> claiming that 10% of those that purchased the 9€ ticket did without at least one of their daily car journeys. [...] But for a start, I think it is not so bad.
I don't know – I suppose you could say any car journey avoided is an improvement, but given the quite radical reduction of fares a figure of only 10 % avoided car journeys stills seems rather disappointing and to my mind rather confirms what was already known beforehand – while ticket prices should be reasonable and not outrageously expensive, the actual key to significantly reducing daily car usage (instead of mostly having people just make additional journeys using public transport) is by improving actual service quality and not by merely making tickets cheaper.
E.g. locally there was project where after a significant improvement in services (up to three departures per hour instead of only roughly hourly at best, plus direct connections into the city centre instead of having to change partway), 40 % of the passengers on that line were former car users!
That's what I'd call an actual success story, but unfortunately it seems that everybody has succumbed to some sort of "cheap, cheap, cheap" mania, and of course for politics slashing fares is an easier win instead of actually improving the infrastructure and somehow dealing with the evolving staff shortage [1] or the increasing planning bureaucracy [2].
[1] Not just drivers, even though that might be the most immediately visible to the general public – e.g. the local state government still doesn't seem to feel any sort of urgency in finally getting the now vacant chair of the railway department at my former university filled again, even though the former professor has been pensioned off already quite a few years ago and it's not as if we didn't also have a shortage of engineers for planning and construction, too.
[2] Instead of actual improvements, we only got a "Planning Speedup Law" ("Planungsbeschleunigungsgesetz") which in practice has hardly sped up anything at all, and sometimes possibly even made things worse (e.g. by having centralised the handling of planning enquiries at the Federal Railway Agency – but without actually correspondingly increasing staffing levels there). The only bright spot from the point of view of public transport in general and the railways in particular (though on the other hand it doesn't paint that good a picture for Germany as a whole) is that the transition of maintenance and planning of motorways from the states to the new federal "Autobahn GmbH" has been similarly botched up, and apparently the new Autobahn GmbH has quite rapidly managed to make itself rather unpopular, both as an employer for individual engineers, as well as as a contracting entity for the various individual construction and engineering companies that handle most of the actual serious work.
Our assessment of the situation is probably not too far apart. When I wrote: "But for a start, ..." I wanted to hint that there are a lot of other aspects that need improvement, too.
With regard to the "Planning Speedup Law" I am extremly sceptical too. I fear that in most cases this will result in the quality of planning suffering without an overall improvement in the situation. As soon as the stakeholders have adjusted to shorter planning processes, they will very likely submit projects at shorter notice and there will be complaints about too long process times again. At the same time, there will often not be enough time to examine the problematic points of the projects in sufficient detail and to look for better solutions.
I don't know – I suppose you could say any car journey avoided is an improvement, but given the quite radical reduction of fares a figure of only 10 % avoided car journeys stills seems rather disappointing and to my mind rather confirms what was already known beforehand – while ticket prices should be reasonable and not outrageously expensive, the actual key to significantly reducing daily car usage (instead of mostly having people just make additional journeys using public transport) is by improving actual service quality and not by merely making tickets cheaper.
E.g. locally there was project where after a significant improvement in services (up to three departures per hour instead of only roughly hourly at best, plus direct connections into the city centre instead of having to change partway), 40 % of the passengers on that line were former car users!
That's what I'd call an actual success story, but unfortunately it seems that everybody has succumbed to some sort of "cheap, cheap, cheap" mania, and of course for politics slashing fares is an easier win instead of actually improving the infrastructure and somehow dealing with the evolving staff shortage [1] or the increasing planning bureaucracy [2].
[1] Not just drivers, even though that might be the most immediately visible to the general public – e.g. the local state government still doesn't seem to feel any sort of urgency in finally getting the now vacant chair of the railway department at my former university filled again, even though the former professor has been pensioned off already quite a few years ago and it's not as if we didn't also have a shortage of engineers for planning and construction, too.
[2] Instead of actual improvements, we only got a "Planning Speedup Law" ("Planungsbeschleunigungsgesetz") which in practice has hardly sped up anything at all, and sometimes possibly even made things worse (e.g. by having centralised the handling of planning enquiries at the Federal Railway Agency – but without actually correspondingly increasing staffing levels there). The only bright spot from the point of view of public transport in general and the railways in particular (though on the other hand it doesn't paint that good a picture for Germany as a whole) is that the transition of maintenance and planning of motorways from the states to the new federal "Autobahn GmbH" has been similarly botched up, and apparently the new Autobahn GmbH has quite rapidly managed to make itself rather unpopular, both as an employer for individual engineers, as well as as a contracting entity for the various individual construction and engineering companies that handle most of the actual serious work.