this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
260 points (95.8% liked)
Europe
8324 readers
1 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well sure but that’s because Switzerland has a pretty awesome and geographically-appropriate-for-its-size train system.
Also, the flag’s a big plus
What does that mean? I'm not sure if I correctly interpret that as somewhat dismissive, as if a good train system was a given or not. It's the result of political will and investment.
A bit like when you get Zerg rushed in Starcraft and say "Well sure but that's because they built so many units early on". It's a decision, and becoming good in that metric was precisely the intent. Also not to do so is a decision. Unlike in Starcraft, the decision to neglect your public transport is not a similarly viable strategy.
I mean that Switzerland has a local and regional rail system that is damn near perfectly sized, scaled, and engineered for its geography and citizenry, which also integrates pretty well with the rail systems of all of its neighbors.
They could have made faster trains, but with the way they wanted to run them, it made more sense to design the rolling stock to have good top speed, but excellent acceleration, thus improving the average speed more meaningfully than a higher top speed would. The rail network is fairly pervasive - you can from and to just about anywhere in Switzerland using trains, with perhaps a bit of bus travel tacked onto either end.
Source: was just over there a couple months ago visiting a family friend, and used the train system a lot.