The 49 euro ticket is a phenomenally good deal. Normal transit tickets vary per city, but for example in Berlin it's 3.50 per trip. So if you take transit twice a day for 7 days, you already recoup the cost of the Deutschland ticket, which lasts the entire month! This makes it good even for tourists who stay for ~a week.
At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in Germany, but a bit more borderline for a tourist.
Compare with eg Toronto's monthly pass, which is $156. A single trip is $3.35, which comes out to 24 two-trip days to recoup the cost of the card. That's almost exactly the number of business days in a month. And that card's only for Toronto!
One thing worth considering is that the 49€ ticket also lets you travel outside of your usual transit zone. We took so many “Deutschland Ticket trips” to towns that wouldn’t be worth a full-priced ticket. We just board the train with lunch and a beer, have a little day trip, then be home in the evening.
Berlin was also relatively cheap before. We already had sensible monthly passes. For people in parts of the Ruhrgebiet, the savings are even more substantial.
A London monthly travel card is £235 from zone 4 and £300 from zone 6. That's 420 to 540 CAD, and you get the pleasure of sweating in the tunnels, freezing on the overground platforms waiting for the next train 30 minutes and cancellations left right and centre.
At least they've finally got their shit together with mobile coverage.
Of course you get to use the buses too for that, and some of those were run by DB until this year, so it's nice to have been subsiding the the nice German tickets! They sold up to private equity, because of course they did, it's Britain and everything has to be private equity.
It is somewhat popular, so I doubt they will kill it outright. Rather I would guess they "reform" it: lots of variants, much higher price, beaurocratic hoops... and then when people stop using it, say "see, it wasn't so great after all".
Same playbook in the UK, where people like the NHS but certain parties don't.
Same playbook in the US, where "big government" has to be bad, so anything that does currently work well gets sabotaged.
A lot of times it's even worse than this, because what will happen is well-run public services will be sold off to the private sector. Who then runs away with extreme greed granted from the privilege of an inelastic market. So prices soar and quality plummets.
Then, we can point and say "see? Look at how bad it is! It would only be worse if the government ran it!"
Extra points if you're able to extract public funds to waste on such private endeavors. See: private schools in America (Yes, they get public funds!)
At 59, it's 9 days of two trips to recoup the cost -- still very worth it for someone living in Germany, but a bit more borderline for a tourist.
Compare with eg Toronto's monthly pass, which is $156. A single trip is $3.35, which comes out to 24 two-trip days to recoup the cost of the card. That's almost exactly the number of business days in a month. And that card's only for Toronto!