Bucharest Trip – Day 3 : Bucharest Metro

I didn’t really need to buy a Metro pass for the time that I was in Bucharest, but I love underground systems and I make the most of them whenever I can. OK, it’s geeky, but there we go, it’s all about the travel adventure and I’m very much into that. The purchase process was simple enough as there’s a vending machine which sells Metro tickets and there’s an English option available.

As some background, there are currently five Metro lines in the city and the first one opened on 19 November 1979, so much later than in some other European capital cities. The network is publicly owned but is separately managed from the rest of the city’s public transport system, so there’s no integration of tickets. There’s a new sixth line being planned to the city’s airport and that seems a most sensible idea. The prices are cheap, so a weekly ticket is something like £6, with the services running from 05:00 until 23:00. On the times that I used the network, there were regular services and it’s easy to understand how to change lines at the interchanges.  The network, along with all public transport in Bucharest, is currently subsidised by the Government in an attempt to reduce the volume of traffic on the city’s heavily congested roads.

I got a bit muddled up with how to put the ticket in the machine, so being rather sociable I went and asked one of the staff at the gate line. The helpful staff member showed me which way to put the ticket in, which was inevitably not the way that I had been doing it. Handily, the system is like New York and Warsaw (amongst many others) which is that there’s no need to put a ticket in when leaving the network because all journeys are the same price.

I’m not sure that either of my two loyal readers will be that excited about my photos of some signs that I took during the time I was there, but here they are anyway. Sometimes this blog is just about me and not anyone else  🙂