A little more than two months after the launch of the nationwide ticket, Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) already considers the project a success. Yet the statistical evaluation is still underway. And initial findings indicate that although the special ticket is certainly having an effect, it can hardly fulfil all the hopes and goals placed on it.

"In fact, the data is still very thin," says Philipp Kosok, a transport researcher at the Agora Verkehrswende association. "We have very little robust data as yet.” He is aware of just over a handful of studies that meet scientific standards.

Above all, the studies prove how successful the marketing for the ticket was. "With almost 98 per cent, almost every person surveyed has heard of the 9-Euro-Ticket, two thirds even know it well," the Association of German Transport Companies announced in July. It surveys around 6000 consumers every week, with many special questions specifically for users of the ticket. In June alone, more than 30 million people had a 9-Euro-ticet - including season ticket holders who did not have to buy it separately.

The high demand is felt by passengers and employees on buses and trains. "The ticket leads to higher use of public transport, but mainly selectively on certain routes - even to the extent that traffic breaks down there," says Christian Böttger, a rail expert at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (HTW). An analysis of mobile phone data by the Federal Statistical Office revealed at the beginning of July: "In June 2022, nationwide rail traffic movements were 42 per cent higher on average than in June 2019."

The problem is that around a quarter of the trips made on public transport would not have been made at all without the ticket, according to the VDV. These are therefore additional journeys and not trips to replace journeys that would otherwise have been made by car. "From the studies conducted so far, we can only identify a slight shift from road to public transport of at best two to three percent," says HTW researcher Böttger.

This is in line with the initial results of a study from the Munich area, which included evaluating the movement data of hundreds of participants. It concluded that 35 percent of the test persons travelled more frequently by bus and train - but only 3 percent used their own vehicle less often. However, the researchers noted a certain dampening effect on road traffic in Munich. Instead of the usual slight increase in June, it decreased by three percent. An evaluation by the traffic data specialist TomTom for the Deutsche Presse-Agentur had also indicated a decrease in traffic jams in large German cities during the first phase of the 9-Euro-Ticket.

Klaus Bogenberger, head of the Technical University (TU) Munich who led the Munich study, had not been expecting to see a radical change in daily behavoiur. After classifying the results presented in July, he draws a positive interim conclusion. "The important result is that many people have integrated public transport into their everyday life."

However, the Munich study looks at an area with relatively dense public transport services, and results from the University of Kassel show that this can make a big difference. According to the study, the larger the cities in the survey, the higher the proportion of those who said they had bought the ticket.

Researchers led by Jan Christian Schlüter of the TU Dresden focused on the reasons people bought the ticket and what a follow-up offer would need to cost. The most important arguments for using the 9-Euro-Ticket were the price and the simplicity of the offer. However, many people also stated that they wanted to try out public transport. It will be interesting to see whether users buy the ticket a second time, he said.

Many people can imagine a more expensive follow-up offer, as the Dresden survey shows. Most people named prices between 60 and 90 euros.

But in the view of the researchers, the price of a public transport ticket is not decisive for the long-term success of the transport turnaround. "If we really want stable growth in public transport, then we have to expand capacities," says HTW expert Böttger. "What we have seen is that the system is really at its limit."

Böttger calculates that there is an investment backlog in new construction and expansion of around 150 billion euros for rail transport alone - including the inflation in construction costs over the past few years. "The government is far, far from providing this investment."

Original text: Matthias Arnold and Christof Rührmair, dpa

Translation: Jean Lennox