While I was researching Straphanger, I was pretty sure that, if any place could claim the title to having the world’s best transit, it was going to be an Asian nation. China, for example—in terms of track mileage, the Shanghai metro is the world’s largest system under a single management, and it’s all been built since the early 90s. Or the Tokyo region, with over 800 stations, a megalopolis that developed in tandem with private rail lines.
When transit scholars, including the late Paul Mees of Australia, told me that Switzerland probably had the world’s best transit, I hesitated to hold it up as a model. Last summer, though, I was lucky enough to spend six weeks in Romandy, the French-speaking west of the country, and I began to see Mees’s point.
I'd been to Switzerland a few times before, and was duly impressed with its remarkably extensive rail network…
…as well as the options in its larger cities, such as Zürich, with its trams, of which philosopher Alain de Botton wrote: "There's little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transportation from point A to B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied."
