The bike compartments through the Lötschberg tunnel are regularly overcrowded, the situation is similar in Graubünden and the ride to Ticino with a bike as self-loading luggage has become an almost unsolvable gauntlet. The capacity bottlenecks at SBB have reached unacceptable levels at times this year and have brought the car back into play as a relevant alternative. A solution to the situation is not in sight, as SBB itself does not see any possible solutions. "We can't increase the number of bike spaces on the trains," Ducrot told Velojournal. He even sees no chance of eliminating the bottlenecks; maximizing the number of seats has priority.

From the point of view of cyclists, Ducrot's statement on the multifunctional compartments used in double-decker trains is also less than pleasing. "Older people in particular complain about the poorer seating comfort of the folding seats." Such a statement suggests that SBB gives greater weight to the complaints of some pensioners who are spoiled for comfort than the space requirements of cyclists. To this day, briefcases and beauty cases seem to be SBB's preferred items of luggage, while cyclists are best taken along without their bikes.

SBB's proposals for alleviating the capacity problem are more superficial than efficient: the range of rental and hire bikes is to be expanded and leisure traffic is to be increasingly handled by regional trains. Mountain bikers will hardly ever make use of rental offers because rental bikes are too cheap and owning a bike is too expensive to leave it in the cellar. Rental offers are and will remain a non-issue in mountain biking, while at the same time mountain bikers make up a large proportion of self-bikers. And the fact that leisure traffic should switch to regional trains is hardly ever a reality - the loss of time is too great and the transfer maneuvers too complicated.

Ducrot is pessimistic about the future of self-loading bikes: "Not much will change in terms of infrastructure." The situation is unlikely to improve until 2020 at the earliest, when new trains could improve the service.

The full interview can be read on the Velojournal website.
www.velojournal.ch/aktuelle-ausgabe/ausgabe-5-2009/velo-und-bahn-wohin.html