What Integrated Transport Looks like
What I did on my holidays by Thomas Ableman, Aged 43 1/2
I spent half term in Switzerland and I want to tell you about it.
We spent two days with my cousin in Geneva and two days staying in the home of a Swiss family in St Gallen province.
The crucial thing here is that both destinations were random ‘ordinary’ places in ‘ordinary’ Switzerland. We weren’t in a ski resort or a hotel, and we didn’t have any choice. We went to where those people are.
So what was our transport experience like?
Chambésy
Geneva is a city of 200,000 nested in an urban area of around a million (much of it across the border in France). It’s an international, expensive, hilly city. Think Bristol but without the countercultural tinge and with more foreign diplomats.
Geneva, with pin showing the location of Chambésy
Cousin Stephen lives in Chambésy, a suburb with a population of around 3,500 people around 5km from the city centre. Think maybe Stoke Bishop in Bristol, though a bit further out.
Chambésy station is on the Léman Express, the local rail service in Geneva. It runs every 15 minutes with trains into the centre of Geneva taking five minutes. There are six lines, so Chambésy is directly connected to 32 stations spread around all parts of the conurbation - both in Switzerland and in France. Direct trains from smaller places outside Geneva city are less frequent but the lines interweave at Geneva main station providing a memorable train service to Chambésy at 00, 15, 30 and 45 minutes past each hour.
The service is likely to improve once the rebuild of Geneva station is complete. They’re adding underground platforms to complement the current surface station.
The Léman Express service, showing the location of Chambésy
I enjoy walking in a foreign city, so we strolled up the hill to Cousin Stephen’s house. If we’d preferred to take the bus, then we could have used number 59 which picks up outside the station one minute after the train arrives. It then connects to the rest of the suburb, though talking to cousin Stephen, he always uses the 20 bus direct from town as this takes just 16 minutes door to door.
It doesn’t matter which he uses: like all public transport in Switzerland, both train and bus use the national Swiss fare and ticketing system, so you can simply use the SBB app (or the local bus company app) to buy the ticket. Or you can use EasyRide, which will enable you to tap your phone and it will then track your journey by GPS and bill you the cheapest fare for the rides you did.
Schänis
Schänis is a village in the rural canton of St Gallen. It’s not somewhere you’ve ever been, I am sure. It’s not one of your chocolate box Swiss villages: it’s completely flat and is largely comprised of newish housing. It has a population of 3,800.
The station is on a single-track line between Rapperswil and Ziegelbrücke. Trains run every thirty minutes in each direction. After Ziegelbrücke, the trains either go to St Gallen via Sargans or Schwanden. That means that Schänis has direct trains to 38 stations in the local area, all either hourly or half-hourly.
But it’s the connections at Ziegelbrücke that make the rail service so spectacular for a village of fewer than 4,000 souls.
Every hour, the local train from Schänis arrives at Ziegelbrücke at a few minutes to the hour. Simultaneously (and it really is simultaneously!) a northbound and southbound ‘interregional’ train draws up at the adjacent platforms. The train towards Schänis also arrives in the opposite direction. All four trains sit there for long enough for everyone to switch between them and then at exactly 00 past each hour, the interregional trains head off from Ziegelbrücke towards Chur (the oldest city in Switzerland), Zürich (the biggest city in Switzerland) and Bern (the capital of Switzerland). The whole interchange process takes a matter of minutes, so it feels almost like staying on the same train. There are always plenty of seats.
This map shows everywhere you can reach from Schänis at least hourly, either directly or with an almost effortless connection (the bigger the blob, the bigger the place):
A map showing the places that can be reached from the rural village of Schänis every hour with one easy change
Despite living in the middle of no-where, Schänis feels hyper-connected. Indeed, the journey into the Swiss financial capital of Zürich takes just 55 minutes (including the change of train). That’s roughly the same as driving the whole way, despite starting in a tiny rural village. That means it’s perfectly credible to live out in the sticks and commute into the city.
We made use of the Ziegelbrücke connection on the journey home (to travel back to Paris via Zürich) and to visit Chur (and then onto Arosa, via the hourly train that winds up the mountains to the Alpine ski resort 1,700 metres above sea level).
But even though these rail connections are spectacular, it’s the buses that give public transport in Switzerland the same sense of freedom that car travel offers in every other country.
As a family, we don’t ski, but we did go tobogganing. Unfortunately, (in yet another visualisation of the day-to-day impact of the climate crisis) all the local toboggan runs to Schänis were denuded of snow, so we needed to travel further to a toboggan run higher up (and even that, at 1,400 metres was tenable largely only thanks to snow machines. It’s very scary). The ski resort of Elm has a suitable toboggan run, and is 40km from Schänis.
To get there, you get the train to Schwanden. When you arrive at Schwanden, you step outside the station for the 541 bus to Elm. It’s waiting for you, and leaves a few minutes later. The whole journey from Schänis to Elm takes exactly 60 minutes. Just to repeat that: this is a 40km journey from a rural village to a small ski resort. (i.e. from the middle-of-nowhere to the middle-of-nowhere) that can be done in 60 minutes every single hour.
This is repeated all over Switzerland. At virtually every one of the 1,800 stations in Switzerland, you’ll see a bus sitting outside as the train pulls in. A few minutes after the train pulls out, so does the bus. Just under an hour later, you’ll see the bus in the opposite direction arrive a few minutes before the train does. That way everywhere is connected seamlessly to everywhere else with no waiting.
And, as I mentioned earlier, you simply need to tap EasyRide on your phone at the start of the day, and you never need to think about tickets or fares: the GPS will track everything you do, and automatically bill you for the cheapest tickets for the journeys you made, whether it’s a rural bus or a Zürich tram or the Intercity train between them.
This isn’t Denmark
I know what you’re thinking: this is all very interesting (well, I hope you are. Maybe you’re astonished at just how boring this all is) but what’s the point of it all? Britain isn’t Switzerland, so who cares what a whole load of chocolate-munching watchmakers get up to? To that degree, I’m reminding myself of Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton in the 2016 primary campaign.
Bernie Sanders was going on about how great the social safety net is in Denmark and Hilary Clinton snapped “This isn’t Denmark”. And she was right. The USA is nothing like Denmark. However, equally, Hilary Clinton never quite managed to paint a vision of where she wanted to take America. So uninspiring was her campaign that she managed to lose it to a man like Donald Trump. (Do you remember just how implausible that felt back then?).
If there’s one thing I learned from my time as a startup founder, it’s that the best startups have what is known in the sector as a “big, hairy, audacious goal” (and, no, I don’t know why it has to be hairy).
Google set out to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” back in 2004. Who can say they haven’t achieved it? When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, he opened a bookshop but he was planning an “Everything Store”. The idea of a website that sold everything sounded crazy in the 1990s. But he did it. It was not inevitable they’d succeed (most startups fail) but they would have been far, far, (far!) less likely to achieve their big, hairy, audacious goals if they hadn’t articulated them.
Maybe (just maybe), Hilary Clinton could have beaten Donald Trump with a big, bold, audacious plan to give struggling citizens the safety net of Denmark, even though they were starting from a different place. Even though we’re a million miles from the magic of the Swiss integrated transport network, so was Switzerland once. Everything Switzerland has achieved in terms of timetable and fare integration has been achieved in the first half of my lifetime.
How about we set out to achieve the same thing for the UK in the second half?
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