Has Switzerland Built the Best Public Transportation System in the World?
The joy of when governments works
A lot of my recent posts about the future of American government have been, in a word, grim. So trying to end the year on a more positive note, focusing on the practical joys of god government.
If you are in the takes game, its essential to offer contrarian perspectives. It will rile up people, and get them talking about you, even if you are wrong.
Having been in Switzerland this year, here is my hot take: it’s very pretty.
Ok. Maybe I am not so hot at the takes game, and should stick with what I am good at, which is writing about governance.
Just one more hot take then:
Switzerland feels like a rich country, while the United States feels like a country with rich people.
The difference is that in Switzerland, the infrastructure is amazing. This is most obviously true with the public transportation system, which combines incredible access with reliability. It feels like a collective commitment to build, maintain, and subsidize a world class public good. Switzerland reflects the adage that “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”
So rather than write a standard travelogue, let me praise the Swiss transportation system, while interspersing it with pictures I took of the various places it brought me to.
My family SwissPass covered trains, buses, boats, trams, funiculars and generally offered a discount on ski-lifts and gondolas (and access to some museums). Physical barriers to transport largely don’t exist. You hop on and off, relying on a trust but verify system. As a result, the user experiences few frictions. We never had to worry about where to get a ticket or how to validate it. I just kept a shot of our travel pass on my phone. Over the course of two weeks, I was also asked to provide an ID once. (You can also upload your ID to a transport app and use that instead).
Over the course of two weeks, we never once used a taxi, uber or rental car. Even in more remote areas, a bus connection or train station was never far away. Switzerland has the most dense rail network in Europe.
It turns out that its not actually fascists who make the trains run on time, but well organized social democracies. Of about 20 train rides I took, only one was late, by three minutes. This means that different parts of the system are synchronized to allow for tight connections — I can’t recall waiting more than 15 minutes for a connection anywhere, and it was more typical to find a five minute gap between connections. This is a bit disconcerting at first, and you see a lot of tourists running from one platform to another to grab the connecting train. But after a while you realize this is all by design, and the system has budgeted time for you to make a connection without hurrying.
Coordination, rather than blazingly fast trains, is the basis for how Switzerland makes their system efficient. While in reality there are local, regional and national systems, multiple train operators, and multiple modes of transportation, they are coordinated to work as one.
The physical spaces were also well designed. Trains, trams and buses had screens telling you which was the next stop and destination (useful when, as happened a couple of times, we hopped on a bus going in the wrong direction).
Train platforms digital signs tell you not just when the next train is coming, but which carriages are first class, second class, bike friendly, family carriages, and more or less full. It felt like at every stage, the design of the physical space was intended to reduce everyday learning costs.
All of this is not inexpensive. A 15 day pass is 459 Swiss Francs, or about $540, and it’s only slightly cheaper for an 8 day pass. Its less for youths under 25, and free for kids under 16. (For Swiss residents, an annual pass is about $4700, or they can buy a travelcard for a point-to-point commute). We were there for two weeks and used some transportation every day, so got our moneys worth (you can also buy a flex pass that allows you to use it only certain number of days over a time period). It costs more to get a first class pass, which is really only valuable for ensuring you can get a seat on busy trains in peak tourist season. (One observation is that I observed consistently empty first class carriages even when the rest of the train was pretty full, which suggests a pricing/allocation failure).
I compared the Swiss travel system to the UK National Health System to one of my hosts in Switzerland: that is, a public function that is also a source of national pride. He agreed. Its not just the quality of the system, but that transportation itself is central to the Swiss story of innovation. They enabled access to the most remote parts of the Alps via feats of engineering, with bridges, tunnels, cogwheel trains and other innovations. One professor I spoke to noted that ETH Zurich originated as a technical university whose purpose was to dig holes in the ground. They were able to build on that engineering background to become one of the best universities in the world today.
Our actual travel itinerary was pretty simple: In our first week we traveled from Zurich to Lucerne, using it as a base to visit towns by the lake (using the public transportation boats), and Alpine regions like Grindlewald and Engelberg. During our second week, we were in Bern, and made a couple of day trips, to Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen and Montreux. Plenty of other valid ways to spend your time. For example, I was sorry not to be able to take more of the panoramic train choices. But Lucerne in particular was a great choice that allowed us to mix mountain and lake views depending on the day.
All of this is to say, I am willing to admit that my assessment of the Swiss transportation system may be biased by the fact that what you see outside the window is frequently breathtaking. It has little high speed rail compared to places like France, Germany, China or Japan. On the other hand, the simplicity and accessibility of the system appealed to my obsession with reducing administrative burdens in all citizen-state interactions. The system was designed not just to get the traveler from A to B, but to every other stop in the alphabet, and with a minimum of confusion.
After living in Switzerland for 7 years (2016-2023, outside of Zürich), I can attest you concisely captured the essentials. Residents have other options than the full pass you mentioned. I had the half-fare card, which was fantastic.
The maintenance of roads, sidewalks, and paths made you feel like your taxes were being used effectively. Trails in the forest would be regarded and repacked with gravel (or similar) when they became too rutted, for example.
Since you didn't have a car, you probably aren't aware that the parking app has a nifty feature: you only pay for the time you parked. Say you park and you pay for 2hrs, but you leave after 90min. If you tap cancel on your parking app, you only pay for the 90min. What an amazing idea, right?
There are faster inter-regional trains, but the need for high-speed in a small country like Switzerland isn't the same as others, particularly when Switzerland doesn't have the same very long straight lengths. But, as you note, you can get most anywhere. Now, it's not exactly anywhere easily. We had friends visit from London in eastern (French) Switzerland and the travel time for us to get to them, whether by public transport or our car, was more than if we just flew to London. But that isolation is also part of the beauty. Glad you enjoyed the country. I miss it very much.