Greenpeace calls for more long-distance trains from Zurich and Geneva

According to the Greenpeace analysis, Geneva only had four direct train connections to major cities compared to 17 in Vienna. Keystone / Martial Trezzini

Greenpeace is calling for more European long-distance trains between major cities. According to an analysis by the environmental organisation, there is potential for 15 more train connections from Zurich – and as many as 25 in Geneva.

Greenpeace is calling on the federal government and the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) to improve rail connections with European cities. European governments should give priority to rail transport over air transport, the environmental organization announced on Tuesday.

Do you want to read our weekly top stories? Subscribe here

To this end, air travel concessions should be abolished and a kerosene tax introduced for airlines. There also needs to be more economy tickets for trains and a simpler booking system, for example via a pan-European booking platform.

Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe analysed a total of 990 routes between 45 major European cities, according to the environmental organisation. Direct trains operated on only 12% of the routes, while direct flights were offered on 69%. According to Greenpeace, a direct day or night train with a journey time of less than 18 hours could be operated on 419 routes (42%) with the current infrastructure.

+ Read more: How to behave on a Swiss train

According to the press release, the cities with the most direct train connections to other major cities were Vienna (17), Munich (15), Berlin (14), Paris and Zurich (13 each). Geneva only had four direct connections. The difference between Zurich and Geneva was particularly with regards to night train connections: There were nine in Zurich and none in Geneva.

Translated from German by DeepL/jdp

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].