Transport Atlas of Switzerland

Part of the results of COST 340, a recent internationally funded project, is a series of images and maps representing the development of transport in Switzerland since 1950.

It can be argued that the central objective of Swiss transport policy in the last 150 years has been to improve accessibility, which links investment, the change in land use and economic growth with the systematic increase in market sizes of companies and activity spaces of people.

The level of accessibility is the result of the log sum term of a simple destination choice model (see Williams, 1974), which is based on the resident population and the travel times between the municipalities. These are calculated seperately for private and public transport. The values account for the effects caused by the population in the areas surrounding Switzerland (see Fröhlich and Axhausen, 2004).

The size of the country seems to have shrunk, if improved speeds and decreased travel times are taken into consideration. This changing shape has been traced by constructing time-scaled maps, where distances have to be read as travel time and not as distances (see Carosio, Dolci and Scherer, 2005).