€9 Instead of €63: Does Germany Need Its Ultra-Cheap Ticket Back?

From June to August 2022, nationwide local and regional public transport cost just €9 per month. Around 52 million tickets were sold, while roughly ten million existing season-ticket customers automatically received the reduced fare.

The attraction was obvious. No complicated fare zones, no need to check regional boundaries and almost no price calculation. In the VDV survey at the time, 69 percent of users named the low price as their main reason for buying the ticket, while 88 percent said they were at least satisfied with the offer.

People also travelled much more by rail. Germany's Federal Statistical Office recorded a sharp increase in longer rail journeys during the scheme. Across the three-month period, daily rail movements over distances of at least 30 kilometres were around 44 percent above 2019 levels on average.

But that is where the conflict begins. An extremely cheap ticket can create huge demand, but it does not automatically create more trains, tracks or capacity.

A later academic study found that rail trips increased by around 35 percent, while car traffic fell by only around 1 to 5 percent. The additional rail demand also worsened service reliability, with effects even spilling over into long-distance services.

That makes the story more complicated than simply saying the €9 Ticket was either a complete success or a failure.

As a financial relief measure, its impact was obvious. Existing public transport passengers paid far less, while many people tried buses and trains for the first time. According to the VDV survey, one in five buyers had previously not normally used public transport. Almost 30 percent of these new customers continued using it after the scheme ended.

The experience was very different in rural areas. Ticket ownership there was only around half as high as in urban areas, with poor connections, low frequencies, long travel times and distance to stops among the reported problems.

A cheap ticket can only make existing transport cheaper.

The scheme also required substantial public funding. Germany provided an additional €2.5 billion in regional transport funding to finance the €9 Ticket.

That makes the debate interesting again today. Germany's current Deutschlandticket costs €63 per month in 2026 and is used by around 14.5 million people.

A permanent €9 fare cannot simply be compared with a temporary three-month experiment. But summer 2022 demonstrated one thing very clearly: a very simple and very cheap ticket can persuade huge numbers of people to try public transport. Research also shows that low fares alone cannot solve weak services, poor connections or insufficient capacity.

So perhaps that is the real question: does Germany need another extremely cheap nationwide ticket, or would the same money be better spent on more frequent, reliable and better-connected public transport? Would you buy a new €9 Ticket immediately? Did you personally use the €9 Ticket in 2022?

_{Copyright: Deutsche Bahn AG / Claus Weber}