One of the things I like best (and will miss most) about living in Switzerland is the transportation. Seriously. Before living here, I lived in New York and Boston, and I appreciated the fact that I could get away with not having a car and still get around, but Switzerland elevates the car-free lifestyle to a new level. Not only can I get around anywhere in the city without a car, I can do so on trams, buses, boats, funiculars, and trains.
And everything runs on time – in other places, the schedules are mere guidelines regarding the relative frequency of subway trains or buses. Here they are written in stone – if the schedule says the tram will be here at 10:32, it will be here at 10:32, just in time for you to transfer to the bus that leaves at 10:33. You can plot your trip out to the minute, knowing exactly when you need to leave your apartment, and exactly when you will arrive at your friend’s housewarming party. Not only that, but it works nationwide. If I have tickets to see a concert in Lucerne, I can plot out the exact Zurich tram, train, and Lucerne tram I will need to take to get there in time.
(That said, there have been a few disturbing tram delays in recent weeks – there have been several occasions where a tram I wanted to take was three or even four minutes late. Having lived here for over three years, I was suitably horrified.)
It’s definitely a far cry from inter-city travel in the U.S., where, even if you’re lucky enough to be traveling between cities serviced by Amtrak (read: major cities on the Northeast corridor), the schedules are still only a general guideline, with arrival and departure times being understood to mean “stated time plus or minus half an hour.”
A German friend is planning on going to New York, and was thinking of going to visit his friend in rural New Hampshire. I assumed he was going to rent a car, but he said he would probably take a train, and was surprised when I told him that there probably wasn’t a train going where he wanted to go. Welcome to America, the land of the free and the home of the very large spaces that aren’t serviced by mass transportation.
As wonderful and well planned as the public transportation system is, there are still a few things that puzzle me. Trivial things, but I still wonder about them. The first is that all of the trams in Zurich are numbered. We have trams 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15. What happened to trams 1 and 12?
Another is that the tramlines are color-coded. Blue means 14, yellow means 13, and so on. It makes it easier to read the map and to tell from a distance what tram is on its way. What puzzles me, however, is that there are two red trams, two green trams, but no orange tram. They covered the main rainbow colors (besides orange), doubled two of the colors, and then randomly branched out into pink, black, and brown. There doesn’t seem to be a system, which is very odd in this country that loves and lives for systems.
I sometimes watch the tram drivers at work. At first glance, the cockpit (driver’s seat?) of the tram looks unsurprising – a steering wheel, lots of buttons and switches, a microphone, and so on. And then you stop and realize that you don’t have to steer a tram – it just goes on tracks. And then you observe that the steering wheel is basically a gas and brake pedal in one – the driver turns it right to go faster, and left to go slower. Doesn’t that seem it could get a bit confusing (and swervy) for the tram driver if he drives a car when he’s not at work? Just a thought.
And everything runs on time – in other places, the schedules are mere guidelines regarding the relative frequency of subway trains or buses. Here they are written in stone – if the schedule says the tram will be here at 10:32, it will be here at 10:32, just in time for you to transfer to the bus that leaves at 10:33. You can plot your trip out to the minute, knowing exactly when you need to leave your apartment, and exactly when you will arrive at your friend’s housewarming party. Not only that, but it works nationwide. If I have tickets to see a concert in Lucerne, I can plot out the exact Zurich tram, train, and Lucerne tram I will need to take to get there in time.
(That said, there have been a few disturbing tram delays in recent weeks – there have been several occasions where a tram I wanted to take was three or even four minutes late. Having lived here for over three years, I was suitably horrified.)
It’s definitely a far cry from inter-city travel in the U.S., where, even if you’re lucky enough to be traveling between cities serviced by Amtrak (read: major cities on the Northeast corridor), the schedules are still only a general guideline, with arrival and departure times being understood to mean “stated time plus or minus half an hour.”
A German friend is planning on going to New York, and was thinking of going to visit his friend in rural New Hampshire. I assumed he was going to rent a car, but he said he would probably take a train, and was surprised when I told him that there probably wasn’t a train going where he wanted to go. Welcome to America, the land of the free and the home of the very large spaces that aren’t serviced by mass transportation.
As wonderful and well planned as the public transportation system is, there are still a few things that puzzle me. Trivial things, but I still wonder about them. The first is that all of the trams in Zurich are numbered. We have trams 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15. What happened to trams 1 and 12?
Another is that the tramlines are color-coded. Blue means 14, yellow means 13, and so on. It makes it easier to read the map and to tell from a distance what tram is on its way. What puzzles me, however, is that there are two red trams, two green trams, but no orange tram. They covered the main rainbow colors (besides orange), doubled two of the colors, and then randomly branched out into pink, black, and brown. There doesn’t seem to be a system, which is very odd in this country that loves and lives for systems.
I sometimes watch the tram drivers at work. At first glance, the cockpit (driver’s seat?) of the tram looks unsurprising – a steering wheel, lots of buttons and switches, a microphone, and so on. And then you stop and realize that you don’t have to steer a tram – it just goes on tracks. And then you observe that the steering wheel is basically a gas and brake pedal in one – the driver turns it right to go faster, and left to go slower. Doesn’t that seem it could get a bit confusing (and swervy) for the tram driver if he drives a car when he’s not at work? Just a thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment