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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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

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