europe does. If we weren't so insular and joined Schengen, then sure - high speed trains to Paris/Brussels/Cologne/Amsterdam from Birmingham/Manchester/Leeds/Bristol would work, but there's very few trips more than about 200 miles.
HS2 isn't really worthwhile as a speed improvement, the main benefit is the increased capacity -- effectively six-tracking the WCML south of Crewe (and 4 tracking the Crewe-Manchester link).
Germany has high speed trains for a long time (eg. the 200km of Frankfurt-Cologne: 55 minutes, topping out at 270km/h or so outside the city centers)
It's just this route which had some geography-induced engineering challenges that was finally upgraded to be able to service at the trains' maximum speed.
Small correction: the Cologne Frankfurt line tops out at 300km/h, unless they reduced speed recently.
What's fun is that the train tracks go right next to a bit of Autobahn for a while. Despite the fact that it's a section without speed limit, it still looks like a long stretch of parking lot when the train goes by :-)
Does France still have the problem that a lot of the connections are via Paris because there are no connections that run between the lines that are connecting cities to Paris? The image of the rail network on the TGV article in Wikipedia is giving the impression.
Did you know that mathematicians named a metric after that? It's the SNCF metric when the distance between two points (cities in real life) is defined as the sum of their distances from the origin (Paris in this case). (that is: go from city A to Paris and from Paris to city B, no matter how close A and B are geographically).
There are lines between other cities but they are usually serviced by slower regional trains rather than TGVs. Unless you're traveling to a neighboring city you'll probably have to wait for transfers too.
Yes they still do. You can arrive in Paris North in a fancy Thalys or Eurostar, but will then have to somehow get to Paris Lyon or South using weird subway like trains which are often packed, dirty, smelly and confusingly inefficient unless you're used to them.
This is why I don't travel by train to the South of Europe. It's a waste of time, and an uncomfortable one at that.
There's the circle tgv line around Paris, there's part of a line between Strasbourg and Lyon, and I believe they're working on Bordeaux-toulouse, which should enable Bordeaux-Marseille.
Because Germany's population is much more decentralized than most countries, which leads to a new line being planned to become a very political topic. You can't plan a line from A to B without the cities C, D, E that are roughly on the route joining in and requesting to be added as stops.
On top of that, Germany is a federal system whereas France has a very centralized government... so I imagine the politics of financing and building HSR lines is very different (and you end up with very different networks, check out the maps on wikipedia)
They started building this route in 1991 right after German reunification (it connects the old East with the West). Parts of the route were built in the following years.
A part of the route goes through difficult terrain. It's a completely new route that now contains 27 new tunnels and 37 new bridges, some kilometers long. All this through an environmentally sensitive area. So it was quite expensive and difficult to agree on. Work was even stopped on this part at some point around 2000, mainly because of the costs IIRC.
Paris-Bordeaux and Paris-Strasbourg also opened fairly recently. On the other hand, there have been high speed lines from Cologne to Frankfurt, Hannover to Würzburg and Hannover to Berlin for many, many years.
I took this connection for the first time this week and I was really impressed. I even took a picture of the screen once it showed that we crossed 300km/h. They used the latest ICE model, wifi was really reliable and they now even offer onboard entertainment. You can watch tv shows, movies, get access to audiobooks etc. on your phone, tablet or laptop (even though the selection is still quite limited). The train is one of my favorite places to get work done. I always try to get a seat in the cabin where phone calls are not allowed.
> DB will introduce the nre ICE 4 train on the route, which allow bicycles to be taken for the first time and with 830 seats provide 10% more capacity than the previous model.
These ICE4 are the worst ICEs in terms of comfort. They've been reducing the distance between rows over the years, and it is now only 85cm. It used to be 102cm in the ICE1 -- that was cool. ICE2 had 97cm, ICE3 had 92cm, which was still comfortable for me. Now, 85cm is too short to sit comfortably if you are a tall person. The previous models all had good seats and enough space. But the ICE4 is awful. The seats are also too upright and the backrest can only be tilted when pulling the seat to the front, which is impossible for taller people because the legs will have no space. Without this, the seats are so upright they almost push you over. Naps are impossible due to this. And where some lordose support should be, there is a hole. I really hate the ICE4s, I always end up with a sore back.
But sure, there is 10% more capacity thank you very much.
same with the new ICs - I used to really enjoy going with a IC - even more than a ICE - now it's just a like white RE the seats also seem to be the same.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadIt was one of the nicest train rides I've ever taken though - you got to see so much of Germany. The onboard restaurant was awesome.
I hope you don't miss out on seeing the incredibly scenic Bavarian landscapes and villages. I could do without looking at the mostly industrial landscape further up north though.
Here are some details (only found a german link: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsprojekt_Deutsche_Einhe...) - costs for the whole track was around 10 billion euro.
Taking the train between major cities is often more expensive than flying in Europe. People choose the train because it's comfortable and convenient, not because it's cheap.
Also 150 EUR is a full price ticket. If you book a few weeks in advance, and are willing to take the 'slow' train you can probably get a ticket around 30 EUR.
Will the CA train run at 186 mph or 220 mph?
This will translate to an extra 30-45 minutes?
By the way, CAHSR predicts ridership 20-30x higher than that mentioned in this headline.
I recall the cost of 2 train tickets being comparable to gas and 1 day 1-way rental for an entry level Mercedes (E class perhaps?).
Autobahn or train... it wasn’t a hard choice.
Edit: As Canadians, we took the car rental. We couldn't turn down an experience of no-speed limits, even if driving is work.
You can also book early. Often you get a ticket for 20-60€ but these are limited. At least they made an UI for this: https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_start.post?dbka...
If you don't use ICE/IC you can get a daily flatrate for 44€ for whole Germany or for 20-25€ for one (or multiple) federal states.
Now we often have empty trains and busses are on the Autobahn...
Here are the prices vs. inflation: https://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/1643856533...
However the price for a certain track depends on a lot of things and this new high-speed track has lot's of buisness customers that avoid a flight this way - so it's priced higher.
It's a complicated system with lot's of subsidies, subcontractors and so on. There is a price to pay for using the track to a different company that runs the train...
Another problem is that freight train traffic is even more expensive and they simply forgot to invest in the system for 30 years - now the Autobahn is clogged with trucks...
Can you say how it is "public owned" if it is not a publicly traded stock? It sound like their bid to list it on the stock exchange failed?
It's still not a government entity so they don't need to be that transparent and have more leeway to keep wages down.
Deutsche Bahn is infamous for extracting as much profit as possible, especially when they had no competition (long-distance buses were mostly outlawed until 2012 because of a Nazi-era law). A particularly well-known instance were the local express trains ("S-Bahn") in Berlin where they outright closed many depots and ignored mandated maintenance schedules until:
> On May 1, 2009 an S-Bahn train of the class 481 in Kaulsdorf derailed due to a broken wheel. According to S-Bahners, the scheduled general inspection of that train had been postponed for two years. This accident led to the S-Bahn chaos of 2009, since the Federal Railway office mandated shortened test intervals and therefore at times only 165 out of 552 required quarter trains were available. Eventually, all axes had to be replaced because they were generally considered to be inadequate.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_S-Bahn (lightly edited because the original article reads like it came out of Google Translate)
They really made a mess with this attempt at privatization. It went so far that Deutsche Bahn AG destroyed their own (payed with public money in the 80ies) working and good rolling stock in an attempt to keep the market prices up? https://www.swr.de/forum/read.php?5,3880
Also there's the summer special, where you can get 4 trips for 96 euros.
Honestly driving on a long straight crowded highway is just as dull no matter what the speed limit.
We gave up on it when it said this 1-lane railway underpass, for 2 way traffic, was an 80km/h road...
I’m not that familiar with the models, but I know that Mercedes and BMW have lower-level models in N. America because they don’t want to “dilute their brand”. So entry/mid class definitions will differ between Germany and Canada.
The US does have the 1 series (finally), but just the coupe, and it’s still marketed as something sporty.
I liked the 118d hatch, but no dice in N. America (except Mexico).
As probably most people have heard, we in Europe think that Americans are a bit silly to want such large vehicles. Driving an A class or 118 would be both more fun and use much less fuel than an SUV that you really only use on highways and streets.
As a German, I wish we would impose strict speed limits on the Autobahn to avoid tourists, or anyone for that matter, do such wasteful dangerous joyrides.
Note: have been in a car accident so appreciate I am very very biased against how offhand and casually people go about such behaviour, how lives are destroyed for no reason.
Even if the train itself produces less CO2 than a car, somewhere along the line those extra EURs are being used to buy things that produced CO2. And Germany’s gas taxes keep that in mind.
Or maybe the car company just needed to relocate cars out of Munich (no surprise during Oktoberfest) and there weren’t many train tickets left.
Deutsche Bahn advertises their long-distance trains as running on 100% renewable energy.
Almost half of German electricity is from coal.
It’s all the same grid. If DB earmarks some renewable electricity for itself, then the non-renewable mix is increased for another customer.
Funny how two people can face exactly the same problem, both quickly conclude that the obvious choice is so obvious you don't even have to mention it and then both make the exact opposite choice.
If renting a car and taking the train was the same price I'd take the train without even blinking.
Something like Newcastle <-> Sydney <-> Wollongong?
[1]: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-22/australian-housing-una...
unlikely to ever happen!
The way the Spanish are doing it (and they've got a ton of high speed track) is to roll out slower / cheaper rolling stock on the shorter lines (RENFE Avant). The longer distance routes get the faster, fancy tiling trains.
Not sure if I understand correctly.
SF to San Jose is a similar idea. No sense in having Caltrain run HSR train sets.
Air travel is the king of hidden time fees. They say that it's an hour from Berlin to Munich, but you have to show up at the airport an hour before the flight, it takes 15 minutes to get off the plane and get out to the curb, even if you didn't check a bag, it takes 40 minutes to get to the airport, and another 40 minutes to get from the airport to the city center. By the time you add it all up, 4 hours is how long it takes on the plane, and most of that is annoying stressful walking from one place to another, waiting in one line after another, cooped up in a tiny seat, and for maybe 30 minutes of the whole 4 hours, you can use your laptop and do something useful.
The best thing about trains is that you end up right in the city center, and you can often just walk wherever you need to go.
Heaven forbid someone invoke Poe's law!
I've got <20 minutes by car to airport, about an hour by public transport to central train station - even though the train station is closer as the bird flies, and this is Europe with "good" public transport.
1. I absolutely could not sleep on a bus that makes frequent turns on country roads.
2. On the way back to Germany, we got stuck for 2 hours in a passport check, because customs found a Bulgarian family on the bus that had previously been extradited, and there was a long argument before they left the bus.
- "same speed as the "high-speed" train" - are you deluded
- "Only with the car is faster" - yeah, if I drive the kind of car that can average 180 km/h.
I mean, there are no speed limits on Autobahn so nobody would stop you...
Now I live further away it's much more variable. If I'm travelling from Heathrow T5 you have to be into security at t-35, so off the train at t-40, so out of Paddington at t-62, add a bit of leeway means leaving Paddington at t-80 to t-90 depending when the trains are due.
If it's a long haul where there only one flight a day I may well push it out to plan to arrive at an airport as early as t-75, which while excessive, is just in case there are problems like punctures or whatever.
First of all, it's nearly legendary how unreliable the trains can be here during winters and hot summers. Second, flying is actually cheaper (I rarely fly with a big luggage).
Finally, it takes me 15 minutes to get to Tegel airport. All the security and boarding procedures are highly optimised there. I usually leave my flat around an hour to the boarding time.
Then the flight to Munich is an hour or less. In the end (with the train to the city center) it takes less than 4 hours.
On the other hand I wouldn't mind taking a long distance overnight international train provided I had a bed there.
You might want to reconsider if slightly more convenience is worth ~80-90% higher emissions.
But this goes in the other direction, too. In democracies you need to build majorities (or at least growing minorities) first before you get policy. If enough of us decide it's a good idea to behave ethically it makes it a lot easier to pass laws that mandate ethical behaviour.
So no, you do not get a free pass by voting green.
It will never work from the bottom up even if everyone agrees what the right thing is.
Today, a lot of people don't take responsibility for their actions because nobody external is telling them to. This is being a toddler. You wait for some parent figure to tell you that you have to do something when you dont want to.
Today, most of the western world are toddlers and its being programmed into us through movies and games as well. Because this is a state of mind that is super easy to control. You end up in consumer mode, wanting things that make your life easier. :)
I might have no responsibility for it, but it affects me. If I choose to cycle to work I'll be a second class citizen on the road while people in cars pass me with little regard to my life. Why would I choose this? Why would anyone choose this? The answer is there is no reason to choose it, so people don't.
This just ends up with you declaring: It's someone else problem to make me.
That's not pragmatic. Unless you personally invest time and effort into political change to address these issues, it's just lazy and irresponsible.
Just own that. I have adjusted some behaviours and still fall short in many other areas. Never said it was easy. But here is actually an example where it is easy. Take the train and little cost in time and money, while gaining comfort and productive time. And you're saying you can't even be expected to do that? That's just cynical and irrational.
When it comes to what transport mode is best for the environment I basically am a toddler. I don't actually know what's best. I need to be told what's best by one having a prohibitively high price.
I don't even need to claim that it won't work, I can just point to evidence and you can see: it does not work. People are taking the plane because they can afford to.
This sort of response isn't acceptable here. I would suggest you rephrase.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Nobody should be expected to make a personal sacrifice to do the right thing.
A toddler can't be expected to do the right thing, but you wouldn't let your ten year old get away with this, would you? "I can't be expected to clean my room when it's sunny outside!".
I am calling out the normalization of irresponsibility here with a re-contextualization. I am not calling the person I respond to a toddler, nor treating them as one.
Political campaigning and change is how you change things.
Of course, for this you first need to win people's minds. But that's just the first step.
I never claimed that you can fix structural problems by individual behaviour. I claimed that you can't fix them without (some) changes to individual behaviour.
Political change never just happens without activists pushing for it. And in order to understand the space they are pushing for, you need both, leading by example and credibility in asking people to pass laws that mandate behavioural changes.
Finally, I see no evidence for the idea that pushing outside the political sphere can not also lead to societal and behavioural change. Meat consumption is way down among younger people. Car ownership is down, too. This is in all likelihood to slow. But if we ever hope to change laws in cities to get rid of cars where they are not needed, well then having a large chunk of the population cycling and using public transport, and having had a gradual build out of alternative infrastructure due to this chunk of the population is going to make things politically a lot easier.
The same logic applies to divestment. If a large enough number of individual actors divest from carbon extraction, the politics of it change dramatically. And once enough people signal by divesting that they believe that the political change will come (thereby making carbon stocks worthless), they can trigger others into such behaviours.
Arguing for political action always has my vote. It's probably one of the best ways to use your time. But arguing against adjusting your behaviour is cynical and lazy. And arguing against people on here advocating for others to change their behaviour is actively arguing against political action. Because that is what political action actually looks like on the ground.
So it is totally reasonably to argue for making the right choice the obvious one, e.g. by externalising the costs of bad choices. It doesn't help until there's a majority for it, as you point out, but one way to build public support is to build awareness and criticise the current situation.
I've always liked this scheme, because assuming you set the tax high enough for society to - as a fallback - take action to rectify the problem (e.g. hiring more people to clean up in this case), with a punitive margin on top, the tax provides a financial incentive to innovate to drive down the cost of acting responsibly.
There is a collective return service you can participate in, but if you find a better alternative you're free to use it as long as you can demonstrate what your return rate is. Or you can pay the tax and leave it to the government, but your margins will be worse than the competitions, as the return scheme is cheaper.
The general mechanism feels like it'd be adaptable to a lot of situations where you want to make sure it gets rectified, but also don't want to trust the government to dictate specific solutions - in this case it doesn't matter if e.g. the fallback solution is severely cost-ineffective; the more costly the fallback is, the stronger the financial incentive to find a better solution is.
Anyone has good recommendation of a reliable charity for this? Also, so far all calculators I've seen usually count the carbon emission for economy, but for longhaul flights in business class, I'm sure the actual emissions are significantly higher... I cannot avoid flying but I do think that I should at least pay the actual cost of the carbon emissions I cause.
Its calculation also includes the flight class, aircraft type, flight type (charter, scheduled) and they documented it as well (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/standards/emissions_calculation/...). We use it to offset our business flights. It's a charity and donations are tax deductible under German law.
But for only one hour of that can you be working, reading, or just relaxing. For the rest you'll either be on your feet or at the very least aware of your next connection.
I use this time to organise my thoughts and take a breath.
Penalising medium and long haul, and flights to minor towns or remote towns excluded of course as alternatives are rarely viable. And of course, alternatives can't immediately handle all the passenger load so scaled approaches are needed.
Thinking more of the Paris-London, New York-Boston, etc. Seems it worked with Barcelona - Madrid already, which might be more due to convenience than price?
Though don't think it will happen as the opposition will be too much, and making the taxes/fee rules work easily without complicated red tape will also doom it.
The decision to close it is just a way for insincere and short-term thinking politicians to gain some cheap points.
Maybe it's just Tegel airport, but every time I have to pass security in Frankfurt Flughafen (last time a few days ago), I feel violated. I travel quite a lot and it's the strictest security I've seen in an airport.
The ICE trains in Germany are not that great either. I remember buying a ticket from Hanover to somewhere in the south and to save money I bought a non-registered seat ticket. Imagine my shock when upon entering the train there were dozens of people sitting on their suitcases or on the floor, and I proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in similarly miserable conditions.
Regarding ICE's: That's one of the trade-offs. Either guaranteed (cramped) seating after being "violated" or un-violated uncertainty.
Every time I use one mode of transportation, I'll damn myself and vow to always use the other mode from now on.
Unless you live north of Tegel though, it's going to be faster to get to either Hbf or Südkreuz, and when you get there, you just walk to the platform, wait for the train, walk on, and sit down.
The hidden times you mentioned depend heavily on where you live and what your destination is. Going to the train station can be painful in the first place.
Another thing to consider: I regularly feel sick when I work on trains not so when flying. That’s why I prefer a long plane flight to a train ride.
The flight ended up being 3 minutes faster.
But because I‘m super paranoid about missing my flight I would never show up at an airport „just in time“. So I‘d definitely go by train for this route.
Arriving at an airport - even last week in Moscow where's there's convoluted immigration, security, and I was checking a bag, more than an hour before take off seems crazy. An extra hour a flight adds up to days of wasted time hanging round at airports.
There is no need. You just turn up at the platform before departure time and get on.
1) The trains go every 30 minutes to Munich, so I don't have to wait that long.
2) The price structure of trains vs planes. The standard DB train ticket is flexible, i.e. you can use any train at the given date. Booking a flight on the same day is very expensive (and might be impossible if all seats are taken). There are discount tickets that are not flexible, but the price of the flexible ticket doesn't increase to enormous sums just because I book it on the same day - it's always the same.
I regularly take flights that only fly directly from Luton or Stansted, both of which take around 1 1/2 hours of travel time from our office in Central London. But that involves multiple connections, each of which could be missed or held up.
With a train it basically never takes more than 10 minutes from arrival to walk to your platform, so you don't need to waste so much time just in case there is a delay. Also if you miss it you might be able to get the next train for free depending on your ticket.
With trains I just factor how long takes for the subway right across the street to take me 8 stations to the center.
Even an inner german (or inner Schengen for that matter) flight has a lot more unknowns than a train:
1. public transport times are often a lot longer to airports. So you usually have to factor in more buffer. 2. what‘s the waiting time at luggage drop? 3. what‘s the wait at security? 4. how long do I need to go through security (I travel with lots of electronics which I usually have to take out)
If any of these things don‘t go as I expected my stress level increases because my calculated time buffer goes down. That‘s why I factor in an insane amout of time before boarding and usually end up hanging out at airports for hours.
For trains: The only unknown is the time that it takes me to get to the station. Every other time is practically zero.
And as someone else pointed out in this thread: the cost (in terms of money and time) for missing a train is a lot smaller.
This isn't true, or at least that's not true in a general sense. IIRC ticket prices of all high-speed services offered by Spain's high-speed train operator, Renfe, increase as we get close to the travel day. In some cases, I assume due to low demand, sometimes prices drop a couple of weeks to the travel day. I assume all prices follow a predetermined progression accompanied by ad-hoc adjustments depending on demand levels.
Source: I've scraped price data out of Renfe's site for fun.
> there is just a certain amount of lower fares (going up in stages, the closer you get to the travel date...
That's true for saving fares (Sparangebote). The train price for Flexpreis (an offer without a binding to a certain train) does not change that often.
[0] for all the reasons cameldrv mentioned, plus the impact on the environment. It may be noted that high-speed trains are worse on the environment than classic ones, although still in a different league from air travel.
I fly frequently but I'm also unable to predict how much time I need. It varies greatly. Security/check-in can take anything between a few minutes and 30+ min each. Usually, late passengers can cut the line, but I wouldn't take the risk.
I've personally never been on a German train that was on time. Of course this is anecdata, but still...
[0] https://www.citymetric.com/transport/are-german-trains-reall...
So, I took the old ICE a couple of times which took over 6 hours and indeed never really gets anywhere near it's maximum speed. They had a particularly slow variant taking nearly 7 hours. The new one should be a bit under 4 hours. So, the new line is very competitive with air travel and I'd prefer it over taking a plane. It's a much more relaxed way of traveling. German trains are pretty comfortable.
They could improve things further by eliminating stations from the route and improving the track. https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ has a nice visualization of the speed limits on different routes. There are only a handful of segments where trains can go full speed in Germany. If you look at the Berlin-Munich track, it only goes full speed about half of the route. IMHO, Berlin-Munich could get to about 2.5 hours but it requires a lot of investment. Faster if they get proper high speed trains. Compare this to France, which has proper high speed tracks and trains ride at 300 km/hour there.
That‘s also what happened with this new Berlin-Munich connections. The route makes little sense when you want to connect both cities as fast as possible. The detour only makes sense if you understand that the route needed buy-in from the states in goes through, and it was galling to state governments not to have their biggest cities connected, as well.
But it‘s not just influential elites. When Deutsche Bahn recently mulled killing the IC stop (not ICE - a category lower) stop in my town I was very unhappy. Fortunately they decided against it. But just from the plain numbers I can believe that it shouldn‘t have an IC stop.
The food is known to be quite expensive and not great thought, I wouldn't recommend it
Especially if you're flying into Berlin. I spent an hour in the air from Munich to Berlin, and then an hour waiting for my baggage to be unloaded and placed on the conveyor...
On a scale from 1 to 10 (being the best), airplane food ranks -5. ICE restaurant brings home a solid 0.
ICE's bigger cooking compartments (relative to the everything cramped airplanes) allow for better options. Plus, you have real tables to eat from and elbow space.
The ratio of "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other" vs. "unrelated diners engaging in conversation with each other because of the ridiculousness of the food" is way higher in ICEs than in planes.
Long story short: In an ICE you have to know what to order. Most meals will be optimized for their type of kitchen (stews; the most ordered item must be Chili con Carne). At least ICE meals don't shy away from their humble origins of being heated-up like airplane food does ("Sansibar Airplane Currywurst...").
(Source: www.bahn.de, the official website of Deutsche Bahn)
Last month I had to instead take a flight (direct ~1h) but it ended up being more stressful and pretty much taking the same time since you have to add the time it takes to get to the airport and go through security.
Not to mention that the trains are quite comfortable and there’s lot of room to walk or even sit down at the on board bistro for a beer or some food.
If anything, why Germany is so late to the party?
Also frequency wise the Uk wins over this link. London to Edinburgh, 534km, takes 4h20 and runs every half hour.
HS2 is under construction which is a true high speed line and will knock an hour off trips to Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and allow more frequent trains (the WCML can only support one train an hour to Glasgow for example as the lines south of Rugby are crammed - over 40tph in each direction, or one every 3 minutes on each track)
The UK doesn't really have a great market for long distance trains in the same way that Europe does. If we weren't so insular and joined Schengen, then sure - high speed trains to Paris/Brussels/Cologne/Amsterdam from Birmingham/Manchester/Leeds/Bristol would work, but there's very few trips more than about 200 miles.
HS2 isn't really worthwhile as a speed improvement, the main benefit is the increased capacity -- effectively six-tracking the WCML south of Crewe (and 4 tracking the Crewe-Manchester link).
That would definitely be high-speed according to German standards. Local trains top out at 120 km/h (75 mph) or very seldomly 160 km/h (100 mph).
It's just this route which had some geography-induced engineering challenges that was finally upgraded to be able to service at the trains' maximum speed.
What's fun is that the train tracks go right next to a bit of Autobahn for a while. Despite the fact that it's a section without speed limit, it still looks like a long stretch of parking lot when the train goes by :-)
Did you know that mathematicians named a metric after that? It's the SNCF metric when the distance between two points (cities in real life) is defined as the sum of their distances from the origin (Paris in this case). (that is: go from city A to Paris and from Paris to city B, no matter how close A and B are geographically).
There are lines between other cities but they are usually serviced by slower regional trains rather than TGVs. Unless you're traveling to a neighboring city you'll probably have to wait for transfers too.
This is why I don't travel by train to the South of Europe. It's a waste of time, and an uncomfortable one at that.
A part of the route goes through difficult terrain. It's a completely new route that now contains 27 new tunnels and 37 new bridges, some kilometers long. All this through an environmentally sensitive area. So it was quite expensive and difficult to agree on. Work was even stopped on this part at some point around 2000, mainly because of the costs IIRC.
These ICE4 are the worst ICEs in terms of comfort. They've been reducing the distance between rows over the years, and it is now only 85cm. It used to be 102cm in the ICE1 -- that was cool. ICE2 had 97cm, ICE3 had 92cm, which was still comfortable for me. Now, 85cm is too short to sit comfortably if you are a tall person. The previous models all had good seats and enough space. But the ICE4 is awful. The seats are also too upright and the backrest can only be tilted when pulling the seat to the front, which is impossible for taller people because the legs will have no space. Without this, the seats are so upright they almost push you over. Naps are impossible due to this. And where some lordose support should be, there is a hole. I really hate the ICE4s, I always end up with a sore back.
But sure, there is 10% more capacity thank you very much.
By the way, even ICE1 trains are less comfortable than they used to be because the rubber rings in the wheels were removed for safety reasons.
But Berlin—Munich has a Vmax of 300 km/h, so it would only make sense to put more ICE 3 on that route. I doubt the ICE 4 info is correct.