There’s been a lot in the news recently about train travel in Europe for this new year. Headlines have included, “Faster trains and cheaper tickets; 5 New European Train Routes; and, Europe’s night trains are making a comeback,” all aiming to show the benefits of new routes, lower costs, faster speeds, and lower emissions. We’ll see the beginning of sleeper services from Paris to Berlin plus Amsterdam to Prague with a direct service from there on to Budapest. Bordeaux will be linked directly to London with no changes required as will Barcelona to Geneva. While lower priced tickets will be good, “free” is even better and that was the topic of an article about travel in Luxembourg.

Free public transit is not new in one of Europe’s smallest countries. However, the British newspaper, The Guardian, sent a reporter to Luxembourg to evaluate how effective their ticketless system has been since it began in March 2020. Steve Rose’s first trip took him from the bottom of the country to the top in about 3 hours including getting to/from stations/hotels via tram or bus plus the train itself, all without spending a single euro. He found the transportation system’s app easy to use, the train/bus/tram clean, modern, and frequently scheduled yet surprisingly almost empty of any other passengers.

In interviewing the few other people around him, Rose said the riders were proud of their system that offered true benefits to unemployed job seekers and even to those with jobs but that were low paying. Without the burden of buying tickets for traveling to and from work it was possible to seek housing far from their expensive center city places of employment. The same benefit was noted by students who could study (or party) late into the evening and still get back to their  homes that were well outside of town.

The reporter’s final destination, Schmëtt, right on the border with Belgium, gave him a clue about why there were few people riding with him: this tiny town has 4 service stations selling fuel at the lowest price in western Europe. For every 1000 inhabitants of Luxembourg there are 700 cars, with a lower average vehicle age than their neighboring countries and with more luxury brands than most. To further tempt these diehard car owners out of their vehicles, improvements are coming: 50% more seats on commuter services to France with departures every seven minutes; tram line to the airport; all-electric buses; all while progressively increasing the carbon tax on conventional motor vehicles.

Although France doesn’t (yet) offer free public transit, according to website Observatoire des Villes du Transport Gratuit, there are 43 cities throughout the country where you can indeed use the local buses, trams, and metro without buying a ticket. The French government is also considering following the example of Germany where you can purchase a 49€ monthly pass that covers local and regional transport throughout the country. A possible difference between the Deutschland-ticket (D-Ticket) and its French counterpart is that the latter might allow the use of Intercités trains, which cover similar routes as the high-speed TGVs but at a lower speed, while the former excludes long distance trains.

Photo notes: The CFL Train photos, including the featured photo across the top of today’s post, are from the Luxembourg national railway website and the D-Ticket photo is from Stadtbus Dormagen. In the first paragraph is Luxembourg’s Pont du Château crossing the Alzette river.