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Recently I moved to Zürich, Switzerland. Today I bought this travel card because I will occasionally travel from Zürich to Brugg due to job. I want to know which places other than Brugg I can visit with this travel card, but it is being impossible to find some map of Switzerland and all the zones. I only found the zones close to Zürich.

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    Note: You are buying here for 10 zones. You are more or less at the tipping point where buying a GA (GeneralAbo) may be usefull. That gives you unlimited travel in all of Switzerland, including many tourist railways and even most lake boats. The best deal in the country. Sep 3, 2020 at 9:27
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    For reference a GA for the same period without any discounts (student, senior, family, etc.) would have cost 340 Francs (around US$370)
    – Nobody
    Sep 3, 2020 at 11:01
  • Thanks, that is more or less the same I paid for this one. It is quite complex this system for newcomers, there are a lot of options and different possibilities.
    – user171780
    Sep 3, 2020 at 12:36
  • And not to forget, for those cable-cars, etc that are not included in the GA you will often get a 50% discount because it counts like a halbtax (half-fare card)
    – Manziel
    Sep 4, 2020 at 13:45

2 Answers 2

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I don't think there are any "SBB zones".

This is not an SBB zone or ticket. It's a Z-Pass travelcard. Z-Pass is a grouping of several unified fare networks around Zürich's ZVV:

Each of those fare networks/regions cover public transport in their respective regions, usually operated by many different companies using many different means of transport (trains, buses, trams, boats, cable cars...). SBB is just one operator among many.

Your travelcard is valid for parts of both Zürich's ZVV and part of A-Welle which is the region around Olten, Aarau, Baden.

Here is the full area which can be covered by A-Welle-ZVV travelcards:

(click the image for link to the high-resolution PDF)

Note that it does not cover the westernmost part of A-Welle (around Olten), for instance.

However, your specific travelcard only covers a limited number of zones which are listed on the travelcard, which if I'm not mistaken gives roughly this:

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    That's the correct answer. Each region in Switzerland has it's own public transport community which is managed by the local public transport companies. In order to make things easier for local travelers, SBB and other country-wide companies usually align their fares to the local public transport communities. Therefore there is isn't any zone map that covers all of Switzerland. You'll find maps for "Unireso" (Geneva), "Mobilis (Vaud)", etc.... If you take an SBB train and stay within one of those communities, the fare will be the same as if you used a bus, tram or boat. Sep 3, 2020 at 7:45
  • There is a project to create a new, nationwide, zone based tariff system. To make that possible the existing ones need to first more or less move to a state where they all operate according to the same principles. That will take some time. Sep 3, 2020 at 9:16
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I believe the Zonenplan Z-Pass should cover the zones of your pass. (also part of this brochure - page 8 in the PDF, labeled 16/17 on top)

From what I can tell, the zones of interest for you will be in the red and blue sections.

A map that covers all of Switzerland is something I'd appreciate too. Unfortunately, that's being made quite difficult because of the fragmentation due to the various regional transportation companies, as well as SBB and Postauto which operate nationally. It's particularly frustrating because all the data behind it is actually published as OpenData at https://opentransportdata.swiss/, but I've not yet seen someone create an easy to read / navigate map from it.

The closest I know is SBB's Trafimage map with the layer "Fare networks map" / "Tarifverbundkarte" activated. It covers different fare and transportation networks / operators across the whole of Switzerland, but it's rather coarse, and not very easy to read if you don't already know your way around. No way to overlay it over a topographic map for example.

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