I assume they are referring to systems like TPG in Geneva. Basically you buy a pass and when you get on an off a bus or street car there is no checking of payment it is just assumed everyone is "honoring" the agreement to pay. Every once and a while transit cops will board and check that everyone has a pass/has paid somehow and if you get caught not paying it can affect your ability to rent housing etc.

It's incredibly common all over Europe, not just Switzerland. Not only the metros but the trams and even buses often rely on this system where there's no turnstile or barrier, you just walk in.

Not sure it's about being a high trust society or not, there's frequent inspections where they block the doors, and you get a hefty fine if you're caught without a valid ticket. I certainly wouldn't call Prague or Rome or Dublin high trust societies on par with a Swiss city.

In Vienna, where there is not a single automated check for public transport tickets (annual passes are analog plastic cards, one-way tickets are paper), there is consistently a less than ~2% fraud rate. So over 98% of users have a valid ticket at any time.

The City of Vienna has concluded that the cost of building such checkpoints combined with the reduced quality of service and the destruction of the city image could never be worth it. I wonder how other cities justify this without implicitly calling their denizens morally inferior to ours.

Could be https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-ch/experiences/metro-lausan...