Which country has the best transit in the world?

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."

But because of its small population and unique geography, I filed Switzerland away as an anomaly, hardly a model to be extrapolated to other nations. But I now believe its fantastic range of non-car transport options has a lot to teach the world. I was staying near a village with a population of 780 in the canton of Vaud, in the foothills of the Jura Mountain. To get there from the Geneva airport, I hopped on to a high-speed train, an escalator ride away from the baggage carousel. There were departures every 10 minutes or so, along the lakeshore of Lac Léman, to Lausanne, Vevey, and Montreux. Downtown Geneva was six minutes away from the airport by train. You can take a bicycle right onto the train, and many inter-city trains have kids' playrooms on the upper levels.

I changed trains in the small lakefront city of Morges. (Morges is where Audrey Hepburn settled down; she’s buried in the local cemetery, and her grave apparently attracts processions of young pilgrims from Japan). There I switched from the SBB network (state rail) for a smaller, private network called MBC, which stands for Morges-Bière-Cossonay, after three of the towns it serves. This is the system I got to know best, and it astonished me.

I then changed trains in Apples, which has a population of 1,220. It's a branch point for trains to L'Isle (pop. 900) and Bière (1,400). This train stopped at villages along the way, spaced about 2 to 3 miles apart. Many stops are by request only. If you don’t buzz, the driver skips the stop. I arrived in the station of Montricher, which was straight out of the 1950s, and featured a quite useful outhouse.

The train went on to L'Isle. Here's the thing: there was a bus waiting for me and the handful of passengers on the train. This was by design, as rail and bus schedules are made to mesh. (Duh!) The articulated bus then took us uphill about a mile to the village of Montricher, making a half dozen stops and delivering me to my door.

You could also get off at the Parc Jura Vaudois, the regional park of the Jura Mountains, where you can hike up a mountain, or ride a bike through the foothills. As Mees pointed out in Transport for Suburbia, transit in Switzerland serves places whose population density is essentially zero. Which makes mock of the idea that residential density is a prerequisite for high-quality transit service.

The crazy thing, for a North American, is the reliability, frequency, and especially the span of service. I could get on a train from 6 in the morning to almost 2 am. Here's the schedule:

This overachieving rural transit company, MBC, also ran buses to local schools, in the morning and afternoon. Often there weren't many people on the trains. Farebox obviously wasn't a big revenue generator. I asked how they kept going. Turns out they make a lot of money transporting goods and supplies, for example, feed and loads of gravel to farmers. They also serve a village near one of Switzerland's larger military bases. (I often rode the trains with young soldiers in fatigues carrying machine guns. Switzerland, as they say, doesn’t have an army—it is an army.) The trains even transport tanks to prevent wear-and-tear on local roads.

Switzerland is a rich nation. People there can afford cars. But car ownership is surprisingly low: 604 vehicles per 1,000 population, vs. 756 in Italy and 837 in the US. With transit options this good, you don't need to rely on cars. (And when I was there, gas was the equivalent of $8.65 US a gallon, which might make you think twice about relying on a car.)

Even small Swiss cities have impressive transit options. Lausanne, pop. 140,000, has a two-line metro system, articulated trolley buses, and a light rail city that connects with its metro. Line M2 runs on rubber tires, has a dozen stations, and can mount a 12% incline.

But it was the level of service of rural transit that was really a revelation to me. It demonstrated how an active rural public transportation network also feeds and maintains a healthy, vibrant, and prosperous farming system—and makes it possible for people of all ages to live, work, and go to school in a rural setting. Outside of big cities. And that’s good for everybody.

It felt like travelling back in time in North America a century ago, when there was still a working network of trolleys, interurbans, and intercity trains reaching deep into the heartland. That’s why Switzerland may be the world’s best—and certainly one of the most inspiring—transit nations. It kept, and has continued to build on, what other countries have lost.