Sylt [SLYT]
May 27, 2022 2:06 PM   Subscribe

The entire German-speaking internet is going to Sylt.

This summer, Deutsche Bahn is offering a €9 monthly transit pass that allows holders to travel across train and transit systems throughout Germany. It’s good news for most, but some people aren’t rejoicing (Guardian).

Sylt is a beach-lined island in the North Sea that attracts celebrities and the well-to-do, and which has variously been compared to Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons (NYT archive). Some of its residents have expressed concerns about hosting an onslaught of cheap-transit-addled plebian visitors, and hilarity has ensued.

Will Sylt become home to a modern-day Chaostage? Only time will tell.
posted by evidenceofabsence (24 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
That video was HILARIOUS. Thank you for posting this. I am amused and educated.
posted by rednikki at 2:12 PM on May 27, 2022 [5 favorites]


The "hier" to "Sylt" ticket ordering cracked me up.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 2:39 PM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


"Cheap-transit-addled plebian" is an outstanding name for your next sockpuppet account, incidentally.
posted by mhoye at 2:46 PM on May 27, 2022 [8 favorites]


I like the implication that German regular people actually make a place tidier when they invade it. Aww.
posted by emjaybee at 2:47 PM on May 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


Yeah, the ticket is only valid for local trains, not high-speed long-distance trains. It's like driving to California but just on one county road after another. You gotta really like riding commuter lines to get the most out of your 9 euros.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:54 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


This but for American red states (and stay and vote)
posted by condour75 at 2:56 PM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


I bet that water is cold!
posted by Czjewel at 2:57 PM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


Maximum temperature for the North Sea is about 18C / 64F. This time of year, about 11C / 52F. Refreshing.
posted by pipeski at 3:11 PM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


Here's some german language satire with stock footage from 1995, when an earlier cheap railway ticket was introduced.

"Who pays only 3 DM for a ticket, probably doesn't even have e DM pocket change."

This guy is a former president of the Sylt hotel and restaurant association.
posted by flamewise at 3:45 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


gives a whole new [German] meaning to the word "Insel"
posted by chavenet at 4:10 PM on May 27, 2022


the DeutscheBahn tag gives and gives: Ein Jahr, eine BahnCard 100, keine eigene Wohnung, und ich.

> After a dispute with her landlord, 23-year-old student Leonie Müller abandoned her apartment in Tübingen and started living on trains. On the first of May, Müller bought a BahnCard 100, a ticket which costs 4090€ [2015 prices, now in 2022 it costs 4144€] and entitles her to unlimited travel on Germany's railway network for a year

interesting discussion of flat-rate rail tickets in different parts of the world in that thread
posted by are-coral-made at 4:14 PM on May 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


Are we just not going to acknowledge the brilliance of the post title?
posted by kevinbelt at 5:29 PM on May 27, 2022 [21 favorites]


BRING MIR DIE BLAUEN SEITEN
posted by BiggerJ at 5:42 PM on May 27, 2022


Das Proleten is the name of my new Post-Industrial Hyper-Pop band.
posted by signal at 6:00 PM on May 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


Now let's get Rammstein to do a cover!
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:04 PM on May 27, 2022


After a dispute with her landlord, 23-year-old student Leonie Müller abandoned her apartment in Tübingen and started living on trains.

If that train went near a Six Flags that is basically Big Rock Candy Mountain as a lifestyle.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 7:16 PM on May 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


Since we have completely derailed to cheap German living hacks...at one point when they only charged a single entry fee, not a per-day fee, my brother was seriously considering subletting his Berlin apartment, and just living at My Tropical Island. Camp out on the beach at night, live off of secret locker crackers and the occasional luau...then spring came again, and he reconsidered.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 10:06 PM on May 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


So excited for the 9 Euro Tickets! For reference, a one way city-bus ticket normally costs 3 Euros. Now, 9 Euros for a whole month! Also, you can get to lots of places in Germany within 10ish hours even using local trains, so to the person who said it's like going to California on back roads: still beats the Amtrak to California I was on that was nine hours delayed and was not high speed anyway. German regional trains (can be used on the 9 Euro Ticket) can go up to 200km/h. Obviously the average speed is slower, but it's not necessarily toodling along super slow. Might have to check out Sylt :D
posted by starfishprime at 1:15 AM on May 28, 2022 [8 favorites]


> This summer, Deutsche Bahn is offering a €9 monthly transit pass

I’d like to make it clear that this is not wrong (DB Vertrieb GmbH, a Deutsche Bahn company, does offer them), but a very misleading to tell the story.

Regional transport in Germany is organised by local governments (typically via transport associations). Every couple of years, in accordance with EU regulations, they invite tenders for parts of their public transport networks, looking for the next company to run trains on a set of routes according to a determined schedule. (See, for example, a recent one for the Rheingau-Express; it’s mostly written in German, but you’ll get the idea.) Subsidiaries of Deutsche Bahn, the state-owned railway group, often win these contracts, but they are by no means the only provider of public transport services. In the bottom right corner of this map (PDF link), for instance, you can see a list of all the companies which currently operate local trains in Bavaria alone. And this is only mainline rail; there are many, many more companies if you consider metro, tram and bus networks.

What happened this year is that the federal government proposed a law to introduce a countrywide monthly pass for 9 € for June, July and August, and the federal parliament passed this law. This means that all* companies running regional transport services in Germany, usually by having won one of these contracts, now have to sell these passes and also accept them (regardless of which company issued them) as valid tickets on their own vehicles.

So, yeah, Deutsche Bahn does offer this pass. But so do the Transport, Water and Gas Corporation of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, the Woltersdorf Tramway near Berlin, the Paris-based transnational Veolia Transdev who own the Central German Regional Railways, the state-owned (though the state, in this case, is the Netherlands) Westphalian Railways, and maaaaany, many more.

They will probably sell most of these tickets, simply because they’re the present in almost every corner of the country and because they allow you to buy them through a very popular mobile app, but this is not some Deutsche Bahn thing.

* there are a few exceptions, but it really is almost all of them
posted by wachhundfisch at 4:52 AM on May 28, 2022 [10 favorites]


So I wanted to understand the pun in "leben in vollen Zügen genießen" and it turns out the German phrase for "enjoy life to the fullest" is exactly the same as "live life in full trains". Raymond Chen (of all people) explains.
posted by grahamparks at 11:49 AM on May 28, 2022 [5 favorites]


Everything about this amuses me a great deal
posted by zenon at 2:52 PM on May 28, 2022


and a day-pass that lets you travel all across Germany under the same conditions as the 9-Euro Ticket has a value of 42€

This bit in the Lonely Planet article isn’t quite right - the "Quer-durchs-Land-Ticket" doesn’t usually include buses/trams/U-Bahns in cities, only regional trains and S-Bahns, whereas the €9 ticket does. So you don’t even have to get an extra ticket to get home from the Hbf like I would need to do. (€2.75 in Frankfurt)

For comparison, a monthly ticket for just the area of Frankfurt (equivalent to the city limits) would usually cost €95. (It does have a few additional perks - it’s transferable, and you can take someone with you evenings and during the weekend, but otherwise similar validity to the €9 ticket.)

Basically, provided I either take 4 trips within Frankfurt, go to the next town and back or even just go the airport and back and I’ve got the €9s worth out of the ticket…
posted by scorbet at 5:10 AM on May 29, 2022 [1 favorite]


Two days later and I am STILL singing "Es geht nach Sylt." If I were still a DJ I would play this.
posted by rednikki at 2:05 PM on May 29, 2022 [3 favorites]


Sylt is nice if you like wind.
posted by chillmost at 2:41 AM on May 31, 2022


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