Even at that price, the British mind cannot comprehend such good a deal. An equivalent pass in the UK would be easily 10x that to even cover just a much smaller region than The Netherlands.
For sure. I currently live in the US (fairly rural) and I would kill to have my transportation-related costs reduced to about $150/mo. But where I live, I simply need to have a car to do any basic thing since the moment I step off my driveway, there aren’t even footpaths.
To be a little provocative, yes British train prices are very expensive in comparison but they perhaps also show that heavy subisidies to make tickets dirt cheap may not be the most useful use of resources: People can pay and will pay more than a few tens of euros per month. As long as that holds true what is the case for more subsidies?
Note that 128€ is the monthly price for 100% discount, but 6€ is the monthly price for 40% discount. It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous" to just "reasonably expensive".
Kids under 12 free, too. I don't look forward to having to pay for both of them. Utrecht to Amsterdam round trip for a family of 4 is €80 for a family of 4, or €48 with the discount.
> It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous"
Haha I can't help but feel the Dutch firmly believe rail should be completely free
Isn't it fairly common for your employer to pay half to all of your commuting cost too...? (Almost unheard of in the UK for comparison, with people regularly paying £2,000-£10,000/year to commute)
And the Netherlands is like 10th in Europe for on-the-day return costs per km
Though to be fare I think it's some shorter journeys that are quite expensive right? Eg Utrecht to Amsterdam is 20 EUR return which is pricey. But paying €6/mo to save 40% seems a pretty good deal if you travel a lot off peak
Nice pass. Would be perfect for my wife and I since we don't commute for work. There is something similar here in Switzerland but not as good.
Funny fact: there are cities here that have tried to make public transport free. But the constitution says public transport must have a "reasonable charge". It's obvious that law was created to not overcharge but the courts have ruled that it also means that there can't be no charge. So no free public transport.
My understanding of that ruling is that, the intent of the constitutional clause is not only to prevent ticket prices from being raised unfairly, but also to prevent ticket prices from being so low that they no longer cover the cost of running the network, which would shift that cost to the general taxpayer.
Still frustrating (if the taxpayers want it, might as well let them have it), but not purely a semantic technicality.
Does the Swiss rail not receive public funding? It seems to me that undercharging would only necessitate more public funding, not some fundamental change where taxpayers suddenly have to pay for something they didn't before.
On the other hand, no charges mean you can get rid of a lot of cruft: no tickets, no gates/turnstiles, no machines, no payments, no paperwork thereof, no ticket inspectors, etc etc. So in fact having 0 charge is unequivocally better than having a residual charge.
In other words: charge price = cost, or don't charge at all and get funded by public revenue.
I wasn't aware of that fun fact - I always just assumed it was down to the "personal responsibility" mindset ("people must pay for what they use").
Have the courts also said anything about the charge being super low, e.g. like a CHF 1 per month abo or such? I wonder if that would be a way around those rulings.
That sort of begs the question about elevators and escalators. I’ve never been charged riding those, and I can’t imagine fares tacked on in Switzerland. Have they been ruled on? An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
I know it’s stupid, but I’m genuinely curious now.
Presumably there would be a legal definition of what constitutes public transport, and I would expect it wouldn't include those. But I'm neither swiss nor do I speak any swiss languages so hell if I could find it.
> An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
Every country defines what counts as public transport - it could be a snowmobile, a boat, or a helicopter if needed. The simple definition of "transports people in a public place" would cover a lot of funny things as public transport, like a carousel in a playground.
Is this a knowing joke? Switzerland's largest (very much in both senses) coin is 5Fr, around 6 USD. Not a token amount by any means, though it wouldn't even cover most public transport journeys in cities.
Only valid during the two summer months. It's a rather weak simile of the German Deutschlandticket (now 58 euro/month but valid all day on bus/tram/metro and local/regional trains, but not on long distance trains, in a much larger country).
It started out as an idea to introduce the same concept as the Deutschlandticket in NL. But the government has a budget deficit and the national railway company expected a capacity issue during peak hours. As a result the ticket is only valid in off-peak hours and the low price is only for 2 months.
As an Australian, why are European train prices so high? Obviously it's due to a lack of subsidies, but why are they not subsidised?
For instance, a train from London to Edinburgh (about 4 hours) is about $120 while an equivalent trip in Australia (Melbourne to Albury) is about $10 (it used to be about $40, but that's still much cheaper). Sydney to Melbourne is 900 kilometers and $80, Berlin to Paris is minimum $172.
Is there very little competition from cars and planes?
There is ample competition from cars and planes, europe has one of the most dense and intensive highway networks in the world, and the most dense and intensive short-haul flight network in the world.
Rather, the trains in western Europe are so desirable that the prices don't need to be heavily subsidized in order to be fully utilized.
In most of western Europe, the main barrier to increasing train usage is the physical number of tracks and trains in operation. If prices were further lowered, there'd be nowhere to even put all the extra customers the subsidies would bring in. Therefore, if the governemnt is going to put money into the trains, the first priority is infrastructure expansions, not price subsidies
Railway is national and cross border is always expensive. For a similar distance you can check Hamburg - Munich.
Europe is too poor to subsidiase long travel trains :p EU policy is more to introduce more competitions into the system / partly privatise it (like it works in Italy)
It doesn't work on the GVB Amsterdam local trains or trams...just the NS trains.
There are some routes within Amsterdam that have NS trains paralleling GVB trains, might help save money on those.
A single, non-discounted, one-way train ride between the two biggest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, costs €20,20.
The promotional price of this subscription is only a few euros more expensive than the existing unlimited subscription for weekend train travel (i.e. 6:30 PM Friday to 4:00 AM Monday), which costs €39,50. You can pay €4 extra for a 40% discount the rest of the off-peak hours.
With that discount, my commute (Haarlem <=> Amsterdam) costs €3,30 each way. A single trip to work a month makes the promotional subscription better value.
This special ticket is implemented by providing a 2-month discount on the existing 'off-peak free travel' subscription from the Dutch Railways. This was deemed the only way to quickly introduce such a product [1].
Please, this is the dutch government, who believes or trust them still? The price will be raised to 200 euro and they will make it sound like it's a good thing for you. There is this weird propoganda thing about the netherlands, where it looks like this amazing utopia from the outside, but, it's far from it. Look at the housing crisis, the immigration crisis, the incredibly stupid tax on unrealized gains, the cost of living, and the list just continues.
The off-peak hours this pass is valid: Monday to Friday from 9 am to 4 pm and 6.30 pm to 6.30 am. I wonder what happens if you start your ride 3:59 pm.
When you start a journey, the time you check in at the access gate is taken as the check-in time for your whole journey with that train company. (You may have to check-in and out if you switch trains and the train you're getting on is from a different company).
So if you check-in at 3.59 pm in the north of the Netherlands, and go to the south to arrive around 7.00 pm in the south of the Netherlands and you only use trains from 1 company (like NS) the whole journey will be considered off-peak hours. Even if by the time you arive in the south the peak-hours will already be over.
Most trains run with NS but some regional lines have Arriva (Deutsche Bahn) or Keolis (SCNF).
Additionally there is a 5 minute grace period in your favor, so if you check-in at 4.04 pm it will stil be off-peak.
And because the whole thing is rather confusing for those not already familiar with the system there you get to do it wrong once a year and get your fine waived if you call the train company.
And yes there's little queues just before 06.25 pm every day of people waiting in front of the check-in gates for their pass to become valid (especially on fridays when the weekend-pass will become valid).
The time of tapping in at the ticket barriers counts for the whole trip. If you get in just before the start of peak-hours, you still pay the off-peak rate for the whole trip. But if you tap in before 9am, the whole trip counts as peak-rates also the part that happens after 9am.
Transfer don't change it, they're all part of the same trip. Going out of a station and then back in also doesn't interrupt your trip. As far as I know you need 60 minutes of being "out" of the train system for it to be considered a new trip.
Overall, DB Regio (the regional trains which are covered by the Deutschlandticket) has around a 89% punctuality score[1], which is very comparable to the Dutch numbers. There are certain hotspot regions though where the regional trains are truly fucked, but for most of the country they're totally fine and quite reliable.
It's mostly Germany's long-distance high-speed ICE trains which have punctuality problems (the much discussed 60% punctuality [2] score), but those are not covered by the Deutschland ticket, and the Netherlands has no comparable service to these trains anyways, so if one is envious of the state of Dutch trains, they can happily pretend that German ICE trains simply don't exist. In my experience though, the ICE's are a pleasure to ride.
Sidenote, but the ICE punctuality score is not really directly comparable with the Regional train scores, since they measure different things. The ICE score is about the passenger arriving at their final destination with less than a 15 minute delay including connections, whereas with the regional trains they don't have granular passenger level data, so they measure whether or not a train gets to the platform within 6 minutes of the scheduled time.
The Netherlands runs around 3000 trains a day vs. 50k in Germany. That doesn't excuse Germany's problems which were also predicted years in advance when they stopped investing in maintenance and infrastructure but also shows that the comparison is not entirely fair.
What I don't understand about initiatives like this is... why bother charging at all? wouldn't the system be more efficient without a fare process? at that point you don't have to maintain an entire money handling system.
It would be more efficient for travelers, but not really from a systems point of view.
The Netherlands is densely populated and its railways are amond the busiest in Europe. If twice as many people took the train it would be impossible to have enough trains running.
Also, a money handling system functions as a gatekeeper. With some regularity there are stories in the media of people misbehaving on public transport. If everybody has the right to board it's more difficult to keep those people out.
but wouldn't the whole system be cheaper if it were paid for by taxes? because at that point you don't have to maintain a point of sale? hundreds of fare boxes, communication systems, physical barriers, auditing, accounting, printing cards, employees to maintain and operate it all... you even save a little time it takes tapping a card to get people on
the tax system is also progressive, so the people who are most capable of paying pay the most and the poor truly pay nothing
charging for a public system seems like pure waste
Yes you need a card (ov-chipkaart or ov-pas) but you don't need to be a local to get one. You just order one online for 7.5/5 euros. You do need an address for it to be delivered to, but its valid for 5 years so if you visit the Netherlands again you can reuse it.
We've updated the URL to the English-language version that CalRobert submitted. We appreciate all languages and cultures but HN is an English-language site, so we always want the English version to be submitted here, thanks!
That’s the introductory price. It’ll be €127,95 after that period is over. Kids travel for free, though, so that’s pretty nice.
In hindsight, I think I underestimated the value of my OV card while I was a student: travel whenever, using all types of public transport, for free.
Even at that price, the British mind cannot comprehend such good a deal. An equivalent pass in the UK would be easily 10x that to even cover just a much smaller region than The Netherlands.
For sure. I currently live in the US (fairly rural) and I would kill to have my transportation-related costs reduced to about $150/mo. But where I live, I simply need to have a car to do any basic thing since the moment I step off my driveway, there aren’t even footpaths.
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Can we get some commitment from Andy Burnham for something like this?
To be a little provocative, yes British train prices are very expensive in comparison but they perhaps also show that heavy subisidies to make tickets dirt cheap may not be the most useful use of resources: People can pay and will pay more than a few tens of euros per month. As long as that holds true what is the case for more subsidies?
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Note that 128€ is the monthly price for 100% discount, but 6€ is the monthly price for 40% discount. It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous" to just "reasonably expensive".
100% discount outside of peak hours. That's a small, but quite important difference.
Actual 100% discount is €399,95/month.
Kids under 12 free, too. I don't look forward to having to pay for both of them. Utrecht to Amsterdam round trip for a family of 4 is €80 for a family of 4, or €48 with the discount.
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Try Switzerland
> It brings the prices of rail travel in the Netherlands from "fucking ludicrous"
Haha I can't help but feel the Dutch firmly believe rail should be completely free
Isn't it fairly common for your employer to pay half to all of your commuting cost too...? (Almost unheard of in the UK for comparison, with people regularly paying £2,000-£10,000/year to commute)
And the Netherlands is like 10th in Europe for on-the-day return costs per km
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/01/09/rail-fares-across...
Though to be fare I think it's some shorter journeys that are quite expensive right? Eg Utrecht to Amsterdam is 20 EUR return which is pricey. But paying €6/mo to save 40% seems a pretty good deal if you travel a lot off peak
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Nice pass. Would be perfect for my wife and I since we don't commute for work. There is something similar here in Switzerland but not as good.
Funny fact: there are cities here that have tried to make public transport free. But the constitution says public transport must have a "reasonable charge". It's obvious that law was created to not overcharge but the courts have ruled that it also means that there can't be no charge. So no free public transport.
My understanding of that ruling is that, the intent of the constitutional clause is not only to prevent ticket prices from being raised unfairly, but also to prevent ticket prices from being so low that they no longer cover the cost of running the network, which would shift that cost to the general taxpayer.
Still frustrating (if the taxpayers want it, might as well let them have it), but not purely a semantic technicality.
Public transport is not sustainable from ticket prices alone anywhere in Europe.
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Does the Swiss rail not receive public funding? It seems to me that undercharging would only necessitate more public funding, not some fundamental change where taxpayers suddenly have to pay for something they didn't before.
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Are the city streets tolled?
having a nominal charge would probably lead to less abuse of the system, and any contribution to the upkeep/maintenance would be welcome, I'd imagine
What kind of abuse are you thinking of?
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On the other hand, no charges mean you can get rid of a lot of cruft: no tickets, no gates/turnstiles, no machines, no payments, no paperwork thereof, no ticket inspectors, etc etc. So in fact having 0 charge is unequivocally better than having a residual charge.
In other words: charge price = cost, or don't charge at all and get funded by public revenue.
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I wasn't aware of that fun fact - I always just assumed it was down to the "personal responsibility" mindset ("people must pay for what they use").
Have the courts also said anything about the charge being super low, e.g. like a CHF 1 per month abo or such? I wonder if that would be a way around those rulings.
That sort of begs the question about elevators and escalators. I’ve never been charged riding those, and I can’t imagine fares tacked on in Switzerland. Have they been ruled on? An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
I know it’s stupid, but I’m genuinely curious now.
Presumably there would be a legal definition of what constitutes public transport, and I would expect it wouldn't include those. But I'm neither swiss nor do I speak any swiss languages so hell if I could find it.
> An elevator in a public building is very much public transport.
Every country defines what counts as public transport - it could be a snowmobile, a boat, or a helicopter if needed. The simple definition of "transports people in a public place" would cover a lot of funny things as public transport, like a carousel in a playground.
Free public transport routes worldwide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_public_transport_...
What's the largest-value coin in circulation ? Charge one of those. Drop a coin in the gumball machine, get a token.
Is this a knowing joke? Switzerland's largest (very much in both senses) coin is 5Fr, around 6 USD. Not a token amount by any means, though it wouldn't even cover most public transport journeys in cities.
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The trains can still charge, but what if the government pays the tab automatically?
People who use it more really should contribute something vs those who never use it.
Should people who use roads more contribute something vs those who don't?
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Personally, I find no charge very, very reasonable lol
Only valid during the two summer months. It's a rather weak simile of the German Deutschlandticket (now 58 euro/month but valid all day on bus/tram/metro and local/regional trains, but not on long distance trains, in a much larger country).
It started out as an idea to introduce the same concept as the Deutschlandticket in NL. But the government has a budget deficit and the national railway company expected a capacity issue during peak hours. As a result the ticket is only valid in off-peak hours and the low price is only for 2 months.
and the bus companies didn't want to play ball.
It's been 63 euro for some months now.
As an Australian, why are European train prices so high? Obviously it's due to a lack of subsidies, but why are they not subsidised?
For instance, a train from London to Edinburgh (about 4 hours) is about $120 while an equivalent trip in Australia (Melbourne to Albury) is about $10 (it used to be about $40, but that's still much cheaper). Sydney to Melbourne is 900 kilometers and $80, Berlin to Paris is minimum $172.
Is there very little competition from cars and planes?
There is ample competition from cars and planes, europe has one of the most dense and intensive highway networks in the world, and the most dense and intensive short-haul flight network in the world.
Rather, the trains in western Europe are so desirable that the prices don't need to be heavily subsidized in order to be fully utilized.
In most of western Europe, the main barrier to increasing train usage is the physical number of tracks and trains in operation. If prices were further lowered, there'd be nowhere to even put all the extra customers the subsidies would bring in. Therefore, if the governemnt is going to put money into the trains, the first priority is infrastructure expansions, not price subsidies
Railway is national and cross border is always expensive. For a similar distance you can check Hamburg - Munich.
Europe is too poor to subsidiase long travel trains :p EU policy is more to introduce more competitions into the system / partly privatise it (like it works in Italy)
HSR in France, Italy, Spain can be very cheap. Also, they have generous discounts for 'young people' (up to 30 I think) and 60+.
Living in NL, I have fond memories of the kind of travel enabled by Ouigo when I lived in FR.
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It doesn't work on the GVB Amsterdam local trains or trams...just the NS trains. There are some routes within Amsterdam that have NS trains paralleling GVB trains, might help save money on those.
It doesn't work on bus, metro or tram, which GVB operates, but it does work on trains from all operators, not just NS.
A single, non-discounted, one-way train ride between the two biggest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, costs €20,20.
The promotional price of this subscription is only a few euros more expensive than the existing unlimited subscription for weekend train travel (i.e. 6:30 PM Friday to 4:00 AM Monday), which costs €39,50. You can pay €4 extra for a 40% discount the rest of the off-peak hours.
With that discount, my commute (Haarlem <=> Amsterdam) costs €3,30 each way. A single trip to work a month makes the promotional subscription better value.
This special ticket is implemented by providing a 2-month discount on the existing 'off-peak free travel' subscription from the Dutch Railways. This was deemed the only way to quickly introduce such a product [1].
[1] (in Dutch) https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2026/05/22/voors...
Please, this is the dutch government, who believes or trust them still? The price will be raised to 200 euro and they will make it sound like it's a good thing for you. There is this weird propoganda thing about the netherlands, where it looks like this amazing utopia from the outside, but, it's far from it. Look at the housing crisis, the immigration crisis, the incredibly stupid tax on unrealized gains, the cost of living, and the list just continues.
But then again, which Western country is not having a housing crisis, an immigration crisis and a ballooning cost of living.
The off-peak hours this pass is valid: Monday to Friday from 9 am to 4 pm and 6.30 pm to 6.30 am. I wonder what happens if you start your ride 3:59 pm.
When you start a journey, the time you check in at the access gate is taken as the check-in time for your whole journey with that train company. (You may have to check-in and out if you switch trains and the train you're getting on is from a different company).
So if you check-in at 3.59 pm in the north of the Netherlands, and go to the south to arrive around 7.00 pm in the south of the Netherlands and you only use trains from 1 company (like NS) the whole journey will be considered off-peak hours. Even if by the time you arive in the south the peak-hours will already be over.
Most trains run with NS but some regional lines have Arriva (Deutsche Bahn) or Keolis (SCNF).
Additionally there is a 5 minute grace period in your favor, so if you check-in at 4.04 pm it will stil be off-peak.
And because the whole thing is rather confusing for those not already familiar with the system there you get to do it wrong once a year and get your fine waived if you call the train company.
And yes there's little queues just before 06.25 pm every day of people waiting in front of the check-in gates for their pass to become valid (especially on fridays when the weekend-pass will become valid).
The time of tapping in at the ticket barriers counts for the whole trip. If you get in just before the start of peak-hours, you still pay the off-peak rate for the whole trip. But if you tap in before 9am, the whole trip counts as peak-rates also the part that happens after 9am.
Transfer don't change it, they're all part of the same trip. Going out of a station and then back in also doesn't interrupt your trip. As far as I know you need 60 minutes of being "out" of the train system for it to be considered a new trip.
Significantly worse than the Deutschland ticket
Dutch trains run mostly on time though and with far less disruption than DB, right?
Really depends on where you are in Germany.
Overall, DB Regio (the regional trains which are covered by the Deutschlandticket) has around a 89% punctuality score[1], which is very comparable to the Dutch numbers. There are certain hotspot regions though where the regional trains are truly fucked, but for most of the country they're totally fine and quite reliable.
It's mostly Germany's long-distance high-speed ICE trains which have punctuality problems (the much discussed 60% punctuality [2] score), but those are not covered by the Deutschland ticket, and the Netherlands has no comparable service to these trains anyways, so if one is envious of the state of Dutch trains, they can happily pretend that German ICE trains simply don't exist. In my experience though, the ICE's are a pleasure to ride.
_____________________________
[1] https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2025/de/zusammengefasster-lage...
[2] https://ibir.deutschebahn.com/2025/de/zusammengefasster-lage...
Sidenote, but the ICE punctuality score is not really directly comparable with the Regional train scores, since they measure different things. The ICE score is about the passenger arriving at their final destination with less than a 15 minute delay including connections, whereas with the regional trains they don't have granular passenger level data, so they measure whether or not a train gets to the platform within 6 minutes of the scheduled time.
The Netherlands runs around 3000 trains a day vs. 50k in Germany. That doesn't excuse Germany's problems which were also predicted years in advance when they stopped investing in maintenance and infrastructure but also shows that the comparison is not entirely fair.
What I don't understand about initiatives like this is... why bother charging at all? wouldn't the system be more efficient without a fare process? at that point you don't have to maintain an entire money handling system.
It would be more efficient for travelers, but not really from a systems point of view. The Netherlands is densely populated and its railways are amond the busiest in Europe. If twice as many people took the train it would be impossible to have enough trains running. Also, a money handling system functions as a gatekeeper. With some regularity there are stories in the media of people misbehaving on public transport. If everybody has the right to board it's more difficult to keep those people out.
"money handling system" scales quite well, and more money is good to have if it's affordable enough for many people?
but wouldn't the whole system be cheaper if it were paid for by taxes? because at that point you don't have to maintain a point of sale? hundreds of fare boxes, communication systems, physical barriers, auditing, accounting, printing cards, employees to maintain and operate it all... you even save a little time it takes tapping a card to get people on
the tax system is also progressive, so the people who are most capable of paying pay the most and the poor truly pay nothing
charging for a public system seems like pure waste
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Not for visitors AIUI. You need some kind of card only locals can get.
Yes you need a card (ov-chipkaart or ov-pas) but you don't need to be a local to get one. You just order one online for 7.5/5 euros. You do need an address for it to be delivered to, but its valid for 5 years so if you visit the Netherlands again you can reuse it.
Time, too - they print a card with your photo on it and it takes a couple weeks to show up.
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I think everyone can get the card, though maybe you need a dutch address to sent it to.
No, you need a dutch bank account to pay plus a dutch address to receive the card. That's not going to work for 99% of visitors.
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I mean why not, right? The trains are moving anyways.
In English: https://www.ns.nl/en/season-tickets/dal-vrij
We updated the link, many thanks!
(in Dutch)
We've updated the URL to the English-language version that CalRobert submitted. We appreciate all languages and cultures but HN is an English-language site, so we always want the English version to be submitted here, thanks!