My favorite place in the city of Geneva is the main train station of Cornavin, because I can quickly jump on a train and leave that shithole of a city behind me as fast as possible.
To a large degree, and I don’t chew my words, Geneva is a shithole and definitely the place in Switzerland that I abhor the most. Maybe the only one, really, because the rest of the country is quite lovely. It’s the only city in Switzerland I don’t recommend to foreigners to visit; actually I literally tell them to avoid it at all costs.
But, as fate would have it, I had to go to Geneva recently for work, and thankfully the project and the team I dealt with were wonderful, because the city itself is an unlivable mess of idiotic proportions. I also got to visit plenty of old friends of mine in the area, so that was lovely too.
The government of Geneva has tried (and succeeded) for the past 30 years (at least) to make Geneva a worse place to live, go shopping, travel, stay, and move around. It is absolutely fucking impossible to like this place.
(And don’t tell me that the problem is the socialist government; Zürich has also a socialist government and is an absolutely fantastic place to live in general.)
The origin story of such a mess has some interesting twists. In the 1960s (this was a story relayed to me by old Genevois who lived that era), Geneva made the conscious decision to privilege cars over public transport. This was notably different to other cities in the country, like Zürich, where public transportation was privileged (or, at the very least, not degraded to second-class citizen).
I moved to Geneva from Buenos Aires in 1991, and at the time the city was an agreeable place to live, even if the amount of cars was quite a problem already. The quality of public transportation was reasonably good (although slow as hell), although after traveling a bit around the country I realized that other cities had it much better.
One of the things I remember that shocked me about Geneva and its relationship with public transportation was this: there was a massive parking next to the offices of the TPG (I don’t remember if it was at Bachet-de-Pesay or Carouge). That meant a simple thing: many (if not most) of those in charge of public transport in Geneva… did not use public transport. Think about that.
(Yes, I understand that bus and tram drivers need to go back home easily, particularly when they finish their shifts at 01:00 in the morning. I’m talking about all the other people, particularly those designing the system for others to use.)
Fast-forward to 1994, and Geneva decided that it needed more tramways. Thus started the nightmare for the inhabitants of the city, whereby for the following years streets became a construction site of gargantuan proportions.
But even worse than the degradation of the quality of life for the Genevois was the philosophy behind this initiative: quite literally, one of the founding philosophies of the transport system in Geneva consists in a so-called “cohabitation” (allow me to laugh a little before continuing) between buses and trams and cars and bikes.
Let us be very clear: there is no possible “cohabitation” between cars and anything else. Cars have taken Geneva hostage, public transportation is a joke (really? You call a rate of one bus per hour a “reasonable service”?) and entire swathes of the city unaccessible to pedestrians or even bikes, with infrastructure only dedicated and usable to cars, cars, and more cars.
What one can find in the streets of Geneva is nothing else but noise, unruly and stressed drivers yelling at each other, literal buses and trams stopped in between rows of cars at rush hour, and an overly unpleasant and pervasive smog that is slowly making everyone angry, ill, or both at the same time.
This tramway fever has not stopped, and I had the bad idea of finding an apartment (to stay at for the duration of the project) in the neighborhood of Grand-Saconnex (yes, next to the Petit-Saconnex I talked about previously), a neighborhood about to become the next victim of this flawed “modernization” project. Apparently in a few years time there will be yet another tram line going through that place. Hopefully.
The Grand-Saconnex also hosts a novelty I discovered during my stay: a literal tunnel that injects traffic from the vicinity of Ferney-Voltaire right into the neighborhood of the international organizations. Of course! Instead of reducing the numbers of cars in the city, let’s make a tunnel so that more cars can enter the city. That’s exactly what you need.
The morons in charge of traffic in Geneva have long ago decided that buses had to travel at 20 km/h, while cars can rush inside a tunnel towards downtown at 60. The same bus trip, from the Grand-Saconnex to Plainpalais, used to take me 30 minutes in 1995 (to go from home to university), but it took me one hour to complete in November 2025.
Slow clap.
In the meantime, Buenos Aires created this thing called Metrobus, and I was astonished to realize that what used to be a one-hour trip back in the 1980s can now be completed in half an hour. The trick? Separate lanes, preferred traffic lights, and faster speed limits.
So here’s my recommendation. If you have never visited Switzerland, avoid Geneva. Actually, you know what, avoid Geneva Airport altogether as well. It is shit and believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Just land in Zürich Airport and you’ll thank me later. (I don’t have a recommendation to the Genevois reading this other than moving out of the city.)