Swiss residents travel 90 minutes every day

Traffic jams, like those building up in front of the Gotthard Tunnel, lasted 19,921 hours in 2012 Keystone

Every resident in Switzerland spends on average one-and-a-half hours in traffic every day, travelling about 36.7 kilometres, the Federal Statistics Office said on Tuesday. This is five per cent more than in 2000.

Every year, Swiss residents travel almost 20,500 kilometres, or halfway around the earth – half of that distance by car. They travel about 6,900 kilometres abroad, according to a new publication entitled Mobility and Transport 2013.

The sum of all the distances covered on road and rail by residents and foreigners in Switzerland was 122 billion passenger-kilometres – the number of trips multiplied by the average length of their trips – in 2011,  an increase of 19 per cent compared with 2000.

Three-quarters of that transport performance in 2011 was accounted for by private motorised transport, 20 per cent by public transport and six per cent by non-motorised transport, i.e. by foot and bicycle.

Swiss residents use their cars to cover two-thirds of the daily distance within the country, about a quarter with public transport and less than a tenth by foot or bike. About 40 per cent of the distance they travel for leisure, while commuting to work accounts for about a quarter.

Every person on average spends 83.4 minutes in traffic every day – 91.7 minutes if you include waiting and transfer times. Traffic jams lasted 19,921 hours in total in 2012.

Economic costs

Switzerland, which has a population of eight million, had about 5.8 million cars registered at the end of 2012, an increase of 71 per cent from 1980.

The highest car density in the country is found in cantons Thurgau, Schwyz, Ticino and Valais, where there are more than 600 cars per 1,000 inhabitants. The lowest densities are observed in the cities Zurich, Basel, Bern, Lucerne and Geneva.

Transport cost CHF16.6 billion ($18 billion) in 2010, with public transport and individual traffic each accounting for about half, the government wrote in the report.

The economic costs of road and rail transport, which includes non-monetary costs such as damage to the environment and noise, totalled CHF81 billion in 2005.