Travelling: Tickets I Have Known.

I have been a traveller since the early Seventies, beginning in England, travelling and working in Wales and Scotland, exploring Northern Ireland and, later, Ireland. At a young age I made my first trip overseas to France where, mouth open in amazement, I discovered that the French, and other European foreigners, looked and acted much the same as we did on our small island. My first trust issues, especially of a specific teacher in my North Yorkshire school, began to surface. My desire to travel further grew. Many years later I can look back to travels across the whole of Europe, the Arabian lands, North and Central America with a certain sense of satisfaction and enjoyment. I didn’t get kidnapped in South America, caught up in troubles in Ireland or Cyprus, caught in a Harem in Saudi Arabia, swept to sea from a small island in Scotland, smuggled into or out of Cornwall, or any of the other generalisations we use to define a certain people in one of the many countries around the world.

I have travelled with my thumb, with friends and acquaintances, with people I’d never set eyes upon before, in buses, ships, aeroplanes, cars, and trains. I have smuggled myself into cabins, paid for tickets, had tickets paid for or presented to me and, now and then, simply been overlooked at during controls. As a youth it was always a pleasure to know I could buy a ticket at a massively reduced price, and travel for months on end if I so desired. Europe, especially, was an open book, and simply waiting to be explored with any one of many special tickets designed for students, for the young, for those with a little more ready cash available. Not being one of those in the last category, I picked fruit, made friends and had lovers.

In Germany, after much discussion and a form of practice run, the government and individual States agreed to issue a ticket to cover basic travel across the whole country, for anyone who wished to buy it, at a price of forty-nine euro. The days of my youth revisited me immediately, and I was an early supporter of this wonderful experiment which, according to some sources, has eleven million people taking part. Compared to what I had been paying for regional transport, this new Deutschland Ticket was rather more than a simple bargain, it released me back into the wild, and undoubtedly it has locked many others out of the local areas and into fields further apart.

Let me put the cost of this ticket into context, and add some perspective. A standard ticket for me to travel, by train, from one station to another with no deviation of start or end point, cost ninety-four euro a week. The present inner-city ticket, just for the city and no further, costs seventy-two euro and fifty cent. For forty-nine euro a month, with a little discomfort perhaps, and certainly longer travel times, I can move from one end of the country to another as I will on any regional train or bus. The reader(s) of this site will recognise what a difference that makes, and have noted that my travels have taken me to Hildesheim, Bremen, Hannover, Hamburg, Osnabrück and Schwerin just in the last fortnight or so. I have also, as followers on social media know, made my way from the Big City to the Little City almost every work day, at no additional cost whatsoever. And used various buses and trams wherever I happen to have been, without paying out more.

In Berlin the talk is of increasing the price of the Deutschland Ticket by an unspecified sum to help finance the infrastructure repairs required to bring German railways back to the peak of the performance potential. Pressure is being out on the individual States, whose decision it is, to conform to this idea, and accept an increase. The price has been stable since the ticket’s introduction in May 2023, so there could be some justification for a price hike, perhaps in line with inflation, perhaps a little more. Although, reading through social media these last few days, I see many who are already complaining and claiming that a price increase would make the ticket unaffordable, that they would stop buying it which, to my way of thinking, is an absurdity for such a beneficial asset, even at twenty euro more. Prices from between sixty-nine euro a month, and one hundred have been suggested; all of them grabbed out of the air, since there is no discussion on the higher levels, as yet, of whether an increase should take place or not. It is merely a suggestion from a certain finance minister in Berlin.

That investment needs to be made in the infrastructure of German railways is a fact. Previous governments have ignored the need, and there has been a lot of waste. There is also a certain degree of financial stupidity surrounding monies allocated of late: if work is not completed on time, or within a certain period specified by the government, German railways will be heavily fined. The government will take back the money it is investing, and cause even more financial woes for the business. But what of the idea of investing money from an increased Deutschland Ticket cover price? Should the price be raised by ten euros, that would bring an additional one hundred and eleven million euro into the treasure trove. A small drop of water on a very large, very hot stone slab.

So what happened to the idea of Green Investment, of cutting back on climate damaging engines, reducing traffic, and making this country a better, cleaner place to live in? The present government, as with many before it, subsidises the purchase and use of company cars. It gives companies money to use cars which directly effect the air that we breath, the ground and water we need to survive. These subsidies total several billion euro a year. If we are to move away from the polluting engines, and to cleaner means of travel, it makes sense to invest in the clean and tax the dirty. Politics however, is not always about sense, but more often about vested interests.

There are groups in Germany who are fighting – sometimes by means many find abhorrent – for change. The Fridays For Future movement still exists, even if it has been overrun, some might say, by the more militant activists who, let’s be honest, have their rights and purpose too. Perhaps the peaceful demonstrations we have seen over the last few years need to evolve and take on the form of a string lobbying movement; the numbers are there, as is the will. Perhaps it needs to be made clear that a new generation is growing into a world they wish to keep, and the old political parties and their conservative – regardless of left, centre or right, and written with a small c – outlook is out of date. New parties are being formed, and gaining ground. And why, many should be asking their local parliamentary representatives, are all these funds being spent to benefit the minority, who make profits which could easily cover any small financial loss, rather than being spent to enhance the lives and environment of the majority?