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Comment by jokteur | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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