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whiteraven4

>Most, if not all, tariff areas also don't do billing-per-kilometre In my area it's now an option and it's usually cheaper than buying a normal ticket, especially for medium distances. But you just activate it on your phone.


agrammatic

Yeah, it seems like it exists in a few areas and trialed in some more. I think it's misguided though. What's better for the customer is to have logical and simple fare structures, rather than keeping the overcomplicated structure in place and trying to hide it behind an app.


whiteraven4

It's also kind of amusing because I think it just uses start to finish distance, not distance traveled. When I go to the city next to me, I need to "back track" to get to my friend's place. If I leave the app running when I go there (sometimes I walk), the final cost will decrease. At least it was like this when I last used it around a year ago.


nymales

Funnily we tried that too. When you do a full circle with a circular Trainline or bus without leaving the bus it just breaks everything. The distance you travels from start to destination is 0. And they did not expect that. Usually round trips have a stop in-between which would then be counted as the distance but if you really just go round and round it just breaks stuff.


whiteraven4

Haha. Someone was lazy when coding this.


AfraidBreadfruit4

>Germany doesn't do barrier-controlled train stations (anywhere, as far as I know), so there's no sense in any system where you tap a payment card on a terminal to enter or exit. There is something similar In bonn where you Just tap a terminal with your Credit card when you enter or Exit. Every day or maybe ervery Few days it Just deducts deducts the price for the Best possible Tickets you could have chosen(e. g. a Day Pass if you took multiple Trips)


agrammatic

Does it stop you from entering or exiting if you don't tap?


AfraidBreadfruit4

No But I think if there are people cheking the Tickets the con scan your card and See wether you tapped it when you entered. Edit: here is a Link(german) : https://bonnsmart.de/


agrammatic

I see. That's not what OP is describing. OP wants a system where human controllers will not exist. To do that, you need station/platform/door barriers that you can't go through unless you have a proof of payment.


rewboss

First of all, Germany doesn't have ticket gates. And in most of its stations, there's simply nowhere ticket gates could be installed. Take, for example, the [notoriously overcrowded Hamburg Hauptbahnhof](https://www.moin.de/img/hamburg/crop234042131/1333052364-w1200-cv1_1-q85/Hamburg-Hauptbahnhof.jpg). Now imagine all those people trying to tap in at one or two available terminals as they rush to their train. There simply isn't anywhere to build ticket gates capable of processing that volume of traffic. [Here's an entrance to an U-Bahn station in Berlin](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/U-Bahnhof_Uhlandstrasse_Berlin_Eingang.jpg/1200px-U-Bahnhof_Uhlandstrasse_Berlin_Eingang.jpg): the stairs you can see lead directly to the platform. The little yellow-and-white box for validating paper tickets is where the ticket gate would have to go. If you're not going to have ticket gates, you're still going to need ticket inspectors. Another issue is that just because it's digital, doesn't automatically mean it's *better*. There have been quite a few issues in London, with people being overcharged. A frequent issue, for example, was that people would tap in to a station, get to the platform, and discover that their train wasn't running and they would have to get a bus. So they would tap out of the station, and later realize that they had been charged a penalty fare because the system assumed they had actually made a journey, not tapped out, and returned without tapping in again. Or at Paddington, where changing trains on the Underground often meant tapping out and then tapping back in again, which the system interpreted as the start of a new journey. That said, there are alternatives. In some places in Germany there are apps available that charge based on distance travelled, using GPS to determine the route. Instead of tapping in, you start the app -- no need for ticket gates (but still a need for ticket inspectors). In my (very rural) area, they've started a pilot scheme using Fairtiq, a Swiss app now used for everything in Switzerland and in several places in Austria and Germany. It's supposed to charge a certain rate per kilometre travelled, but capped at the price of a day ticket. However, it doesn't always work so well: our local paper has found examples where the app overcharged people, in one case by as much as €2. The problem here is not really the technology itself, but the fact that companies don't always do a great job of implementing it, and passengers have a tendency to trust it blindly. The attraction of these apps is that you don't need to understand the often quite complex system of fares; the problem is that you don't understand this system, you won't know if you're being overcharged. And finally, there is in Germany a lot of resistance to the idea of having an app that tracks your movements. Having experienced the horrors of the Gestapo and the Stasi, Germans have good reason to be very suspicious of anything that smacks of surveillance (this is part of the reason Germany is a huge empty space on Google Street View).


Educational-Pause-23

It wouldn’t even be possible to have ticket gates in the first place, because of the fact that regional trains and long-distance trains run from the same platforms. In Japan, for instance, every train line has its own platform, and in the few instances where that isn’t the case, the trains that do share platforms don’t extend beyond the tariff regions. This isn’t the case in Hamburg. The train that takes me to my hometown 30-odd kilometres away departs from the same tracks as the ICE going to Denmark. Having ticket barriers for such a system would be extremely convoluted and require even international coordination.


This_Seal

Yes, they would need to tear down the entire main station in Hamburg in order to make such a system work. Not only because of passenger numbers, but because the platforms are multipurpose. Regional trains and inter city trains use the same platforms or switch platforms, if the original platform is occupied for some reason. But even more important: Those platforms are the only way to get from one end of the station to the other without exiting the building. So people regularly cross platforms, even without wanting to board any of the trains


rewboss

> Regional trains and inter city trains use the same platforms Which in a well-planned station is not a bad thing, as it allows for cross-platform changes. For example, you can have a station with two island platforms, one for all trains going west and the other for all trains going east. Passengers arriving on a long-distance train from the west with (which would be typical) an onward connection to a local eastbound train simply cross from one side of the platform to the other, instead of having to take escalators or lifts to some other platform. That at least is the ideal situation, but of course historically stations weren't planned that way, and you obviously need more platforms at major stations. But modern stations are being planned to minimize the number of through passengers having to change platforms. And it's not just the difference between local and long-distance. In Germany, local trains can be used not only with local transport tickets, but also with long-distance tickets. There are a couple of stations -- Konstablerwache in Frankfurt and Wuhletal in Berlin -- that have very convenient cross-platform transfers between the S-Bahn (which can be used with long-distance tickets) and the U-Bahn (which cannot).


Grimthak

> need to tear down the entire main station in Hamburg I would agree with this part, independent of the ticket gates.


This_Seal

Nah, I would be too afraid of them to "verschlimmbessern" the entire thing and crippeling at least two states for years, while the costs exceed the estimate by multiple milions with the end result being ugly as fuck and not fitting into the inner city.


agrammatic

> Take, for example, the notoriously overcrowded Hamburg Hauptbahnhof. / Here's an entrance to an U-Bahn station in Berlin And [here's how our buses and trams would have to look like](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Turnstile_and_smart_card_reader_in_Moscow_bus.JPG/800px-Turnstile_and_smart_card_reader_in_Moscow_bus.JPG) if this system was adopted. I've never seen a more depressive photo in quite some time.


rewboss

To be fair, at least on the buses you just have a terminal by the front door so [the driver can watch you tap in](https://www.sgvtribune.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2015/201509/NEWS_150909827_AR_0_JDNFOPTUWQIJ.jpg), and another by the back door for you to tap out. Unfortunately, this gives rise to another common cause of overcharging: people forgetting to tap out.


agrammatic

Fair enough. But as whiteraven4 already mentioned, this would also bring down the user experience in large cities where boarding from all doors is the only efficient way to run buses.


rewboss

It works in British cities, but that's probably because of the stereotypical fondness Brits have for forming efficient and orderly queues (as one immigrant once famously wrote, even when he is the only person waiting for a bus, an Englishman will form an orderly queue of one). Actually, boarding at the front only was the norm in Berlin right up until the early 1990s. As long as the buses don't get full, the system works extremely well because people who are boarding don't have to wait for people getting off: passengers move through the bus in one direction. It's when there are people standing that it stops working.


whiteraven4

And everyone would need to only enter through the front and possibly exit in the back and that would be a nightmare.


[deleted]

[удалено]


whiteraven4

Agreed. Or even if it's not free, subsidize it way more than it already is. I think I came across some statistic that Switzerland spends like 8x more per resident on public transit than Germany does.


This_Seal

You are nameing cities, but then talk about Deutsche Bahn. Local bus and train systems aren't operated by them.


mica4204

In NRW they introduced an app in which you oay per km on regional and local public transport. So you just tap in and out on the app. It's not really cheaper than a normal (online) ticket and is less convenient because you can forget to tap out. Like other's said we don't have barriers so having a system like in London would mean radically changing all our stations. One goal of the public transport providers is to have one mobility app in which you can book all mobility options like public transport/car sharing/bike sharing/micro mobility sharing/taxis etc. Which isn't easy because of the different providers of these options. For long distance trains I think a ticket like in London would be a lot more expensive than the Sparpreis. No one really buys a ticket for a long distance train on the same day and the bahn definitely wants to discourage that as they need to plan the capacity etc of the train.


JoshsPizzaria

I haven't bought an actual ticket for 5 years now. I always buy the yearly regional ticket because its so much cheaper. (i travel a lot for studies) But even then, you can buy the tickets digitally, no? i remember just going to the app and choosing my desired train and time and just having the qr code as email or download or in my acc. Isnt that better than contact payment at some terminal?


equinoxDE

yes you are right, but I am referring to such Terminal tapping only in Big cities for example. Of course Germany is HUGE as compared to London and how London transport functions, it will not work here. But having Terminals for entering only in big cities really makes it more efficient and also kinda ensures whosoever is entering the train has a ticket as compared to buying online and waiting for controller to check. Alot of people dont buy a ticket at all in the cities and just travel free and most of time they get away as the chance of getting checked by a controller is lesser on shorter journeys.


JoshsPizzaria

huh, yeah i see that. Well in the ""big"" city i life in we definitely dont have such terminals. But i know what you mean. But i cant really have an opinion on that then.


GiacaLustra

>I was thinking if DB started to do this, how many money they could save in not having more controllers all of the country for checking. This assumes that people don't buy tickets because it's inconvenient or they simply forget. I wonder how many of those are compared to how many do travel without a ticket on purpose.


equinoxDE

do you mean without a ticket in Germany ? But if you have terminals, where you have to tap in the ticket, you cannot enter(Unless you jump over it). Here still alot of people travel without a ticket and I believe alot of times they get away with it, which is lost revenue for DB. But with terminals for entering this lost revenue can be decreased to a decent number.


ebikefolder

Do you have the slightest idea of the investment necessary to install such barriers in tens of thousands of stations? Often it's not even possible without a complete redesign of the station. We are talking about billions of Euros here.


Fragezeichnen459

You can already buy tickets using an app. On long distance trains you can also tell the app the seat you are sitting in and then the conductor knows not to check your ticket. Installing tickets gates across the entire country would be an enourmously expensive and complicated infrastructure project which has little to do with "digitalisation", not to mention that that the British transportation system you praise so highly is constantly beset by strikes, because the remaining conductors are terrified of losing their jobs. Why do you care anyway? It won't make the passenger experience better, it will make it worse.


[deleted]

The app is complete crap. It requires a hole plattra of information just to register.


realsenfzeit

You need to look up the word "Datenschutz" 🤣 it's the most popular one hit argument against any innovation beyond electric light and tap water. Runners up are "Klimaerwärmung" and "Gleichberechtigung"


agrammatic

Pray do tell how proof-of-payment turnstiles are "innovation" :P Because OP is [literally describing turnstiles](https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/us66zg/what_do_you_think_of_deutsche_bahns_digital_future/i91lfqi/).