Tickets Please!

Buses. Taxis. Trains. Oh, the tedium! What with all my recent car trouble (I won't labour the point any further...) I've been using an awful lot of public transport to get myself about places. And it's getting somewhat tiresome.

The first thing you have to contend with if you want to use public transport to get anywhere is buying a ticket. And you'd think that after living here for a year that I wouldn't have any problems doing exactly that, but you'd be wrong. A year ago, when I first arrived, I would use the buses quite frequently to get to the shops, or to the beach, and so forth. And I'd step on and ask for a ticket. Two Euros and fifteen Cents each they'd cost. Blimey! Even with one free toddler it was an expensive business getting the family around. Then someone told me not to bother and to use taxis instead, which cost around a fiver to get to the supermarket or beach. But with a family of five many taxi drivers wouldn't allow us to travel; some would, with my littlest one on my knee, but most would not. And then I discovered "Pre-Comprado" or "Pre-Buy" bus tickets which came in two, four and eight journey varieties. The eight trip ones came in at around a Euro per journey and so I thought that my prayers had been answered. Free travelling toddlers considered, this meant I could get my entire family to the beach for the extraordinarily low price of four Euros. And that was it. My journey along the road of cheap public transport had reached it's destination. Well, it had for buses at least. Trains were another matter. Again, a year ago I bought some train tickets to allow my family and I to travel along the Cascais branch line that runs from Lisboa, along the coast to Cascais, and I thought that I had it sussed. The tickets came in the form of a re-usable green card with a microchip inside that I could recharge with tickets at any number of payment machines in the stations. Except they didn't seem to work on the Lisboa Metro system, which I'd read on travel websites that they should. After queueing up at a ticket booth to talk to an actual person, it came to light that I'd charged our tickets up in the wrong way. Instead of charging them with distinct tickets, I should have charged them up with "Zapping", that is, just a monetary value which would decrease by the correct amount every time I scanned it through the machine to use the train or Metro. Fantastic!

All was well with the ticket situation until last week, when the bus company decided to kill off the "Pre-Comprado" tickets and instead replaced them with rechargeable "Zapping" cards identical to the ones that you can use on the trains. Except they aren't the ones you can use on the trains. They look the same and they work in exactly the same manner. Except that now I need to keep two of them in my wallet; one for the trains and one for the buses. The train one I can recharge at a machine in the train station and the bus one I can recharge at the kiosk in the bus station. Easy as pie. Or so it seems right now. I can't wait until next week when everybody's bus ticket needs recharging and suddenly the queues at the kiosks grow to 20 or 30 people long with everyone desperate to recharge their ticket before the once-hourly bus leaves in 30 seconds time. It will be ridiculously farcical I'm sure. Perhaps that won't happen. Perhaps everyone will be organised enough to leave plenty of time to get their bus ticket charged, but I very much doubt it.

Of course, once you have your ticket, and have successfully validated it in whatever the appropriate machine is for your journey, you can get on, find a seat and settle down to enjoy your journey, yes? No. Not enjoy. Endure. The main reason that the vast majority of people travelling around from place A to place B do their travelling in their shiny magic wheeled boxes called Cars is because they don't want to have to share their journey with anyone else, isn't it? For me personally I can live with the crying children. I can live with having to stand because there are no seats left. What is difficult is the paradigm of having to travel in a carriage with many other people who are all absolutely intent of pretending that they are the only person travelling. It's a kind of strange version of Lift Embarrassment. You know, that awkward silence that happens when you get in a lift and everyone is staring at the blank silver metal walls desperately trying to avoid making any kind of eye contact with anybody else. This strange effect of quietly sharing transport under the pretense that you are alone is compounded when one or more travellers decide to break the silence and suddenly talk, either into their mobile phone or to the person next to them, and almost inevitably, in a loud enough voice for the entire carriage to overhear the conversation. And even though I can't understand most of what is being said, since it is usually being said in Portuguese, I somehow still feel embarrassed to be listening in.

However, like I said, I can deal with all that; the awkward silences; the crying children; the surprise changes to the ticketing systems. None of that is a real problem. The main disappointing aspect of public transport is of course the inescapable fact that, inevitably, if you want to get from A to B, that you have to wait for the bus or train to arrive before you can start your journey. For me to get to work I have to ride a bus for eight minutes (according to the timetable) and then a train for nine minutes (again, according to the timetable) followed by a short walk up the tree lined driveway, and yet because of all the waiting involved, the entire journey can take me fifty minutes. The journey home is even worse, since there is only one bus per hour and if the train timetable doesn't sync up with the bus one it can take up to an hour and fifteen minutes to get home. And that really grinds, doesn't it?

Perhaps I'm being somewhat unfair? Public transport isn't all bad. (Should there be a "that" before the word "bad" in the previous sentence? I'm not sure.) It's cheap and environmentally friendly. It's reliable. Well, mostly. And this morning it was even kind of relaxing. Yes, that is what I said. Relaxing. I was on the train and it was quite busy. I had to stand up, near the door. I looked down the carriage at all the people sitting and looking out of the train windows at the houses going by and the occasional glimpse of the sea in between the apartment blocks. A significant number of people were flicking through the morning paper or quietly chewing their way through a nice thick book. The gentle murmur of the few talkers almost completely drowned out by the hypnotic clickety clack of the rails. And I thought to myself that this journey has to be better than sitting in a car in some traffic jam somewhere, doesn't it? Nobody was getting stressed about whether or not they were going to be there on time. No one was gesticulating wildly about the incompetence of the other road users. At that very moment in time (and for a whole nine minutes!) it all seemed very calm and pleasant.

So Public Transport isn't all that bad. But? Will I be happy when I have a car again and not have to worry about making certain to be standing in the bus shelter by twenty past seven every morning? Will I be happy when I can get home after a long day in fifteen minutes flat? You bet I will!