Why Switzerland Is Insanely Well Designed 

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As a Swiss, this video is quite well researched. But I have some small details: 0:16 - The tunnel is designed for 250km/h and they might implement it in the far future, but it has always operated at 200km/h. There is currently no track in Switzerland running faster than 200km/h. 3:14 - The reactor Mühleberg has been shut off in 2019 and is right now slowly beeing disassembled. Switzerland has also decided to abandon Nuclear Energy generation like Germany but they will keep them running until the end of the contract which does make sense economically.

Another major underrated upside of Switzerland imo is also that we dont have a 2 party (government vs opposition) system in politics and that our political parties basically have a gentleman's agreement over who to vote into the executive (which gets elected by parliament and consists of 7 equal members rather than one president)

I’m not Swiss but I live in Switzerland and I’m in awe of how amazing of a country I live in every day

Whenever I go on vacation abroad and come home to Switzerland, I simply realize how much just makes sense in our system. A really beautiful country to live in

Another factor for the good infrastructure is the willingness to invest for returns in decades, rather than for the next quarter or an election term. Another factor is probably the permanent coalition government, which means you need 60% political support for more for most projects. The referendum system ensures boondoggle/pork belly projects have no chance.

Being neutral since 1815 is a great way to built up infrastructure and grow your economy to help bring in more tourism

Quick note: The nuclear powerplant in Mühleberg was already shutdown in 2019. Otherwise great video!

i lived in switzerland for just 4 months, and even though im from denmark (also with great infrastructure), i was amazed by especially trains in switzerland - so modern and efficient. one time i was using the train, and then it stopped for 30 minutes without anyone announcing why, and soon after the staff walked through the train with "giftcards" to all passengers as a way of apologising for the delay. never seen anything like it before!

A few years ago I went to the Italian Switzerland, a city called Lugano. Of all the cities that I have visited, this one was the closest to an Utopia.

We don't only have referendums, we also have initiatives! That is the real achievement 😎

I'm a German and I lived in Switzerland for 2.5 years. The traffic infrastructure is really great. I still struggle to use the adjective "efficient" with Switzerland, because of the overbearing, error prone beaurocracy. It's a nice country to live in, but don't expect things to be easy as soon as you have a piece of paper in hand (and yes, you will use a lot of paper)

Wow, Switzerland sure knows how to do things well By the way, they are geniuses when combining methods such as nuclear power plants and dams to avoid consuming oil, it's a good move knowing how unstable its price is

I live in switzerland and this country amazed me everyday. Thanks switzerland for being my second home.

California: noooo we can't tunnel through mountains that's too expensive :( Switzerland: hold my tunnel-boring machine

Switzerland is such a cool country. Many lessons to be learned from them and a true example to follow.

every day I get more and more proud of my country, I'm so lucky to be born here

No disrespect for CH or to you, but "CH has super efficient hydro plants compared to the European average" could just as well have been "CH has all the mountains, compared to the European average". :)

I'm Norwegian and approve this message: The Swiss are masters of the mountains! ✋🏻😌

I'm swiss and i think we do still have many things we can improve such as city planning to be better for bicycles, give people more benefits if they do not own a car, do not use as much electricity and other resources. The military for example needs reorganization in that area as well. However overall i am really happy to live here. The semi direct democracy is the closest one can have at the moment as a "true" democracy imo. Living costs are high, but so are wages. You have tons of ways to change/educate yourself further in professional life. We have an apprenticeship system where you do not have to go to college/university at all to earn a good living. Someone in my family made an IT apprenticeship back in the day and some further education, but no bachelor or masters degree and they earn about 8k a month. This is way more effective as tons of job require more practical knowledge and you can always add degrees later on. I did the purely academic route (go to uni now) and i work in my respective field. Every path is possible. If you loose your job, you will get paid 80% of your former pay for 2 years if you continue to send out applications. They still have possibilities to improve this as many swiss that used this service say they felt not treated optimally, but it's on good tracks

The video was a bit chaotic but I learned a lot about Switzerland. Good country I wish the best for them.

Proudly Swiss, I will share this video with my friends in the world.

I even had the best gas station experience in Switzerland back when I had to use the motorway from Southern Germany to the Cotê d'Azur 😂 You have to pay + get a coupon when you want to use the toilet & get a discount at the gas station store BUT while I was looking up to the coffee prices, almost everyone who got out of the toilet barrier just gave me their coupons as well so at the end the coffee was free for me. 😎😂

Wind power has a very low uptake in Switzerland, mainly because people don't want to see them. Possibly new forms with vertical blades may help.

Public transport here in Switzerland is indeed so good that I with my 31 years have neither a driver's license nor a car and I never faced issues because of that and I moved 4 times already.

I just want to give you a complimet for the sheer quality of your video’s. The videoclips are perfectly matched to your speech. Your titles manage to catch my attention every time.

Proud to be a swiss 🇨🇭

They: Where are you coming from? Me: Sweden They: I have been there, Swiss people are really nice Me: 🤦‍♂️

I’ve always had a strange passion for geography which your high quality videos manages to please

l mean they had no war for like 200 years? That's enough time to perfectly design a country :D

The new Gotthard rail tunnel is too new to have had explosives in it. The Gotthard road tunnel probably did though.

Love the theme of vids OBF! You cast another light on many projects/countries and change the way i think about things! Greetings from the Netherlands!

Anyone else finds it sometimes weird, when a RU-vid video pops up and its about ur small country:D?

This video proofs that despite what is actually happening in switzerland, the countries myths and cliches lives on forever

There are a few points in this video that are quite misleading: 1. Nuclear Power Plants are set to shut down. Definitely not for "no reason", as we all know about Fukushima and Tshernobyl. It's rather a matter of risk management, do you want to take it or not? Moreover there's the (currently) unsolved issue of nuclear waste. 2. Hydropower Plants as depicted here are hardly an energy source but rather an energy storage. They don't get magically filled with water and then provide clean energy. Are renewables used to pump the water uphill? -> renewable energy. Is fossil energy used to do it? -> fossil energy. Moreover you need the geographic potential to implement these plants. Thus it is of course great that Switzerland uses its potential, but it's not a state of the art example for flatter nations. 3. The education you mentioned has got nothing to do with children under the age of 15, as though shown in the video. It's a way of learning professions that do not require an university degree. Compared to the US, where nearly every professional passed high school and went to college afterwards, the largest part of the swiss doesn't attend high school but learns their profession in a work and education combining programm called "duale Ausbildung" (dual apprenticeship). This is a very succesful, hands on concept which also exists in Germany (not as widespread though). Eventually you would only go to college or university for subjects as engineering, science or social studies.

Usually small countries tend to build really well since they've got very limited land and they think so much before building something

Whenever I leave Switzerland I instantly realize how nice it is to have our infrastructure and clean toilets everywhere.

Imagine if the US worked even with 1% of the energy the Swiss had with the mountain technology involving energy and transportation. The Appalachian region would boom.

Very impressive for a mountainous land locked country which makes it naturally difficult to develop but the Swiss determination shows anything is possible!

To be fair, shining the EU average nuclear dependence of 11% on France was a pretty bad placement, kinda leads people to thinking France isn't a huge nuclear user when it makes up about half their electricity

That's why I love Switzerland

For curious ppl the mostly shown towns in this video are Luzern, Bern and Zürich The big trainstation shown is in Luzern and the beautiful bridge is in Bern 😊🇨🇭

Thank you for spending the time to create and share this content 🙏🏾 some countries do some things better, why not pull from the experience of another if/when there’s something to learn/etc from 💙🇺🇸

Switzerland's secret to green energy production/reliance: Step 1: Find a lake wedged between mountains (preferably with only 1 downstream exit point) Step 2: Build a wall (with turbines inside) at downstream end of lake and let gravity do the rest Step 3: Connect said wall to national power grid

Switzerland shows excellent democracy, ethical life, employment, scenic nature, sectoral developments, educations, and nobel laurates. Great............always.........

Romania (my former home country) can be considered a champion when it comes to green energy! Compared to Germany, Romania decided to keep the Cernavodă nuclear power plant alive and running and there are pretty many water power plants in this country! The energy mix of Switzerland reminds me so much of that of Romania!

Swiss here. 3:14 Mühleberg is out of service since 2019 (there are still 4 reactors because Beznau has 2) 3:22 the government decided in 2011 that Switzerland will opt out of nuclear energy (they started with Mühleberg --> closed in 2019). Although there are debates now about stopping the plan of a controlled shut down (mostly from right wing parties).

Thanks for reviewing my country's infrastructure. We're proud of it.

Shoutout all my swiss folk, lets be grateful every day. Here in zurich people forget way too easily how privileged we are.

3:42 i thought he was gonna start talking about the secret Swiss military bases inside mountains.

7:05 Small correction. The tunnel in the beginning of the video (and the one in the picture) is the Gotthard Basetunnel and was finished in 2016 so it did never have any explosives. The tunnel you mean is the Gotthard tunnel. This one is the older of the the 2, they are both for the same route, but the Gotthard tunnel was built more than 100 years ago where they didn't have the equipment to build such a long tunnel like the Basetunnel. The reason there are 2 is because the 1st one built in the 1800s was already the longest in the world back then with 15 kilometers, but the trains have to take a long route up the mountain and back down on the other side to get to it. For the new tunnel they don't have to go uphill but instead blast towards it, stay in the dark for 20 minutes at 200kph max. speed and blast further to the next station saving about 30 - 60 minutes.

That plug was so smooth. I literally did not know that I was watching an ad until it was over.

Goes to show that with smart planning, nature and progress can coexist.

Now I'm jealous of people who live in Switzerland. They're so lucky to have been born there

I have to make something clear, Germany is not shutting nulcear powerplants down for no reason, because there are a few: First of all, the money to energy ratio of nuclear powerplants isn't that good and the main factor is ofcourse the risk of one missfunctioning and exploding/poisioning the area. (Just wanted to make that clear, but the rest of the video is really great.)

thanks for this video ,I am a Swiss-Canadian growing up in Switzerland and am extremely proud of both countries

The footage is stunning. Maybe one day I’ll get to see it myself but I’m blessed to be around the world in bed seeing this beautiful country. Those mountains 🏔😱

11% of its citizens live abroad. The local population consists sort of nearly 30% migrants with a much higher birth rates than the original ethnic Swiss. Public schools were very conservative in the past but have come up to world standards. Google and many more have set up camp in Zurich to select talents from their very own "MIT" called ETH, a similar tertiary institution having endless courses in English and rivaling the very best global universities sometimes reaching rank 6 of global lists. Sadly, traffic jams are ever present but the rail options are heavy subsidized with affordable bike rentals on many stations. With over 5000km of dedicated scenic bike tracks summer season is full of endless fun. A medical system that en-corrugates better self responsibility with a choice of excess and direct access to specialists. A single common sense accident insurance for all workers that runs on a low 5.5% overhead rounds up the overall efficiency of the country.

Can you do one on the worst designes european country aswell?

Best AD I've seen in a while, genius

So proud to be Swiss. thanks for the awesome video mate

Must be nice to live in a safe, efficient, well governed society with a high quality of infrastructure, education, healthcare and environment. It’s especially envious when the society that you live in is moving backward…..America needs to get its act together

The swiss are amazingly creative. I would have to consider creative and adaptability is some of the best assets for a nation to have to function.

Thanks for the great video about my country, its nice to see how others see switzerland. if you are living here, you kinda forget how good everything is, and yeah its expensiv but it works, is clean and reliable.

I love your Videos and Im so happy u did somethimg about switzerland Greetings🇨🇭

There is a big difference between energy and electricity. The electricity generation is almost fully carbon dioxide free, as almost 100% of it comes from hydroelectric and nuclear power plants. There was a fuel oil fired thermal power plant in the canton of Wallis, but it has been shut down in the 90s. Not to mention the many waste incirenation plants there are in Switzerland. They generate electricity (about 2% of the total consumption) and heat for local houses. There are currently no fossil fuel fired power stations operating in the country.

There are two more aspects to our semi-direct democracy. generally pure direct democracy for a modern nation isn't feasible. we already vote ~4x a year on some 4+ major issues (trade deals, migration laws, energy projects, covid laws and such) if everything was done via direct democracy we'd be doing nothing but vote all day. so generally we leave the day to day politics to politicians. there are however a few important mechanisms. first: Switzerland is extremely federalized, we have 26 Kantons that can decides most things for themselves. second: one can gather signatures to trigger referendums to either force a law or action politicians didn't want. or prevent one they did. basically the citizens always get to veto the politicians. this has many obvious great sides but it also means Organisations like the EU hate dealing with us since our politicians cant really promise things the way pure representatives can, also the process is fairly slow and thus not suited for something like proactive geopolitics games (imho a good thing). I would like to add that we should stick to our neutrality now more than ever. I hate to see our neutral position drift to someone like Erdogan and frankly the credibility of our many institutions from the red cross, to many aid and development organizations, or diplomatic services depend on it. also we already carry sanctions if the majority of the UN and the security council do. why we should automatically carry one decided by brussels and Washington is beyond me and I think our country can do a much greater service to peace and stability in the world by (until now anyway) being able to send observers to conflicts that everyone trusts as neutral (and allows to say send doctors to their prisoners of war), providing a platform for conflict parties to meet that isn't controlled by nato/Russia/China or even being able to exchange messages between say north Korea and the US at the most hostile of times.

hey. great video and almost everything is rigth. well researched. i love my country 🇨🇭🇨🇭

The world should look at us more for inspiration. Halfdirect Democracy, sharing responsibilities, immigration and integration as a culture, almost zero crime, extremely low unemployment, a generally wealthy population, a functional social welfare system, free education. We are not perfect and there are big unsolved problems like how expensive it can be to have children and the sometimes unmaintainable high cost of living. But all in all, it works for most. It's like living a premium service.

It still takes surprisingly long to get from A to B in Switzerland due to the winding road. But on the bright side, you get stunning views

Great video as always! You should do a video of how Estonia became a digital society.

Quality and investment security. The two exports of Switzerland. Powered by the one resource we have. Well educated people

I wrote a book on Switzerland and you did way better than I did! Good job.

This made me think of a song from my country: Moj je život Švicarska - skoro pa savršen. (Translation: My life is Switzerland - almost perfect.)

Proud to be Swiss🇨🇭❤️

I live in Switzerland 20 years only I can say is thank you million times what I great country ❤️🔥

Fun fact, the Gotthard tunnel must be cooled down because the heat from the Earth core (due to it being so deep underground) would keep it at 42C, or 110F. Also, there's 4G connectivity along the whole 20 min of tunnel.

Their railways are nationalised. Maybe the UK should do the same

my recommended section gave me this when it had 106 views. thank you youtube

Hydropower doesn't supply 31% of energy consumption, but production. Big difference

When he’s talking about energy and its figures he’s covering only electric power, not the overall energy consumption!

I love your videos, just one correction. The longest railway tunnel (Gotthard-Basis Tunnel or GBT) was built well after we decided to unrig our infrastructure of explosives ( did we? ;-) thus was never rigged itself. Keep up the good work!

Well done to whoever designed Switzerland

I think the dense railway network isn’t just despite of, but rather because of the mountains. Railways always are wider spread in Mountainous countries due to their space efficiency.

It's funny to see Belgium as 4th as fourth in countries with densest road network when Belgium is known for it's bad roads 🤣🤣

My question on energy production is always “how much of *consumed* energy does ‘X’ handle” since in denmark we might produce a lot of wind power(example number 50%) but that doesn’t de facto mean it is 50%(example) of consumed

2017 railway performance: Germany on 4th place is just unpossible or they manipulated the data

I soon hope to leave my country and be able to become a Swiss citizen, my country has a lot to learn with this country.

That highway density list you showed near the beginning is really mostly a smallest / richest / most densely populated countries list

The Mühleberg nuclear power plant was shut off in december 2019. And Switzerland doesn’t plan to keep producing more nuclear power at the moment.

2:35 not the best choice for an electricity symbol

I am moving to🇨🇭from Germany in just one month , there is a lot of useful ℹ️ in this video, thx 🙏🏼

Switzerland is so beautiful.

Nice video.

i don't agree. 2/3 of electricity is made with water. But in the total Energy-mix the Swiss average consumes, we get around 60% of our energy from fossil fuels. By heating water, driving cars, heating apartments or building new infrastructure. Sorry for my bad english.

Man thats one of the smoothest ad transition i have ever seen

Thanks from a Swiss for this clip. Sometimes people ask you where you would like to be. My answer is: I'm already here.

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Ah yes, the Swiss. In many ways, the mountain dutch

Props to the designer of Switzerland