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Best seller: Most of the nine-euro tickets were booked via the app
Photo: Oliwia Nowakowska / picture alliance / dpa
The nine-euro ticket is already selling like hot cakes ten days before the official start.
At the weekend, many people showed great interest in the heavily discounted monthly pass, which is intended to relieve commuters in local transport.
In Hamburg and Berlin, where the transport associations had already started online sales on Friday, tens of thousands of tickets were sold each.
In the first 24 hours after the start of sales, 56,000 nine-euro tickets were ordered in Hamburg via the app and the online shop of the Hamburger Verkehrsverbund, as the "Bild am Sonntag" reported.
The numbers of the service points are not included.
In Berlin, too, the transport company BVG had already started selling on Friday afternoon.
According to a spokesman, 35,000 tickets were sold by midnight, almost three quarters of them via the app.
The transport companies have not yet given figures for Saturday.
The S-Bahn Berlin also did not provide any information on its own sale.
In Wuppertal, those interested could even buy the ticket on Wednesday – before the budget for it was politically decided.
The ticket is available from Monday in the Munich transport and tariff association MVV, as well as in large transport associations in North Rhine-Westphalia or the Rhein-Main transport association RMV.
Deutsche Bahn also offers the nine-euro monthly ticket "from the early hours of the morning" on Monday.
The Association of German Transport Companies had previously roughly estimated the need for the heavily discounted tickets at 30 million.
The industry sees the expected rush as a "big experiment" - especially if the ticket is used not only for commuting but also for travel on long weekends such as Whitsun or during the summer holidays.
Bahn uses 50 special trains
The discount does not apply to long-distance trains and buses.
But even there "we expect quite full trains," said a railway spokesman on Saturday.
Deutsche Bahn is therefore deploying 50 special trains around the long weekends on Ascension Day (May 26), Pentecost (June 5/6) and Corpus Christi (June 16).
These are to be used primarily on connections that are in high demand, such as between Hamburg and Munich or between North Rhine-Westphalia and Berlin.
According to the information, the additional trains can already be booked.
The nine-euro ticket is available for the period from June to August.
It enables the nationwide use of all local public transport such as regular buses, subways and regional trains for nine euros each per calendar month.
If you already have a local transport subscription, the costs that would otherwise be due are reduced to nine euros.
At the BVG alone, this affects around 870,000 passengers.
The specific design is in the hands of the federal states and municipalities, as they are responsible for public transport.
On Friday, the Bundesrat cleared the way for the ticket, which is part of the federal government's relief measures for consumers, despite heavy criticism from the federal states about the lack of federal funds.
The ticket is also intended to convince more people of the more climate-friendly bus and train travel - but also highlights the general condition of local public transport and the financing of public transport.
However, it remains to be seen how great the desire to switch is among drivers.
Because at the same time there is a cost brake when refueling, which the Federal Council also allowed to happen.
Criticism was expressed at the weekend by the President of the German District Association, Reinhard Sager (CDU).
"Billions are once again being paid out for consumer spending as if there were no tomorrow," he told the newspapers of the editorial network Germany on Saturday.
More urgently than the nine-euro ticket, however, investment funds for the municipal infrastructure are needed, said Sager, who is the district administrator of Ostholstein.
Left parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch spoke out in favor of the fact that there must be significantly cheaper public transport beyond the three months.
"The nine-euro ticket should be valid at least until the end of the year," he told Berlin's Tagesspiegel.
ak/AFP/dpa-afx