Ten days ago or thereabouts, I wrote a prequel to this post, Training It. In it, I suggested that folks like me yours truly (because I don’t know the proper I/me grammar with that), North Americans raised with little hands-on exposure to the wider world around them, couldn’t fully appreciate an optimally functioning transit system. “Convenient, regular, extensive, nearly-always-ontime train travel,” I typed out. I’ll add here, convenient, regular, extensive, nearly-always ontime rail and bus travel, local public transit.

After a few days now travelling around the northwest of Switzerland, I can only double-underline and bold that claim. Among us, New Yorkers, maybe, with their subways, might have a glimpse of what I’m talking about. But the bus system? And their regional rail system? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Not to bore you with the personal details as I have experienced them so far, just to say that you don’t make your daily plans according to public transit schedules any more than you would if you were getting around by automobile. It’s that convenient. You want to get from this city to that one? An hour at most between departures, depending on the time of day, more frequent than that in some cases, rush hours and between major centres. Within town, you’ve got off-peak bus and/or tram frequency at six minutes. Six minutes! Off-peak!!

Imagine that where you live.

That kind of reliability and regularity, all day, all night. Essentially from 5 a.m. to midnight. Every day.

Why would you ever get into a car?

And it’s not as if there aren’t automobiles where I’ve been. The cities and towns I’ve traveled to and around in Switzerland (and Norway before that) would only be considered anti-car by North American standards. Driving is accommodated on equal footing with the other modes of transport, transit, bike, pedestrian. It doesn’t appear to be demonized. It just isn’t prioritized.

Again.

Imagine that where you live.

Throughout most of the places I’ve visited this trip, there are pedestrian crosswalks, marked with nothing more than yellow paint in the street, that give those on foot right-of-way. Honest to god, real life right of way. Drivers stop, well back of the crosswalk in most cases, and wait for pedestrians to make it all the way across the street before proceeding on their way. I’ve witnessed very few rolling stops, nosing into crosswalks, in passive-aggressive efforts to move pedestrians along.

I’ve seen very little biking infrastructure within the cities (but quite a bit between cities) as we think about it in North American terms. Separate, protected. Occasionally built up from sidewalks in places but mostly painted lanes and markings on the roads, which cycling advocates roll their eyes at at home, the difference here being that they are acknowledged and observed. Drivers do not use them to park in or as another traffic lane for them to zoom in and out of.

In fact, there’s been very little vehicular zooming going on by drivers within the cities and towns here. On a day trip yesterday to Luzerne (a one-hour train ride, top of the hour, every hour), it was the first time I really noticed car traffic in the past couple weeks. It bustled in and around the old town, perhaps more so than usual, I wondered, due to some lake front street closures that were given over to the women’s EuroCup 2025 festivities that were kicking into gear? Only a guess on my part. But what seemed to be not much more than almost congestion caught my attention because of its absence in nearly every other place I’d been to.

Getting around Switzerland, and Norway before that, a sense of calm largely presides with a complete streets vibe. While some traffic lights are scattered around places, on and off larger arterial roads mainly, I noted a near absence of stop signs with a smattering of yield signs here and there. Rules understood and intuited rather than prescribed, from the bottom up, the most vulnerable dictating traffic flow and not cowering in the face of the most lethal, waiting to be given permission to safely proceed along their way.

Imagine that where you live.

Maybe because it’s summer. Maybe it’s because I’m on vacation. I don’t know. But it is quite something to be able to move around from place to place and not get all worked up, angry or anxious about it because the streetcar’s never there when you need it to be or some asshole driver believes, as a matter of fact, that he does own the road.

It turns out, with political will and public buy in, mobility issues don’t need to be a zero-sum, fight to the death exercise in futility.

Who knew?