Even at that price, the British mind cannot comprehend such good a deal. An equivalent pass in the UK would be easily 10x that to even cover just a much smaller region than The Netherlands.
For sure. I currently live in the US (fairly rural) and I would kill to have my transportation-related costs reduced to about $150/mo. But where I live, I simply need to have a car to do any basic thing since the moment I step off my driveway, there aren’t even footpaths.
I live in the Netherlands and have absolutely no need for this ticket. When I need to go somewhere, I just walk or bike there, never takes more than 20 minutes. I cannot even imagine living in American suburbia
I moved here from The Netherlands in 2004, and have now lived in Florida, California, and Mississippi and stayed for prolonged periods in many US cities for my job. I wouldn’t feel safe riding a bicycle anywhere here considering the speed of traffic, the size of the vehicles, and lack of dedicated biking infrastructure. It’s a completely different world when you share the road with angry F150 drivers blasting past you at 80 MPH. No, thank you.
I already have the NS Flex free weekend subscription (with 1st class addition) and it's the only way for me to travel longer distances. It's also just about the only available public transport in the neighbourhood because I live in a polder.
Nearest train station is a 35 minute walk, nearest supermarkets are almost an hour walk. One advantage, before Covid and I had groceries delivered, mandatory walking back and forth three times a week to the village did wonders for losing weight.
I live in American suburbia and that's how I live. I can walk or bike whenever I feel like it, drive if it suits me. I sometimes wonder what the average European assumes American suburbia to be. Endless tract homes? Such places do exist, true. But that is far from universal.
I'd be curious what metropolitan area you live in for this to be true! If you're not comfortable sharing for privacy reasons, that's all right. But it seems like this is the case in inner-ring suburbs in the Northeast megalopolis.
Of course you can walk. But can you walk to your workplace, your kid’s nursery, your local bakery/supermarket, your doctor, your dentist, the pharmacy?
I work with a guy from holland. There, he lived in a condo. Here, he owns 40-acers, a couple horses and is trying to grow his own corn. He can play out his rural lifestyle dreams and still work a desk in a city, something that isnt an option without personal transportation. (I would say "car", but he rides an R1 to work most days.)
Note that 128€ is the monthly price for 100% discount, but 6€ is the monthly price for 40% discount. It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous" to just "reasonably expensive".
Nice pass. Would be perfect for my wife and I since we don't commute for work. There is something similar here in Switzerland but not as good.
Funny fact: there are cities here that have tried to make public transport free. But the constitution says public transport must have a "reasonable charge". It's obvious that law was created to not overcharge but the courts have ruled that it also means that there can't be no charge. So no free public transport.
On the other hand, no charges mean you can get rid of a lot of cruft: no tickets, no gates/turnstiles, no machines, no payments, no paperwork thereof, no ticket inspectors, etc etc. So in fact having 0 charge is unequivocally better than having a residual charge.
In other words: charge price = cost, or don't charge at all and get funded by public revenue.
> JOHN COCHRANE: I think the activists who wanted toilet equity did not imagine the solution would be no toilet or a fight with businesses over who's going to be able to use the toilet.
> [...]
> BERAS: Without that incentive, Nik-O-Lok was right. The free public toilets were overrun with people who had to go or people abusing drugs or having sex. Cities were changing. In lots of places, they struggled to fund and maintain public places. With no income from the toilets, taking care of them was harder than ever. Cities couldn't deal. Eventually, they closed them or let them fall into disrepair. The pay toilets may have been flawed, but they served a purpose that no public or private entity has been able to effectively fill since. John says this is a classic tale of a price control, when the government imposes a price.
I think the case for at least allowing nominal payments for toilets is pretty strong. Anything that is free either requires significant and expensive oversight to mitigate anti-social behaviors, or a society that has equivalent anti-social checks baked into the culture (which the U.S. definitely does not have). We should aspire to ubiqitous free toilets, free transit, etc, but there's an infinite number of things people want to be free, or at least subsidized. The public has to pick & choose and allocate its resources wisely.
Note that almost everywhere in the U.S., transit is strongly subsidized and often effectively free for the most in need, but it might require some legwork. In SF where it's quite trivial to get this subsidy (https://treasurer.sf.gov/economicjustice/sfmta-transit-disco...) people still balk at the requirement, though I think the people who complain the most are the ones far too wealthy to have to worry about these things. Some government programs, especially Federal programs, have onerous application and reporting requirements specifically designed to dissuade use, but individual transit subsidies aren't generally structured this way. In SF and to a lesser degree California, there are armies of people paid to hold people's hand through these processes (mostly for Federal and Federally subsidized programs, as many state and especially local programs tend to be very low friction).
Always funny to me how people try and put laws on things for homeless people when the ills people are worried about with homeless people are already illegal but not being enforced. E.g., "we must charge for transit, to keep homeless people off as they could smoke meth on the platform." Never mind smoking meth on the platform is already illegal. Never mind that it isn't getting enforced. Never mind that this lack of enforcement on meth usage suggests farebox enforcement isn't going to suddenly out prioritize meth usage enforcement and be successful to combat meth usage in some round a bout way.
It ends up being about the optics of politicians getting to advertise that they are doing "something" and never mind if it works or not, because the people clamoring the loudest, angry suburban whites usually, aren't even the ones using these systems to begin with. They are told in their propaganda bubbles that these systems are dangerous rather than experiencing it with their own eyes and making any conclusion. They demand action for a system they will never use. After whatever action passes they don't become users either, the goalposts move to some other slight or ill that is really a proxy for "I don't feel safe around black or brown people."
My understanding of that ruling is that, the intent of the constitutional clause is not only to prevent ticket prices from being raised unfairly, but also to prevent ticket prices from being so low that they no longer cover the cost of running the network, which would shift that cost to the general taxpayer.
Still frustrating (if the taxpayers want it, might as well let them have it), but not purely a semantic technicality.
Does the Swiss rail not receive public funding? It seems to me that undercharging would only necessitate more public funding, not some fundamental change where taxpayers suddenly have to pay for something they didn't before.
That sort of begs the question about elevators and escalators. I’ve never been charged riding those, and I can’t imagine fares tacked on in Switzerland. Have they been ruled on? An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
I know it’s stupid, but I’m genuinely curious now.
Presumably there would be a legal definition of what constitutes public transport, and I would expect it wouldn't include those. But I'm neither swiss nor do I speak any swiss languages so hell if I could find it.
> An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
Every country defines what counts as public transport - it could be a snowmobile, a boat, or a helicopter if needed. The simple definition of "transports people in a public place" would cover a lot of funny things as public transport, like a carousel in a playground.
I wasn't aware of that fun fact - I always just assumed it was down to the "personal responsibility" mindset ("people must pay for what they use").
Have the courts also said anything about the charge being super low, e.g. like a CHF 1 per month abo or such? I wonder if that would be a way around those rulings.
Only valid during the two summer months. It's a rather weak simile of the German Deutschlandticket (now 58 euro/month but valid all day on bus/tram/metro and local/regional trains, but not on long distance trains, in a much larger country).
It started out as an idea to introduce the same concept as the Deutschlandticket in NL. But the government has a budget deficit and the national railway company expected a capacity issue during peak hours. As a result the ticket is only valid in off-peak hours and the low price is only for 2 months.
A single, non-discounted, one-way train ride between the two biggest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, costs €20,20.
The promotional price of this subscription is only a few euros more expensive than the existing unlimited subscription for weekend train travel (i.e. 6:30 PM Friday to 4:00 AM Monday), which costs €39,50. You can pay €4 extra for a 40% discount the rest of the off-peak hours.
With that discount, my commute (Haarlem <=> Amsterdam) costs €3,30 each way. A single trip to work a month makes the promotional subscription better value.
This special ticket is implemented by providing a 2-month discount on the existing 'off-peak free travel' subscription from the Dutch Railways. This was deemed the only way to quickly introduce such a product [1].
It doesn't work on the GVB Amsterdam local trains or trams...just the NS trains.
There are some routes within Amsterdam that have NS trains paralleling GVB trains, might help save money on those.
The off-peak hours this pass is valid: Monday to Friday from 9 am to 4 pm and 6.30 pm to 6.30 am. I wonder what happens if you start your ride 3:59 pm.
When you start a journey, the time you check in at the access gate is taken as the check-in time for your whole journey with that train company. (You may have to check-in and out if you switch trains and the train you're getting on is from a different company).
So if you check-in at 3.59 pm in the north of the Netherlands, and go to the south to arrive around 7.00 pm in the south of the Netherlands and you only use trains from 1 company (like NS) the whole journey will be considered off-peak hours. Even if by the time you arive in the south the peak-hours will already be over.
Most trains run with NS but some regional lines have Arriva (Deutsche Bahn) or Keolis (SCNF).
Additionally there is a 5 minute grace period in your favor, so if you check-in at 4.04 pm it will stil be off-peak.
And because the whole thing is rather confusing for those not already familiar with the system there you get to do it wrong once a year and get your fine waived if you call the train company.
And yes there's little queues just before 06.25 pm every day of people waiting in front of the check-in gates for their pass to become valid (especially on fridays when the weekend-pass will become valid).
The time of tapping in at the ticket barriers counts for the whole trip. If you get in just before the start of peak-hours, you still pay the off-peak rate for the whole trip. But if you tap in before 9am, the whole trip counts as peak-rates also the part that happens after 9am.
Transfer don't change it, they're all part of the same trip. Going out of a station and then back in also doesn't interrupt your trip. As far as I know you need 60 minutes of being "out" of the train system for it to be considered a new trip.
Overall, DB Regio (the regional trains which are covered by the Deutschlandticket) has around a 89% punctuality score[1], which is very comparable to the Dutch numbers. There are certain hotspot regions though where the regional trains are truly fucked, but for most of the country they're totally fine and quite reliable.
It's mostly Germany's long-distance high-speed ICE trains which have punctuality problems (the much discussed 60% punctuality [2] score), but those are not covered by the Deutschland ticket, and the Netherlands has no comparable service to these trains anyways, so if one is envious of the state of Dutch trains, they can happily pretend that German ICE trains simply don't exist. In my experience though, the ICE's are a pleasure to ride.
Sidenote, but the ICE punctuality score is not really directly comparable with the Regional train scores, since they measure different things. The ICE score is about the passenger arriving at their final destination with less than a 15 minute delay including connections, whereas with the regional trains they don't have granular passenger level data, so they measure whether or not a train gets to the platform within 6 minutes of the scheduled time.
The Netherlands runs around 3000 trains a day vs. 50k in Germany. That doesn't excuse Germany's problems which were also predicted years in advance when they stopped investing in maintenance and infrastructure but also shows that the comparison is not entirely fair.
What I don't understand about initiatives like this is... why bother charging at all? wouldn't the system be more efficient without a fare process? at that point you don't have to maintain an entire money handling system.
but wouldn't the whole system be cheaper if it were paid for by taxes? because at that point you don't have to maintain a point of sale? hundreds of fare boxes, communication systems, physical barriers, auditing, accounting, printing cards, employees to maintain and operate it all... you even save a little time it takes tapping a card to get people on
the tax system is also progressive, so the people who are most capable of paying pay the most and the poor truly pay nothing
charging for a public system seems like pure waste
No, it's not even close. Those fares don't cover the whole operation of the train system, but they actually go a long way to covering a very large chunk of it. The cost of operating the fare system is a rounding error relative to the sums of money talked about here.
Yes you need a card (ov-chipkaart or ov-pas) but you don't need to be a local to get one. You just order one online for 7.5/5 euros. You do need an address for it to be delivered to, but its valid for 5 years so if you visit the Netherlands again you can reuse it.
We've updated the URL to the English-language version that CalRobert submitted. We appreciate all languages and cultures but HN is an English-language site, so we always want the English version to be submitted here, thanks!
That’s the introductory price. It’ll be €127,95 after that period is over. Kids travel for free, though, so that’s pretty nice.
In hindsight, I think I underestimated the value of my OV card while I was a student: travel whenever, using all types of public transport, for free.
Even at that price, the British mind cannot comprehend such good a deal. An equivalent pass in the UK would be easily 10x that to even cover just a much smaller region than The Netherlands.
For sure. I currently live in the US (fairly rural) and I would kill to have my transportation-related costs reduced to about $150/mo. But where I live, I simply need to have a car to do any basic thing since the moment I step off my driveway, there aren’t even footpaths.
I live in the Netherlands and have absolutely no need for this ticket. When I need to go somewhere, I just walk or bike there, never takes more than 20 minutes. I cannot even imagine living in American suburbia
I moved here from The Netherlands in 2004, and have now lived in Florida, California, and Mississippi and stayed for prolonged periods in many US cities for my job. I wouldn’t feel safe riding a bicycle anywhere here considering the speed of traffic, the size of the vehicles, and lack of dedicated biking infrastructure. It’s a completely different world when you share the road with angry F150 drivers blasting past you at 80 MPH. No, thank you.
I already have the NS Flex free weekend subscription (with 1st class addition) and it's the only way for me to travel longer distances. It's also just about the only available public transport in the neighbourhood because I live in a polder.
Nearest train station is a 35 minute walk, nearest supermarkets are almost an hour walk. One advantage, before Covid and I had groceries delivered, mandatory walking back and forth three times a week to the village did wonders for losing weight.
I live in American suburbia and that's how I live. I can walk or bike whenever I feel like it, drive if it suits me. I sometimes wonder what the average European assumes American suburbia to be. Endless tract homes? Such places do exist, true. But that is far from universal.
I'd be curious what metropolitan area you live in for this to be true! If you're not comfortable sharing for privacy reasons, that's all right. But it seems like this is the case in inner-ring suburbs in the Northeast megalopolis.
Of course you can walk. But can you walk to your workplace, your kid’s nursery, your local bakery/supermarket, your doctor, your dentist, the pharmacy?
I work with a guy from holland. There, he lived in a condo. Here, he owns 40-acers, a couple horses and is trying to grow his own corn. He can play out his rural lifestyle dreams and still work a desk in a city, something that isnt an option without personal transportation. (I would say "car", but he rides an R1 to work most days.)
Note that 128€ is the monthly price for 100% discount, but 6€ is the monthly price for 40% discount. It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous" to just "reasonably expensive".
Try Switzerland
Nice pass. Would be perfect for my wife and I since we don't commute for work. There is something similar here in Switzerland but not as good.
Funny fact: there are cities here that have tried to make public transport free. But the constitution says public transport must have a "reasonable charge". It's obvious that law was created to not overcharge but the courts have ruled that it also means that there can't be no charge. So no free public transport.
having a nominal charge would probably lead to less abuse of the system, and any contribution to the upkeep/maintenance would be welcome, I'd imagine
On the other hand, no charges mean you can get rid of a lot of cruft: no tickets, no gates/turnstiles, no machines, no payments, no paperwork thereof, no ticket inspectors, etc etc. So in fact having 0 charge is unequivocally better than having a residual charge.
In other words: charge price = cost, or don't charge at all and get funded by public revenue.
What kind of abuse are you thinking of?
i've seen this argument before, normally they're talking about homeless people sleeping on trains or in stations
Homeless are the most visible, but perhaps not the biggest issue. See, e.g., the problem with public toilets: https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/1248664709/-public-good-why-i...
> JOHN COCHRANE: I think the activists who wanted toilet equity did not imagine the solution would be no toilet or a fight with businesses over who's going to be able to use the toilet.
> [...]
> BERAS: Without that incentive, Nik-O-Lok was right. The free public toilets were overrun with people who had to go or people abusing drugs or having sex. Cities were changing. In lots of places, they struggled to fund and maintain public places. With no income from the toilets, taking care of them was harder than ever. Cities couldn't deal. Eventually, they closed them or let them fall into disrepair. The pay toilets may have been flawed, but they served a purpose that no public or private entity has been able to effectively fill since. John says this is a classic tale of a price control, when the government imposes a price.
I think the case for at least allowing nominal payments for toilets is pretty strong. Anything that is free either requires significant and expensive oversight to mitigate anti-social behaviors, or a society that has equivalent anti-social checks baked into the culture (which the U.S. definitely does not have). We should aspire to ubiqitous free toilets, free transit, etc, but there's an infinite number of things people want to be free, or at least subsidized. The public has to pick & choose and allocate its resources wisely.
Note that almost everywhere in the U.S., transit is strongly subsidized and often effectively free for the most in need, but it might require some legwork. In SF where it's quite trivial to get this subsidy (https://treasurer.sf.gov/economicjustice/sfmta-transit-disco...) people still balk at the requirement, though I think the people who complain the most are the ones far too wealthy to have to worry about these things. Some government programs, especially Federal programs, have onerous application and reporting requirements specifically designed to dissuade use, but individual transit subsidies aren't generally structured this way. In SF and to a lesser degree California, there are armies of people paid to hold people's hand through these processes (mostly for Federal and Federally subsidized programs, as many state and especially local programs tend to be very low friction).
Always funny to me how people try and put laws on things for homeless people when the ills people are worried about with homeless people are already illegal but not being enforced. E.g., "we must charge for transit, to keep homeless people off as they could smoke meth on the platform." Never mind smoking meth on the platform is already illegal. Never mind that it isn't getting enforced. Never mind that this lack of enforcement on meth usage suggests farebox enforcement isn't going to suddenly out prioritize meth usage enforcement and be successful to combat meth usage in some round a bout way.
It ends up being about the optics of politicians getting to advertise that they are doing "something" and never mind if it works or not, because the people clamoring the loudest, angry suburban whites usually, aren't even the ones using these systems to begin with. They are told in their propaganda bubbles that these systems are dangerous rather than experiencing it with their own eyes and making any conclusion. They demand action for a system they will never use. After whatever action passes they don't become users either, the goalposts move to some other slight or ill that is really a proxy for "I don't feel safe around black or brown people."
Switzerland (2.5 per 10,000) has just under an order of magnitude less homelessness per capita than the US (19.5 per 10,000)
My understanding of that ruling is that, the intent of the constitutional clause is not only to prevent ticket prices from being raised unfairly, but also to prevent ticket prices from being so low that they no longer cover the cost of running the network, which would shift that cost to the general taxpayer.
Still frustrating (if the taxpayers want it, might as well let them have it), but not purely a semantic technicality.
Public transport is not sustainable from ticket prices alone anywhere in Europe.
True for local lines of everyday transportation. But actually high speed trains are sustainable, at least in France.
But also they are super expensive.
That's a bold assertion.
Never mind that you know what's also not "sustainable", if the definition means "costs > revenues"? Automobile roads :)
Does the Swiss rail not receive public funding? It seems to me that undercharging would only necessitate more public funding, not some fundamental change where taxpayers suddenly have to pay for something they didn't before.
Free public transport routes worldwide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_public_transport_...
That sort of begs the question about elevators and escalators. I’ve never been charged riding those, and I can’t imagine fares tacked on in Switzerland. Have they been ruled on? An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
I know it’s stupid, but I’m genuinely curious now.
Presumably there would be a legal definition of what constitutes public transport, and I would expect it wouldn't include those. But I'm neither swiss nor do I speak any swiss languages so hell if I could find it.
> An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
Every country defines what counts as public transport - it could be a snowmobile, a boat, or a helicopter if needed. The simple definition of "transports people in a public place" would cover a lot of funny things as public transport, like a carousel in a playground.
I wasn't aware of that fun fact - I always just assumed it was down to the "personal responsibility" mindset ("people must pay for what they use").
Have the courts also said anything about the charge being super low, e.g. like a CHF 1 per month abo or such? I wonder if that would be a way around those rulings.
What's the largest-value coin in circulation ? Charge one of those. Drop a coin in the gumball machine, get a token.
The trains can still charge, but what if the government pays the tab automatically?
People who use it more really should contribute something vs those who never use it.
Should people who use roads more contribute something vs those who don't?
Yes and they do in many jurisdictations. In Austria gas tax is used for road maintenance, on top of that there are tolls for highways.
Yes. This was the original intent behind the gasoline tax.
Personally, I find no charge very, very reasonable lol
Only valid during the two summer months. It's a rather weak simile of the German Deutschlandticket (now 58 euro/month but valid all day on bus/tram/metro and local/regional trains, but not on long distance trains, in a much larger country).
It started out as an idea to introduce the same concept as the Deutschlandticket in NL. But the government has a budget deficit and the national railway company expected a capacity issue during peak hours. As a result the ticket is only valid in off-peak hours and the low price is only for 2 months.
and the bus companies didn't want to play ball.
It's been 63 euro for some months now.
A single, non-discounted, one-way train ride between the two biggest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, costs €20,20.
The promotional price of this subscription is only a few euros more expensive than the existing unlimited subscription for weekend train travel (i.e. 6:30 PM Friday to 4:00 AM Monday), which costs €39,50. You can pay €4 extra for a 40% discount the rest of the off-peak hours.
With that discount, my commute (Haarlem <=> Amsterdam) costs €3,30 each way. A single trip to work a month makes the promotional subscription better value.
This special ticket is implemented by providing a 2-month discount on the existing 'off-peak free travel' subscription from the Dutch Railways. This was deemed the only way to quickly introduce such a product [1].
[1] (in Dutch) https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2026/05/22/voors...
It doesn't work on the GVB Amsterdam local trains or trams...just the NS trains. There are some routes within Amsterdam that have NS trains paralleling GVB trains, might help save money on those.
It doesn't work on bus, metro or tram, which GVB operates, but it does work on trains from all operators, not just NS.
The off-peak hours this pass is valid: Monday to Friday from 9 am to 4 pm and 6.30 pm to 6.30 am. I wonder what happens if you start your ride 3:59 pm.
When you start a journey, the time you check in at the access gate is taken as the check-in time for your whole journey with that train company. (You may have to check-in and out if you switch trains and the train you're getting on is from a different company).
So if you check-in at 3.59 pm in the north of the Netherlands, and go to the south to arrive around 7.00 pm in the south of the Netherlands and you only use trains from 1 company (like NS) the whole journey will be considered off-peak hours. Even if by the time you arive in the south the peak-hours will already be over.
Most trains run with NS but some regional lines have Arriva (Deutsche Bahn) or Keolis (SCNF).
Additionally there is a 5 minute grace period in your favor, so if you check-in at 4.04 pm it will stil be off-peak.
And because the whole thing is rather confusing for those not already familiar with the system there you get to do it wrong once a year and get your fine waived if you call the train company.
And yes there's little queues just before 06.25 pm every day of people waiting in front of the check-in gates for their pass to become valid (especially on fridays when the weekend-pass will become valid).
The time of tapping in at the ticket barriers counts for the whole trip. If you get in just before the start of peak-hours, you still pay the off-peak rate for the whole trip. But if you tap in before 9am, the whole trip counts as peak-rates also the part that happens after 9am.
Transfer don't change it, they're all part of the same trip. Going out of a station and then back in also doesn't interrupt your trip. As far as I know you need 60 minutes of being "out" of the train system for it to be considered a new trip.
Significantly worse than the Deutschland ticket
Dutch trains run mostly on time though and with far less disruption than DB, right?
Really depends on where you are in Germany.
Overall, DB Regio (the regional trains which are covered by the Deutschlandticket) has around a 89% punctuality score[1], which is very comparable to the Dutch numbers. There are certain hotspot regions though where the regional trains are truly fucked, but for most of the country they're totally fine and quite reliable.
It's mostly Germany's long-distance high-speed ICE trains which have punctuality problems (the much discussed 60% punctuality [2] score), but those are not covered by the Deutschland ticket, and the Netherlands has no comparable service to these trains anyways, so if one is envious of the state of Dutch trains, they can happily pretend that German ICE trains simply don't exist. In my experience though, the ICE's are a pleasure to ride.
_____________________________
[1] https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2025/de/zusammengefasster-lage...
[2] https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2025/de/zusammengefasster-lage...
Sidenote, but the ICE punctuality score is not really directly comparable with the Regional train scores, since they measure different things. The ICE score is about the passenger arriving at their final destination with less than a 15 minute delay including connections, whereas with the regional trains they don't have granular passenger level data, so they measure whether or not a train gets to the platform within 6 minutes of the scheduled time.
The Netherlands runs around 3000 trains a day vs. 50k in Germany. That doesn't excuse Germany's problems which were also predicted years in advance when they stopped investing in maintenance and infrastructure but also shows that the comparison is not entirely fair.
What I don't understand about initiatives like this is... why bother charging at all? wouldn't the system be more efficient without a fare process? at that point you don't have to maintain an entire money handling system.
"money handling system" scales quite well, and more money is good to have if it's affordable enough for many people?
but wouldn't the whole system be cheaper if it were paid for by taxes? because at that point you don't have to maintain a point of sale? hundreds of fare boxes, communication systems, physical barriers, auditing, accounting, printing cards, employees to maintain and operate it all... you even save a little time it takes tapping a card to get people on
the tax system is also progressive, so the people who are most capable of paying pay the most and the poor truly pay nothing
charging for a public system seems like pure waste
No, it's not even close. Those fares don't cover the whole operation of the train system, but they actually go a long way to covering a very large chunk of it. The cost of operating the fare system is a rounding error relative to the sums of money talked about here.
ok, but hear me out
let's say the fare system costs $1 million to operate and maintain
and let's say the fare system collects $10 million in fares
couldn't you just collect $10 million in additional taxes, just add a "railway fare" line item, and save everyone the $1 million?
Not for visitors AIUI. You need some kind of card only locals can get.
Yes you need a card (ov-chipkaart or ov-pas) but you don't need to be a local to get one. You just order one online for 7.5/5 euros. You do need an address for it to be delivered to, but its valid for 5 years so if you visit the Netherlands again you can reuse it.
I think everyone can get the card, though maybe you need a dutch address to sent it to.
No, you need a dutch bank account to pay plus a dutch address to receive the card. That's not going to work for 99% of visitors.
I mean why not, right? The trains are moving anyways.
In English: https://www.ns.nl/en/season-tickets/dal-vrij
We updated the link, many thanks!
(in Dutch)
We've updated the URL to the English-language version that CalRobert submitted. We appreciate all languages and cultures but HN is an English-language site, so we always want the English version to be submitted here, thanks!