Flixtrain is on the move. The private German railway company plans to launch new routes across Europe and order 65 new trains for €2.4 billion. We travel from Hamburg to Cologne to see what its service is like.
Flixtrain is on the move. The private German railway company plans to launch new routes across Europe and order 65 new trains for €2.4 billion. We travel from Hamburg to Cologne to see what its service is like.
Ugh, this pisses me off. This Semi-Open market means you have the DB Fernverkehr which is not subsidized or anything, but it also has to service routes that are not profitable, so it needs to cross-subsidize, meaning the profitable routes are more expensive than they would be in an open market. So, ideally, you would want to close off the market, but no, we want competition everywhere. So we have companies like FlixTrain who then run the profitable routes, and leave the unprofitable routes to DB Fernverkehr, and then people wonder why their prices go up…
Hard to blame FlixTrain for taking advantage of the situation, though.
Frankly this is a result of negligence by the federal government. The lawmakers could have legally specified areas that would be marked as essential and therefore exempt from Article(s) 12 (and 14) of the constitution. But they didn’t which is why the Federal wheather service lost to Weather.com in front of the German Federal Constitutional court and were henceforth ordered to demand money for their app. An app that uses data collected and paid for by the taxpayer and that is also used by private weather websites.
Exactly!