🌺 Cat PöñíçkøvāFour mains and four USB ports for three seats, someone took this really seriously. (All while most other cd carriages have often just like one plug per 4 seats if any.)
Alon@pony ICEs are one plug per two seats.
@Alon with Czech railways it usually depend on the mood and supplier of whoever did the retrofit, when it’s new long distance ish rolling stock, it tends to be a plug per two seats as well, however, shockingly enough, commercial open access ops almost always go for a plug per seat because it doesn’t cost much more and people like it
@pony @jon Proposal: abolish first class, make second class better. In exchange for FDP's support for this plan, pass a YIMBY law, reduce every C2 language requirement to C1, require government offices to speak English, and, I don't know, announce a new nuclear plant somewhere (it doesn't need to actually go through with how high the construction costs are, but eh, it's FDP).
Jon Worth
anyMouse@anymouse_404 @jon @Alon yeah? i've been in trains with first class aisle full of standing people (at first class ticket price)
Diego
Birds or Trains?@bklyngap @DiegoBeghin @pony @jon Regional trains here are generally underfull, except specifically when they're either ersatz intercities for D-Ticket holders or ersatz commuter rail to suburbs beyond the S-Bahn. So usually first class is just charging more for the same service...
@bklyngap @DiegoBeghin @pony @jon I don't know. I don't fully get what the point of it is - can't tell if it's just a more straightforward way of doing market segmentation than airline-style yield management or RENFE-style differential pricing for different speed classes. So it boils down to extra revenue vs. fewer seats, and I think that depends on the railroad. I think the first class fare premium on the TGV is on the low side?
@Alon @DiegoBeghin @jon @pony yeah the pricing model itself seems to depend on the RR. A low premium for TGV seems silly given their general ticket structure.
@DiegoBeghin @Alon @jon @pony I sorta have to assume that JR gets the business model right with no yield mgmt, reserved, unreserved, business-travel class (green car) and a high end first only on under capacity routes…
@Alon @pony @DiegoBeghin @jon that being said you couldn’t do 5 abreast in Europe, so I’m not sure how you translate it.
@jon @DiegoBeghin @pony @Alon and on the US side I have to assume Acela first exists solely as a loss leader to capture politically influential VIPs.
@bklyngap @jon @DiegoBeghin @pony Where were you when you read Paul Krugman's blog post mocking George Will for riding the Regional business class after writing about how trains are a plot to make Americans more amenable to socialism?
@pony @DiegoBeghin @Alon @jon hahaha — regional business actually has a point now! You can pick your seats (which is worth a lot sometimes).
@bklyngap @pony @DiegoBeghin @jon We get that here with only a few euros' extra charge (and they still don't indicate the direction of the train's travel, so I accidentally booked backward-facing seats on the train to Munich; why is Europe).
@pony @Alon @DiegoBeghin @jon lol Germans really do hate the concept of customer service don’t they?
@bklyngap @pony @DiegoBeghin @jon That's not Germany, all of Europe operates under the assumption that passengers are indifferent about the direction they're facing. They let you pick exact seats here, and on the TGV they don't but let you say whether you want a loud car or quiet car and whether you want a window or aisle seat, but somehow direction of travel isn't believed to matter here.
Chris Begley@Alon @bklyngap @pony @DiegoBeghin @jon I can't read the whole thread, but I totally remember choosing my seat Berlin-Munich based on if it stopped in Leipzig, so I would get Leipzig-Munich facing forward
@bklyngap @pony @jon @DiegoBeghin Yeah, it's always more pitch, though not that much - the Shinkansen Green Car is 1.16 m if I remember correctly, whereas standard class is 1 m, translating to 17 vs. 20 seating rows.
oh yes (sickos mode)@pony an updated version of 90s upholstery