Comment by YmiYugy

In a per capita sense of course. But it does pose an interesting question. To what degree does the quality of rail scale with absolute investments vs per capita investments. On the face of it rail is almost entirely fixed cost. The capital investment for tracks, trains and the operating cost for staff and energy are fixed to matter how many or few people the trains are serving. The crux is that for a given cost the quality scales inversely with the population and covered area. Transplant the Swiss rail expenses to Japan and it would make for a pitiful experience. Stretching over an area 9x larger and having to serve 12x more people, simply requires a lot more rolling stock, track and personell to offer a similar level of experience. In particular when talking about rural rail service it's most apt to compare areas of similar size and population and in this local sense Switzerland is not just richer per capita but absolutely.