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Comment by immmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Swiss here. Amazing system, using it everyday. Brutally expensive tickets tho.

Another Swiss here.

Brutally expensive? Sure, when you look at full fare tickets. Since every Swiss, who uses public transport owns a half fare card those prices are (mostly) halfed, though.

When it comes to commuter travel prices become outright reasonable.

The best deal, if you use the train for a regular commute intercity is the Generalabonnement[0].

ca. $4000 (6500 for first class) for a year of unrestricted travel throughout the (almost) whole country on any train is actually a steal.

There are also special saver tickets, restricted to a specific train and usually booked well in advance, which can be outright cheap.

[0] https://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/ga/...

German here, who traveled a lot through Switzerland.

I find it even more amazing that there are more people who have a Generalabonnement than a Bahncard 100 (the German equivalent which is a bit cheaper). [1]

Commuting between Fribourg and Zurich was always great, even when there were only circa five minutes to change trains in Bern. It's so efficient, I always catched my train in Bern.

[1] >2019: 500'000 Exemplare des GA sind seit dieser Woche im Umlauf. Dies entspricht im Vergleich zu vor 20 Jahren einer Verzwanzigfachung.

>Anzahl der Besitzer einer BahnCard 100 bis 2021. Die BahnCard 100 der Deutschen Bahn wurde lange Zeit immer beliebter, im Jahr 2021 gab es rund 36.000 Besitzer.

> I find it even more amazing that there are more people who have a Generalabonnement than a Bahncard 100 (the German equivalent which is a bit cheaper). [1]

To contextualize this a bit: Switzerland has about a tenth of the German population (~8.5M vs ~83M)

> I find it even more amazing that there are more people who have a Generalabonnement than a Bahncard 100 (the German equivalent which is a bit cheaper).

GA costs about 50% of a typical monthly Swiss salary.

BC100 costs about 100% of a typical monthly German salary.

Germany has a 8.7 times larger area, and a 7.4 times longer rail network though.

Yes, but in Germany you probably don't travel 8 times as much.

Is there any alternative to this? Because that's about 4 times the price of the normal monthly local bus pass in the US and the UK. Most people don't need to travel around the country, they just need to commute to their jobs.

Yes, there are.

Mostly, but not necessarily, within regional transportation networks.

As a for example: I pay roughly $1200 for one year of travel within the city of Zurich and the adjacent zone including the airport.

This includes any mode of transportation, except taxis.

A Generalabonnement makes more sense, though, commuting from, say, Zurich to Basel, which is not uncommon.

Edited to add: Regional commuter passes also allow for use of intercity trains, provided that they stop within your zone of validity.

ah cool that sounds very reasonable then

If you just want Zürich city it is less, about $850/year

That sounds about right.

Apparently half a million Swiss did the math and decided 4 times that local bus pass price is worth their money. It's not like you have to get a GA. I don't and I'm happy with the half-fare abo, my daughter has a local pass and a half-fare abo (which doesn't help to the local pass reductions), but if you go in the mountains or skiing enough weekends (and many do) you will save lots with the GA - as the mountains are often not in your local bus network.

1/2 fare card is about 170$ a year and gives you 50% off every train ticket.

There are yearly abos for specific routes (home to office, typically) that you can choose for 1/2/3/4/5 days a week. But the price usually gets close enough to a full GA that most people in this situation opt for a GA. And many employers cover the 1/2 fare card or GA for their employees.

SBB also (used to?) has a plan where you get a yearly GA and a Tesla or eGolf in every major train station you arrive. It feels magical: get on any train any time and when you arrive there is a car waiting for you. Use it, get back on the train, and there is another car at your destination for you to drive. It isn’t cheap but it’s a pretty neat concept.

Yes you can only have the smaller passes. But taking the GA is really convenient. You just enter every public transport without thinking about buying a ticket. I had a general abo for years and decided against renewing it when I moved to a job 3min of biking distance from home, I missed it dearly despite owning a car.

You are drunk after a late night. Some sort of public transport will bring you home. You want to do some hiking today? You just go to the nearest train station and decide at the last minute. You want to go to that music festival/concert on the other side of the country? Take the train, have a nap, chitchat or share a meal with your friend for a few hours without the stress of traffic, looking or paying for parking a car at your destination. Train is great, it allows you to move from A to B while basically being at the pub.

You might not need to access your whole country but once you realize you can you use that opportunity and realize your country is much deeper and more interesting than you thought it was.

That's all correct. In addition, you can get almost the same convencience without purchasing an expensive GA by using the EasyRide feature [1]. No more worrying about buying and choosing the right ticket.

[1] https://www.sbb.ch/en/timetable/mobile-apps/sbb-mobile/easyr...

Amazing! Everywhere needs this

However you look at, it's brutality expensive. It's nearly always cheaper to drive.

That depends on a lot of factors. If you live in or around Zürich for example, the median price just to rent a parking space is CHF 200/month, or CHF 2400/yr.

For comparison, an adult GA is CHF 3860/yr, so paying for a parking space in Zürich alone puts you 2/3rd of the way to the cost of public transportation, even disregarding costs like insurance, the car itself, registration, vignette, fuel, vehicle maintenance, tyres and parking costs away from home.

Where did you get the price figure for a parking space in Zürich?

It's CHF 300 per year in a blue zone where you have to find a spot whenever you feel like parking your car.

That number was from Immoscout24 listings of parking spaces for rent [0].

If you have vacant spaces in blue zones near you, that's a viable option. There are plenty of places where that's not the case though.

[0]: https://www.immoscout24.ch/de/parkplatz/mieten/ort-zuerich

I pay 250 / month for a parking space in an underground garage. That's close to the upper limit from what I've seen. Usually, the prices start around 100-150 for a dedicated parking spot outside.

Maintaing a car (bottom line) in Switzerland hits you with a minimum of 800 Franks a month, or almost 10'000 Franks a year.

A first class Generalabonnement is virtually half the price of that.

So, no. It's certainly not cheaper to drive.

Would you mind sharing your numbers? I recently tried to figure out how much my car costs me but it was less than half of your 10'000, so I'm wondering - either I missed something, or you have a rather expensive car.

If you take the deductable tax rate per kilometer, which is 70 Rappen[0], and assume 15000 kilometers a year you get 10'500 Francs per year

If you Google the question you find a variety of answers, but I think looking at it from the tax man's perspective is a good start.

I agree that the cost nay vary, but it can also be significantly higher than 1K per month, depending on the model of car, yearly kilometers and your risk from an insurance perspective.

[0] That's the rate you can deduct from your taxable income per kilometer if you use a private car for work purposes.

Thanks, that clarifies things. The number makes sense as a rough average (which would make sense for the taxes), calling it a 'minimum' was what confused me a little.

And it might be quite a bit faster too. For example, to get to the airport from where I lived would take 3 hours by train and 2 by car.

I wouldn't be so sure. Maybe if you look just at the price of the car itself, but between parking, gas, insurance, maintenance, the actual cost can get fairly high.

I don't know about prices now, but when I lived there, if you actually needed to travel so much that the GA was worth it over the half-fare card, it definitely was worth it over the car, just on gas prices alone.

I'm from the Netherlands, living in Switzerland, and public transport prices in both countries are roughly the same. But other prices + salaries in CH are almost double the ones in NL. Also, punctuality, cleanliness and sitting space in Swiss trains is much better.

So at least comparing to NL, public transport in CH is brutally cheap.

Only if you own the car in the first place and wouldn't part with it by any mean.

Owning a car is brutally expensive.

Swiss expat living abroad. I'm in Switzerland just enough every year to feel the pain of the full fare tickets, and yet not enough to justify the cost of the half-fare card. I live in Asia, but I'm often flying in and out of Switzerland from short hops around Europe, and it's rather shocking and sad to pay far more for the train home from the Airport than my flight cost, almost every single time.

Also then I do fly in long haul, I usually have the choice of a $100 train ride from Zürich or a far cheaper connecting flight to GVA followed by a $30 train. I would much rather take the train from ZRH but it's almost always cheaper to fly.

Switzerland's public transit system is absolutely amazing and I use it anytime I'm in Switzerland — but we have to admit it's one of the most expensive in the world.

> a year of unrestricted travel throughout the (almost) whole country on any train

Any train, or boat, or tram, or bus,... :)

Source: expat in Zürich and loving it!

That's not a bad trade-off to be fair. In the UK tickets (at least inter-city) are also brutally expensive but the system is, to put it kindly, often flakey.

I had a delay repay for the first time in years a few weeks ago - someone threw themselves under a train at Milton Keynes just before my train was due to leave Euston.

I don’t consider £25 each way Manchester-London to be brutally expensive to be honest - http://brfares.com/!faredetail?orig=MAN&dest=EUS&rte=371&tkt...

Shows as £46.70, which still isn't bad, though off-peak is often less painful. If you have to use the train to commute to work, then things start raking up.

I live 15 miles outside London and 17 years ago was paying best part of £2k a year just to get into central london and back, today it would be the best part of £3k a year to make that same journey. Using the same tracks, (probably trains) and stations all those years ago. Though more people than back then, which was already at levels upon peak work commutes that saw you playing sardines.

That almost gets you one year of travel in 2nd class throughout the entire Swiss train network (including public transport in cities).

Switzerland has a population of less than london. £3k would get you transport throughout london too - rail and bus.

Nobody should be commuting from Manchester to London. That's £46.70 return, so £23.35 each way, arriving in London about 1030.

Peak time london commuting is the most expensive part of the network to deliver, as it requires increased amount of capital that's mostly idle, yet peak time commuters get massive discounts compared with occasional use. Compare Reading to London. A season ticket works out to be about £22 return for 5 days a week, a normal peak time ticket is £52.10.

> I don’t consider £25 each way Manchester-London to be brutally expensive to be honest

I think you're citing pretty much a best case there. I just put in the same journey on a morning next week and got £150 each way, which I suspect is still not the worst case.

Before the pandemic, my wife used to pay about £5K/year for a London - Brighton season ticket (a distance of about 50 miles).

Possibly the most infuriating thing is that it's highly unpredictable what's cheap and what's expensive, and long journeys can often be several times the cost of flying. From a social-welfare/cost-of-carbon and oil-crisis perspective, this is nuts, especially when you compare what Germany is doing[1].

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/germany-slashes-summer-train-fa...

£25 each way is a walk up fare, you just need to take the slightly slower train (which is still faster than the car and about the same speed it was in the 90s), arriving in London about 1030.

Peak time commuting tickets are likewise a bargain. Brighton-London for £5,300 5 times a day 50 weeks a year at 65 miles each way is 32,500 miles, or 16p per mile. For a car doing 45mpg that will cost you £6,300 in fuel alone, let alone parking, depreciation, wear and tear, etc.

The car will carry 4 people and luggage. So if you consider car pooling, or you need to be in office 3 times a week, it's not a good deal. Or your car is electric. Even for a couple, a car makes economic sence.

Also consider comfort - have you see how crowded those trains get, sometimes you might have to stand for hours on a long distance train. If you are able bodied man thats one thing, but if you are pregnant or injured, that's tought.

They are not suppose to be close.

Sure, you could spend 3-4 hours driving from Brighton to central London and paying £65 to do it.

It doesn't come close with season tickets, hence the reason so many people chose to commute by train rather than driving. Also why people take the train rather than commuter bus services which tend to be cheaper

As someone who has lived long-term in both countries, I think that while the Swiss system is absolutely better than the UK system, people in the UK are a bit _too_ self-deprecating about the UK rail system, which is, all things considered, relatively good. Honestly, the biggest pain point in my eyes is that, because of privatisation, it's not all integrated into a single booking/refund/information system, which unfortunately does it make it _feel_ quite flakey.

> which is, all things considered, relatively good

It really depends on the line and the company. Virgin from London to Manchester is a reasonably good experience. Anything Northern (as a for example) makes me fume when I even think of taking any of their trains.

Also, prices for spontaneous bookings are outrageous. Even compared to Switzerland.

It will be as of next year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Railways.

How did I miss this? Thank you for linking it, I'm very curious how things will turn out!

> Honestly, the biggest pain point in my eyes is that, because of privatisation, it's not all integrated into a single booking/refund/information system, which unfortunately does it make it _feel_ quite flakey.

Despite some shortcomings in that area, at least in the UK they did keep a common ticketing system with through-ticketing (and integral passenger rights for the whole of your journey) between operators even through the whole of the privatisation saga. In Germany they've mostly ignored that topic and we're mostly only saved by the fact most long distance trains are still operated by DB, and for international journeys it's equally bad, with often no through-tickets available.

I have to admit I don't fully understand the issue you're talking about, but I'd like to find out more. Could you give an example? I've booked trains entirely via DB from Basel Bad Bf to Copenhagen, for example, but perhaps you mean something else?

I think they mean if you wanted to book a multi-leg trip of which only one leg is DB operated, it's a mess to coordinate and buy for different operators.

(I have no experience with this, but that's my interpretation of the comment.)

Some examples:

- Cologne – Bruxelles is served by both DB and Thalys. In principle both operators run in alternating hours and taken together you get an hourly service [1] between the two cities. Unfortunately for quite a few years now, Thalys has withdrawn its through-ticketing arrangements and so you can no longer buy through-tickets involving Thalys and a connection on the German side. If you buy the tickets separately, you've got no guarantees that your ticket will remain valid in case of a missed connection. (Thalys still participates in Railteam and HOTNAT, but that only applies to connection between high-speed long-distance trains, so if your connection involves some other kind of train, too bad).

- It also means (apart from the fact that Thalys requires mandatory reservations) they're semi-useless for domestic journeys (beyond Cologne, Thalys trains usually continue through to Dortmund), because in the case of delays or cancellations your ticket won't be valid on alternative DB services. If you're lucky they'll take you on a goodwill basis, otherwise you'd have to either wait for the next Thalys (only every two hours and with some larger gaps!) or pay for a DB ticket out of your own pocket and claim the money back afterwards.

- The services between Paris and Germany via the LGV Est are operated in cooperation between SNCF and DB, so luckily both operators will sell tickets for all services on that line, no matter whether they're TGV or ICE services. It's still not perfect however, because (at least online?) DB won't sell tickets involving a connection in France, while SNCF won't sell tickets involving a connection in Germany. So if you don't live in one of the larger cities directly served by the through trains (I live near that line in Germany, but technically I first still need to take a local train first for three stops or so) and need to go somewhere in France other than Strasbourg or Paris, you still can't get a through ticket.

- Through tickets to Italy are equally problematic. Maybe things are slightly better at a booking office, but at least online playing around with international-bahn.de it looks like the above, i.e. DB/ÖBB won't sell tickets involving connections in Italy and vice versa for FS.

- international-bahn.de is happy to sell you combined tickets, but its FAQs also say that those don't necessarily count as a through ticket and in the case of missed connections you might have to depend on the goodwill of the operators involved.

- For a few years now it seems that there is at least the so called Agreement on Journey Continuation (see https://www.seat61.com/european-train-travel.htm#AJC), which is at least a step in the right direction and is better than nothing, but that agreement is

a) still somewhat obscure, and

b) effectively still a somewhat more formalised goodwill arrangement, with the exact details and regulations not (!) being made public and remaining a secret among the participating railways

c) also doesn't cover all operators, e.g. Thalys doesn't participate, and neither do some of the large open access operators that exist in e.g. Italy, Austria, or the Czech Republic

And like I mentioned previously, in Germany technically the law asks all railways to work together in creating fares for through-ticketing (§12 AEG), but especially as far as long distance trains are concerned this obligation seems to have been mostly forgotten.

[1] Albeit with some gaps, especially on Thalys's side. I don't know whether those gaps are a recent, Covid-induced phenomenon, or have been present for a while longer.

Thank you for the detailed comment! I can say I've had good experiences on connections between Germany and Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, and Germany and the Netherlands, including regarding missed connections, but it sounds like the situation isn't so great when it comes to other countries/operators.

expensive in absolute or relative terms? is it expensive e.g. compared to a car?

I would say, if you take single tickets (even with the half-fare card), the tickets are quite more expensive than the trip with a normal car (counting costs of car, of gas, insurrance, ...).

However, if you have a monthly fare because you go somewhere regularly, it is still expensive, but much more managable.

The monthly General Abo (unlimited travel for all public transports in Switzerland) is ~340$/month. A parking spot in a city could already be from 80$ to 200$ a month.

I'd like to add that the fact that single tickets are [sometimes too] expensive in some cases is due to the approach of billing by geographic zones, which has its own up- and downsides.

For example: If I want to go from somewhere around Lake Zurich to Zurich, I have to pay to "travel in every geographical zone" between me and Zurich. However, this also allows me to travel freely in these zones.

In addition to that, if you pay for a return trip (which most people usually do), you automatically pay for travelling freely in these zones in any direction for a full 24 hours.

So assuming a half-fare card, I pay CHF 3.20 to take the bus 500m and back, which is ridiculously expensive for that distance, however, I "only" pay CHF 12.90 for riding all forms of PT (train, bus, ship, etc.) between me and Zurich, including the whole city for a full day, which is relatively reasonable for Zurich standards.

That is way cheaper than I would have guessed. A yearly subscription for public transport in Berlin alone costs at least twice that.

S/he wrote 340 a month, not a year

City tickets in Switzerland also are around 300-500/year. (sure our cities are nowhere near Berlin in size) the 340/m option does allow you to use nearly any transport (boats, trains, buses, some cable cars) in the whole country including price reductions (up to 50%) for most non-included transport methods (like private mountain trains or tourist hot spot cable cars).

> City tickets in Switzerland also are around 300-500/year

Zurich zone 110 (city center) is 782chf/year ($816) for the non-transferable one. Bern is 790chf/year. I'm not sure where you're getting "300-500/year".

https://www.zvv.ch/zvv/de/abos-und-tickets/abos/netzpass.htm... https://www.mylibero.ch/de/libero-abo/jahresabo

That's absolutely new to me. Last time I got a Libero it was like 380 or so for 2 zones.

Thanks for the correction

> I would say, if you take single tickets (even with the half-fare card), the tickets are quite more expensive than the trip with a normal car (counting costs of car, of gas, insurrance, ...).

Which numbers are you using for this calculation?

I assume you have some price-per-kilometer traveled by car (all expenses included) and by train?

Swiss here, it always depends. Some rides are cheaper by car but take less time by train and you have WiFi and fresh coffee in trains so it's only partially travel time partially leisure or work time.

Some routes are more expensive, but again way more comfortable than a car.

The there are dozens of hacks to save. Early booking, last minute bookings, half fair (which is only $200 or so a year and makes you pay half for everything including boats and some mountain trains), $50 24h all inclusive tickets, ...

IMO if you assume our median income to be 3 times that of Austria (or Germany, Italy for that matter). And our tickets on average cost only 1.5-2x as much while we actually have one of the best networks you can think of I would say it's not expensive at all.

My all in leasing car is $500 + petrol. For 2 people getting 2 all inklusive Tickets would still be cheaper.

Half fare card is CHF 185 for the first year or CHF 165 for every subsequent year (CHF 120 / CHF 100 if you're 16-26).

For anyone planning to spend any amount of time in Switzerland and using PT, it is well worth considering. It does exactly what it says, you only pay half.

So assuming you travel from Zurich to Bern (CHF 51 -> CHF 26, you safe CHF 25), it's worth it after only 8 trips.

Everyone seems to have a half price card except tourists. I think this is designed to get subsidize tourists less, because otherwise Swiss rail and metro prices appear twice as much as other European countries.

Tourists have access to tourist-only specials though, which make up for that, I think: https://www.sbb.ch/en/leisure-holidays/inspiration/internati...

You need to do a lot of train travel to amortize those costs. If you just need to take the train from Geneva airport to Lausanne and then maybe the metro a couple of times, it won't be worth it.

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