Luxury

[nullplan]

Today I decided on a whim to go to Nuremberg, because last time I was there I saw an ad for the traffic museum having a new special exhibition about train toilets, and I also hadn't seen the standard exhibition in a while (I don't even remember when I was there last). And I went by train because doing so cost me nothing. I already have a Deutschlandticket for work (because they'd reshuffled the bus stops, so taking the bus was actually worth it now, and the Deutschlandticket was cheaper than all the other option just for the bus alone, even if I only use the bus half the time I'm working).

For those not living in Germany, the Deutschlandticket is a non-transferable ticket, valid for one month (and you have to get it as a subscription, but you can cancel at any moment, and it is always valid for only one calendar month). It costs 49€/month, and as the name implies, allows one to use all regional trains, busses, and trams (except for some museum/tourist trains and trams) in all of Germany.

And then it hit me: These 49€/month are far below the total cost of car ownership. Let's run some numbers, shall we? I own an Opel Corsa. I bought it for 10,000€ in cash, so there's no loan to pay off. How many kilometers am I going to get out of it? Well, if it is 200,000 km, I have hit the bloody jackpot. But that means that I have to write off 0.05€/km (because when the car was barely used, it was worth 10,000€, and when I sell it, it will be worth scrap value).

Next, let's look at fuel. My car drinks 7l/100km in city traffic (so short routes and lots of stop-and-start). It gets more efficient on the Autobahn (like 6l) if I avoid speeds above 130 km/h (if I floor it to the maximum rated 175 km/h, it drinks 10l). At the current fuel prices of - let's not quibble with minor details here - 2€/l, this comes to a nice and easy 14€/100km, or another 0.14€/km to add to the tally, coming to 0.19€/km already.

For the amount of driving, let's not use me as an example, because I often don't drive. Let's use my boss. He lives 10 km away from work and commutes by car. Why he won't just use the bus is beyond me, but with this, he gets 20 km round trip, and 100 km per work week. But twice a week he also has to go to other places, so let's call it 150 km per week. That is 600 km per month. With the previously calculated kilometer price, this comes out at approximately 120€/month, just in write-offs and fuel.

But wait, there is more. There are annual costs as well. Namely insurance (ca. 700€/year), car tax (90€/year), and repair/maintenance. I pay ca. 200€/year for that. Some of that is tire storage, because I don't have the space here, and I do get them swapped semi-annually (winter tires in winter, and summer tires in summer), but that is also cost I only have because of the car, so let's add it to the tally. So that is 990€/year in annual costs, which comes out at 82.50€/month. Which combines with the previous figure to more than 200€/month.

So that means that owning a car in Germany right now, while living 10 km away from work and commuting by car, is more than 4 times as costly as just owning a Deutschlandticket. And using it you get to do cool things, like look at train toilets in a museum on a whim for absolutely zero additional charge for the transportation (and the museum ticket cost me 7€). My boss could buy tickets for his whole family for that money. And some of my calculations were really generously rounded.

The actual exhibit turned out probably exactly the right size. There's just not a whole lot to say. For half a century, trains didn't have any toilets, because they were modeled on stagecoaches, and they didn't have toilets either. And for the best part of a century after that, we used the so-called "open system" (I shall leave that to your imagination. Suffice it to say that there is a sign on the Brockenbahn train cars, telling you to not use the toilet past Schierke station, because that is where the nature preserve area starts). But since the 70ies, modern rail cars are actually using a vacuum suction system. And there is also not a whole lot of variety to talk about there.

[lambduh]

I'd love to live somewhere with decent mass transit, one day. Here in Ontario, our passenger trains yield to freight trains. It's been four jobs and six or seven years since I would have been able to reliably take the bus to work. The four jobs since have all been accessible by bus, but either not late enough or early enough for the requirements of the job, and would have taken 1-2 hours in the best case by bus, compared to 10-20 minutes by car.

It would be a lot cheaper to not have a car, but when you do have a car it often ends up that the marginal cost of any trip is less if you use the car. This is probably a very different calculation in a reasonable city, our mass transit is more expensive than yours and our gas is a lot cheaper, for better or worse.

I would love to not have to own a car. My car doesn't even have a toilet.

[eekee]

I've heard Germany's car lobby is as strong as the USA's gun lobby. Good to know the country manages to run affordable public transport anyway. I wish Britain did; long-distance train tickets cost "'OW MUCH?!?!"

I love cars, but there's increasing evidence that cars are amongst the stupidest things humans have ever used. Recent research has found tyre dust particles are small enough to get through the brain-blood barrier, though we don't know what it does to the brain. It must affect some biological systems; it's known to kill a couple of species of fish. It's so abundant as to make up over 50% of the microplastics in the ocean, and no place on Earth is free of it.

I'm happy I don't need more than an electric bike. The bike has tyres of course, but there's much less force on them which probably means much less dust produced.

I would love to not have to own a car. My car doesn't even have a toilet.

I know, right?

[nullplan]

I've heard Germany's car lobby is as strong as the USA's gun lobby.

Let me say it like this: Every traffic minister since 1994 (the founding of the current Deutsche Bahn AG) has said how important the trains are, and how we need to invest in the rails to make them fit for the future, and then proceeded to spend at least twice as much on the Autobahn anyway. And it isn't even working; we have a massive maintenance backlog on both the rails and the streets, and tons of bridges need replacing. Because all of that money did not go into Autobahn maintenance, but construction, because of course it is the more visible change to build a completely new road than to maintain an old one. But construction adds to the maintenance backlog a couple years down the road (haha), making the problem worse.

Truth be told, the railway system is running at or above capacity. There are no buffers left; every little thing causes huge disruptions. If you are planning to ride a train here, better pick a route with enough buffer time for all the transfers. I didn't on Saturday, I picked a route that had 6 minutes transfer time. What happened? Some idiots decided to walk on the tracks, so one train got delayed 10 minutes, causing me to miss the connection (I didn't even try; the app said it would "likely not be reached", which means they weren't willing to delay the connecting train), so I had to take a detour via Ingolstadt, and the whole ride took an hour longer than it should have. Which was already an hour longer than a drive would have taken.

On the way back, the same connection had problems again, so I took another route on which I had 20 minutes transfer time. Naturally, the trains were on time then. Though the first one, the Nuremberg-Stuttgart regional train, was packed to the rafters. I did get a seat, luckily, but there weren't many left.

Good to know the country manages to run affordable public transport anyway. I wish Britain did; long-distance train tickets cost "'OW MUCH?!?!"

We have that country-wide ticket only since last year. It took an act of parliament to establish, and at the 1-year mark, there were a couple of voices calling for its abolition, and others calling for a higher price. And even one braindead county wanted to get out of the system entirely. They could be dissuaded, luckily.

Express train tickets can cost you a pretty penny here as well. I'll go on another trip over the weekend, and the tickets for that one cost me 80€. It is a 400km trip using an Intercity (not express). I might have saved more, had I booked more in advance. ICE for the same route would have cost me 150-200€. But I decided against that because it would have saved less than an hour, and the cost difference was just so huge.

[chase]

My wife and I bought a lightly used car, a Ford Bronco Sport, which we share. With insurance and gas it costs about $800 USD a month. I'm near Houston, TX. There are no passenger trains, there are a couple bus stations, I think the closest is about 10 miles away. And the bus schedule is awful, far apart and often late. Its all 'burbs and everything is very spread out in Texas.

If you don't have your own car you are likely going to use Uber or similar to get where you need to go. There is an on road tram if you are downtown and only need to go to other areas in downtown. The tram often gets into accidents with cars.