Anyone else find Swiss public transport pricing unnecessarily complicated?
We all know it's expensive, and the standard advice is "just get a Halbtax."
But once you travel more frequently, you're stuck choosing between:
– GA Travelcard (simple but CHF 4,000)
– Point-to-point travelcards with their route-specific pricing
– Halbtax Plus (Half Fare Travelcard Plus) with the prepaid reload discounts
– Or sticking with regular Halbtax (Half Fare Travelcard)
Every year I'd end up in Excel, plugging in all my routes and travel frequency to figure out what's actually cheapest.
Now tired of the annual spreadsheet ritual and finally built a proper tool for it:
https://sirindudler.github.io/SBB-Travelcard-Calculator/
It's free to use, no login, no saved data, no ads.
The project is open source, if you have any feedback, ideas or feature requests, please let me know in the comments, via dm's or create an issue/pullrequest in the github repository.
I hope this can help you save money and use public transport in a more cost effective way (sorry SBB).
by ImTheRealSirin
11 comments
Post is up again, feel free to chime in with ideas or requests.
This is fantastic! Thank you so much for this!
Halbtax plus is a no brainer for anyone under 25 because of the reduced prices it’s less expensive than a ZVV Abo but you can ride anywhere even in first class.
I use it only to go to work atm and last year by the end of the year I had so much budget left that I drove 1st class for 3 months. It’s a great deal.
For me, the cheapest option is a 9 o‘clock pass annual subscription ( https://www.zvv.ch/de/abos-und-tickets/abos/9-uhrpass.html) but I‘m not sure how you would include such rather specific subscription options without making the calculator very complex to use
Sadly it’s much more complicated. Halbtax has sometimes a 25% discount (ZVV, Passepartout, ..), somtimes 30% (TNW), sometimes 20% (Tarifverbund Zug). All those transport associations also offer subscription. There are also saver tickets and day passes. Often you can get a Halbtax for a reduced price (like this 152 Fr. offer from Coop: https://www.coop.ch/content/dam/hfc/Clubvorteile/Freizeitangebote/SBB/2024/2024neu/VMA24_0464_FZ_Gutschein_Erwachsene_Halbtax_148x105_d_high.pdf).
TLDR: Ticket prices in Switzerland are way to complicated.
Amazing! Could you add the option of adding a route only 1 per month?
Great site but the GA should calcul month to month and see if it’s better than full year. If you only take trains for 6months, it shows the same price as 12 months.
Thanks for your work! Maybe you could change the duration to be based on weeks instead of months? It would allow to calculate the usage a bit more precisely (holidays, sickness, etc.)
Needs a way to specify that one will deposit their GA for X days. If you go abroad for your holidays, you might just save about 1/12.
This looks like it was made with Claude 😭
super cool idea, something I didn’t know I needed but for sure will be useful in the future, but you should implement buying multiple travelcards, i.e. both a regular half fare and a half fare plus
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