The governments and local authorities should do everything is possible to support sustainable urban mobility and should bring their contribution to increase the public transport, which is also facing massive challenges such as energy costs and labour crisis but it brings environmental benefits.
“Car is a condition of freedom (…) and the public transport is seen as a common good. We cannot afford a degradation of public services at a time of crisis. If it to expensive to use a car, public transport must provide. Governments must do anything to maintain and increase the use of public transport in time of crisis,” Karima Delli, Chairwoman of the Transport and Tourism Committee (TRAN) of the European Parliament, said at the Global Public Transport Summit organised by UITP in Barcelona on 4 – 7 June, 2023.
The statement was made during a session where speakers underlined that the public transport is facing increasing operational costs and needs more investment to deliver citizens increased capacity, connections and comfort to achieve a modal shift from private transport and to contribute to the reduction of emissions.
The Chairwoman of TRAN said that the climate ticket and free public transport are key pillars to a fast modal shift and encouraging citizens to consider public transport.
From April, Deutsche Bahn has started to sell its climate ticket, the Deutschland-Ticket (D-Ticket) a EUR 49 pass per month available on public transport network across Germany.
According to the Association of German Transport Companies, in the first month, 10 million purchases have been recorded, around half of them (around 5 million passengers) were switching from their previous (existing) subscriptions. Another 4.3 million passengers are new subscribers who previously used cash fare public transport tickets (single tickets) or season tickets without a subscription switched to the low-cost pass. The analysis of the association says that around 700,000 people are new customers who have generally not used public transport to date.Due to the additional demand for the Deutschland-Ticket, the utilisation of public transport has increased, but this does not lead to congestion.
The German state and federal authorities are supporting the public transport and this year the state are expected to receive more than EUR 10 billion for this sector while the federal government will spend EUR 1.5 billion each year from 2023 until 2025 for the Deutschland-Ticket.
Share on:
