Public Transport, Germany and Canada

We went from Berlin to Hamburg, 280 kilometres or so, by bus, for seven Euros each, less than 11 dollars Canadian.  A bus ticket from Williams Lake to Kamloops, about the same distance we traveled, costs more than 70 dollars Canadian, more than six times as much for the same distance.

Ours was no special ticket.  The Berlin bus station advertised tickets to other cities for the same amount, or for a few Euros more, for example to Munich, farther away than Hamburg.

Berlin and  Hamburg are bigger than Williams Lake and Kamloops.  More people on a route makes each person cost less, and pay less, than on sparse routes.  Still, public transportation seems more valued here than in Canada, even noting that Germany has more than twice Canada's population in a land much smaller than Canada.

A couple Sundays ago, we rode Hamburg buses, river ferries, and trains for 3.20 Euros each, about 5 Canadian, for up to two hours.  This cost more than a Cdn $2.75 Edmonton bus and train ticket, and more than a Cdn $3.00 Vancouver bus, seabus, train ticket good only for one fare zone; a ticket to cover all three Greater Vancouver zones costs about Cdn $6.00.

Another comparable ticket, but we did not get one, is a 7.00 Euro (Cdn $10.50) one-day pass for Berlin buses and trains.  A similar Hamburg pass costs 6.40 Euros, about Cdn $10.00  In Vancouver, one pays Cdn $9.00 for a one-day pass for buses, train, and the sea bus, but in only the one, core zone, not the adjacent second and third fare zones.

Trains here are as frequent as I found in the French Riviera in 2012, and buses go frequently to outlying neighborhoods and towns, as I found in Ireland in 2015.  A few Euros got a train ride of up to 20 km on the French south coast, 25 or 30 got me from Ventemiglia to and from Turin, Italy, across the mountains to the north.  Eight Euros bought an Irish bus ride from Dublin to Galway, across the island.

Canada had good passengers trains until I was a teenager in the mid-1970s.  Economics and ecology will bring trains back, from their current use by the elite and the romantic, to their use by everyone.  Remember what Canadian Pacific Railway builder William van Horn said in the 1880s as rails crossed Canada, "If I can't export the scenery, I'll import the tourists."  For a century, trains carried tourists as well as people merely trying to get somewhere.

Mom and I went by train about 300 km from Drumheller to Edmonton around 1970.  From the 1920s-50s, there were passenger trains from Edson, where I was born and raised, down the Coal Branch, a mining that stretched 100 km to the south.  

Today I bicycled on paths in a forest a kilometre from Neugraben, the Hamburg suburb where we are staying.  I rode past a horse-riding business.  Sitting later at a shaded picnic table, I saw a horse-drawn wagon of ten or so tourists go by.

By foot, horse, bus, train, or bicycle, people get around.