Switzerland has a dense and reliable network.
Transport – Facts and Figures
- Switzerland has a road network around 73,000km long, 5,200km of railway lines, a 21,500km public transport network and 1,000km of mountain railways. Swiss airline flight routes cover 551,700km.
- The Swiss travel more by train than any other nation in the world, clocking up an average of 2,400 km per person every year within Switzerland.
- At 3,454m above sea level, the Jungfraujoch railway station is the highest in Europe.
- Switzerland has around 1,800 tunnels and 28,000 public transport stops.
- The country's greatest engineering feat is the 57km-long Gotthard base tunnel – the longest rail tunnel in the world – which opened in 2016. Every day, 325 trains travel through the Gotthard tunnel at speeds of up to 250km/h.
- Switzerland has three international airports (Zurich, Geneva and Basel), 11 regional airports, 49 airfields and 24 heliports.
- The country's six biggest airports handle almost 58 million passengers per year.
- In 2018, some 6.1 million motor vehicles were registered in Switzerland, of which 6 million were cars.
- Switzerland’s sea-going (merchant) fleet is based in Basel.
- With 15 vessels, the Lake Lucerne Navigation Company has Europe’s largest fleet of self-propelled ships operating on inland waterways.
- With 2,028 trains passing through every day, the railway line between Zurich main railway station and Zurich Langstrasse is the busiest in the country.
- Between 1980 and 2018, the volume of goods freighted by rail and road across the Swiss Alps more than doubled to 39 million tonnes.
- The Vitznau-Rigi line, which opened in 1871, is the oldest mountain railway in Europe.
- The No. 10 route, operated by Baselland Transport (BLT), is the longest tram line in Europe. Running from Dornach to Rodersdorf, it covers 25km, and takes in three cantons (Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt, Solothurn) and two countries (Switzerland and France).
- The automated M2 line of the Lausanne Métro climbs 338 metres, with inclines as steep as 12% in some places. This is a world-first for rubber-tyred underground trains.