Toward a Green and Efficient Transit Future
This summer’s 9-Euro monthly pass aims to get Germans out of their cars and onto the rails
By Sindhu Ananthavel
BERLIN — When Matthias Gibtner was growing up in East Berlin in the 1970s, light rail trains, buses and trams whisked him from school to home and everywhere in between. After the Berlin Wall fell and the two cities reunified in 1990, he was alarmed that the West Berlin transit system was planning to abolish the tram network that East Berliners like him had relied upon.
“I thought there should be an opposition to this attempt, and I wanted to work as a volunteer to make it happen,” Gibtner said.
Though he had no expertise in urban planning or public transportation, he had a life’s worth of first-hand experience on public transit. In 1995, Gibtner joined the Berlin Passenger Association, known as IGEB, which advocates for German public transit consumers. Today, he is the deputy chairman.
“At the IGEB we ask and fight for a good, reliable system with affordable fares to allow everyone in Berlin to use public transport as they need,” Gibtner said.
IGEB represents a massive consumer base of over 30 million people who use public transportation across Germany. Any shifts in transportation policy — such as fare rates and train frequencies — are felt keenly by the Autobahn-loving German population, who carefully weigh the cost and quality of public transit before leaving their cars at home.
At the same time, Germany puts itself forward as a role model for Europe and the world for green practices in energy and infrastructure — which took a hit when Russia invaded Ukraine in late February causing fuel prices soar and making Germany’s reliance on Russian oil and gas a hot political issue.
To show it’s responding dramatically, the federal government is spending $2.6 billion to subsidize a summer train and subway — S-bahn and U-bahn — pass that allows anybody in the country to ride city and regional transit lines for less than $10 a month — the so-called 9-Euro pass. The hope is that it will convince more Germans to move to public transit.
“Green energy is a big focus for Germany. When [U.S. Transportation] Secretary Pete Buttigieg was in Berlin, we took him to Central Station to learn more about German practices,” said Izaak Martin, assistant cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. “Europe has a lot of best practices when it comes to transportation that we in the U.S. could benefit from. Germany has a lot.”
The 9-Euro monthly pass is effective through June, July and August. Ridership has gone up by 40 percent in the capital region since the introduction of the pass, says Joachim Radunz, public relations officer for VBB, the transit authority that oversees the states of Berlin and Brandenburg. If ticket prices stay the same as they were before the pass, he will consider it a success if there is even a 10 percent rise after the summer.
Approximately 30 percent of commuters in Berlin and Brandenburg use public transit and the remaining 70 percent use cars, Radunz said. “We need a transportation change in Germany, and to bring drivers into the public transportation system.”
Currently, only 300,000 people out of 1.3 million commuting in the greater city area use public transportation, and the agency is constantly looking for ways to increase that number — trying to draw people away from cars and to transit, part of its larger green urban strategy.
This includes a commitment to energy neutrality city-wide by 2050, with environmentally-friendly technical innovation required for all new infrastructure and equipment. The city is looking to incorporate a hydrogen powered train into its system within the next year, according to Radunz. The BVG — Berlin’s city transit system — has decreed that by 2025 all buses must be electric. The S-Bahn is already run completely on green power and the trains will be completely environmentally friendly by 2030.
“There are no new technologies that are not green or alternative energy,” Radunz said.
Weaning people off cars is a main federal goal for the 9-Euro pass, but a summer bargain is what passengers care about.
Berliners such as Maren Zimmerman are benefiting, budget-wise, from the pass. Zimmerman commutes from Wilmersdorf to Mitte, Berlin on a daily basis for work, and also to drop off her daughter at daycare, and has been using transit more frequently now that the price has been reduced.
“I share one car with my husband, which we only use once or twice a week,” Zimmerman said.
Andrea Burth also owns a car, and since the introduction of the summer pass, has been more frequently using public transit, to avoid high fuel prices.
“Now I use the U-bahn [subway] because otherwise I would have to use my car, and the price of diesel is very high,” Burth said.
Diesel prices were rising even before the recent Russian-Ukrainian war, and escalated since Russia’s invasion this past February.
Russia has long been Germany’s largest supplier of oil and gas. The first major Germany-Russia gas pipeline started in 1970, and much has been invested in a new pipeline that completed construction in September 2021. Though existing pipelines continue to provide energy to Germany via Russia, the new controversial 1,200 km pipeline transporting natural gas has had its final approval put on hold in light of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Still, Germany is reluctant to embargo Russian oil in the way the United States has, to protest Moscow’s invasion.
“You have to look where your dependencies lie, Germany has been struggling with this,” said Martin of the U.S. embassy. “Cutting off those ties at one point is going to be very complicated and very painful.”
According to consumer advocate Gibtner, government efforts such as the 9-Euro pass are misplaced. The tram network is already fully electric, and Gibtner said cost cuts that reduced service have been deeply detrimental to German infrastructure and green energy efforts.
Gibtner said the German government’s primary transit focus during reunification in the early 1990s was reconnecting subway lines, which was costly and complex. He believes expanding the tram network would have cost less and connected the two formerly split sides more efficiently.
“We suffer from this mistake today. You can’t go from East to West on just the tram, you have to transfer, and it makes public transit less attractive,” Gibtner said.
Inefficiencies on the subway system have only been highlighted by the introduction of the 9-Euro pass. Train delays, particularly, are a heavy issue.
At Gesundbrunnen station last month — the first month the 9-Euro pass was in effect — Gibtner boarded the RE3 line which extends to the Baltic Sea, a hotspot station for summer travelers. Before it could depart, however, the train was halted and suddenly more than 100 passengers on a train transporting 800 were asked to step off.
“The train couldn’t start at the station because it was too full. The police had been called and they asked people to leave the train before it could start its journey,” Gibtner said.
On the first Friday in July, a train routed from Berlin Central Station through Hannover was delayed about 15 minutes. A substitute train failed to have the designated reserved seating passengers had paid for, leading to widespread confusion and irritation. There was a domino effect of delays in Hannover and Frankfurt and many other routes were also badly delayed that day.
One man yelled into his cell phone for 10 minutes, trying to get a re-route after getting into Frankfurt late.
“I’ve already paid for the flexible fare,” he pleaded. “And you are telling me I won’t get in until two hours later?”
Over a loudspeaker, Deutsche Bahn blamed the volume of passengers — how long it took for people to get on and off the trains — for setbacks in efficiency. But while delays and crowding have been amplified by higher passenger numbers from the summer 9-Euro ticket, Gibtner and others say these problems have been developing for years.
“Our demand is to improve the capacity of this line by extending the trains with additional cars and shortening the intervals at which the trains run, Gibtner said of the RE3 line that recently kicked 100 passengers off a train. “At least two trains per hour departing is mandatory,”
Adding the much-needed three more cars to many trains would also require a reconfiguration of the train stations themselves, which do not have enough room to accommodate the added train length. These expansions require time and money, says Gibtner, who also feels that the 9- Euro pass is too cheap to be sustainable.
Konstantin Krex, head of public relations at Holzmart — an open-air restaurant marketplace in eastern Berlin, echoes that sentiment, believing that a flat rate should be charged per year for public transit.
“I want the government to force me to buy the ticket, and make it around 20 euros a month for everyone. Then it’s fine, and whoever doesn’t want to use it, bad luck,” Krex said.
Some suggest a 365-Euro ticket, bought once per year to cover all transportation at a euro per day. Vienna was the first to implement such a ticket, and many — including German officials — have looked to the Austrian capital as an example.
The savings to the consumer would offset expenditures on cars as more people use transit, advocates say. Krex primarily uses his bike as transportation, coupled with public transport, but does own a car that he views as a “luxury.”
“I think they should make owning a car more and more pricey so that people stop using cars,” Krex said. “I think we’re not even half where we would need to be, when you consider the price for diesel and gas, parking, taxes and all that. It must go up because that’s the only way people will shift.”
Though public transit is more developed in Germany than in most American cities and states, Berliners constantly advocate for improvement, saying accessibility is the bottom line. They are willing to tolerate slightly higher prices, if the end goal is a safer, smoother transit experience, says Gibtner, of the IGEB consumer lobby group.
“Public transport must not be a luxury item, it must be for everybody. It provides freedom,” he said.
Sindhu Ananthavel is a student at UC Santa Barbara pursuing Communication and Journalism.
