As frequent commuters on public transport, the General Abonnement (GA) makes everyday travel easier for many people. But is it really valid everywhere?

For more than 20 years, SBB has been producing so-called validity area maps in printed form or as PDF files. The desire to display more details on the maps was one of the drivers behind our digital validity area map project. In addition, PDF maps no longer met the requirements for digital information transfer. The most important reason for replacing the previous cards and the associated manual maintenance of content was the fact that the information on areas of validity was already available in other databases, where it was used as the basis for fare calculation and ticket sales, and where a great deal of energy had therefore already been invested in keeping it up to date.

To make the complex subscription validity information from NOVA understandable and usable for everyone, geOps combines data expertise with precise cartography. At the heart of this is our topologically correct public transport network with detailed route lines and stops in various levels of generalisation. Using our specially developed routing engine, we generate precise line routes from the fare edges stored in NOVA, defined by start and end stops. Heuristics are also used to correctly display special cases such as different station numbers, airport buses or cross-border connections. This means that even minor differences, such as in the Jungfrau region or on tourist mountain railways, can be reliably mapped. For particularly complex cases, such as seasonal sports buses or directional restrictions on Lake Constance, the map deliberately uses neutral representations with corresponding notes. The result is an intelligent fusion of data modelling and map design that clearly visualises even complicated fare scenarios. Data integration and publication as vector tiles is fully automated with pipelines, allowing it to be updated several times a year.