Like the issues with money in Russia I wrote about before, transportation is a huge part of daily life here that was hard to adjust to, and so I thought I’d write about how to get around St. Petersburg!

Public Transportation – Metro (28 roubles); Bus, Trollybus, Tram (25 roubles)

The metro is by far the fastest and safest way to get around. The St. Petersburg metro is also beautiful – all the stations are made from marble, and in at least three stations they have enormous mosaics decorating the walls. The metro is extremely deep here; when riding the metro, you legitimately have to factor in time for riding the escalators, and in the center it’s especially deep because it’s the closest to the river. For example, at my station Приморская/ Primorskaya, there are 28 lamps on the escalator. At the Московская/ Moskovskaya station, which is very far inland, there are only 11 lamps! It might seem weird to count the lamps… but trust me, the escalators get very boring. There is also special etiquette for the escalators – when descending into the metro, you have to stand to the right hand side so that other people can run past you on the left. When ascending, though, people just crowd onto both sides of the escalator, so you can’t run up (though you would never want to anyway). The only problem with the metro here is that the stations are relatively far apart, and they don’t reach a lot of the outer parts of the city. Which means you can either walk, or take one of the above-ground types of transportation.

Buses and trollybuses are essentially the same, except that trollybuses are attached to wires above the street. In the center there are lots of buses that run similar routes, so it’s pretty easy to get where you need to go. However, buses can be extraordinarily inconvenient as well. They tend to be inconsistent; for example, bus 6 won’t show up for 20 minutes when it’s supposed to be running on 10 minute intervals, and then 2 minutes later another bus 6 will show up and later pass the first bus 6. I live at the start of about 15 bus/trollybus routes and 2 tram routes – which is great, when the buses decide to actually show up. I was waiting at the bus stop for 15 minutes this morning and and not one bus, trollybus or tram showed up! So they’re not the best if you’re running on a time table. Also, we’ve been experiencing record heat for the past 2 weeks, and buses tend to be little better than furnaces…

In about the 2nd week of class, construction started on Плошадь Труда/Ploshad’ Truda, one of the main intersections in the city. As you can imagine, this causes horrendous traffic and has significantly affected bus routes. Ploshad’ Truda happens to be the intersection that connects my island and the mainland, meaning it is very hard to get off my island at certain times of day. I was once stuck on a bus for 2 hours, for what should have been a 40 minute trip.

And last but not least, St. Petersburg has a 106 year old tram system! These run on tracks in the middle of the street. Because they are in the middle of the street, to get on and off them in most places you need to run through traffic. Sometimes there will be a platform in the middle of the street, but they’re rare from what I can tell. Most of the trams in the city are very old; probably 40-50 years old at my best guess. I learned some interesting trivia about trams in the Metro Museum: before other forms of public transportation developed and before a lot of bridges were built, trams used to run across the ice of the Neva in the winter!

All of these types of transportation close at about midnight, which can lead to some problems with bridges…

Bridges

Every night from about 1 to 5 am, the bridges in St. Petersburg rise to let big cargo ships into the city. Since St. Petersburg is “The Venice of the North” and has many, many different islands, this can cause big problems for people who stay out late and are not on their home island by the time the bridges rise! I have seen many a grumpy student who has shown up to class after missing the metro and the bridges and was forced to spend a night in a 24  hour cafe or similar place.

Walking

I have never walked so much in my life as here, and usually carrying a pretty heavy backpack. I thought Smith gave me good walking exercise, but that is nothing compared to the amount of walking done here. Walks that at the beginning of the trip would leave me winded now don’t even make me bat an eyelash. I think the primary reason for the amount of walking despite the amount of public transportation available is that it’s often very questionable whether taking public transportation is worth it. Taking the metro only one stop or a bus for less than three stops is just kind of silly. However, usually the walks instead of using public transportation for a small number of stops are almost always at least 20 minutes, if not more. So, it is a question of a significant amount of walking if you choose not to use public transportation, especially if you’ve been walking the whole rest of the day.

While I am used to walking now, it doesn’t mean I like it. Today is the 7th day in a row that my feet/legs have significantly hurt in some capacity or another (soreness, stiffness and/or acute pain when walking) because I walked a lot on our visit to the ancient city of Pskov and my legs simply haven’t had enough time to fully recover.

Маршрутки/ Marshrutkas

The name “marshrutka” comes from the Russian word маршрут/marshrut, which means “route.” Marshrutkas are private “buses” – some are actual buses, but most are what we would consider a van. They are all marked with a K (for commercial) before their route number to identify them as marshrutkas and not regular buses (for example, I take the K6 or the K350 to school sometimes). They are more expensive than buses (usually 30 or 36 roubles) but they’re generally faster than normal buses and people take them because they offer a greater variety of routes. For example, the K350 goes all the way from where I live, Васильевский Остров/ Vasilievsky Island which is north of the center, to Kupchino/Купчино, which is essentially the very southernmost edge of St. Petersburg, and no regular bus would ever run a route that long. They also might go down different streets than normal buses.

Marshrutkas operate on their own unique system. To get on one, you need to flag it down like you would flag down a taxi. To get off, you need to tell the driver when to stop, but usually only a few hundred feet before the stop (which makes it hard to ride a marshruka to a place you’ve never been – you don’t know when to tell them to stop). Mostly people sit in the back of the van but if you’re bold enough you can also take the shotgun seat! I mentioned that marshrutkas are general faster than normal buses… this is mostly due to terrible and dangerous driving. I saw one driver counting change and talking on his cell phone while pulling out from a stop once… Another time, I was on a marshrutka and it took 15 seconds after we were on the road for someone to shut the door.

On the “crazy Russian driver”

I know there are lots of YouTube videos that show “crazy Russian drivers,” and to be fair there is a lot of dangerous driving here, but I’d like to say a few words in defense of the average driver in St. Petersburg – which includes bus drivers, because I’ve seen more than my fair share of terrifying driving by bus drivers. In a lot of ways, you just cannot be a safe driver here if you want to get anywhere. The first problem is the volume of traffic, especially during rush hour. Every inch of the street is packed, including spaces that would normally be empty – namely, the middle of an intersection. If you need to make a turn or change lanes, you have to be extremely aggressive or it’s not happening because there is literally no space anywhere on the street. Of course, this leads to incredibly dangerous situations like cars pulling in front of moving trams, but sometimes there’s just nothing else you can do.

Intersections are especially bad. Most intersections are set up in a really, really dangerous way. What happens is all the traffic on one street is given a green light at once (for example, all traffic going east and west is given a green light while north-south traffic is stopped), including foot traffic. Which wouldn’t be a problem… except there are no separate turn signals for vehicles, right or left. That means there are cars (and buses and trams) making right AND left turns right into the path of the pedestrians! However, cars have no choice but to endanger the pedestrians by getting (too) close to them or they will never make those turns, because there are no turn signals. And don’t even get me started on the chaos that is cars making left turns while the traffic from the other side is still going straight… Essentially, it’s engineered to be very dangerous. If the system of lights was better, I’m sure that intersections would become a lot safer.

Of course, Russian drivers aren’t completely innocent. My host family 2 years ago laughed at me when I wanted to wear the seat belt in the car. Calling and texting while driving are much more common than I would like. I could write a book on the bad parking that goes on in this city… and the strange parking, too. Sometimes cars just pull up on the sidewalk for no reason and park there when they probably shouldn’t, but no one seems to care enough to do about it. There are a lot of drivers that are unnecessarily aggressive towards pedestrians (i.e., I don’t think they would stop even for your dead body). But in general… I think most of the unsafe and/or crazy driving I’ve seen has been mostly out of necessity of actually getting somewhere.

In America I complained about never having public transportation because it can trap you… now, I’m finding I miss the control of having a car at my disposal, and I’m definitely missing roads that are not by their very nature crazy to traverse. At Smith I missed having a car as well, so I’m inclined to believe this is my true opinion and not simply a product of missing home.