It's hard for foreigners to grasp that our comprehensive public transport network connects even the most remote areas of Switzerland. My parents are living on a farm in the countryside and still I can get there easily by train and bus. If I need some more flexibility (moving stuff, skiing, ...), there are electric car rentals available at any major train stations. It's my ideal version of mobility.
PS: The Swiss federal railways also have a large set of open data to enable such cool projects: https://data.sbb.ch/pages/home/
Compare me visiting my parents who live in a "remote" town of in BC about 200km from Vancouver. After a ferry and a bus I found myself outside a grocery store asking strangers for a ride north (no taxi service). A kind soul drove me to the highway turnoff. I walked the last five miles. That's what most of North America is like once you step slightly outside of the major cities: No car, no get there.
Is that surprising given that you could fit over 200 Switzerlands into Canada and another 200 into the US? BC alone is over 20 times the size of Switzerland. Cars are the best possible option in that case surely?
Usually locations for skiing are very well connected. Trains that go to popular skiing locations of have places to store your equipment. There are also bikes available at most stations.
> It's my ideal version of mobility.
It can decently be a lot better in a lot of ways. But we have to not just complain but try to objectively criticizes so we can continue to improve.
I would like to actually do high-speed rail. Switzerland did really well improving on InterCity trains and got more people to use them. But that became almost a mantra of 'speed doesn't matter'. The actual mantra is 'not as fast as possible, but as fast as required'.
This was correct and with the Rail2035 plan, we are going further in that direction. Many InterCity trains go from every 30 min to every 15 min. Basically turning most of the country into an S-Bahn like system.
But I think beyond that we should seriously consider a totally new high-speed line, right across the major population centers. That would not just make rail competitive with driving, but beat driving with a big stick. Also this would free up a huge amount of capacity from the existing lines and allow things like 15min regional and inter-regional travel. Plus it would increase cargo capacity.
Sadly its currently not in the Rail2050 plan, but there are people pushing for it.
Further, I think we can do a lot, a lot better in terms of biking. Compared to the Dutch we are utterly primitive in integrating biking in the larger transport network. In the Netherlands they have figured out that bikes are the optimal feeder system into the rail network and have taken huge advantage of that. Switzerland needs to do so much better in that.
Frankly, I think its really useful. I was able to perfectly travel around on Christmas. Getting to family in different parts of the country, no problem.
> That would not just make rail competitive with driving, but beat driving with a big stick.
Between major population centers, I believe it already beats driving by a long shot... I personally don't think it has to be faster: as long as I can work in the train, it's fine if it takes 90min instead of 75.
> Further, I think we can do a lot, a lot better in terms of biking.
And the best part is how reliable and timely the trains and buses are. As a foreigner living there I commuted by bus into Geneva from a suburb. I don't think my bus was ever more than 1 minute late - and this was in the middle of its run. I hate to compare that to my wife's commute here in Boston....
Replace "foreigners" with "Americans". Functional public transport is not that special; most countries have it. The main difference in Switzerland is the hostility of the terrain to building infrastructure.
If your parents lived on a farm in rural China, you would say the same thing.
Swiss public transport is IMHO special in three respects: a) density of the network, b) frequency (even remote areas get a bus an hour), c) punctuality.
I'm not saying no other country can match this (I haven't been everywhere), but at least Germany or Italy can't.
Thanks for the link, author of the website here. For this particular #swisstrains project I was using derived GTFS dataset form this one https://opentransportdata.swiss/en/dataset/timetable-54-2024... - this portal contains public transport data from all swiss transport operators (not only SBB)
It says it is "an animation based on the official timetables of the Swiss Federal Railways(SBB) network". To my understanding its only scheduled positions.
Thanks for featuring, author here. This is the first version of the #swisstrains webmap which I've made 17yrs ago, it still runs for historical reasons, it used to fetch also live delays but the position of the trains were still interpolated, using the average speed between the two timetable stops.
The other clones are more or less using same technique, swiss transport agencies are not (yet) offering live position of the trains / vehicles, only the actual delays measured at stations.
>> Does this have real-time positions, or only scheduled positions?
Such an important question! One of my pet peeves with the NYC Metro Timings app is that it sneakily presents scheduled arrivals as real-time. The best example of this is which it shows trainings happily running/arriving on lines that are actually shut down for construction!
I don't know about NYC, but in my territory the public transit authority shares live and real-time data with Google. It's exposed in Maps with a very nice interface, such that I don't even need to install the buggy, bespoke app provided by the transit service.
They also have an SMS query service which seemed to always be inaccurate or lying. I stopped using it, it was so unreliable. But Google Maps can tell me exactly where the next bus/train is, how much delayed, how crowded it is, whether security is on board or not, because Google polls actual passengers about these parameters.
There's one for The Netherlands as well -> https://en.treinposities.nl/. Relies on an open API so there's bound to be others. This one is good because it has some live webcam links on the map as well. At least one of the live cams use YouTube as a streaming platform and have active rail nerd communities chatting and answering questions, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UfHjV-oUmE
Thanks for featuring, author of the website here. This is the same version as the one I've first made back in 2006, the main dataset is a derived GTFS dataset from swiss raw timetables (HRDF) [1].
The position of the trains are interpolated, based on the departure / arrival times of stop times and is using the average speed. I've used to have also an hourly updater for the delays using the GTFS-RT dataset [2] but is gone due to lack of time. ATM there is no official dataset to give the live position of the vehicles, all the other websites are just interpolating positions based on the time delays.
The website still runs as hobby project, is not meant to be taken as source of truth for actual position of the trains, though I get many requests from trainspotters and photographers asking me for such feature :)
And for some routes you can sit and enjoy watching the route displaying actual train units [3] more a simcity-like feature :)
It's also great to see the utter mess that DB organization is. I found their live tracking on [1], but it can only be ordered as a product to embed somewhere, they don't show it on their site. Then there is the random https://www.bahnhof.de/, which seems to collect information about train stations. But if you want to schedule your trip or buy a ticket, you'd better get the DB Navigator app, which is not available as a web version. FML.
Readit News
PS: The Swiss federal railways also have a large set of open data to enable such cool projects: https://data.sbb.ch/pages/home/
> It's my ideal version of mobility.
It can decently be a lot better in a lot of ways. But we have to not just complain but try to objectively criticizes so we can continue to improve.
I would like to actually do high-speed rail. Switzerland did really well improving on InterCity trains and got more people to use them. But that became almost a mantra of 'speed doesn't matter'. The actual mantra is 'not as fast as possible, but as fast as required'.
This was correct and with the Rail2035 plan, we are going further in that direction. Many InterCity trains go from every 30 min to every 15 min. Basically turning most of the country into an S-Bahn like system.
See here if you are interested: https://sbb-step2035.ch/de/personenverkehr/
But I think beyond that we should seriously consider a totally new high-speed line, right across the major population centers. That would not just make rail competitive with driving, but beat driving with a big stick. Also this would free up a huge amount of capacity from the existing lines and allow things like 15min regional and inter-regional travel. Plus it would increase cargo capacity.
Sadly its currently not in the Rail2050 plan, but there are people pushing for it.
Further, I think we can do a lot, a lot better in terms of biking. Compared to the Dutch we are utterly primitive in integrating biking in the larger transport network. In the Netherlands they have figured out that bikes are the optimal feeder system into the rail network and have taken huge advantage of that. Switzerland needs to do so much better in that.
Frankly, I think its really useful. I was able to perfectly travel around on Christmas. Getting to family in different parts of the country, no problem.
Between major population centers, I believe it already beats driving by a long shot... I personally don't think it has to be faster: as long as I can work in the train, it's fine if it takes 90min instead of 75.
> Further, I think we can do a lot, a lot better in terms of biking.
Yes!
If your parents lived on a farm in rural China, you would say the same thing.
I'm not saying no other country can match this (I haven't been everywhere), but at least Germany or Italy can't.
Personally I prefer TRAVIC, which has nearly 100% real-time coverage for Switzerland and also includes busses and trams:
https://travic.app/?z=9&x=921422.5&y=5949724.5
Thanks for the Travic link.
The other clones are more or less using same technique, swiss transport agencies are not (yet) offering live position of the trains / vehicles, only the actual delays measured at stations.
Such an important question! One of my pet peeves with the NYC Metro Timings app is that it sneakily presents scheduled arrivals as real-time. The best example of this is which it shows trainings happily running/arriving on lines that are actually shut down for construction!
They also have an SMS query service which seemed to always be inaccurate or lying. I stopped using it, it was so unreliable. But Google Maps can tell me exactly where the next bus/train is, how much delayed, how crowded it is, whether security is on board or not, because Google polls actual passengers about these parameters.
https://bouw.live/puls-amsterdam/
with no corresponding trains on the map.
The position of the trains are interpolated, based on the departure / arrival times of stop times and is using the average speed. I've used to have also an hourly updater for the delays using the GTFS-RT dataset [2] but is gone due to lack of time. ATM there is no official dataset to give the live position of the vehicles, all the other websites are just interpolating positions based on the time delays.
The website still runs as hobby project, is not meant to be taken as source of truth for actual position of the trains, though I get many requests from trainspotters and photographers asking me for such feature :)
And for some routes you can sit and enjoy watching the route displaying actual train units [3] more a simcity-like feature :)
[1] https://opentransportdata.swiss/en/dataset/timetable-54-2024...
[2] https://opentransportdata.swiss/en/cookbook/gtfs-rt/
[3] https://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/?hms=10:00:00&vehicle_nam...
Signed,
An American
https://travic.app/?z=6&x=1652866.9&y=6336146.8&l=osm_standa...
It's also great to see the utter mess that DB organization is. I found their live tracking on [1], but it can only be ordered as a product to embed somewhere, they don't show it on their site. Then there is the random https://www.bahnhof.de/, which seems to collect information about train stations. But if you want to schedule your trip or buy a ticket, you'd better get the DB Navigator app, which is not available as a web version. FML.
[1] https://www.dbinfrago.com/web