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Germany and France in talks about shared railway tickets (www.sueddeutsche.de)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Sorry for the German source, I couldn't find an English one.

Apparently, there are first talks between the German and French traffic ministers to expand the national railway tickets (49€ ticket on the German side, a soon-to-be equivalent in France) in the respecting neighbour country. It's still a more than early stage, will take several years and will have to overcome the incompetency of Wissing, but the idea is intriguing.

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[–] pumpkin 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not german or french, but I think this is a great first step to get cheap rail travel throughout europe. I'm really hoping more countries will follow germany's lead on the cheap ticket price and being able to use this in other countries is really important too.

Another important thing we have to do though is have a unified booking system which lets anyone from any EU country book their tickets and use an app their familiar with. It'd be awesome for me in Sweden to be able to easily book train tickets to Spain with the ease it is to book a flight down to Spain. Currently it's hard to find out which routes are available and from those routes, booking through different operators which have different policies and different ticketing mechanisms or apps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think the way to do this is to have an open API for booking trains, like planes do. That's how Expedia, Google Flights, ITA matrix, etc work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system

Apparently there is some progress in Sweden about this: https://www.railtech.com/all/2022/11/14/what-can-countries-learn-from-sweden-when-it-comes-to-multi-modal-ticketing/?gdpr=accept

But I think there will probably have to be some sort of EU regulation to get this to happen EU-wide any time soon.