Germany is densely populated and I think distances between villages/cities are shorter than in the USA. So more potential passengers on shorter routes. But no excuse for US America to not offer at least the minimal puplic transport in towns and cities over 50k inhabitants.
Do the Americans want it ? If less than 50% vote for yes, it will not happen, that's democracy. If the majority is made of dumb people, dumb people will rule.
Really... so what do you do in such an American city when you (because of what reason ever) don't have a driver's license or aren't able to drive? 🤔 For a long time I lived in a German city of about 500,000 inhabitants. It has a light rail system with about 120 km length, 19 km of these are underground in the city center. Additionally there are a lot of bus lines. I got a driver's license as soon as possible because it can be important to have. But I didn't have a car when I lived there. You need to have a car even in big cities in the USA, right? Except perhaps in New York or Boston or Washington or ... Have a nice day 🖐👴
Person from *very* rural Germany here. Seeing just five minutes of well-functioning public transport already made me jealous... I live in a small town (2.400 inhabitants) just three kilometres from the border to the Czech Republic, and I used to rely on public transport to get to secondary school. There were 3 buses a day in each direction, I had to get up at 6 to in the classroom at 8, the 30km journey would take almost an hour, mainly because the bus stopped like 20 times on the way. I really enjoyed just listening to music and zoning out on the bus, but having an entire hour more to myself is still the better option now that I have a car. I also usually take at least one of my classmates to school so we're sharing the fuel cost. Oh, and did I mention that if I missed the bus at 1pm or school ended any time after that I'd have to wait til 4pm for the next? And in some cases school ended at 16:45 which meant my parents would have to pick me because there was literally no other way of getting home. We also had a railway branch line running through the town that connected to the mainline in Neustadt a. d. Waldnaab (also where I go to school), but the track was lifted in the 70s and it's a cycle path now that the council invests more money in then any other infrastructure projects (No, taking a 3 hour bike ride to school isn't an option...) So that's my story from the 'typical' town in rural Germany. If you made it this far, thanks for spending your precious time reading this comment There's probably a few typos but this is the internet so all good...
I don't understand why they always put these cycle paths down and then feel awesome about it instead of just reopening the railway. It makes sense that bikes are trendy in urban areas but their use in rural areas for actual commuting is pretty limited, as distances tend to get very long very quickly.
That sounds very similar to my experience in the same area (I went to school in Tirschenreuth), although it wasn't quiiiiite as bad for me. At least they had scheduled busses for all the possible ending times of a school das for me. The cost was ridiculous though, since in years 11 and 12 you have to pay for your own tickets. A monthly ticked used to cost 100€ for me back then, and that was in 2017/18, I don't want to know how much it is now. And that ticket then was valid for exactly one line, between my home town and the town where my school was.
@@firnen_ Oh I completely forgot about the cost of the tickets, thanks for the reminder! (I knew someone out there would read my comment and say "yeah I know that place") Anyway, the tickets. I still have a stack of them in my desk to claim money from the council (which I never did because I got my license halfway through year 11 and didn't get above the threshold of 450€). Last time I payed for a full month was October 2021 and that cost me 138€. (in most cases it was cheaper to buy tickets weekly since Holidays happened regularly (as you'll know) so three weeks was cheaper than the full months). Last time I took that bus was probably in May 2022, and a single trip home cost almost 9€ then. We had an excursion to Berlin at the end of year 11 when the 9€ ticket was a thing and it was such a blessing to just hop on any U- or S-Bahn and go wherever we wanted. Hope you too now found a better alternative, either by taking the car or moving. I don't know what I'll be doing after I got my Abitur but there's something in my that wants to get as far away from this place as possible xD
@@jonistan9268 They're marketing it as a tourist attraction but I honestly don't see any point in it. The trainfan in me wants to rebuild the line as a heritage railway but that's likely to remain a dream... There was a plan several years ago to move the bus stop to a more central position in town and away from former the station forecourt, but nothing ever came of that.
I live not far away from rewboss. Aprox. 40 km north. In the "Vogelsberg". So we're lucky to have a bus 4-6 times a day. Sa/So no regular bux, only bad organised call bus. Often the bus does not come or is so delayed, so the next train at the bus hub is gone. With a car I can ride in aprox 60 minutes to the middle of Frankfurt. With my bike I used when I was younger it takes aprox. 1:45 due to a very good bike way. With OPNV the longest shortest time is 2:30 the longes time ever was 4:30.
I lived for a while in the Swiss countryside (a village with 1000 inhabitants). We had a bus (with WiFi and USB chargers for every seat) every 30 minutes to the next railway station in either direction from 6am to 11pm and hourly service on Sundays, with an on-demand-service on Friday and Saturday nights from the station, where it connected to the night regio trains from Zurich and Luzern. Whilst still having a car, we hardly used it, mainly for day trips with the kids. I always took the bus-train combo to work. This works well if a society understands public mobility as a basic need.
@@OnkelJajusBahn Ich werde wohl dieses Jahr aus persönlichen Gründen nach fast 20 Jahren wieder zurück nach Deutschland ziehen und auch wenn es Vieles gibt, wegen dessen ich mich wieder auf die Heimat freue, den nahezu perfekten öffentlichen Verkehr werde ich vermissen. Neben dem dichten Netz und Takt, der Sauberkeit und der Pünktlichkeit sind es auch kleine Dinge: Wenn ich hier am Bahnsteig stehe und der Zug fährt ein, kann ich mich völlig normal weiter unterhalten - in Deutschland (und auch anderswo) rumpelt und/oder quietscht es immer. Ich weiß nicht, wie die Schweizer das hinkriegen, dass alles nahezu lautlos abläuft. Bessere Technik? Bessere Wartung? Keine Ahnung.
@@mina_en_suiza Oh, verstehe. Alles Gute für den Umzug. Ich war erst einmal in der Schweiz, hab aber vor, da noch öfters hinzufahren, weil der ÖV einfach so beeindruckend ist. (Ist natürlich nicht der einzige Grund). Wäre eine interessante Frage, woran das mit dem Quietschen liegt. Keine Ahnung. Vielleicht sind einfach die Schienen in besserem Zustand? Keine Ahnung. Weil die Züge sind in Deutschland jetzt auch nicht wirklich älter als in der Schweiz, wenn auch wahrscheinlich nicht in so top Zustand, wie in der Schweiz. Aber keine Ahnung, ich kenne mich mit Technik nicht aus.
@@OnkelJajusBahn Bei der Technik bin ich auch überfragt, aber es wird halt unglaublich viel mehr in Ausbau und Instandhaltung investiert. Im Moment habe ich kein Auto, obwohl ich es manchmal vermisse (Für Ausflüge mit den Kindern mit Schlauchboot, Zelt oder Skiern ist es schon super), aber das spart trotz der relativ hohen Preise (ist relativ, weil es für Einwohner super Vorteile gibt) einfach auch wahnsinnig viel Geld. Da ist auch schon mal ein Taxi oder ein Mietwagen drin, obwohl für beides die Preise hier einfach unverschämt sind (Wir reden hier von 4-5 mal deutsche Preise).
I know you usually move around fairly well by bus and train but when I saw the title of the video I thought you were going to say "well, my wife has a license". 😄
Pretty cool to finally have a look at Aschaffenburg (and see it's got good public transportation). I first heard about it from my English teacher, who used to translate it to "Backside Monkey Castle". He even looked a bit like Rewboss. My life has come full circle, i guess.
Notice that it's not called "Arschaffenburg" but "Aschaffenburg" which more accurately translates to "Ashen Monkey Castle." In my opinion, waaay cooler sounding. ;)
I wish we had public transport as sufficiently well structured as this in the nineties btw. growing up in a rural village in the Hannover area. Our bus line was so notorious for being late (or not arriving at all), we didn't even have to make up excuses anymore. Finally getting a car really meant freedom. And a punctual lifestyle, of course.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a small village with an hourly bus service in rural Germany. Just around 200 people living there, it had both a local train line (sometimes trains did stop there, sometimes not, depending on scheduling and who was in power in local politics) and the bus service which did run to the next train station in the next urban center (a small 125.000 people University town in southern lower saxony). As it happens, once the ICE was introduced that train station actually had direct high speed access north and south and via branch lines east and west. I still use it to visit my parents from Berlin in just 2 hours by train (3 hours by car). An hour bus service is invaluable, you have to remember the rough time of the hour when it departs on both ends and can be very flexible with that. Didn't catch the last one? Well, the next one will depart soon anyway. It allowed me so much autonomy in my youth to do my own stuff, i don't know how it would have worked without it. Of course, i did move to Berlin eventually and have lived there for the last 23 years, not needing a car at all. But i do love my year pass for the whole ABC-System which allows very flexible transportation on anything from ships to trains. And yes, you get used to the next S-Bahn being only 10 minutes away, or the next Underground 5 minutes. Moving with my job to my now secondary home in Porto, Portugal, i had to re-adjust and for the first time since my education in the USA (back then it was a very old clunker i shared with another student) i actually bought a car. Which is extremely expensive just to take the 15 minute drive to work or the 15 minute drive to the beach or the 6 hour (7 with charging stops) drive to the Algarve. But cycling, which i use extensively in Berlin, is simply suicide on 2 wheels in Porto, and sadly public transport, while still being good, is simply not good enough for my rather extreme working times (start to work at 5 in the morning, or end it at 1 in the morning on a late duty).
A couple years ago the Göttingen bus services reorganized and increased frequency from hourly to every 30 minutes from smaller Bovenden and Rosdorf, about 20 minutes into the city. Almost no point in having a car when things are well connected to town and for longer journeys to everywhere else in Germany or neighboring countries.
Lived in the Ruhrarea or a University Town my entire life I do own a driver's license, I probably can count on one hand how often i drove in the last 4 years at least But because of this it's really hard for me to actually have any connection to any part of rural Germany i feel, as they usually take the car (their primary transport) to come to the city, but most places are just basically impossible to visit by public transport (which was always my primary transport) It's kinda sad because it just feels like those places stood still in time and that it limits the opportunites of people in freetime, schooling (how many greatly qualified people choose to go rural and not city), employment I'm not saying that the city is always better, but it feels like the divide between rural and urban populations shouldn't be one that only cars can cross
Halbe Stunde bis Stunde ist (für entlegene Gebiete) perfekt! Zum einen kann man sich das wirklich gut merken, aber viel wichtiger: man kann einige Dinge innerhalb von einem Tag erledigen. Morgens mit dem Bus zum Oberzentrum, Mittags/Abends zurück. In Regionen ohne Anbindung (oder noch schlechterer) wirds knapp mit 2-mal am Tag... Und wenn man einen Bus verpasst, kommt _immerhin_ in einer Stunde ein neuer. Wobei auf dem Land die Busfahrer auch anhalten, wenn man angerannt kommt...
I totally agree that dial-a-ride services are just adding an unnecessary step onto something which should be fairly straightforward. Newport in South Wales tried to replace a lot of their bus network with an app-based system called “Fflecsi”. While it was good in many ways, it worked a lot like Uber, so you could often get into a glorified minibus within 5-10 minutes, and it did reach all the way out into the rural parts of the county, it did have the inevitable drawback that those who are not tech-literate couldn’t book a bus, as apps are complicated, and you couldn’t just hail a bus down at a stop. Newport City Council and the Welsh Government pulled the plug and reintroduced the old timetables. Spent a few million pounds on a pilot scheme that simply wouldn’t work for Britain’s ageing population without massive state-sponsored tech education. Anyway, rant on dial-a-ride systems (outside of London, London’s are great) over.
Dial-a-ride can be a solution for hours with less traffic, like evenings, early mornings or weekend - that's how it's managed in my county with "shared taxis". But even if you've got a monthly ticket, you might have to pay additionally for the service.
@@hypatian9093 my city does the same thing. During the night there are hardly any public transport lines, so they have shared taxis, they can be booked through an app (which works pretty well IMO, you see where your driver is in real time, you know the license plate, where exactly you will be picked up etc) or on the phone and it is heavily discounted especially for those who have a yearly ticket for example. I usually pay a quarter of what a normal taxi would cost. Better than public transport at night because I feel much safer that way.
It's funny how a rural community "very poorly served" in Germany may only have a few buses a day. I also live in a rural community, but in Alberta, Canada. There are no buses, trains, or any kind of public transportation at all, I'm embarrassed to say, even though I am only about 40 km from a city of over a million in population. Even our two largest cities, both of over a million people, and located about 350 km from each other, do not have train service connecting them. They do have bus service connecting them, but only 5 buses per day. When I've travelled to Europe, it is always heartening to see how things "could be" if we didn't embrace the car culture so much here. The most "poorly served" area, pretty much anywhere in Europe, is far ahead of the "best served" area for public transportation in Canada.
My German village is investing in public transport like crazy! Last December we went from an hourly bus to half-hourly + an extra on-demand bus to remote outskirts that previously only had 8 buses a week (on weekends only).
@@schinkenspringer1081 Does it matter? Also since I wrote this, the on-demand bus was cancelled due to lack of usage… so my comment isn’t even relevant anymore.
I grew up in a village near yours and back then we had two buses a day (mainly for the kids to get to and back from school in Amorbach). But I went to different schools a bit further away in Miltenberg and Walldürn, I can't count how many times I had to do hitchhiking in order get home - or wait for hours until my dad finished work and could pick me up. Nowadays there is one bus per hour, pretty awesome 👍
I feel like the US (and to some/most extent, Canada and to some extent, Australia) designed cities and roads where driving is the best and sometimes only option to get somewhere without thinking about the fact not everyone can drive for various reasons which is what you said on video. It's the equivalent of making a building only accessible to someone that can go up the stairs (this can be the case for old buildings when regulations were not in place)
I am about the same age as Rewboss and live in an Australian city with the world's largest tram network. We also have have a good urban train system and busses where the trams and trains don't go. I walk to a nearby supermarket and get the tram into the central city. Even the town where I spent my childhood had hourly trains to a nearby regional city of 100,000 people and the more distant big city of 5 million people where I live now. There are extra busses from the big city to holiday destinations such as beach resorts in summer and ski resorts in winter. So I have never missed out on anything because I do not own a car. 🙂
@@stephanweinberger It's only sad now though. By that I mean, people only see it that way today. People forget that back when this was done, having a car was something that was considered desirable. It was considered a standard of living improvement. It still is in many places. My Chinese friend told me he "finally made it" when he could swap a motorbike for a car. So we're looking at this through an entirely different lens now. And when these road systems were developed, socialized care for such people was higher than it is now (hospitals were all charities or non profits). Busses routes existed and were larger, and the US rail system used to massive. It's still the biggest one in the world, but it used to be about 2-3 times larger. Even in Europe this was often the case. Germany, France and the UK in particular pushed for automobiles post WWII until the 50s or 60s. The reason that stagnated there and didn't here is pretty simple: WWII. The economies, production, factories, standard of living etc in Europe took a long time to get going.
@@thysonsacclaim The inherent problems of focusing solely on car infrastructure have been known for _decades_ now. That's why most cities in Europe already began to reverse course in the 80s and 90s. They didn't do this on a whim, but because of actual facts and research. But for some reason US cities keep repeating the same mistakes over and over - and literally go bankrupt in the process. Because spread-out, car-dependent suburbia simply doesn't generate enough revenue to maintain all that expensive infrastructure.
Not to mention the advantage that regular scheduled, centrally organized public transit has: Massive economies of scale. It's infinitely more efficient both in terms of fuel usage, and in terms of raw capacity to have services like this compared to Ubers etc. It's almost like consolidating these essential services has mostly upsides. Not to mention the fact that mobility isnt negotiable for a functional modern life. By the way, the concept you reference of more service attracting more customers in public transit is called "induced demand". It works in both directions. When you spam-build highways and interstates, you get congested roads. When you make buses and trains more available, people flock to them.
All my adventures outside the USA over the past five decades have made me wonder why we have such crappy transit systems here (in the USA). But then I remember: we don’t share anything. It’s all “me! The Rugged Individual!” You’re on yer own here.
I am one of those who can’t drive because of disability. Buses are the only way getting around. I am so glad I am in a city with excellent transportation. I couldn’t survive without it
I live in a Bavarian small town of ~1200 inhabitants and luckily i have a Bus service pretty similar to yours, which depending on the time of day drives once, twice or even thrice an hour. But one thing which makes that service even better is, that during the time where the Bus only drives once an hour, there also is a Taxi that you can call which will take you to the next train station, which is also part of the public transportation network and therefore is completly free for me.
This level of rural bus service seemed fairly normal to me compared to my experience in Austria. I was not living in a rural village but I often went to visit friends and such, and it was almost always a timetable like this - once an hour. This might have been easier in the area I was in, because the villages lined up along the valleys creating a direct corridor that allowed for just a few lines to cover the vast majority of them. And on top of that, as a student I only had to pay €80 for my annual public transit pass.
Vielen Dank für dieses Video. Ich stimme dir zu 100 % zu, man muss das Rad nicht immer und überall neu erfinden. Ich wohne in Hamburg und bin jedesmal verärgert, wenn Entscheidungsträger immer von autonomen In Demand und ridepooling Bussen reden als Ergänzung zum klassischen ÖPNV , dieser aber aufgrund von Stau und fehlender bevorrechtigung immer unbeliebter wird.
Ganz ehrlich: Wenn die so reden würde ich auch sauer, weil ich nichts verstehe... (keine Ironie) In demand (heißt es nicht "on demand"? wie auch immer) verstehe ich noch, falls es dann "auf Abruf" bedeutet, aber was ist "ridepooling"? Reite ich Schwimmbecken? xD (mehr Sinn kann ich nicht rausziehen)
@@PunkHerr ja, meinte auch "On Demand" und "Ridepooling" also auf Abruf und die Fahrt wird geteilt. Also es kann sein ich buche eine Fahrt auf Abruf von A nach B und eine andere Person wird unterwegs eingesammelt,weil sie in die ungefähr gleiche Richtung muss.
@@nuvaboy jetzt bekomme ich noch Englischnachhilfe^^. Mein Problem mit Sprachen ist, dass ich in ihnen denke. D.h. hätte ich einen englischen Satz, dann würde ich vielleicht (!) verstehen, was das bedeutet. Aber in einem Deutschen erwarte (wie in erahnen, nicht befehlen) ich Deutsch und dann muss ich währenddessen übersetzen oder nachfragen (, was manche dann als Pingeligkeit oder trollen abtun).
It’s so funny to me to see all the places I stood around waiting for busses or trains as a kid in your videos. Never thought Schöllkrippen would ever be able to get so much attention. Anyway, what’s also funny to me is that everytime I’m back to visit my family I’m always complaining about the public transit to get me to Schneppenbach - quite the contrary to what you’re describing 😅
Very much agree. I live in rural France without a car. I cycle a lot and take public transport when available. I save a lot of money on running a car. It’s convenient for me-people with cars all to often rush around all the time without any planning for efficient use if time.
I don't have a driving licence either, and the mother & sister of my ex lived in a village near Aschaffenburg. Luckily one of those was always on hand to give me a lift if I needed to get into Aschaffenburg proper when visiting them!
Good quality, low cost public transport is an incredibly useful thing. While local bus services in the UK are ok, where they exist, rail is insanely expensive.
You can add: For car owners: during car repairs (no matter if something broke, or someone crashed into you) or maintenance you have an option to get somewhere (to work for example) While i don't like to use public transport myself (i used it in two different areas of my home country for 13 schoolyears and 10 years of work, and i have not been ill as often since i have no public transport connection to my new workplaceand have to use the car and if it's not too far, i rather walk than use a bus or tram) it is still something important to exist in my view. -> I am not the only person living in the area, and other people might need it, or benefit greatly when there is public transport.
Welcome. I'm living without a car in Leoben, a mid sized upper styrian university and industrial town, on a hill, and do all local transport by bike. Luckily we do have a train station where all long distance trains (railjet, eurocity, intercity, nightjet) stop. Actually I have a driving licence (I got it for my civilian service in 1990) and use it every couple of months/years with the "rail and drive" car sharing service of ÖBB, or sometimes renting a van from a furniture store to move bulky items. But it's been a long time since I needed that.
Valid topic, as I am considering moving back home to Germany. With one bus per hour to the station (15 mins away) it gets tricky with jobs that are too far away (even 60km would take me 2 hours door to door. Although bus services have improved, back when I did my apprenticeship there was one bus every two hours and I had to start work earlier in order to make the last bus home at 4:30pm. While it is better now, it still has lots of room for improvement, especially for those who do not drive anymore needing to go food shopping or the GP and so on without a car is tricky if the shop is not wthin walking distance (and lots of shops in villages have closed down since I was a child, making people dependent to go to the next bigger town to get their food.
It's similar in my small town in the Weserbergland which fortunately has a railway station. The trains arrive hourly approximately on the hour (and the ride from here to Hanover or Paderborn takes an hour, too), during peak hours there are trains at the half hour. The local bus line arrive a bit before the trains and depart a bit after them (well, technically it's two bus lines since it's a loop line: on the hour in one direction to the city centre and residential areas, at half hour in the other direction). You can go to the county seat by train in 15 minutes for the 15 km (but you have to get to the station here and in Hamelin from the station to the town centre) or you can take the bus, which goes every hour. That takes about 50 minutes - but you have several stops here in the town and in Hamelin as well, some directly in the historc centre or the central bus hub at the local shopping centre. It's the lazy solution - might take a bit longer, but is more convenient. The monthly ticket for the whole county is 40 € and it's transferable to another person, in the evenings and on weekends 1 adult and up to 3 children can travel with you .
The transportation system in Germany is one of the things that I miss the most. My 12 years living in Heidelberg, there was always a way of getting from point A to point B. Mostly, I rode bicycle but during the winter or if I needed to get somewhere quicker I could put my bicycle on most of the transport And get to my destinations easily. Back here in the USA there is an effort to have better transportation but it still is nothing like the German system. How I miss that. Are you a bike rider too?
When I’m in Germany (Hannover) which is about half the time now with the other half in the UK, I drive to Hannover and then my car effectively sits there for weeks on end without me having to use it. I have to make a deliberate effort to occasionally get it going just so that battery doesn’t go flat.
I spent the 1974-75 school year studying at the Gutenberg University in Mainz for my Master's Degree. I found I had distant relatives in my ancestral homeland near Regensburg. I bought a train ticket from Mainz to Aschaffenburg, then hitch-hiked the rest of the way to Regensburg to visit them.
Thank you very much for this inspirational video! I am 31 years old, same as you I don't have a car and even a driving license (and I am not sure if I want to), but I want to move out from Berlin in 10-15 years to some rural area (MV, Ostsee?); so, when thinking about that I considered getting a driving license as the only option to get my dream closer. Your video shows there are other options as well, if not available now - there is a real chance they will become available later. So thank you, Andrew.
In a way, living in Berlin prepares you for the long bus rides in rural areas: Living there it's normal to travel an hour - I lived in Prenzlauer Berg and worked in southern Spandau. Here in rural Lower Saxony people complain if they have to commute for 20 minutes... wimps ;)
I know that feeling. I had to live in rural areas most of my life. Without a car, which I never owned, even a few kilometers can feel like a huge distance. Buses go every now and then, but it's complicated and time wasting to take the bus to go to somewhere and back. Now I'm in the very comfortable position of living in a city where I can use several different means of public transportation to get where I have to go. But you can go to many places by feet and by bike or motorbike too and that's what I'm doing most of the time. Living close or in a city clearly has its adventages. Living on the countryside can give you the feeling of not being part of the world or being cut off from normal life.
Currently living in a rural area! Funny that the so-called 'Expressbus' comes once every hour and it takes you to Osnabrück in almost an hour. That doesn't sound express to me, though! Good thing we got two more bus options (another one that runs once every hour also, and another that runs 3x an hour on weekdays).
Well, I live in a small rural village right on the Hessian-Bavarian border (Haingrund, near Wörth a. Main, you might know). The challenge here is that we have TWO bus companies that transport people to and from our village and either terminate at the train station in Höchst Odw (Hessen) or in Wörth a. Main (Bavaria). All in all: That sounds like public transportation luxus! The problem is that these bus lines are neither coordinated nor connected in any way. So there are times when there is no bus at all and on the other hand they chase each other on the same route at intervals of one minute.
a bus every hour. A village in Ireland would never get that service. Mine only gets buses because there is a main road running through so buses from other places might as well stop but sometimes it isn't even officially on the timetables. And more like 2-4 a day max.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only person living in rural Germany without a car. Our local public transport in the Breisgau region is similar to yours. To be fair though we also have pretty good cycle infrastructure so I generally use that. I do have a licence though. Ironically I now have to drive occasionally as part of my job running a bicycle shop...
I also don't have a car and live in a Großstadt in NRW. While it is definitely not a big city by any stretch of the imagination, I think the surrounding the countryside is well serviced. There are many tiny villages and small towns that are linked by bus and rail, which I have used to visit friends and occasionally go places on weekends. I think NRW is well served, but other states in Germany may have fewer options for public transportation outside of Groß- and Kleinstadt.
1 bus an hour? Luxury... It's 1 nearly every 2 hours where I currently am. A few year ago I stayed with my dad in the rural German village that he was living in at the time. The village had 1 train an hour (on a single line track) from DB and a local company. It also had about 5 buses a day, which I couldn't really use all that often for they were at inconvenient times for me. When I did use them, however, those buses were of the coach type that you filmed in for the video.
To me (living in the Rhine Main Area between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden), the problem with public transport is not so much getting to the bigger cities, the main problem is getting from the periphery to other parts of the periphery. It would take me roughly 1.5-2h to get from home to my job instead of the 25 minutes by car. I would gladly use public transport if that made any kind of sense.
A collegue told me, that, when he went by bus, then he had to hope, the other bus was late. He had to switch busses but his second bus departed before the first bus arrived. Because of that, his commute to work would be an hour. So he drives by car and the commute was less than 10 minutes. And this was in Bremen. A very big city.
I moved to Mainz and I’ve gotta say, I’m very unimpressed with public transit now. In Heidelberg the public transit was phenomenal. Here in Mainz, the only way I can describe the local system is “6, ungenügend”. Busses come every half hour… Unless they don’t. It takes me over two hours to go a little over 6 kilometers to the Uni Campus, and frequently the busses and teams are so full that there is not only not a seat, but it is physically impossible for anyone else to get on. I didn’t plan on buying a car when I came here, but I had to.
Given how often I was there, I didn't feel the buses were _that_ infrequent in the sense that many buses came in every 15 minutes (sometimes interlined). That being said, I have experienced rush hour multiple times so rush hour service should definitively be improved.
Sounds like I'm here in a similar region but in one of the towns (roughly 30-40k) and the county(?) main town is a bit smaller than Aschaffenburg. I had to use the busses to go to school to that county(?) main town for some years. Express busses won't happen here. 1. there is a train connection. But the train station is at that border of the town which is max. far away from the county(?) main town. So in most cases the public transport route planner won't suggest it, especially if you're destination is too far away from the train station in the county(?) main town. 2. At the typical time in the morning for students, there're already two busses since there're two places in that town where like 99,9% of the students using that routes go to. What were the problems? 1. I was one of the like 0,1% students. My school didn't exist concerning the planning of the bus route (BTW: Also the universitiy where I went in that same town afterwards, that was even worse). That means if my lesson end at their regular times, I mostly have to wait quite long because of one bus every hour. When school started like at 9:45h, I had to be there even much more too early since there's a 2h hole between roughly 9 and 11h. 2. Many indirections(?) to provide bus service to really every village -> takes time. In the meantime, things are even worse: 1. lower speed limit on the main streets in the villages -> takes more time. 2. Some bus stops were rebuild in a way that if there're two busses short behind each other (like the two "school" busses in the morning"), it's possible that the second bus which is already ready to go is completely blocked by a bus standing at the bus stop in the opposite direction p´in combination with the first bus in his direction with to many stupid children buying their month tickets at the bus driver a the first school day of the month instead of somewhere else some days before. 3. When I went to school, I didn't have to change busses on the route, now I would have to -> loosing time, problems if one bus is too late and it's uncomfortable. 4. My school moved in an other part of the county(?) main town so it's even worse reachable with public transport. So it's very attractive to drive the shortest way out of the town and to the Autobahn and then into the town -> you're much faster. BTW: Maybe that travel bus companies would "got back" the busses too dirty after public transportation routes.
I moved to a small town in Saxonia and it's surrounded by tiny villages with inhabitants of 100-500. Even though it is not densely populated most of these villages have a bus which goes every 2 hours (and because of overlapping many villages have more than one line). In comparison I lived my whole life in northern Baden-Württemberg and to most villages Buses only went twice a day and the time tables of buses didn't made any sense nor were they connected to trains. Transferring was a mess
I'm trying to live without a car in a bigger town than yours in Italy but it's tough. But I'm curious to know how you bring your cats to the vet? Or if you have an emergency? But it's possible that your wife has both a driving license and a car and she covers those situations.
Funny that you make this video right now. Because in the Landkreis Aschaffenburg, many bus lines had been changed concerning their hourly rides. (And I’m extremely furious). I always took the "Linie 53" at 4.30pm, which now got removed completely. So I either need to wait for over an hour or take two buses with only 5 minutes transfer time in between - praying that the first bus arrives in time. I logically didn't go through all bus schedules, so I just wanted to ask, if you aren't affected by that change?
I grew up in Pflaumheim and took Bus 54 to school in Aschaffenburg every day for 8 years. While it is true that the public transport in the area is much better than it could be, I would not want to rely on it solely. Buses take a circuitous route and stop frequently, which... is the point of buses. But it also means that travelling by bus is quite slow. And it gets so much worse if you don't want to go to or from the city - then you are looking at very long travel times very quickly, for trips that would be short hops by car. If I were still living with my parents - as my brother does -, I would definitely get around by car - as my brother does.
Oha, der ÖPNV ist bei dir ja wirklich vergleichbar mit dem Angebot in der Schweiz in ländlichen Gebieten. So lässt es sich natürlich schon ohne Auto leben. Natürlich stellt sich dann noch die Frage, wie es frühmorgens, abends und am Wochenende aussieht.
As Andrew said, every hour the same minute is the begin of that too. But germany is just very big, this is hard to reproduce. And real acceptance starts with higher frequencies.
The issue is just in general that it's mostly profit-driven, and basically a very slow upward or downward spiral. Downward spiral ending at nobody wants to use it at all, and upward spiral might still not end somewhere where its profitable. Either way, no private company would take the risk, and therefore this has to be funded by the state. I have lived in a small village in Germany where the situation was very bad. But now I live in France at the German Border, and the situation is even worse. Shortly before I moved here, there was a bus like 3 times a day or so. When I moved here, they switched it already: Bus only Morning and in the Evening. Noon only on demand. Then half a year later, that was cancelled as well. Now it's only a school bus leaving at 7 in the morning and getting back at 17:00 or so, but that also depends on the weekday. And that fits to other sentiments. In a facebook group I asked about green waste, like cut grass or big things like old furniture. Back in Germany it was collected like once per month or so. But here...well, everyone has to have a car anyways, right? So you are supposed to bring it to the scrapyard yourself, which is like 2km away. So they were kind of saying that the idea of collecting it is stupid and blaming me to move here without having a car.... I am not seeing how this is helping getting to a more eco-friendly future, or as we call it in Germany "Energiewende".
There is nothing about profitability. It's accepted knowledge you cannot run such a service profitable. It's taxpayers money to run the bus, the ticket price is just a little extra on top. If the city council wants a bus at 4am, they will pay it and take the risk of no riders. It's not the bus operator taking the risk.
From the age of 14 to 18, we lived in a tiny village in Baden-Württemberg's countryside; Aside from the buses for school, there were maybe 4 or 5 a day that drove. I really disliked it, since, as my father said, the "Bordstein ist hochgeklappt" from about 18:00 on. So if you wanted to see a movie in the cinema in the next city at evening, or maybe do whatever in the evening, you either needed someone to drive you back, or sleep at a friends place. This ended up in countless evenings of many of us do-no-goods beeing outside way too long, drinking shitty V+Energy beer mixes and doing what young people do. Then again, I wouldn't want to miss those times.
I wish public transport is an option everywhere. Cars shouldn't be the end all be all of transportation but one option. Options are important in a democratic society.
Living in a village were is 1 bus a day in the one direction and six in the other from Monday to friday. And no service on weekend. One bus every hour seems pretty luxurious to me…🤷🏽♂️
We simply need to consider an efficient public transport system as an essential service. Besides, there are advantages. If people can live in the countryside, the pressure on the big cities lessens and that's a win win for everybody.
Public transport ftw. A viable and for already 100 years technically avaliable way to fight climat change that additionally already has been _implemented_ way more effective in the past!
Ironically, your bus service is almost as good as mine, living within the city limits of the second largest city in Austria. There's plenty of times where walking is faster than taking the bus around here, and it's always faster to cycle. And I'm lucky enough to live close to some bike infrastructure, because the roads around here don't even have sidewalks...
It seems like here in Austria you always have to chose between good public transport or good bicycle infrastructure. Difficult to get both at the same time. Are there cities that are actually good at both?
I lived 6 year at a place where I have only one Bus per hour. And that only because there where two lines. Else it would be just one bus every two hours. This in itself is not that bad. Even though it drastically limits how you can plan stuff and there is essentially no room for errors. But there are two or three other massiv problems. Where I lived the bus may arrive 15 minutes to early or to late. Means you had to stand there at least 15 minutes early and had to wait over half an hour and then you didn't even knew if the bus came even earlier this time or if you should wait just another minute before you can go home again. Even though at this point you may also just wait for the next Bus. And the second thing was the weekend. They still had this one per hour schedule, but only with these small 8 passengers cars and you had to call them to ask if they still have a free seat from your stop to your destination. But my nemesis was that the last bus drove at around 10:30 pm. Else I had to walk 12 kilometers just to to home. This almost got me fired since I had had to clock out early every single day. Rural area public transport? Never again. It's not often enough, not long enough and not reliable enough. (according to my experience)
I have a license but I didn't drive in 15 years. I'm not rural, but that doesn't matter. I go into the city maybe once, twice a week and yes, it's only like 2 kilometer to walk. But I'm sick to the bones of having to justify myself everywhere. Having a car is such a standard, that I'll have to draw the excuse lottery: 'I lost my license' (claiming due to alcohol got progressively uncooler the older I got :D ), 'my eyes are too bad', 'I have lost my car', 'I had an accident', 'Jesus came with a soft air gun and shot my tires' - srsly everything is accepted but 'I do not want to drive because it is not my thing' is not. And yes, I do groceries with a bike, a trailer and a basket.^^
I don’t have a licence either and I totally agree with you. People think you’re an alien and I also use my bike everywhere and people say, oh she rode her bike here as if it’s a huge thing. I feel happiest when I’m in Holland and wonder why I wasn’t born Dutch. 😢
0:45 "Let me show you how I get to Aschaffenburg, which is where people around here go for shopping and leisure and it's also a local administrative center, it's where I have to go when I apply for German citizenship." Don't forget, it's the place of the PO box mentioned at the end of each video. Or do you have the content actually delivered to your house (and the PO box address mostly for privacy)?
The last bus to my village leaves the hub at 8.05 pm weekdays, 7.00 pm Saturdays, and weirdly 9 pm Sundays. The service at weekends is only once every two hours, though.
Andrew, that bus driver at 3:00 looks suspiciously similar to you. Is this some hidden sibling conspiracy trying to sell the idea of public transport to people? I'm buying :o)
I love driving my cars, and I can't imagine a world in which I wouldn't drive. That being said, I fully support public transport, and it should be improved vastly. Every person that isn't driving by car, is a car less on the road. Less traffic means I can get through traffic easier. Less cars mean I (eventually) find parking spots easier. Also, with smartphones being in almost every pocket, a lot of people who hate driving, will distract themselves with phones. If every of those people could use public transport, less accidents will happen. Also, if public transport also becomes cheaper, it means that I would be able to use it without much extra cost, the few days I really couldn't stand driving. But as soon as you need to own a car, that extra cost of a ticket, really makes you reconsider if you really are going to pay extra just to use public transport. I think tickets should be as cheap as the fuel I would use with my car.
It really seems impossibly inconvenient. Can you also ride a bicycle or so to smaller errands (groceries, doctor, etc.)? Buses need to be run pretty well for this to work. I had a similar pulsed timetable when taking the bus to high school and it was... OK. Not the most convenient, but it beats driving if you can't have a licensed yet lol. The worst thing was that the school hours where somewhat irregular, and if you are unlucky you have to arrive 50 minutes early. The main problem I think is that often times they are not able to run the buses reliably enough for this to work. You really want that bus to show up at 08 minutes after the hour. If it is sometimes 20, or 40, or maybe it is early at 01, then I don't know if I could have ever tolerated it.
Getting around in America is a nightmare. You don't want a system like we have where you need a car. I wish I could just walk or take a bus/train anywhere I needed to go.
Induced demand is a well known argument, and it's right. If there is an attractive offer people would accept it. Unfortunately in car dependent Germany we induce demand on cars by building roads and autobahnen, we don't induce demand by building rails, bike friendly streets and options to combine public transport and biking.
This is one thing the UK does better than Germany; In my village we get a bus an hour to the 2 closest towns both interchange all interchange with a rail hub and 1 bus a day to and from the historic city
Still i can not imagine getting groceries like that. I cannot get big bags or baskets In a Bus. Not speaking of several of them. And carriage of bottles.
It all depends on where you are, there are a lot of rural German villages that are definitely very well served by a mainline railway route thay passes by it, generally 1tph or less. But in the uk for example rural services are very differnt depending on where you go. As all busses outside of london and greater manchester now are deregulated, meaning anyone can set up any bus service whereever and the council doesnt have the right to stop them, it means theres this divide where really in the middle of nowhere places just dont get busses anymore becuase whos gonna run them. But then rural places that are sort of on the way between 2 bigger places get great frequencys of service, often operaters trying to compete with each other, and its that commercial conpeteion that pushes bus operators to stop operating in the really rural villages, and start conpeteing with other oparators on other main rural routes. The bus operators here only care about the commercial potential of the route. Which is why in greater london tfl accutally makes a loss ln the bus network, but it takes people to train and tube stations to spend money on their services and in london, which is why on the edge of london and just outside of the boundry tfl run 2 bus per hour services to really small villages via really tiny country lanes, because on the border between london and the home counties the bus operators would never make money from those routes
Here in Switzerland, there are nightly regional trains on Friday and Saturday nights (usually every 60 or 90 minutes) in many regions, often with connecting bus or on-demand services at the stations. You have to pay an extra 5 Francs for the night service, though.
Demand is too low. There are some bakers who start their job at 2am an in these areas, there is also not much nightlife, it's all finished at 11pm, but last buses often go around 8pm to the countryside.
Most villages are connected to public transport one way or another around my town Dresden and can be used with the same ticket, BUT sadly our people in charge still havent understood that its takes simplicity and consistency in a transport timetable to attract costumers ... its ridiculous how they constantly shift the mostly hourly service for a couple of minutes throughout the day. While it gets completely different on weekends. very late or early you then are pushed onto a taxi-like service and trying to change from one of such line to another is a painful exercise in timetable maths. And the insanity doesnt stop there, the routes a line takes also can change depending on daytime / what day of the week it is. (whoever came up with that needs to be tortured) If you make a mistake on such a line you can divert quiet far from the intended village and then you either have to get back to a far off crossing of lines in the larger cities (because no lines exist which circle those urban centers) ... or you hike across fields. Luckily I live in the city and only rely on those rural bus/train lines for my fishing hobby ... but through that I experienced probably more of the rural network then most other people and its a pain in the ass to plan a trip around the saxon countryside with public transport.
Convenience. Convenience is all it takes. This includes regular service, well-maintained vehicles, dedicated bus lanes where heavier traffic is probable, and bus stops where people actually want to go, like near the train station, the city center, etc.
Some people take public transport because they want to protect the climate and therefore not use a car. The problem with on demand buses is, that climate conscious people don't call a huge bus where you are the only person other than the driver sitting in it. If a bus comes by regularly, you take it because you don't want it to drive around for nothing and also it's there anyway.
Buses generally outperform cars very quickly in efficiency. If a diesel bus gets roughly 15-25 l/100 km, and a passenger diesel car gets 5 l/100 km, you only need 3-5 passengers to even out with a car with only a driver. A full regional coach with around 40 seats (e.g. an average Flixbus in central Europe) will get 0,625 l/ 100 km per passenger on the worse end, while a City Bus will be able to accomodate 70 people, meaning 0,357 l/100 km for a full bus. A diesel car with 5 people will get 1 l/100 km, but realistically a fully loaded car on a highway will not be getting 5 l/100km :)
@@ChaplainDMK I know some small settlements with under 100 people. How probable is it that every hour 5 people will take it? Maybe the village could be one stop among many on the way from one bigger town to another, but then there are often already trains which run between these stations. You see, it's not as simple as it seems.
@@bananenmusli2769 What are you talking about? That buses are less efficient than trains? Or what? And yes plenty of places have even less than 100 inhabitants, and yes you usually string them together and have buses (or trains) running to major centers. And if the towns are so small, and there's so little demand, there are vans that are used as buses, with a proper door, and capacity for 15-20 people. Fuel economy drops to only 10ish l/100km and you again only need like 2 passengers to beat an ideal car in fuel efficiency.
@@ChaplainDMK Just for the record, I completely support public transport and I want there to be more but again, if only two people take the bus (or a van) you could just drive an efficient car. Even if it might be slightly more efficient to take the bus, it only needs one or two times for the bus to come to find out that nobody is waiting and just like that the entire advantage of the bus is gone. That's why in small villages like that there is only one or two school buses in the morning and at noon bringing the children back home and it's mostly fine for them except when they have to see a doctor or do something else in town which doesn't happen very often. In such situations you need to be flexible and it would be stupid to run a bus line only for such rare events
It’s sad how a small German town has better public transit access than my American city of over 600,000
I believe it's a village, not a town.
This just adds to your point.
Germany is densely populated and I think distances between villages/cities are shorter than in the USA. So more potential passengers on shorter routes. But no excuse for US America to not offer at least the minimal puplic transport in towns and cities over 50k inhabitants.
@@herzogotto2239 tbh in the east coast of the US is as dense as most of western europe and yet it still isnt great
Do the Americans want it ? If less than 50% vote for yes, it will not happen, that's democracy. If the majority is made of dumb people, dumb people will rule.
Really... so what do you do in such an American city when you (because of what reason ever) don't have a driver's license or aren't able to drive? 🤔
For a long time I lived in a German city of about 500,000 inhabitants. It has a light rail system with about 120 km length, 19 km of these are underground in the city center. Additionally there are a lot of bus lines. I got a driver's license as soon as possible because it can be important to have. But I didn't have a car when I lived there.
You need to have a car even in big cities in the USA, right? Except perhaps in New York or Boston or Washington or ...
Have a nice day 🖐👴
Person from *very* rural Germany here.
Seeing just five minutes of well-functioning public transport already made me jealous... I live in a small town (2.400 inhabitants) just three kilometres from the border to the Czech Republic, and I used to rely on public transport to get to secondary school. There were 3 buses a day in each direction, I had to get up at 6 to in the classroom at 8, the 30km journey would take almost an hour, mainly because the bus stopped like 20 times on the way. I really enjoyed just listening to music and zoning out on the bus, but having an entire hour more to myself is still the better option now that I have a car. I also usually take at least one of my classmates to school so we're sharing the fuel cost.
Oh, and did I mention that if I missed the bus at 1pm or school ended any time after that I'd have to wait til 4pm for the next? And in some cases school ended at 16:45 which meant my parents would have to pick me because there was literally no other way of getting home.
We also had a railway branch line running through the town that connected to the mainline in Neustadt a. d. Waldnaab (also where I go to school), but the track was lifted in the 70s and it's a cycle path now that the council invests more money in then any other infrastructure projects (No, taking a 3 hour bike ride to school isn't an option...)
So that's my story from the 'typical' town in rural Germany.
If you made it this far, thanks for spending your precious time reading this comment
There's probably a few typos but this is the internet so all good...
I don't understand why they always put these cycle paths down and then feel awesome about it instead of just reopening the railway. It makes sense that bikes are trendy in urban areas but their use in rural areas for actual commuting is pretty limited, as distances tend to get very long very quickly.
That sounds very similar to my experience in the same area (I went to school in Tirschenreuth), although it wasn't quiiiiite as bad for me. At least they had scheduled busses for all the possible ending times of a school das for me. The cost was ridiculous though, since in years 11 and 12 you have to pay for your own tickets. A monthly ticked used to cost 100€ for me back then, and that was in 2017/18, I don't want to know how much it is now. And that ticket then was valid for exactly one line, between my home town and the town where my school was.
@@firnen_ Oh I completely forgot about the cost of the tickets, thanks for the reminder! (I knew someone out there would read my comment and say "yeah I know that place")
Anyway, the tickets. I still have a stack of them in my desk to claim money from the council (which I never did because I got my license halfway through year 11 and didn't get above the threshold of 450€). Last time I payed for a full month was October 2021 and that cost me 138€. (in most cases it was cheaper to buy tickets weekly since Holidays happened regularly (as you'll know) so three weeks was cheaper than the full months). Last time I took that bus was probably in May 2022, and a single trip home cost almost 9€ then. We had an excursion to Berlin at the end of year 11 when the 9€ ticket was a thing and it was such a blessing to just hop on any U- or S-Bahn and go wherever we wanted. Hope you too now found a better alternative, either by taking the car or moving. I don't know what I'll be doing after I got my Abitur but there's something in my that wants to get as far away from this place as possible xD
@@jonistan9268 They're marketing it as a tourist attraction but I honestly don't see any point in it. The trainfan in me wants to rebuild the line as a heritage railway but that's likely to remain a dream...
There was a plan several years ago to move the bus stop to a more central position in town and away from former the station forecourt, but nothing ever came of that.
I live not far away from rewboss. Aprox. 40 km north. In the "Vogelsberg". So we're lucky to have a bus 4-6 times a day. Sa/So no regular bux, only bad organised call bus. Often the bus does not come or is so delayed, so the next train at the bus hub is gone. With a car I can ride in aprox 60 minutes to the middle of Frankfurt. With my bike I used when I was younger it takes aprox. 1:45 due to a very good bike way. With OPNV the longest shortest time is 2:30 the longes time ever was 4:30.
I lived for a while in the Swiss countryside (a village with 1000 inhabitants). We had a bus (with WiFi and USB chargers for every seat) every 30 minutes to the next railway station in either direction from 6am to 11pm and hourly service on Sundays, with an on-demand-service on Friday and Saturday nights from the station, where it connected to the night regio trains from Zurich and Luzern.
Whilst still having a car, we hardly used it, mainly for day trips with the kids. I always took the bus-train combo to work. This works well if a society understands public mobility as a basic need.
Damn. Switzerland is just next level.
@@OnkelJajusBahn Ich werde wohl dieses Jahr aus persönlichen Gründen nach fast 20 Jahren wieder zurück nach Deutschland ziehen und auch wenn es Vieles gibt, wegen dessen ich mich wieder auf die Heimat freue, den nahezu perfekten öffentlichen Verkehr werde ich vermissen. Neben dem dichten Netz und Takt, der Sauberkeit und der Pünktlichkeit sind es auch kleine Dinge: Wenn ich hier am Bahnsteig stehe und der Zug fährt ein, kann ich mich völlig normal weiter unterhalten - in Deutschland (und auch anderswo) rumpelt und/oder quietscht es immer. Ich weiß nicht, wie die Schweizer das hinkriegen, dass alles nahezu lautlos abläuft. Bessere Technik? Bessere Wartung? Keine Ahnung.
@@mina_en_suiza Oh, verstehe. Alles Gute für den Umzug.
Ich war erst einmal in der Schweiz, hab aber vor, da noch öfters hinzufahren, weil der ÖV einfach so beeindruckend ist. (Ist natürlich nicht der einzige Grund).
Wäre eine interessante Frage, woran das mit dem Quietschen liegt. Keine Ahnung. Vielleicht sind einfach die Schienen in besserem Zustand? Keine Ahnung.
Weil die Züge sind in Deutschland jetzt auch nicht wirklich älter als in der Schweiz, wenn auch wahrscheinlich nicht in so top Zustand, wie in der Schweiz. Aber keine Ahnung, ich kenne mich mit Technik nicht aus.
@@OnkelJajusBahn Bei der Technik bin ich auch überfragt, aber es wird halt unglaublich viel mehr in Ausbau und Instandhaltung investiert.
Im Moment habe ich kein Auto, obwohl ich es manchmal vermisse (Für Ausflüge mit den Kindern mit Schlauchboot, Zelt oder Skiern ist es schon super), aber das spart trotz der relativ hohen Preise (ist relativ, weil es für Einwohner super Vorteile gibt) einfach auch wahnsinnig viel Geld. Da ist auch schon mal ein Taxi oder ein Mietwagen drin, obwohl für beides die Preise hier einfach unverschämt sind (Wir reden hier von 4-5 mal deutsche Preise).
@@mina_en_suiza Oh, interessant. Verstehe.
I know you usually move around fairly well by bus and train but when I saw the title of the video I thought you were going to say "well, my wife has a license". 😄
She probably has.
Pretty cool to finally have a look at Aschaffenburg (and see it's got good public transportation). I first heard about it from my English teacher, who used to translate it to "Backside Monkey Castle". He even looked a bit like Rewboss. My life has come full circle, i guess.
Haha good one :p
Notice that it's not called "Arschaffenburg" but "Aschaffenburg" which more accurately translates to "Ashen Monkey Castle." In my opinion, waaay cooler sounding. ;)
@@Gromelnope Speaking of which I remember him showing said castle and said monkey in a video a good while ago.
@@Gromelnope not colloquially...
I wish we had public transport as sufficiently well structured as this in the nineties btw. growing up in a rural village in the Hannover area. Our bus line was so notorious for being late (or not arriving at all), we didn't even have to make up excuses anymore. Finally getting a car really meant freedom. And a punctual lifestyle, of course.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a small village with an hourly bus service in rural Germany. Just around 200 people living there, it had both a local train line (sometimes trains did stop there, sometimes not, depending on scheduling and who was in power in local politics) and the bus service which did run to the next train station in the next urban center (a small 125.000 people University town in southern lower saxony). As it happens, once the ICE was introduced that train station actually had direct high speed access north and south and via branch lines east and west. I still use it to visit my parents from Berlin in just 2 hours by train (3 hours by car).
An hour bus service is invaluable, you have to remember the rough time of the hour when it departs on both ends and can be very flexible with that. Didn't catch the last one? Well, the next one will depart soon anyway. It allowed me so much autonomy in my youth to do my own stuff, i don't know how it would have worked without it.
Of course, i did move to Berlin eventually and have lived there for the last 23 years, not needing a car at all. But i do love my year pass for the whole ABC-System which allows very flexible transportation on anything from ships to trains. And yes, you get used to the next S-Bahn being only 10 minutes away, or the next Underground 5 minutes. Moving with my job to my now secondary home in Porto, Portugal, i had to re-adjust and for the first time since my education in the USA (back then it was a very old clunker i shared with another student) i actually bought a car. Which is extremely expensive just to take the 15 minute drive to work or the 15 minute drive to the beach or the 6 hour (7 with charging stops) drive to the Algarve. But cycling, which i use extensively in Berlin, is simply suicide on 2 wheels in Porto, and sadly public transport, while still being good, is simply not good enough for my rather extreme working times (start to work at 5 in the morning, or end it at 1 in the morning on a late duty).
A couple years ago the Göttingen bus services reorganized and increased frequency from hourly to every 30 minutes from smaller Bovenden and Rosdorf, about 20 minutes into the city. Almost no point in having a car when things are well connected to town and for longer journeys to everywhere else in Germany or neighboring countries.
Lived in the Ruhrarea or a University Town my entire life
I do own a driver's license, I probably can count on one hand how often i drove in the last 4 years at least
But because of this it's really hard for me to actually have any connection to any part of rural Germany i feel, as they usually take the car (their primary transport) to come to the city, but most places are just basically impossible to visit by public transport (which was always my primary transport)
It's kinda sad because it just feels like those places stood still in time and that it limits the opportunites of people
in freetime, schooling (how many greatly qualified people choose to go rural and not city), employment
I'm not saying that the city is always better, but it feels like the divide between rural and urban populations shouldn't be one that only cars can cross
Halbe Stunde bis Stunde ist (für entlegene Gebiete) perfekt! Zum einen kann man sich das wirklich gut merken, aber viel wichtiger: man kann einige Dinge innerhalb von einem Tag erledigen. Morgens mit dem Bus zum Oberzentrum, Mittags/Abends zurück. In Regionen ohne Anbindung (oder noch schlechterer) wirds knapp mit 2-mal am Tag... Und wenn man einen Bus verpasst, kommt _immerhin_ in einer Stunde ein neuer. Wobei auf dem Land die Busfahrer auch anhalten, wenn man angerannt kommt...
I totally agree that dial-a-ride services are just adding an unnecessary step onto something which should be fairly straightforward. Newport in South Wales tried to replace a lot of their bus network with an app-based system called “Fflecsi”. While it was good in many ways, it worked a lot like Uber, so you could often get into a glorified minibus within 5-10 minutes, and it did reach all the way out into the rural parts of the county, it did have the inevitable drawback that those who are not tech-literate couldn’t book a bus, as apps are complicated, and you couldn’t just hail a bus down at a stop. Newport City Council and the Welsh Government pulled the plug and reintroduced the old timetables. Spent a few million pounds on a pilot scheme that simply wouldn’t work for Britain’s ageing population without massive state-sponsored tech education. Anyway, rant on dial-a-ride systems (outside of London, London’s are great) over.
dial-a-ride services are, in my opinion, glorified taxis
@@no1fanofthepals honestly I agree. I’m all for them being an option, just not in replacement to regular buses.
@@j3ojos yeah they should be a separate thing
Dial-a-ride can be a solution for hours with less traffic, like evenings, early mornings or weekend - that's how it's managed in my county with "shared taxis". But even if you've got a monthly ticket, you might have to pay additionally for the service.
@@hypatian9093 my city does the same thing. During the night there are hardly any public transport lines, so they have shared taxis, they can be booked through an app (which works pretty well IMO, you see where your driver is in real time, you know the license plate, where exactly you will be picked up etc) or on the phone and it is heavily discounted especially for those who have a yearly ticket for example. I usually pay a quarter of what a normal taxi would cost. Better than public transport at night because I feel much safer that way.
You're definitely lucky!
I live in a *very* rural area in Germany (
It's funny how a rural community "very poorly served" in Germany may only have a few buses a day. I also live in a rural community, but in Alberta, Canada. There are no buses, trains, or any kind of public transportation at all, I'm embarrassed to say, even though I am only about 40 km from a city of over a million in population. Even our two largest cities, both of over a million people, and located about 350 km from each other, do not have train service connecting them. They do have bus service connecting them, but only 5 buses per day. When I've travelled to Europe, it is always heartening to see how things "could be" if we didn't embrace the car culture so much here. The most "poorly served" area, pretty much anywhere in Europe, is far ahead of the "best served" area for public transportation in Canada.
My German village is investing in public transport like crazy! Last December we went from an hourly bus to half-hourly + an extra on-demand bus to remote outskirts that previously only had 8 buses a week (on weekends only).
Which Village?
@@schinkenspringer1081 Does it matter? Also since I wrote this, the on-demand bus was cancelled due to lack of usage… so my comment isn’t even relevant anymore.
@@ajfrostx i study mobility-management and am therefore interrested in such developments
I grew up in a village near yours and back then we had two buses a day (mainly for the kids to get to and back from school in Amorbach).
But I went to different schools a bit further away in Miltenberg and Walldürn, I can't count how many times I had to do hitchhiking in order get home - or wait for hours until my dad finished work and could pick me up.
Nowadays there is one bus per hour, pretty awesome 👍
I am fortunate, i live in a rural town with good public transport. If that 49€-Ticket comes in May, i'll happily buy it.
I feel like the US (and to some/most extent, Canada and to some extent, Australia) designed cities and roads where driving is the best and sometimes only option to get somewhere without thinking about the fact not everyone can drive for various reasons which is what you said on video. It's the equivalent of making a building only accessible to someone that can go up the stairs (this can be the case for old buildings when regulations were not in place)
That's not just a feeling, but the sad reality. Just take a look at videos from 'not just bikes' or 'city beautiful'.
I am about the same age as Rewboss and live in an Australian city with the world's largest tram network. We also have have a good urban train system and busses where the trams and trains don't go. I walk to a nearby supermarket and get the tram into the central city. Even the town where I spent my childhood had hourly trains to a nearby regional city of 100,000 people and the more distant big city of 5 million people where I live now. There are extra busses from the big city to holiday destinations such as beach resorts in summer and ski resorts in winter. So I have never missed out on anything because I do not own a car. 🙂
@@stephanweinberger It's only sad now though. By that I mean, people only see it that way today. People forget that back when this was done, having a car was something that was considered desirable. It was considered a standard of living improvement. It still is in many places. My Chinese friend told me he "finally made it" when he could swap a motorbike for a car.
So we're looking at this through an entirely different lens now. And when these road systems were developed, socialized care for such people was higher than it is now (hospitals were all charities or non profits). Busses routes existed and were larger, and the US rail system used to massive. It's still the biggest one in the world, but it used to be about 2-3 times larger.
Even in Europe this was often the case. Germany, France and the UK in particular pushed for automobiles post WWII until the 50s or 60s.
The reason that stagnated there and didn't here is pretty simple: WWII. The economies, production, factories, standard of living etc in Europe took a long time to get going.
@@thysonsacclaim The inherent problems of focusing solely on car infrastructure have been known for _decades_ now.
That's why most cities in Europe already began to reverse course in the 80s and 90s. They didn't do this on a whim, but because of actual facts and research.
But for some reason US cities keep repeating the same mistakes over and over - and literally go bankrupt in the process. Because spread-out, car-dependent suburbia simply doesn't generate enough revenue to maintain all that expensive infrastructure.
@@Dave_Sisson Thats why i said to some extent for Australia, not to most or all
Not to mention the advantage that regular scheduled, centrally organized public transit has:
Massive economies of scale. It's infinitely more efficient both in terms of fuel usage, and in terms of raw capacity to have services like this compared to Ubers etc.
It's almost like consolidating these essential services has mostly upsides. Not to mention the fact that mobility isnt negotiable for a functional modern life.
By the way, the concept you reference of more service attracting more customers in public transit is called "induced demand". It works in both directions.
When you spam-build highways and interstates, you get congested roads. When you make buses and trains more available, people flock to them.
All my adventures outside the USA over the past five decades have made me wonder why we have such crappy transit systems here (in the USA). But then I remember: we don’t share anything. It’s all “me! The Rugged Individual!” You’re on yer own here.
I am one of those who can’t drive because of disability. Buses are the only way getting around. I am so glad I am in a city with excellent transportation. I couldn’t survive without it
Thank you for this very informative video.
I live in a Bavarian small town of ~1200 inhabitants and luckily i have a Bus service pretty similar to yours, which depending on the time of day drives once, twice or even thrice an hour. But one thing which makes that service even better is, that during the time where the Bus only drives once an hour, there also is a Taxi that you can call which will take you to the next train station, which is also part of the public transportation network and therefore is completly free for me.
Thanks!
Wow, thank you very much: that's very generous of you.
The most sobering analysis of rural transit from a rural perspective. Very good video.
This level of rural bus service seemed fairly normal to me compared to my experience in Austria. I was not living in a rural village but I often went to visit friends and such, and it was almost always a timetable like this - once an hour. This might have been easier in the area I was in, because the villages lined up along the valleys creating a direct corridor that allowed for just a few lines to cover the vast majority of them. And on top of that, as a student I only had to pay €80 for my annual public transit pass.
and in the winter, buses were even more frequent to keep up with ski tourism though they were more limited in route due to the dangerous roads
Vielen Dank für dieses Video. Ich stimme dir zu 100 % zu, man muss das Rad nicht immer und überall neu erfinden. Ich wohne in Hamburg und bin jedesmal verärgert, wenn Entscheidungsträger immer von autonomen In Demand und ridepooling Bussen reden als Ergänzung zum klassischen ÖPNV , dieser aber aufgrund von Stau und fehlender bevorrechtigung immer unbeliebter wird.
Ganz ehrlich: Wenn die so reden würde ich auch sauer, weil ich nichts verstehe... (keine Ironie)
In demand (heißt es nicht "on demand"? wie auch immer) verstehe ich noch, falls es dann "auf Abruf" bedeutet, aber was ist "ridepooling"? Reite ich Schwimmbecken? xD (mehr Sinn kann ich nicht rausziehen)
@@PunkHerr ja, meinte auch "On Demand" und "Ridepooling" also auf Abruf und die Fahrt wird geteilt. Also es kann sein ich buche eine Fahrt auf Abruf von A nach B und eine andere Person wird unterwegs eingesammelt,weil sie in die ungefähr gleiche Richtung muss.
@@denism.1051 ohne da lange drüber nachgedacht zu haben, dann ist das also Fahrt auf Anfrage und mit eventueller Fahrgemeinschaft, richtig?
@@PunkHerr so ziemlich. Zum Begriff: "pooling" bedeutet in diesem Zshg. "sammeln" (so, wie sich Wasser in einer Pfütze sammelt)
@@nuvaboy jetzt bekomme ich noch Englischnachhilfe^^.
Mein Problem mit Sprachen ist, dass ich in ihnen denke. D.h. hätte ich einen englischen Satz, dann würde ich vielleicht (!) verstehen, was das bedeutet. Aber in einem Deutschen erwarte (wie in erahnen, nicht befehlen) ich Deutsch und dann muss ich währenddessen übersetzen oder nachfragen (, was manche dann als Pingeligkeit oder trollen abtun).
It’s so funny to me to see all the places I stood around waiting for busses or trains as a kid in your videos. Never thought Schöllkrippen would ever be able to get so much attention. Anyway, what’s also funny to me is that everytime I’m back to visit my family I’m always complaining about the public transit to get me to Schneppenbach - quite the contrary to what you’re describing 😅
Very much agree. I live in rural France without a car. I cycle a lot and take public transport when available. I save a lot of money on running a car.
It’s convenient for me-people with cars all to often rush around all the time without any planning for efficient use if time.
I don't have a driving licence either, and the mother & sister of my ex lived in a village near Aschaffenburg. Luckily one of those was always on hand to give me a lift if I needed to get into Aschaffenburg proper when visiting them!
Good quality, low cost public transport is an incredibly useful thing. While local bus services in the UK are ok, where they exist, rail is insanely expensive.
South London Suburbs here - feeling very lucky to have an integrated transports system London wide, we even have night buses !
Danke!
Wow, thank you.
You can add: For car owners: during car repairs (no matter if something broke, or someone crashed into you) or maintenance you have an option to get somewhere (to work for example)
While i don't like to use public transport myself (i used it in two different areas of my home country for 13 schoolyears and 10 years of work, and i have not been ill as often since i have no public transport connection to my new workplaceand have to use the car and if it's not too far, i rather walk than use a bus or tram) it is still something important to exist in my view. -> I am not the only person living in the area, and other people might need it, or benefit greatly when there is public transport.
Excellent video and the point you make is both valid and important.
Welcome. I'm living without a car in Leoben, a mid sized upper styrian university and industrial town, on a hill, and do all local transport by bike. Luckily we do have a train station where all long distance trains (railjet, eurocity, intercity, nightjet) stop. Actually I have a driving licence (I got it for my civilian service in 1990) and use it every couple of months/years with the "rail and drive" car sharing service of ÖBB, or sometimes renting a van from a furniture store to move bulky items. But it's been a long time since I needed that.
Living without a car is something i always wanted! Thank you
Apart from it being expensive and unnecessary if you live in a city - why?
Valid topic, as I am considering moving back home to Germany. With one bus per hour to the station (15 mins away) it gets tricky with jobs that are too far away (even 60km would take me 2 hours door to door. Although bus services have improved, back when I did my apprenticeship there was one bus every two hours and I had to start work earlier in order to make the last bus home at 4:30pm. While it is better now, it still has lots of room for improvement, especially for those who do not drive anymore needing to go food shopping or the GP and so on without a car is tricky if the shop is not wthin walking distance (and lots of shops in villages have closed down since I was a child, making people dependent to go to the next bigger town to get their food.
This was a fascinating Video and delightful to watch!
It's similar in my small town in the Weserbergland which fortunately has a railway station. The trains arrive hourly approximately on the hour (and the ride from here to Hanover or Paderborn takes an hour, too), during peak hours there are trains at the half hour. The local bus line arrive a bit before the trains and depart a bit after them (well, technically it's two bus lines since it's a loop line: on the hour in one direction to the city centre and residential areas, at half hour in the other direction). You can go to the county seat by train in 15 minutes for the 15 km (but you have to get to the station here and in Hamelin from the station to the town centre) or you can take the bus, which goes every hour. That takes about 50 minutes - but you have several stops here in the town and in Hamelin as well, some directly in the historc centre or the central bus hub at the local shopping centre. It's the lazy solution - might take a bit longer, but is more convenient. The monthly ticket for the whole county is 40 € and it's transferable to another person, in the evenings and on weekends 1 adult and up to 3 children can travel with you .
The transportation system in Germany is one of the things that I miss the most. My 12 years living in Heidelberg, there was always a way of getting from point A to point B. Mostly, I rode bicycle but during the winter or if I needed to get somewhere quicker I could put my bicycle on most of the transport And get to my destinations easily. Back here in the USA there is an effort to have better transportation but it still is nothing like the German system. How I miss that. Are you a bike rider too?
When I’m in Germany (Hannover) which is about half the time now with the other half in the UK, I drive to Hannover and then my car effectively sits there for weeks on end without me having to use it.
I have to make a deliberate effort to occasionally get it going just so that battery doesn’t go flat.
I spent the 1974-75 school year studying at the Gutenberg University in Mainz for my Master's Degree. I found I had distant relatives in my ancestral homeland near Regensburg. I bought a train ticket from Mainz to Aschaffenburg, then hitch-hiked the rest of the way to Regensburg to visit them.
Thank you very much for this inspirational video!
I am 31 years old, same as you I don't have a car and even a driving license (and I am not sure if I want to), but I want to move out from Berlin in 10-15 years to some rural area (MV, Ostsee?); so, when thinking about that I considered getting a driving license as the only option to get my dream closer. Your video shows there are other options as well, if not available now - there is a real chance they will become available later.
So thank you, Andrew.
In a way, living in Berlin prepares you for the long bus rides in rural areas: Living there it's normal to travel an hour - I lived in Prenzlauer Berg and worked in southern Spandau. Here in rural Lower Saxony people complain if they have to commute for 20 minutes... wimps ;)
I know that feeling. I had to live in rural areas most of my life. Without a car, which I never owned, even a few kilometers can feel like a huge distance. Buses go every now and then, but it's complicated and time wasting to take the bus to go to somewhere and back.
Now I'm in the very comfortable position of living in a city where I can use several different means of public transportation to get where I have to go. But you can go to many places by feet and by bike or motorbike too and that's what I'm doing most of the time. Living close or in a city clearly has its adventages. Living on the countryside can give you the feeling of not being part of the world or being cut off from normal life.
Currently living in a rural area! Funny that the so-called 'Expressbus' comes once every hour and it takes you to Osnabrück in almost an hour. That doesn't sound express to me, though! Good thing we got two more bus options (another one that runs once every hour also, and another that runs 3x an hour on weekdays).
"Express" doesn't mean "frequent", it means "doesn't stop at every stop".
Well, I live in a small rural village right on the Hessian-Bavarian border (Haingrund, near Wörth a. Main, you might know). The challenge here is that we have TWO bus companies that transport people to and from our village and either terminate at the train station in Höchst Odw (Hessen) or in Wörth a. Main (Bavaria). All in all: That sounds like public transportation luxus! The problem is that these bus lines are neither coordinated nor connected in any way. So there are times when there is no bus at all and on the other hand they chase each other on the same route at intervals of one minute.
a bus every hour. A village in Ireland would never get that service. Mine only gets buses because there is a main road running through so buses from other places might as well stop but sometimes it isn't even officially on the timetables. And more like 2-4 a day max.
I'm glad to know I'm not the only person living in rural Germany without a car. Our local public transport in the Breisgau region is similar to yours. To be fair though we also have pretty good cycle infrastructure so I generally use that.
I do have a licence though. Ironically I now have to drive occasionally as part of my job running a bicycle shop...
I also don't have a car and live in a Großstadt in NRW. While it is definitely not a big city by any stretch of the imagination, I think the surrounding the countryside is well serviced. There are many tiny villages and small towns that are linked by bus and rail, which I have used to visit friends and occasionally go places on weekends. I think NRW is well served, but other states in Germany may have fewer options for public transportation outside of Groß- and Kleinstadt.
Really nice piece
1 bus an hour? Luxury... It's 1 nearly every 2 hours where I currently am.
A few year ago I stayed with my dad in the rural German village that he was living in at the time. The village had 1 train an hour (on a single line track) from DB and a local company. It also had about 5 buses a day, which I couldn't really use all that often for they were at inconvenient times for me. When I did use them, however, those buses were of the coach type that you filmed in for the video.
To me (living in the Rhine Main Area between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden), the problem with public transport is not so much getting to the bigger cities, the main problem is getting from the periphery to other parts of the periphery. It would take me roughly 1.5-2h to get from home to my job instead of the 25 minutes by car. I would gladly use public transport if that made any kind of sense.
Hey I lived in Mexico in the boonies in the jungle. The bus still came down the main road every half hour or so.
A collegue told me, that, when he went by bus, then he had to hope, the other bus was late. He had to switch busses but his second bus departed before the first bus arrived. Because of that, his commute to work would be an hour. So he drives by car and the commute was less than 10 minutes.
And this was in Bremen. A very big city.
I moved to Mainz and I’ve gotta say, I’m very unimpressed with public transit now. In Heidelberg the public transit was phenomenal. Here in Mainz, the only way I can describe the local system is “6, ungenügend”. Busses come every half hour… Unless they don’t. It takes me over two hours to go a little over 6 kilometers to the Uni Campus, and frequently the busses and teams are so full that there is not only not a seat, but it is physically impossible for anyone else to get on.
I didn’t plan on buying a car when I came here, but I had to.
Given how often I was there, I didn't feel the buses were _that_ infrequent in the sense that many buses came in every 15 minutes (sometimes interlined). That being said, I have experienced rush hour multiple times so rush hour service should definitively be improved.
Sounds like I'm here in a similar region but in one of the towns (roughly 30-40k) and the county(?) main town is a bit smaller than Aschaffenburg. I had to use the busses to go to school to that county(?) main town for some years. Express busses won't happen here. 1. there is a train connection. But the train station is at that border of the town which is max. far away from the county(?) main town. So in most cases the public transport route planner won't suggest it, especially if you're destination is too far away from the train station in the county(?) main town. 2. At the typical time in the morning for students, there're already two busses since there're two places in that town where like 99,9% of the students using that routes go to.
What were the problems? 1. I was one of the like 0,1% students. My school didn't exist concerning the planning of the bus route (BTW: Also the universitiy where I went in that same town afterwards, that was even worse). That means if my lesson end at their regular times, I mostly have to wait quite long because of one bus every hour. When school started like at 9:45h, I had to be there even much more too early since there's a 2h hole between roughly 9 and 11h. 2. Many indirections(?) to provide bus service to really every village -> takes time.
In the meantime, things are even worse: 1. lower speed limit on the main streets in the villages -> takes more time. 2. Some bus stops were rebuild in a way that if there're two busses short behind each other (like the two "school" busses in the morning"), it's possible that the second bus which is already ready to go is completely blocked by a bus standing at the bus stop in the opposite direction p´in combination with the first bus in his direction with to many stupid children buying their month tickets at the bus driver a the first school day of the month instead of somewhere else some days before. 3. When I went to school, I didn't have to change busses on the route, now I would have to -> loosing time, problems if one bus is too late and it's uncomfortable. 4. My school moved in an other part of the county(?) main town so it's even worse reachable with public transport.
So it's very attractive to drive the shortest way out of the town and to the Autobahn and then into the town -> you're much faster.
BTW: Maybe that travel bus companies would "got back" the busses too dirty after public transportation routes.
I moved to a small town in Saxonia and it's surrounded by tiny villages with inhabitants of 100-500. Even though it is not densely populated most of these villages have a bus which goes every 2 hours (and because of overlapping many villages have more than one line). In comparison I lived my whole life in northern Baden-Württemberg and to most villages Buses only went twice a day and the time tables of buses didn't made any sense nor were they connected to trains. Transferring was a mess
That's the historic result, of not having a car for sale for everybody for a long time.
I'm trying to live without a car in a bigger town than yours in Italy but it's tough. But I'm curious to know how you bring your cats to the vet? Or if you have an emergency? But it's possible that your wife has both a driving license and a car and she covers those situations.
Funny that you make this video right now. Because in the Landkreis Aschaffenburg, many bus lines had been changed concerning their hourly rides. (And I’m extremely furious). I always took the "Linie 53" at 4.30pm, which now got removed completely. So I either need to wait for over an hour or take two buses with only 5 minutes transfer time in between - praying that the first bus arrives in time. I logically didn't go through all bus schedules, so I just wanted to ask, if you aren't affected by that change?
Great Video!
I grew up in Pflaumheim and took Bus 54 to school in Aschaffenburg every day for 8 years. While it is true that the public transport in the area is much better than it could be, I would not want to rely on it solely. Buses take a circuitous route and stop frequently, which... is the point of buses. But it also means that travelling by bus is quite slow. And it gets so much worse if you don't want to go to or from the city - then you are looking at very long travel times very quickly, for trips that would be short hops by car.
If I were still living with my parents - as my brother does -, I would definitely get around by car - as my brother does.
good points
When I saw the title of the video I thought it would be a kind of survival crash course involving camping and catching your own food. 😅
Oha, der ÖPNV ist bei dir ja wirklich vergleichbar mit dem Angebot in der Schweiz in ländlichen Gebieten. So lässt es sich natürlich schon ohne Auto leben. Natürlich stellt sich dann noch die Frage, wie es frühmorgens, abends und am Wochenende aussieht.
Hear, hear! I could not agree more!
Worked great for me cut though the woods and got the train. South West Germany 😎
Introduction of "Taktfahrplan" is what made public transport take off in Switzerland.
As Andrew said, every hour the same minute is the begin of that too. But germany is just very big, this is hard to reproduce. And real acceptance starts with higher frequencies.
The issue is just in general that it's mostly profit-driven, and basically a very slow upward or downward spiral. Downward spiral ending at nobody wants to use it at all, and upward spiral might still not end somewhere where its profitable. Either way, no private company would take the risk, and therefore this has to be funded by the state.
I have lived in a small village in Germany where the situation was very bad. But now I live in France at the German Border, and the situation is even worse. Shortly before I moved here, there was a bus like 3 times a day or so. When I moved here, they switched it already: Bus only Morning and in the Evening. Noon only on demand. Then half a year later, that was cancelled as well. Now it's only a school bus leaving at 7 in the morning and getting back at 17:00 or so, but that also depends on the weekday. And that fits to other sentiments. In a facebook group I asked about green waste, like cut grass or big things like old furniture. Back in Germany it was collected like once per month or so. But here...well, everyone has to have a car anyways, right? So you are supposed to bring it to the scrapyard yourself, which is like 2km away. So they were kind of saying that the idea of collecting it is stupid and blaming me to move here without having a car....
I am not seeing how this is helping getting to a more eco-friendly future, or as we call it in Germany "Energiewende".
There is nothing about profitability. It's accepted knowledge you cannot run such a service profitable. It's taxpayers money to run the bus, the ticket price is just a little extra on top. If the city council wants a bus at 4am, they will pay it and take the risk of no riders. It's not the bus operator taking the risk.
5:26 Oh come on, missed opportunity for a "reinvent the wheel" pun!
From the age of 14 to 18, we lived in a tiny village in Baden-Württemberg's countryside; Aside from the buses for school, there were maybe 4 or 5 a day that drove.
I really disliked it, since, as my father said, the "Bordstein ist hochgeklappt" from about 18:00 on. So if you wanted to see a movie in the cinema in the next city at evening, or maybe do whatever in the evening, you either needed someone to drive you back, or sleep at a friends place.
This ended up in countless evenings of many of us do-no-goods beeing outside way too long, drinking shitty V+Energy beer mixes and doing what young people do.
Then again, I wouldn't want to miss those times.
I wish public transport is an option everywhere. Cars shouldn't be the end all be all of transportation but one option. Options are important in a democratic society.
Here in the US, rural transit is not very reliable but it feels more safe than in big cities like LA and SF.
What's the deal with your rotating logo in the first few seconds (00:12 to 00:19-ish)? Does it signify something or is it just a design choice?
This only works if buses are reliable and on time. Not the case in my area. Buses will be to early, too late or will fal out.
Greetings to the "Kahlgrund" from right over the border in Hesse!
Living in a village were is 1 bus a day in the one direction and six in the other from Monday to friday. And no service on weekend. One bus every hour seems pretty luxurious to me…🤷🏽♂️
We simply need to consider an efficient public transport system as an essential service.
Besides, there are advantages.
If people can live in the countryside, the pressure on the big cities lessens and that's a win win for everybody.
How about a hyperloop from Hanau to Aschaffenburg?
Public transport ftw. A viable and for already 100 years technically avaliable way to fight climat change that additionally already has been _implemented_ way more effective in the past!
Ironically, your bus service is almost as good as mine, living within the city limits of the second largest city in Austria. There's plenty of times where walking is faster than taking the bus around here, and it's always faster to cycle. And I'm lucky enough to live close to some bike infrastructure, because the roads around here don't even have sidewalks...
It seems like here in Austria you always have to chose between good public transport or good bicycle infrastructure. Difficult to get both at the same time. Are there cities that are actually good at both?
I lived 6 year at a place where I have only one Bus per hour. And that only because there where two lines. Else it would be just one bus every two hours.
This in itself is not that bad. Even though it drastically limits how you can plan stuff and there is essentially no room for errors. But there are two or three other massiv problems.
Where I lived the bus may arrive 15 minutes to early or to late. Means you had to stand there at least 15 minutes early and had to wait over half an hour and then you didn't even knew if the bus came even earlier this time or if you should wait just another minute before you can go home again. Even though at this point you may also just wait for the next Bus.
And the second thing was the weekend. They still had this one per hour schedule, but only with these small 8 passengers cars and you had to call them to ask if they still have a free seat from your stop to your destination.
But my nemesis was that the last bus drove at around 10:30 pm. Else I had to walk 12 kilometers just to to home. This almost got me fired since I had had to clock out early every single day.
Rural area public transport? Never again. It's not often enough, not long enough and not reliable enough. (according to my experience)
I have a license but I didn't drive in 15 years. I'm not rural, but that doesn't matter. I go into the city maybe once, twice a week and yes, it's only like 2 kilometer to walk. But I'm sick to the bones of having to justify myself everywhere. Having a car is such a standard, that I'll have to draw the excuse lottery: 'I lost my license' (claiming due to alcohol got progressively uncooler the older I got :D ), 'my eyes are too bad', 'I have lost my car', 'I had an accident', 'Jesus came with a soft air gun and shot my tires' - srsly everything is accepted but 'I do not want to drive because it is not my thing' is not.
And yes, I do groceries with a bike, a trailer and a basket.^^
I don’t have a licence either and I totally agree with you. People think you’re an alien and I also use my bike everywhere and people say, oh she rode her bike here as if it’s a huge thing. I feel happiest when I’m in Holland and wonder why I wasn’t born Dutch. 😢
0:45 "Let me show you how I get to Aschaffenburg, which is where people around here go for shopping and leisure and it's also a local administrative center, it's where I have to go when I apply for German citizenship." Don't forget, it's the place of the PO box mentioned at the end of each video. Or do you have the content actually delivered to your house (and the PO box address mostly for privacy)?
when is the last bus home? 20:00 21:00 22:00 or 23:00? Or later? which would surprise me. And no connections on weekends? oh boy
The last bus to my village leaves the hub at 8.05 pm weekdays, 7.00 pm Saturdays, and weirdly 9 pm Sundays. The service at weekends is only once every two hours, though.
Andrew, that bus driver at 3:00 looks suspiciously similar to you. Is this some hidden sibling conspiracy trying to sell the idea of public transport to people? I'm buying :o)
That probably can work better in rural villages and less well in areas with individual farms and other one-off houses that are not clustered together.
If you had a couple beers with lunch, would you get on the bus without a second thought?
Or would you be considering the fact there’s no bathroom?
I would reconsider whether drinking over the legal limit ist a smart behaviour at that time.
Better have your couple of beers on a weekend at home.
Being over 50 years old, I can sadly relate to this comment....
I love driving my cars, and I can't imagine a world in which I wouldn't drive.
That being said, I fully support public transport, and it should be improved vastly.
Every person that isn't driving by car, is a car less on the road.
Less traffic means I can get through traffic easier.
Less cars mean I (eventually) find parking spots easier.
Also, with smartphones being in almost every pocket, a lot of people who hate driving, will distract themselves with phones. If every of those people could use public transport, less accidents will happen.
Also, if public transport also becomes cheaper, it means that I would be able to use it without much extra cost, the few days I really couldn't stand driving.
But as soon as you need to own a car, that extra cost of a ticket, really makes you reconsider if you really are going to pay extra just to use public transport.
I think tickets should be as cheap as the fuel I would use with my car.
It really seems impossibly inconvenient. Can you also ride a bicycle or so to smaller errands (groceries, doctor, etc.)?
Buses need to be run pretty well for this to work. I had a similar pulsed timetable when taking the bus to high school and it was... OK. Not the most convenient, but it beats driving if you can't have a licensed yet lol. The worst thing was that the school hours where somewhat irregular, and if you are unlucky you have to arrive 50 minutes early.
The main problem I think is that often times they are not able to run the buses reliably enough for this to work. You really want that bus to show up at 08 minutes after the hour. If it is sometimes 20, or 40, or maybe it is early at 01, then I don't know if I could have ever tolerated it.
Getting around in America is a nightmare. You don't want a system like we have where you need a car. I wish I could just walk or take a bus/train anywhere I needed to go.
Induced demand is a well known argument, and it's right. If there is an attractive offer people would accept it.
Unfortunately in car dependent Germany we induce demand on cars by building roads and autobahnen, we don't induce demand by building rails, bike friendly streets and options to combine public transport and biking.
Considering how crucial the auto industry if for the German economy that doesn't seem that strange.
@@soundscape26 good for the companies, bad for people and environment.
Nice to add you to my collection of urbanist TH-camrs.
He's not an urbanist TH-camr, more of a thematic Jack of all trades.
@@soundscape26 Yes. He's already on my list of linguistics TH-camrs. And travel TH-camrs. And general trivia TH-camrs.
This is one thing the UK does better than Germany; In my village we get a bus an hour to the 2 closest towns both interchange all interchange with a rail hub and 1 bus a day to and from the historic city
Still i can not imagine getting groceries like that. I cannot get big bags or baskets In a Bus.
Not speaking of several of them. And carriage of bottles.
You say you don't have a licence but the driver at 3:01 looks like you ;)
Now that you mention it...
It all depends on where you are, there are a lot of rural German villages that are definitely very well served by a mainline railway route thay passes by it, generally 1tph or less. But in the uk for example rural services are very differnt depending on where you go. As all busses outside of london and greater manchester now are deregulated, meaning anyone can set up any bus service whereever and the council doesnt have the right to stop them, it means theres this divide where really in the middle of nowhere places just dont get busses anymore becuase whos gonna run them. But then rural places that are sort of on the way between 2 bigger places get great frequencys of service, often operaters trying to compete with each other, and its that commercial conpeteion that pushes bus operators to stop operating in the really rural villages, and start conpeteing with other oparators on other main rural routes. The bus operators here only care about the commercial potential of the route. Which is why in greater london tfl accutally makes a loss ln the bus network, but it takes people to train and tube stations to spend money on their services and in london, which is why on the edge of london and just outside of the boundry tfl run 2 bus per hour services to really small villages via really tiny country lanes, because on the border between london and the home counties the bus operators would never make money from those routes
Are there any nightbuses to rural germany from the city for people who had a night out? Or do you have to wait for the first bus in the morning?
I don't know about Rewboss's town, but typically you don't get night buses on a line like this, no.
Here in Switzerland, there are nightly regional trains on Friday and Saturday nights (usually every 60 or 90 minutes) in many regions, often with connecting bus or on-demand services at the stations. You have to pay an extra 5 Francs for the night service, though.
No. In most small towns bus service ceases in the evening, some have no buses at all on Saturdays and Sundays.
Demand is too low. There are some bakers who start their job at 2am an in these areas, there is also not much nightlife, it's all finished at 11pm, but last buses often go around 8pm to the countryside.
Most villages are connected to public transport one way or another around my town Dresden and can be used with the same ticket, BUT sadly our people in charge still havent understood that its takes simplicity and consistency in a transport timetable to attract costumers ... its ridiculous how they constantly shift the mostly hourly service for a couple of minutes throughout the day. While it gets completely different on weekends. very late or early you then are pushed onto a taxi-like service and trying to change from one of such line to another is a painful exercise in timetable maths.
And the insanity doesnt stop there, the routes a line takes also can change depending on daytime / what day of the week it is. (whoever came up with that needs to be tortured) If you make a mistake on such a line you can divert quiet far from the intended village and then you either have to get back to a far off crossing of lines in the larger cities (because no lines exist which circle those urban centers) ... or you hike across fields.
Luckily I live in the city and only rely on those rural bus/train lines for my fishing hobby ... but through that I experienced probably more of the rural network then most other people and its a pain in the ass to plan a trip around the saxon countryside with public transport.
What would you suggest to make public transport in rural areas even more attractive and maintain efficiency of cost?
Convenience. Convenience is all it takes.
This includes regular service, well-maintained vehicles, dedicated bus lanes where heavier traffic is probable, and bus stops where people actually want to go, like near the train station, the city center, etc.
Draufzahln
@@timowagner1329 And the needed increase in taxes would certainly be much lower than the price of getting and maintaining a car.
"A couple of beers at lunch time" - This would've been the sentence to speed up the citizenship application process. :D
Some people take public transport because they want to protect the climate and therefore not use a car. The problem with on demand buses is, that climate conscious people don't call a huge bus where you are the only person other than the driver sitting in it. If a bus comes by regularly, you take it because you don't want it to drive around for nothing and also it's there anyway.
Buses generally outperform cars very quickly in efficiency. If a diesel bus gets roughly 15-25 l/100 km, and a passenger diesel car gets 5 l/100 km, you only need 3-5 passengers to even out with a car with only a driver. A full regional coach with around 40 seats (e.g. an average Flixbus in central Europe) will get 0,625 l/ 100 km per passenger on the worse end, while a City Bus will be able to accomodate 70 people, meaning 0,357 l/100 km for a full bus. A diesel car with 5 people will get 1 l/100 km, but realistically a fully loaded car on a highway will not be getting 5 l/100km :)
@@ChaplainDMK I know some small settlements with under 100 people. How probable is it that every hour 5 people will take it? Maybe the village could be one stop among many on the way from one bigger town to another, but then there are often already trains which run between these stations. You see, it's not as simple as it seems.
@@bananenmusli2769 What are you talking about? That buses are less efficient than trains? Or what? And yes plenty of places have even less than 100 inhabitants, and yes you usually string them together and have buses (or trains) running to major centers.
And if the towns are so small, and there's so little demand, there are vans that are used as buses, with a proper door, and capacity for 15-20 people. Fuel economy drops to only 10ish l/100km and you again only need like 2 passengers to beat an ideal car in fuel efficiency.
@@ChaplainDMK Just for the record, I completely support public transport and I want there to be more but again, if only two people take the bus (or a van) you could just drive an efficient car. Even if it might be slightly more efficient to take the bus, it only needs one or two times for the bus to come to find out that nobody is waiting and just like that the entire advantage of the bus is gone. That's why in small villages like that there is only one or two school buses in the morning and at noon bringing the children back home and it's mostly fine for them except when they have to see a doctor or do something else in town which doesn't happen very often. In such situations you need to be flexible and it would be stupid to run a bus line only for such rare events
"The average tiny little rural village in Germany might get 2 buses a day"
That's still 2 more than most medium sized towns in America get