Euro Buses

I have already made a couple of posts already (here and here) about my recent international travels, but I wanted to share some photos specifically about my experiences riding the bus in Europe.

Here are some photos and commentary.

The first bus to ride in travels was the airport bus:

It had a fascinating dash–no gear shift stick, but rather operated by buttons (drive, park, reverse).

The first public bus we rode was in Vienna:

This suburban line has 15 minute frequencies on weekdays, which matches the highest frequency bus route in my hometown.

We bought an ulimited 7-day pass through an iOS app.

Buying the pass was moderately easy in English, but you had to go through the onerous process of creating an account..

We mostly rode the streetcar in Vienna, which had nice open-gangways that made it easiser to find a seat:

But we did ride a public mini-bus through the city center and got an incredible tourism experience.

The route took us past Stephansplatz in the center of the city:

Buses and streetcars were prevalent in the next city that we visited (Graz, Austria), but our hotel was so centrally located that we opted for walking everywhere:

We did note a very elaborate bus stop installation with greenery (on a street without much greenery):

We visited Ljubljana next, but stayed so briefly that we only rode a private (packed) Flixbus to Lake Bled of which I have no photos.

And after Ljubljana we visited Zagreb where we only rode the streetcar aa couple of times (and got no photos of the experience!).

I did however get photos of how congested the sidewalks were:

Payments in Zagreb was moderately difficult–I downloaded the “Moj ZET” mobile app and bought 2 one-way tickets for me and my wife, that you then activated by showing your phone screen to a QR code reader.

The next stop on our trip was Split, Croatia where we rode the bus to a nearby beach.

The bus was backed up in pretty severe traffic congestion, and one way did not have good air condition while the return trip had excellent air conditioning (but was packed with passengers).

The only photos I took of the Split bus rides was out the window of the bus, where there were a couple of brave bicyclists riding on what was effectively a 6-lane highway (like San Mateo’s El Camino Real)::

Check here for a whole album of bike photos from the trip 😂

Our last bus ride of the trip was in Milan–from the main train station directly to the airport (~60 minutes, 20EUR for 2 people):

It was privately operated, and we were shocked at how aggressive & erratic the driver’s behavior was.

We were glad to end that bus ride and hop on the airplane back to the US–where we sat in traffic in a highly utilized Brooklyn bus:

We all need faster buses, everywhere!