EPIC Guide

Transportation

Switzerland generally has excellent public transport in the form of trains and buses, meaning you do not need a car. However, you may want to get a bike depending on where you live, and may still want to own or rent a car if you frequently need to go to areas poorly served by public transport.

While taxis and apps such as Uber exist, they are far more expensive than public transport, easily by an order of magnitude. Due to this, in Switzerland taxis are not a common means of transportation.

Public transport

Public transport in Switzerland is managed by SBB/CFF/FFS at the federal level, and by public agencies in each town or canton.

You should always have a valid ticket, even though you do not need one to enter buses or trains, as you can to be controlled and will pay a large fine if you have no ticket. For trains, you buy a ticket for a trip, not for a train, with the exception of “super saver” tickets. That is, you might buy a ticket “from Lausanne to Zurich”, and you can then take any train that does this trip on the day the ticket is valid, unless your ticket also specifies a “via” station which is an additional constraint for multi-part trips.

EPFL provides PhD students with a free “half-fare” card, which is good because the full fare is really more of a “tourist tax”. Get yours as soon as possible; more information here.

In general, the easiest option to buy a ticket is to get the SBB app and use its “EasyRide” feature: swipe to check in, swipe to check out, and at the end of the day the app computes the cheapest ticket corresponding to your route and bills you. (The computation is retroactive, thus for instance two trips in the same day might be “combined” into one trip using a ticket with a longer validity period that ends up being cheaper overall)

If you use the bus/metro around Lausanne often, get a travel pass, which EPFL subsidizes; see here.

If you are under 25, you may be interested in the SBB seven25 Travelcard, which allows people under 25 to enjoy unlimited travel anywhere in Switzerland from 7pm to 5am for only 390 CHF/year.

If you know which exact train you will get in advance, such as when going to the airport on vacation, the SBB website sells “super saver” tickets that are considerably cheaper but need to be bought in advance and only work for one specific trip at one specific time. There is also a saver day pass.

Your “commune” (city) also likely sells a few daily passes per day at reduced rates, see their website, e.g., this one for Écublens.

If you’re going skiing, the “magic pass” includes some transport discounts.

Bike

If you need a bike, Point Vélo sells new and second-hand bikes. They also perform repairs and teach free mechanics courses.

PubliBike is a bike sharing service that works at EPFL and generally around the area.

There is plenty of bike parking around EPFL.

Car

If you want to come to EPFL by car, parking rules can be found here.

You have access to the car sharing service Mobility through EPFL, with discounts. See here.

You can also get special discounts with Europcar with a Camipro; see here.

Exchanging a foreign driver’s license

Detailed information about exchanging a foreign driver’s license for a Swiss one is available on the Canton of Vaud website. Key points:

• You have 12 months from the date of your arrival in Switzerland to exchange your license.
• Depending on the country that issued your license, you may have no additional testing requirements (e.g. for EU countries), only the theoretical test, or both the theoretical and the practical driving test.
  • USA is on the “only theoretical” list—but this is only because a standard US license (or to be precise, standard licenses from most US states) lets you drive some kinds of light trucks that are not covered by a standard Swiss license. If you are willing to give up that extra privilege, you do not have any testing requirements. This information is not available on the official website but was provided verbally by a staff member so you just have to fill out the form and trust the process. Shardul can confirm through personal experience that this worked for a WA driver’s license in 2023.
• A section of the form is to be filled out by an optician after an eye exam. You can have it done at many eyeglasses shops. It has a standard price (15 CHF in 2023) and takes just a few minutes.

You may be used to ridiculously long wait times for in-person visits to the motor vehicles office in your home country. Switzerland, of course, is not like that. When Shardul visited the Lausanne office on a weekday morning in 2023, he had to wait for barely ten minutes, and was out the door in another ten.

Exchanging your foreign license typically means that you surrender your old license and get a new Swiss one. However, the authorities will only take your old license if they have an agreement with the issuing country or some other means to actually cancel it. Absent that, there is no point, so you get to keep it. This is true at least for US licenses.

Please let us know if you exchanged your license from another country and have additional information from the experience!