If you want to buy a ticket with the Swiss train service (SBB), you´d better already know the Swiss map and SBB’s tariff regulations in great detail. Otherwise you might unwittingly become a fare dodger.

Imagine you arrive at Zürich Airport without local knowledge, and want to visit someone in Uster (the suburb in which I happen to live):

From “Zürich Airport” to “Uster” the vending machine will present you with the following options:

How to chose the correct “via”? From a logical perspective anyone could assume “the less zones the cheaper” so I´ll best go “via Wallisellen” if I´m not in a rush. While that´s not always true, in this specific case it is (cheaper but slower…).

If you chose “via Wallisellen” the last thing to do is pay:

You, the latest SBB-customer (aka fare dodger), now have a ticket “Zürich Airport” to “Uster” “via Wallisellen”. You copy these details, 1:1, into the prepared SBB-Mobile-App to find a corresponding connection:

All listed connections must be “via Wallisellen”, since that´s what you entered, right?

you just chose the next available one, leaving 15h32:

If you pay detailed attention you´ll be surprised: Change in Oerlikon?! Where is Wallisellen? So you go into the details and find the details as per below: Wallisellen does appear, so this connection actually takes us “via Wallisellen”.

Still weary that something might be wrong you check all(!) other connections. They´re all the same – it´s always via Oerlikon (and also via Wallisellen). So you assume all is good…

If you´re not checked you´ll never know. However, if you are checked, you have to pay CHF 100 fine as a “fare dodger”. Reason: Oerlikon is already in Zürich’s “110”-Zone, the one we wanted to circumvent. The catch is that the vending machines and the SBB-Mobile-App handle connections differently. The vending machine looks at used zones in theoretically possible connetions. The SBB-App looks for “fastest connections”, where “passing through” counts as “via”.

If you want buy the proper ticket, you´ll have to know which connection passes through which zones. Something that is nearly impossible, especially for tourists.