EYou don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. The ancient Romans already knew that. In other words, if you get something as a gift, you shouldn’t also make high demands. If the federal government now offers the prospect of a monthly ticket for nine euros as a temporary compensation for the rising energy prices, very few will complain about the offer. It could start as early as May 1st with the low-cost travel, which is limited to three months.
The transport ministers of the federal states also praise the idea itself. In this way, they argue, consumers would be financially relieved and new customers could possibly be won for local transport, for example drivers who left their vehicles in the garage because of the high fuel prices. But why be satisfied with the sparrow in your hand when you think the dove on the roof is within reach? In any case, a majority of the ministers responsible for transport promptly countered the nine-euro initiative by the federal government with the demand to introduce a zero-euro ticket for local public transport.
The responsible state ministers argue that the transport companies would need weeks just to convert the ticket machines. A free ticket would be much easier to organize: if you wanted to drive, just get on. However, nobody would then know how many people would be using local transport, and the transport associations need to know who is traveling when and how in order to be able to plan in the interests of the users.
Rising passenger numbers, falling revenue
There is no doubt that cheap tickets will bring more customers to transport companies in the short term, and free travel would certainly be even more popular. Studies by economic researchers show that when people are offered something free of charge, they behave fundamentally differently than when they have to pay a price, no matter how small. If a chocolate bar is offered for zero euros, even people who don’t really like sweets will grab it.
However, junk offers also give the impression that what costs nothing is also worthless. If buses and trains run free of charge for users, the operators question the value of their offer. Those responsible for local public transport currently have enough problems anyway. For some time they have been confronted with rising personnel, construction and energy costs. The Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund (RMV) recently pointed out the explosiveness of this development, which was accelerated by the corona pandemic. According to RMV, the costs for drivers, service and workshop personnel have increased by around ten percent since 2017, and diesel and electricity prices by 15 and 33 percent respectively. And that’s not even counting the explosion in fuel prices since the start of the war against Ukraine.
On the other hand, the number of passengers in the network area increased again slightly last year, but revenue fell again. In the pre-Corona year 2019, around 808 million people were still traveling by bus and train in the Rhine-Main area, the number fell to 524 million in the following year and rose to 565 million in 2021 (a drop of still 30 percent in comparison to 2019). In the same period, RMV revenues fell from EUR 970 million (2019) to EUR 762 million (2020) to EUR 759 million.
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