Transport

After a small medical break and knee surgery of my partner I am back to hit the keyboard. The mentioned fact is important, because he is very limited now in moving, so the usual daily todos are completely up to me, and that makes the next topic relevant - what transport methods Warsaw has, and overall, what can you expect on the roads, if you visit the Poles? 

First of all, Poland couldn't be considered as a centralized country. Although Warsaw is the most populated city, it does not mean, that everything is concentrated to here. As the most important center points of the country there are more big cities on the list, they have population from half million to 750 thousands, like for example Cracow, Łódź, Gdańsk or Wrocław, which are at least as worth to consider to visit, as the capital city.

We, Hungarians - coming from a small country - first don't even understand, how is able to travel 500 km-s from one city to another, considered as an average distance here, which takes 5 hours by train or by car on the highways too. And this is so natural, like by us the 2-3 hours treshold, when we are travelling 250 km-s from one border of our country to Budapest.

The capital, Warsaw is somehow similar to the country itself by this case. Though the size of city is almost identical to Budapest - more, than 500 square metres - the arrangement is absolutely different. While our capital is totally centralized - if we have to do some things, we go to downtown - in Warsaw, downtown is not that high-priority, neither from living-perspective.

Traffic in Warsaw. source: Warsawblog.com

It has more reasons: first of all, the real estate-prices are pretty high in the city center (what means twice as much as the Budapest prices) in case of renting or buying too, so many people has only the opportunity to buy or rent an apartment in outer districts of the city.

On the other hand, it is natural here, that "anywhere you want to go in Warsaw, count on 1 hour". This refers mostly to the public transportation, but because of traffic jams, it also does not count sometimes, whether you want to arrange things faster by a car or not.  About the syncronisation of downtown traffic lights: someone hadn't got too much sense of coordination, because I rarely have seen here green wave and smooth going-on. And my partner was really happy, when at Bp. from Keleti Railway Station to Blaha Lujza square we got a nice continous green wave by car through the lights. (This is a quiet popular route at Bp.)

But I have met a few pretty useful and logical solutions here according to transport!

For example, license plate numbers has a meaning here, because the first characters are referring to the origin place of the car, so a faster, sportier Warsaw driver will know, how to handle a situation, when in front of him a slower driver from Lublin is sitting by the steering wheel, who likely got used to a different speed.
Also I have to tell you, that Warsaw drivers are very polite by pedestrian crossings - they stop almost all the time if they see that someone wants to pass!

According to public transportation, the local company is called ZTM (Zarząd Transportu Miejskiego - Urban Transport Management) and they also set some rules, which are worth to consider.

One of these is, that if there are more stops at a corner or a square, the bus and tram stops are everywhere numbered, and signs of the the stopping lines are also visible from further distance too. The only thing what I am missing is, that on the GMaps the stops are not signed properly - there are situations, when I arrive to the stop 51, and I would have to change to 04, but first I have no idea, where it should be, so it needs some research. But still, the orientation is much easier on that way.

And after this, there is the numbering method of buses and tramways. Surprisingly it also has some logic! In a nutshell:

- Tramlines are numbered from 1 to 79.
- 100-399 are standard buses, from these the seasonal ones are: 300-399.
- 400-599 are the fast lines, and there are also some seasonal ones: 400-499.
- 700-899 are going out of Warsaw, from these the seasonal lines are signed between 800-899.
- Z sign means lines, what are replacing tramways because of some service interruptions like breakdown, failure or planned works.
- E marks express lines, which are meaning smooth connection between a remote district and the city center.
- and N is for night buses.

Most of buses are equipped with modern indicator displays and loudspeakers (maybe it is not a big deal, you say, but believe me, travelling through such distances by bus sometimes for hours, deeply engaged by a book or your phone it can be very useful ;) And old Ikarus buses were used for the last time in traffic at the previous weekend (thanks for info, Neuro!). Also interesting, that vehicles are not stopping before, but after  the bus stop indicator plate, so usually we have to run after the bus if we are not aware of that :).

In Warsaw there is one metro line, but the second is in progress, maybe next year it will be announced. It is in service from 5AM to 1AM, on the weekends it is till 3AM! It has electronic entry system, but if you buy SMS ticket in the system of mPay (I usually do that), you can use the lift too at most of the stops.

SMS ticket is a great invention, you don't have to run to shops or vendors, if you need suddenly a ticket, and you can even buy time tickets (20-40-60 minutes). But through mPay system you can also buy parking tickets.
The 20 minutes ticket costs 3,4 PLN (0,8 EUR) 60 minutes is 6,4 (approx. 1,5 EUR), single ticket is 4,4 (1 EUR) and if you are living here, the personal monthly ticket is really reasonable 100 PLN (24 EUR). As a tourist, you can use 1 and 3 days travel cards, these cost 15 and 30 PLN (and we are envious because of that, compared to HU). But these are not for 24 or 72 hours, they are only good till the expire day midnight. The controllers aren't very friendly and they are really strict, so it's not worth to cheat, but these infos above are worth to keep in mind - it also happened to me that I believed that the next day I still had a valid ticket because of the 72 hours - it wasn't anymore, but I noticed it in time.

Also worth to mention the SKM trains (Urban Fast Railways), which are signed with S (you can also go to Chopin Airport with these).
Some train stations are however tricky, like Centrum Railway Station (Dworzec Centralny), because you not only have to pay attention to the platform number of your arriving train (it also can change meanwhile on the display) but also sections are there, which means that parts of one peron are also numbered separately and the vehicle will stop only at one particular section of the platform. We had been doing some jogging excercises sometimes because of that :) Also don't be surprised, that between the train and the platform there always will be a small hole, because most of the rails were designed slightly wider than the trains are nowadays.

The fastest way to get to Warsaw is of course by plane - for example, from Budapest it takes 1 hour, but unfortunately this route is served only by Wizz Air and LOT now, Ryanair cancelled the flights on Warsaw-Budapest from the 5th November.

If you decide to visit Poland, I would highly recommend a splendid route planner app and website, which is called Jakdojade, and gives a big help for those who are not familiar with the bigger cities or know completely nothing about places here.
If you decide to use public transportation, it is a need-to-have app!
Also if you plan to come by car, Targeo.pl can help you to track the actual traffic status on the roads, but my darling warned, that this site was working much better and actualized sooner in the past, than now.

Anyway, those, who visit that country, don't have much chance to get lost, I think, if they are using the opportunities above - if I managed myself well, it means something, because I was never good at navigation :) Enjoy your time here and I wish the fewest possible traffic jams for drivers!