European Country State Capacity Reviews
Last week, I did a mildly insane thing. I travelled overland from London to Tallinn, only taking public transit, via notable Brutalist landmarks, at speed.1
All in all, I covered about 3500 km in four days. This was across seven countries (the UK, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), and involved trains, buses, trolleybuses, subways, and one tram.
Below, I have reviewed my impression of each country’s state capacity - seen through the lens of trying to cover 1000 km a day and having never taken their public transit before.
Belgium: Everyone tells me Brussels is an ugly city with no culture. This may be true, but it’s a lovely city to transit. My train in was on time; my train out was (roughly) on time; my subway trains were on time. Signage was good, buying tickets was relatively easy, everyone I spoke to was helpful and had excellent English. If you’re going to run through a European city with luggage, I recommend this one. 9/10.
Germany: when I checked in to finish the race, the race management asked me if I had been Deutsche Bahned. I was, in fact, Deutsche Bahned. I took four trains in Germany; three were delayed, one was cancelled, and the replacement train was… also delayed.2
As my friend Susannah Hares texted me, this is a problem with expectations management. Everyone expects German transport to be good, because Germans are known to be efficient and fond of engineering. Alas, Deutsche Bahn apparently exists to disprove national stereotypes.
That being said, once you were on a train, it was a reasonably pleasant experience. The chairs were comfortable; the wifi sort of worked;3 it was reasonably straightforward to book. DB does function, as long as you completely ignored the timetable.
I am docking an additional point because my intra-Berlin train claimed on board that it was stopping at Charlottenburg. This was news to me, because Google Maps said it was non-stop to Zoologischer Garten. It was, in fact, non-stop to Zoologischer Garten. 6/10.
Poland: oh god, seat reservations. Seat reservations. Perhaps I am dumb and American (I am dumb and American), but it had never occurred to me that one might have a valid ticket for a train and not have a seat.
In general, if one is traveling on an Interrail/Eurail pass, one can pay a small fee to reserve a seat. Some trains (particularly high-speed trains) require you do so. Except, apparently, this does not actually work in Poland. At the time I was attempting to leave Katowice for Warsaw, neither PKP nor DB4 would let me purchase a seat reservation.
Often, one can pay for a seat reservation on the train, so I got on the train anyway. (Well, actually, I looked at a slower train, noticed that it was standing room only and had no air conditioning - in August. I decided I'd try my luck buying seat reservations instead.) The conductor told me that this was not possible, because the system was down, and that technically I should owe a penalty fare. However, since the system was down, he also could not issue me one of those, so I should just go find an empty seat. Good for me, less good for the fiscal state of Poland's transport authorities.5
This was not the only infrastructure in Poland that simply didn't work. Both trains I took were significantly delayed, though since I was coming from Germany, I was used to that by this point. More significantly, I also attempted to buy a ticket for a local train within Warsaw. The ticket machines on that particular train were all broken, so I could not. In general, it is not a good sign for your transit system when your tourists are trying to give you money and fail.
Also, none of the PKP customer service people at Warszawa Centralna spoke English. I am aware I was in Poland, and thus, I shouldn't expect everyone to speak English. However, if you are working in customer service for travel, on a continent where English is often the de facto lingua franca, having at least one English speaker on-site at your largest train station seems like it would be a good idea.
Poland has been on a remarkable journey of development for the last thirty years. Unfortunately, there are still some gaps - and Poland doesn't seem like it's quite used to being a place where people go on vacation. 4/10.
Lithuania: Seat reservations continued to be a problem here. It appears that one can only add seat reservations to an Interrail pass from the desktop version of the Lithuanian rail operator’s website, which is a problem if one is currently sprinting across Kaunas.
Thankfully, Lithuanian train tickets are at least cheap; I simply bought a whole new ticket when I couldn't manage to buy a seat reservation. It was only €11.6 (England, take note; imagine if 90-minute trains in England were €11.)
And buses in Kaunas took contactless. After several days of using increasingly baffling ticket machines,7 it was such a relief to just tap my card and be charged an amount, even if I didn't know exactly how much I was paying.8 7/10.
Estonia: In 2013, Tallinn made headlines for making transit free for residents. As public policy, the effects of this seem to be debated; a 2016 paper found a 15% increase in ridership, but more recent work suggests the policy has not stemmed the decline in transit use. In 2021, the National Audit Office of Estonia concluded that Tallinn’s elimination of fares had not reduced driving.
Lupine Racing participants were also given free transit by the city of Tallinn. I do hope that the residents’ transit card works better than the QR code we were given; a reasonable number of us ended up paying for transit simply because the code wouldn't scan.
Still, the trams and buses were pleasant and on time. Towards the outskirts of the city, stops could be relatively spread out, with quite a walk between stops. Indeed, Tallinn reminded me of nothing so much as a somewhat more Scandinavian Chicago.9 The infinite hipster food trucks were of similar quality to those in Chicago, but trams were far more pleasant to be on than the El. 7/10.
Latvia: I wouldn’t know; I was in Riga for nine whole minutes.
If this sounds fun to you, you may wish to join me going from Vienna to Chisinau in October. Brutalist landmarks not required for the next iteration, though I will probably include them anyway.
I have now been on two more DB trains in the last week. Both were delayed.
Better than Thameslink, at least.
Yes, DB is the German train operator, but you can buy Polish train tickets through their website.
Especially since I was far from the only person this happened to.
You also got a free bottle of water for your €11!
The “change language to English” buttons on ticket machines do not always… work.
€1, apparently.