Public Transportation

Every day, I get the opportunity to observe a smorgasbord of my fellow human beings on Prague public transportation.  It is impossible to get a genuine feel for a people unless you are on public transportation, I think.  If you don’t have the opportunity to see couples, one on the other’s lap, making out, old ladies slyly tripping each other with their canes in the fight for seats, bums sleeping on late-night trams or young professionals with their cell phones constantly buzzing and beeping and blipping, you’re bound to have a limited perspective.  I ride trams the most, so this is where the majority of the observing goes on, but there is also much to be said for people-watching on buses and the metro.  Here is a brief (but, I hope, helpful) guide to what each sort of public transport is like:

The Tram

When you ride a tram, you say to the world and to yourself, “Wherever I am going, I am not in a hurry to get there.”  Trams are notoriously slow, and stop for all kinds of reasons.  They get involved in traffic accidents.  They hit pedestrians.  I was on one once that had to stop because of an electrical fire somewhere in the bowels of the tram.  Every so often, in the middle of a route, the driver will step out of his compartment at the front and announce that the tram is going to a different place than is posted on the window of the tram.  Then he or she changes the placard and most of the people get off and try to find another way home.  Sometimes the route is changed without any warning at all, and then alert passengers must listen as the next stop is announced, so that they can leap through the closing doors in case the announced stop is one to which they do not care to go.  A few people have words with the tram driver before they get off, but most just listen.  I arrived in Prague shortly after the floods, when public transportation was in a constant state of flux.  I thought that there would be some stability once all the metro stations were working again, but I can see now that I was naive in those days.

Everyone rides the tram.  Even if you have a car in this city, it is often more convenient to ride trams because parking spaces are so rare that people hang on to them for days once they have them.  Many elderly people do not ride the metro because of all the steps.  For this reason, you can sometimes be in a tram populated entirely by the elderly, blue hair and bald pates bobbing to the rocking of the tram.  Young people are supposed to give up their seats for the elderly, and they usually do.  Every so often, though, a young person pretends not to see someone, burying his or her head in a book or looking intently out the window.  This is a pitiful sight to behold, especially since older people are generally carrying the most things.  Every old woman I have ever seen on a tram has had at least two or three plastic bags, and maybe a cane besides.  Older men are much smarter.  They don’t carry anything.  They are also very chivalrous; they often remain standing so a woman -- any woman -- can have a seat.  I am not so chivalrous.  I generally size people up before I give up my seat to them.  Here is my system:  a person gets my seat if they have gray or white hair, a cane, more than two bags, a small child, or a seeing-eye dog.  Exceptions can be made, but this is generally the rule.

There is also a difference between day and night trams.  On day trams, people are often going places that they do not want to go, like work, and so tend to be subdued.  The only people who talk a lot on day trams are usually tourists.  Especially large groups.  The nationalities that I generally see in large groups are the British and the Italians.  Before I came to the Czech Republic, I thought that Americans were lousy tourists and stuck out like sore thumbs, but we are nothing compared to the Italians.  Amorphous packs of Italian tourists take over whole tram cars and shout to each other across the aisle.  They also shout to each other if they are sitting right next to one another.  Italians, at least Italian tourists, do not have a volume control.  There are certainly some groups of Americans that are like this, but there are fewer of them by far.  You also get small groups of American tourists, dressed in their colorful jackets, peacefully glancing through their guidebooks and disturbing no one.  I have seen some Italians like this, so they do exist, but not very many at all.  The reason for the loudness of large groups, I think, is that a person in a large group can become comfortable and deceive himself into having the unconscious assumption that there is no one else around who is not in the group.  They are performing for each other; they are having a good time.  They are also the ideal target for pickpockets, because they are not paying attention.  If I were a pickpocket, I would go to large groups like a bee to honey.  Particularly on trams, because then they are crowded into a small space.

Night trams run every night from 12:30 to 5.  There are fewer of them than there are day trams, and they come less frequently; about two per hour.  They are party trams, though.  Everyone is having a good time on night trams.  They have just left the pub and are singing all the way home.  They lean out the windows and shout to passersby.  There is, on average, one couple making out per car on a day tram; there are five or six on night trams.  Those who are not entwined with their partner are busily engaged in attempts to pick someone up.  This is extremely difficult, and not just because they are incoherent from alcohol.  Night tram drivers like to have their fun too, and lurch as much as possible to throw everyone off-balance.  When the tram comes to a sudden stop, everyone falls to the ground, rises up hurling curses at the driver, and then resumes singing or making out.

The Metro

The metro was not fully operational for the first several months after my arrival in Prague because of the floods.  This was a shame, too, because it took me about an hour to get to school every morning on the tram, and only 40 minutes once the metro worked.  The last metro stations in the city reopened in February, however, and since then I have had the chance to see most of them.

There are three metro lines here, the green, yellow and red.  The green runs diagonally through the center from northwest to southeast, the yellow runs horizontally, and the red is vertical through the center and then tails off to the southeast.  Each metro line has its own motif, and each station has its own character.

The green line is the old-fashioned futuristic line.  It looks the way people thought things would be in the future 20 years ago.  All of the tunnels are decorated with rows of large  bulging or receding circles.  Each station has its own color circles, so I suppose you would be able to figure out which station you were in even if you couldn’t read.  Or hear.  Or if you weren’t color blind.  Actually, the different colors don’t help much at all except in the aesthetic realm.  The longest escalators in the city are on the green line.  The longest ones that I have experienced, at Hradcanska and Namesti Miru, take two minutes to get you from one end to the other.  In the meantime, you’re in an impressively lit shaft decorated with movie advertisements, looking covertly at the people going the other direction.  Just like the future!

There isn’t much to say about the decoration of either the red or the yellow line.  The red line has the nicest cars, though.  On both the green and the yellow lines, a passenger is likely to board a sickly green train that has been in use since the heyday of communism.  The trains were even bought from Russia and have Cyrillic writing on the outside.  The trains on the red line, though, are new, white, clean, and have drastically reduced seating options.  In the Russian cars, there are only benches for everyone to squeeze onto, all facing the opposite window and the opposite people.  The new ones follow the pattern of two seats facing one seat, facing either the front or the back of the train.  This is incredibly convenient if you are riding the metro with two of your friends, but you might prefer the benches if your group is any other size.  The yellow line is the most recently constructed one (with the most stations), and is also pretty futuristic.  Most stations have white domed ceilings lit from beneath.  My favorite station on this line is Andel (Angel).  Under communism, it was called Moskevska, and still has murals on the walls featuring indomitable workers and flags with the hammer and sickle.

Buses

There are a few things that you can do on other forms of transportation that are out of the question on buses.  You can stand in the middle of a metro car, take your hands from the bars, and “surf.”  You can also do this on some of the tamer tram routes.  But if this is attempted on any bus, you will quickly be whipped into the wall.  Likewise, it is possible to bring a book and read on the tram and metro.  But thanks to cobblestone streets in the center of town and potholes elsewhere, it’s reasonable to expect a reading rate of about one paragraph per two kilometers.  Making out on buses is also strongly discouraged because of the risk of losing teeth or putting your boyfriend’s/girlfriend’s eye out.  I have, however, still seen some intrepid couples going at it nonetheless.

I don’t ride buses often around the city; not many people do.  It’s much more common to ride a bus starting from the last metro station in a particular direction, going off toward the suburbs.  These buses, unlike the city buses, do not have standing room.  If you have a transportation pass, it will usually get you to a certain point in the bus’s route, but you have to buy a ticket to get to the end.  I have yet to figure out what the limit of the pass is, or how it is possible to find out. 

The atmosphere is a relaxed one on buses that run outside of the city, and this can be seen immediately upon entering the bus.  Every driver has a bus, and decorates it to his or her liking.  The drivers also blast their favorite radio station throughout the bus.  This lends a peculiar atmosphere to each trip.  Some drivers give their bus a tropical air, with plastic flowers, leis and pictures of parrots.  Others make their bus a shrine to a particular sports team, such as Sparta.  My favorite driver goes for a “picking-you-up-for-the-prom” theme.  He has a bouquet of small red flowers hanging from the rearview mirror, always wears wraparound sunglasses and a tie, and listens to an ‘80s station on which love songs are in heavy rotation.

Lately more and more people have been coming to their senses and realizing that going to a foreign country as a tourist serves almost no purposes at all.  Trinkets can be bought anywhere, and although monuments vary from place to place, the sorts of people you encounter at those monuments do not.  They are all tourists, just like you.  If any people  want to come to Prague or the Czech Republic and want to experience Czech culture, they ought to do a lot of things, but they ought to at least start by riding public transportation.  The culture of any place is all about the people and their history; and while you will not get much history on a tram, you will get about as much people as you can take.