[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

The Cities Best Explored by Their Own Weird Public Transport

Some cities with unusual public transport make the ride the main event. Funiculars, river buses, cable cars, trolleys, and the cheap day passes that turn a commute into a tour.

I have a confession that probably loses me my travel-writer card: some of the cities with unusual public transport gave me better afternoons than any museum I queued for. The ride was the thing. Not the destination. The actual moving-through.

It started in a steep little hill town where I was too cheap for a taxi and too lazy to walk up. There was a funicular, this creaky wooden box on a cable that’s been hauling people up the same slope since before cars existed, and it cost about a euro. I rode it up. Then I rode it back down just to do it again. The conductor gave me a look. I did not care.

Here’s my hot take. Those open-top hop-on hop-off buses are a tourist tax. They’re slow, they’re loud, the recorded narration is hosted by someone who has clearly never been to the city, and you’re sealed in a bubble with forty other people doing the exact same thing.

Local transit is the opposite. It’s cheap, it goes where actual residents need to go (which is usually the interesting part), and you’re shoulder to shoulder with people living their normal Tuesday. You overhear things. You see the unglamorous bits between the postcards. And every so often the system itself is genuinely strange and wonderful.

A few of my favorite kinds:

• River buses. Cities built on water often run commuter boats that cost a normal fare but hand you a skyline view people pay 60 for on a “cruise.” You’re just… going to work, but on a boat.
• Cable cars and gondolas. Not the ski kind necessarily. Some cities string them across rivers or up cliffs as real transit. You float over rooftops for the price of a metro ticket.
• Old trolleys and trams. The rattly wooden ones, polished smooth by a century of hands. They grind up streets too steep for buses and the whole car leans into the turns.
• Funiculars. See above. I’m obsessed.

Timing matters way more than guidebooks admit. Ride a river bus at rush hour and it’s a crush of commuters and you can’t see a thing. Ride the same boat at 10am or after the evening peak and you’ve practically got the deck to yourself, golden light included.

I learned this on a river commuter boat where I’d squeezed on at 8:15am, wedged against a man eating a very fragrant breakfast sandwich, unable to see water let alone a skyline. Went back the next morning at half ten. Empty deck. Coffee in hand. Same one-euro-something fare. Completely different day.

And the side you sit on, oh man, this is the rookie mistake. On a funicular or a hillside tram, the view is on one side and a retaining wall is on the other. On a river bus, one side gets the historic waterfront and the other gets a parking garage. Ask a local, or just watch which way the regulars face. They know.

On one of those old leaning trolleys, a woman maybe seventy got on with two heavy bags, and three different people stood up at once to give her a seat, and she scolded all of them and stayed standing the whole way up the hill out of pure stubbornness, gripping the brass pole, swaying with every turn like she’d been doing it her whole life. Which she probably had.

That’s the stuff. You don’t get that on a tour bus. You get a man with a microphone telling you a building is “iconic.”

So next time you land somewhere, before you book anything, look up how the locals get around. If the answer is a boat, a cliff cable car, a wooden funicular, or a tram that’s older than your grandparents, congratulations. You’ve found one of the cities with unusual public transport, and your best afternoon is already paid for.

Forget the hop-on bus. Buy the day pass, ride the weird one twice, and thank me later.

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