Overcrowded trains and even a train evacuation last weekend at Munich Central Station: The nine-euro ticket shows the expected effect. People are accepting the cheap offer, as can be seen a month after the ticket was launched. Above all, leisure travel with buses and trains has increased significantly, which also affects the Munich area.
In the case of the Munich S-Bahn, in addition to the inner city area, the excursion lines to the lake areas, such as to Lake Starnberg or Lake Ammer, are in greater demand. More passengers are on the move here, especially on weekends and during the holiday season. “The S-Bahn therefore has additional staff for passenger guidance and has trains ready for all cases, which can also be used at short notice if necessary,” said the spokesman. During the week, the nine-euro ticket increased the number of train passengers by around ten percent.
The Munich Transport Company (MVG) reports the same number. “Whether these ten percent are actually all new because of the nine-euro ticket or whether other factors – more events, more leisure activities, more tourists – and if so, to what extent, have led to the increase in passengers, we can Unfortunately, we can’t say yet,” says an MVG spokesman. By the beginning of June, MVG vehicles were about 80 percent utilized compared to the pre-corona level, so there is still room for improvement. On weekends, however, the MVG records an occupancy that is roughly at the pre-corona level. But one is far from overloaded.
The transport companies use all available capacities
The Bavarian Regiobahn, with which tourist destinations in Upper Bavaria, in the Allgäu and in Austria can be reached from Munich, among other things, sees a significant increase in day-trippers and older people, as a spokeswoman for the dpa said. “Many are happy that they can travel further away with little money.” During the pandemic, occupancy was only 30 percent in some cases. “Now the trains are as full as before Corona.”
The transport companies emphasize that they are using all available capacities in terms of staff and vehicles. Lukas Iffländer, deputy chairman of the Pro Bahn association, draws a “mixed balance of the nine-euro ticket,” as he says. The railway operators would have “got out the two to three percent that were still possible”. Nevertheless, the system is at the limit. After all, the nine-euro ticket shows how many people would use public transport if it were cheap and easy.
The ticket has only a minor effect on car traffic: The traffic data provider Tom-Tom, which monitors the “congestion level” using data from navigation devices, measures a value of 20.5 percent for the Pentecost holidays in 2022. This figure represents the additional travel time caused by traffic jams; the comparative figure is the value of the free flow of traffic, which is mostly measured at night. In the Pentecost holidays in 2021, the traffic jam level was 23.2 percent, in 2020 it was 20.2 percent and in the pre-Corona year 2019 it was 23.2 percent.