Berlin’s public transportation system.

A few words have already been said about this topic in my previous posts, but I wanted to dedicate a special post to the public transportation system in Berlin, because there’s a lot of things to consider and to talk about when it comes to that. Before we arrived to the city, and actually started going around without a car, as we’re used to here, I couldn’t even imagine what that would look like, especially in a city as big as Berlin, with a population of around 3.5 million people, excluding all the tourists visiting it.

I knew that they have a lot more to offer when it comes to the public transport than we have here in Ljubljana, and I also heard about it from some people that have been to Berlin before. But nothing can accurately describe all of that, unless you really experience it on your own. I downloaded an app (Desoline’s Berlin map U-Bahn S-bahn) on my phone, and by just looking at the map of the whole system, it didn’t really make a lot of sense to me with all the different numbers, colours, signs and symbols. Even our own system here, we only have public buses in Ljubljana, sometimes doesn’t make sense to me, so I don’t think that’s such a shocker that the system that’s at least 5 times bigger and more complex would be confusing. Remember, that was still way before we actually set foot in the city.

There are 5 different means of public transportation in the city of Berlin itself and its surroundings. Of course you can use buses, trams, regional trains, along with U-Bahn and S-Bahn trains. U-Bahn is short for Untergrundbahn (underground railway), while S-Bahn got its name only from trying to mirror U-Bahn’s name, which was established almost 30 years earlier, even though some people might say S-Bahn comes from Straßenbahn (street railway), but that name is associated with Berlin’s trams. By what I’ve seen during those 4 days in the city, is that most of the people use those last two means of transport the most, so U- and S-Bahn. We also used that all the time, except for going from and to the airport, where we had no other option but to take a bus. While being in the city itself, taking a bus wouldn’t really make that much sense because of all the traffic and everything, so the railway system is much more efficient and gets you to your destination faster, even though the trains stop at every station along their routes. During our time there, I can’t remember a time when we had to wait more than 5 minutes to get onto a train. When you consider how many people either live or visit Berlin, you’d expect the trains to be very crowded all the time, but that wasn’t the case. Okay, it is true that they did fill up quite a lot at certain times, and that at the end of July, a lot of locals leave the city, but I was still expecting more crowded trains.

Berlin’s tram network is actually the third largest in the world, which I had absolutely no idea that that’s the case when we were there. We were spending most of our time in former West Berlin, and when the city was divided, West Berlin replaced tram lines with buses, which is still visible to this day. These days, some tram lines do go to that part of the city as well, but they’re not that common. That’s also why we haven’t even stepped on one of the trams, even more so because U- and S-Bahn are also much easier to use, in my opinion. Maybe I would be saying something completely different if we were staying in the former East Berlin, and would use trams more, but let’s leave something for the next visit. 😀

Some of the railway stations in Berlin are absolutely ENORMOUS! For example Alexanderplatz or Friedrichstraße stations, where a lot of different railway routes intersect, making it easier to choose then which train to hop on if you want to continue on your way to another part of the city. As it’s the case with any public transportation system, you really have to be careful to pay attention to the route number and final destination when choosing the right platform to get on a train. It’s not that hard to go in the wrong direction! 😀

After searching for things to see in Berlin, I came across the Berlin WelcomeCard. At first, I wasn’t particularly sure about it, especially because when I presented the idea for it to my parents, they were even less interested in it than I was. Later on, my dad looked a little more into it, then we decided that it would be a good idea to get it anyway. So, with the Berlin WelcomeCard you can use all of the public transportation without any limitation, you only have to be careful about the different city zones. Along with the access to the public transport, Berlin WelcomeCard offers discounts at more than 200 locations all around the city, should you decide to visit them. The locations include museums, galleries, shops and many more. You can find more information about that here.

Whenever I visit a new city or go someplace I’ve never been before, I always find something worth coming back for. May it be the people that I meet, the sights or just the general feel of the place, there’s always something. When it comes to Berlin, it’s their public transportation system. And that, coming from me, a person that prefers getting in a car instead of using a bus here, says a lot about it.