Swiss Sojourn 5
V. Getting Around
Continued from Shades of Gray. Zürich is not a large city, but its topology and topography is such that navigating it requires some familiarity. The Stadt transport system attempt to make that easy. It works about as well as one could reasonably expect.
For two or three Francs, one can travel throughout Zürich on buses or streetcars for half a day, after which one’s ticket expires. Fares vary by zones, and tickets may be purchased from vending machines at any stop. On board, no tickets are sold or taken. One simply buys the proper ticket, rides and gets off, no questions asked. None, that is, except for the occasional inquiries by certain plainclothes employees of the transit system who randomly enter trams and proceed to ask each passenger in turn to produce a ticket or a pass. If one is found not to have paid for passage, a violation is written to the tune of 50 Swiss Francs ($60). In two months, I have seen this happen maybe three times, just often enough to keep me honest.
I am on my second Regenbogenkarte, or rainbow card (must be a marketing term), which is a monthly pass costing 65 FR, good throughout the city system (but not on railroads). Since I moved close to the campus I don’t use it every day. So while I may not be saving any money, I don’t have to hassle with the ticket robots when I am in a hurry and don’t understand exactly how to specify my destination. In Boston, an MBTA subway and bus pass used to cost me $43 per month, and did save me money when I commuted downtown to work.
Transit is set up here so that trams follow routes that connect the center of the city (around the Hauptbanhof) with outlying areas, while buses mostly skirt the center, running in rough rings around it. In fact, the main shopping streets downtown are devoid of cars, even taxis, and there the trams have dominion. Pedestrians use these streets as sidewalks, dodging the trams, which hum through every couple of minutes. Beyond downtown, one usually can get a seat, but even when a car’s full up the ride rarely takes more than 20 minutes of strap-hanging.
Most trams are double cars, with a driver in the front and no one else in attendance. Unlike some other street railways (like Boston’s Green Line), the drivers actually steer their vehicles through the many rail junctions where tracks cross and diverge. Also, the rolling stock here is both newer and kept in far better repair than that in Boston. Like their Boston brethren, tram drivers usually announce the names of the stops as they come to them as a convenience to passengers. But the locals know what the stops are, and the foreigners can barely understand their names as pronounced in local dialect, not much of a help.
My stop is Berninaplatz, where Berninastrasse crosses Shaffhausenstrasse, the street along which trams 10 and 14 travel. My service varies from every five minutes or so at peak hours, to 15 minutes on weekends and an agonizing 30 minutes late at night. Trams and buses run from about 5:30 AM to just after 1 AM, fairly civilized for a city where businesses are required to close at 6:30 PM (except for restaurants and bars, and except on Thursday evenings, when stores can remain open until 9:30). And Lord help you if you need to buy something on a Sunday.
Some people complain about the noise trams make, but I like it, and find them remarkably quiet for such large vehicles. I can barely hear them from my flat on the third floor, about 80 meters from my stop. At that distance, the monotone f-sharp whine of the motors fades, and all I hear is the metallic motion of the wheels, steel on steel, which to me sounds like giants ice-skating, almost soothing. It is certainly far less obnoxious than bus sounds, and even those seem more muffled than in Boston.
The frisking of trams on Schaffhausernstrase is the first thing I hear upon waking and the last thing I hear as I try to fall asleep. Church bells, it seems to have been decreed, must clang in united cacophony every 15 minutes, but only between 7 AM and 7 PM, so sleep can proceed uninterrupted. A bit about that next time.
Next: Bells du Jour
