[saiya-jin]

I live in such smallish city (Geneva, 500k folks in central part). Yes its nice to get to Paris in say 3.5h by direct TGV, faster than plane if you count center-center, although more expensive.

Well, and that's about it. I don't care for Paris that much, there are about thousand other places I prefer visiting. Its not that exotic to Europeans compared to Americans, and Paris' painful and obvious drawbacks (its a mega tourist trap, rampant crime, french are often rude if you don't speak perfect parisian french etc.) remove a lot of its allure.

Currently we travel to nearby islands with small kids (balearic, canarias, sardinia, corsica, greek ones etc.). We travel home which is 1500km away (1:30 flight to +-nearby airport, or 15h+ multi-train galore), we travel exotic (0 options for trains).

Heck, being Swiss, we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive even for us since we don't commute by them to work every day, and Geneva being border town literally at the edge of confederation surrounded by France has little use of rails for us. France has pretty bad rail situation in comparison - our usual way to Chamonix takes 45mins by car, and 2+h by train. Family of 4 with 2 tiny kids? Never, ever, with all necessary luggage, even for free.

You can't have cheap good reliable railway network even in dense Europe, unless its heavily subsidized. Its a pipe dream, nice one but unless they tax flights into oblivion they will remain as easier and cheaper option for most. Options will be different for rural living and different family settings obviously.

[hiq]

> we use practically 0 Swiss trains. They are super expensive

I guess you know that, but if you live in Switzerland you're supposed to have the discount card ("demi-tarif") which makes the train way more affordable. It's still not cheap, especially if you compare with a car trip not taking the price of the car and maintenance into account (which is reasonable if you need the car for other reasons anyway). But in my case at least, without kids, it's really worth being able to use my time to do something productive rather than driving.

Also curious about the Chamonix example: I've never lived in Geneva, but aren't there a ton of other options in Switzerland that are way more connected than the French side? Why choose this example over Swiss resorts?

[saiya-jin]

Any mountain in Switzerland is minimum +1 hour compared to France, when looking for comparable awesomeness as that Chamonix for example, that would mean Zermatt, 3.5h. Or Grindelwald, 2.5h. Why do that to yourself for weekends?

Besides there are pretty places much closer in France. France is also much cheaper, food better. Not that many reasons to chose otherwise for short weekend trips.

Car is unfortunately a must for family of us, any alternative is world of pain and limitation, even ignoring the prices of trains (just like any other family we know). You need so much equipment for whole family and small kids especially, that using trains means we wouldn't be traveling at all. People we know that don't own the car rent it out every weekend they need and waste tons of time and energy on chasing lower prices. Even with demi-tarif/halb-tax (which makes you waste 200 CHF/USD per head per year for no services), the prices of Swiss trains are properly bad. It still is marginally cheaper to take one's own car even if driving alone, and often much faster.

Frequent experience from times before when I was using Swiss trains for commute/traveling around - you end up standing for quite long amount of time during normal times, many people travel everywhere. Not nice if you are ie tired after long hike/skitour. With small kids, just a horrible experience.

All this ignoring current covid crisis and the fact that in trains here you are stuck in long narrow tube with 100 other people, few coughing, few sneezing, few not wearing masks on nose, or at all because they hold that can of beer for 2 hours to have an excuse, kids not wearing anything at all etc.

[zahllos]

Also if you do commute to work every day by train, it probably makes sense to buy a GA (a yearly ticket that gives you unlimited travel on all swiss public transport for that year) for 3800chf. Almost anyone I know commuting some distance does this.

Of course if you work in Geneva that's a different matter. There aren't any trains in Geneva as it just isn't big enough, but unireso's tram network is widely used.

This is particularly timely because right now there's a hole in the line between Lausanne and Geneva. Consequently you can't currently take a train either way and have to use a replacement bus. The autoroute is seeing stupid levels of traffic right now as a result as all the people who usually take the train get in cars instead.

Chamonix is almost certainly slower by train unless there are traffic issues. This is also likely true of the Swiss resorts too because personal motorised transport avoids the inconveniences of waiting and changing that trains inevitably have. But the article is about eliminating short haul flights in Europe, not this.

[frobozz]

3800chf is an amazing price for that.

By contrast, that's roughly the same price as an annual ticket between central London and a town about 30 miles away.

[sideshowb]

Chamonix is just an outlier in many ways though. Overly touristic but fantastic off piste and mountaineering. Rail networks always have some poor journeys and this is definitely one of them, in student days I remember once having to bivi by one of the stations and wait for tomorrow's train