Tramtastic

Observations

You know how advertisements for housing will say “on a bus line” or “near public transportation”? Except for a brief stint in college when it was a necessity, this has never been a big plus for me. In fact, I usually would associate a nearby bus stop as a possible hindrance to a good night’s sleep. What with rowdy teenagers or mentally disabled people shouting at themselves at all hours of the night. Unless there was absolutely no other possible option, I would never take a bus in Seattle. You can judge me with that information if you want, but then again you are probably somebody I know and I didn’t have any friends who took the bus unless absolutely necessary either. Those who did never liked having to do it. So when I heard about all the great public transportation systems in many European cities, I generally just shrugged and thought ‘whoopdy frikin doo’. Our brief stay in France didn’t do much to change my mind either. With that background in mind, I have to say, the public transportation in this city is great.

I spend about 45 minutes a day on the Zurich trams. It is one aspect of living here that I think I have a pretty good handle on. It isn’t a chore to take a tram or to figure out how to get somewhere. They are amazingly clean and amazingly abundant which means they are not often packed and you can find a seat easily. Many locations in the city are serviced by more than one line and there are numerous hubs which make for great people watching. And, of course, their punctuality is world famous. Not that it would even matter if the tram showed up at 12:26 instead of 12:24 like the timetable says because the next one is only 7 minutes behind it. Unless you are traveling at night or early in the morning, you don’t need to have a timetable at all. Also, the nice color coding makes it easy to spot which tram is heading your way and to read the tram map.

Here is the stop next to our apartment. Chiz is partial to the 4 since it is the purple line, but I'm a die hard number 2 man.

The trams are so popular that one of the ex-pat events I attended (Chiz was out of town) was based around which tram line was the best...

There was a vote and two tram lines tied for first place. So, we had to find out first hand which was best. A group of us met at the number 7 tram stop at the main train station and embarked on a pub crawl to the many bars that the route serviced. I have to say, it was a good line indeed. A date for the other tram line adventure has not been set yet. I’ll take a camera along for that one.

Another thing I found very interesting about the trams (and I realize now this is probably fairly common worldwide) is that you are really just buying insurance when you purchase a ticket. There is literally a 90% chance your ticket will never be asked for. They enforce ticket purchase simply by putting teams of three or four people out around the city who jump on a tram during a stop at the last possible second and then ask to see everybody’s ticket while the tram is in motion. If you don’t have one, you get a very hefty 80 Franc fine. I haven’t kept track, but this might actually be a financial risk worth taking. As with most everything else here, it isn’t cheap to ride these suckers. A quick one way ticket is 2.40 Fr. An hours worth of tram riding is 3.60 Fr. A full day pass is the best deal at 7.60 Fr. and what I have to buy every day. That gets to 80 pretty fast. Luckily, this will stop being a concern when we get our yearly passes.

We haven’t done much bus riding here, but they are very popular as well. In fact, we were just recommended a good Indian restaurant a bit out of town that will require a bus ride to reach. We are going there tonight so I’ll comment here if anything exciting happens.