LuminousVoid

I’ve recently gotten back from my trip to Switzerland. In short, it’s a fascinating, well run, and incredibly expensive country. My trip took me to Geneva, where I hung out with an international crowd of NGO folks. Then I joined a friend of mine in the Bernese Oberland — Alpine villages, basically. She works for Untours, a travel company that rents out apartments in European countries — the idea is that then the traveller is going off the touristy path. Since she was there on work she offered me a stay at one of the apartments. Lastly, I went and spent a few days in Zurich — not so international as Geneva, but quite wealthy and hip. For me one of the highlights was having a beer at the Cabaret Voltaire, site of the begginings of the Dada movement.

Transit throughout Switzerland was tightly integrated. In general trains had arrivals and departures 4-5 minutes after each other, minimizing layovers. Local bus departures from train stations were timed for a few minutes after major trains arrived. Fares were under two systems: either a conductor came by and checked your ticket, or you were riding a bus or other vehicle where you were responsible for validating the ticket yourself. Its this last system thats the topic of this post.

In Zurich, the latter system was noted with signs warning passengers that they faced a fine of 80 CHF if they they were caught without a ticket — tickets were about 3-4 CHF. Travellers were alerted to the system with a multi-lingual sign: German, French, Italian and English. Here is the German Part of the sign:

So the System is called some sort of “self-control.” Fair enough — you get your ticket on your own and validate it on your own and most of the time you never see a conductor — those come by every once in a while making random inspections. The 4 times I rode that train I saw one inspector.
But the hilarious thing is the logo: Thats an eye! They’re watching you. Its a reminder of the Panopticon — you’ll behave because you don’t know if you’re being watched. Its also wonderfully Orwellian: the system is called “self-control,” right next to the reminder that youre being watched. And this is all in the town that brought us Dada.
To be fair, the English translation they provided was called “Penalty Fare Area.” The idea being that here you faced a penalty fare for not having a valid ticket.