[ad_1]
IIn France, the starting shot was fired a day earlier: when President Emmanuel Macron spoke in his televised speech on Tuesday about the crown restrictions, which should apply after December 15 and therefore also at Christmas, the race for tickets for the French SNCF railway began. . In a matter of minutes, the number of reservations quadrupled compared to the previous days. Sometimes the railway website is barely accessible.
Also in Germany, many people are likely to start preparing for their travels no later than after the Prime Minister’s Conference on Wednesday. But the risk of infection remains high, even at Christmas. That is why the question arises even more than in other years of how to get to your destination reliably, but also safely, during the holidays.
The restrictions on rail traffic are in the last of the 18 bullet points in the resolution document of the Prime Minister and the Federal Chancellor, and that has been reduced considerably. Before the negotiations, there were draft precise rules about which seats were still allowed to be reserved and which were not, to ensure distance.
All of this is removed from the final decision. Instead, there is only one sentence on the key question of how the state-owned company should maintain long-distance reservations in the future: “The ability to reserve seats will be limited in parallel.”
But this sentence leaves almost everything open: there is no mention of a reservation requirement on long-distance trains. Because even if only certain seats such as those at the window are reserved, that does not mean that no passenger with a valid ticket but without a reservation is allowed to board.
Deutsche Bahn announced that as of November 27, only one seat can be reserved per double seat in the open-plan car. The window seat is always assigned automatically. If there are seats at the table, only two diagonally opposite seats can be reserved. So only two of the six places can be reserved in compartments. In general, the number of places that can be reserved is reduced to around 60 percent. There should be special areas for families where they can sit next to each other. However, there is still no reservation requirement.
This leads to the grotesque situation that the new regulations will ensure that not all seats are reserved, but that they do not have to remain free. On the contrary: unreserved passengers can be sure that a large part of the seats will remain free and the chances of finding a free seat will increase. However, the distance and protection against infection could be reduced.
This is not a problem in everyday life, since the beginning of the second confinement, significantly less than half of all places have been occupied, currently it is around 20 to 25 percent. But that should be different at Christmas. The rush for trains on the railways is enormous in normal years around the holidays. Anyone traveling on ICE shortly before Christmas should be prepared for crowded trains.
However, since the beginning of the pandemic, the Minister of Railways and Transport Andreas Scheuer (CSU) has always refused to introduce a reservation requirement for his trains. They absolutely want to keep the so-called open system so as not to alienate customers with season tickets like the Bahncard 100, who can basically take any train and pay big bucks for it.
Instead, people rely on extra seats at Christmas and verify that mandatory mask is required on trains. Deutsche Bahn announced in the fall that this year it would offer significantly more seats at Christmas.
This is possible thanks to the expanded train fleet. As of the mid-December schedule change, there should be an additional 13,000 seats each day, as more new trains are rolled out, the train sequence increases and additional connections are offered.
This point can also be found in the resolution of the Prime Minister’s Conference: “The seating capacity will be significantly increased by more than 20 million kilometers of seats per day to allow even more distance between travelers,” he says. That sounds huge, but last year Deutsche Bahn reported more than 98.4 billion of so-called passenger-kilometers – that is, the number of kilometers traveled multiplied by the number of passengers.
Mathematically, this results in an average of 270 million person-kilometers per day, probably significantly more during the holidays. 20 million additional passenger kilometers is not that much and, especially at Christmas, may not be enough to guarantee the necessary distance on trains.
Furthermore, Deutsche Bahn notes that the Navigator app displays trains in which more than half of the seats are likely to be occupied, so not all passengers will have a free adjacent seat. However, this will be of little use if, due to the rush, this notice is simply displayed on all trains on particularly popular days.
If the number of reserved seats is cut in half, many trains should quickly show up as full. If you still have to depend on a train trip, you have to dare to get on one of the trains and hope that not many others will choose the same connection without a reservation. With a flexible fare ticket, you can basically use all trains that day, even if the corresponding connection is shown as highly booked or there is no possibility of reservation anymore.
The dilemma cannot really be resolved. The railway simply doesn’t have enough trains to be able to offer so much extra capacity on short notice, so every second seat is guaranteed to stay free even on the peak days around Christmas. Therefore, passenger representatives advise not to jump on the train directly on December 23 or on Christmas Eve, but to start the journey a few days earlier, advice that by no means everyone can hear.
The bus is also unlikely to be a real alternative this year. The last remaining long-distance travel agent, Flixbus, temporarily ceased operations in early November and will not offer trips during the second lockdown.
The company intends to resume operations when things are in time for Christmas. Trips from December 17th can be rebooked on the website. However, as on trains, only the mask requirement applies on Flix buses, the adjacent seat does not have to be empty.
