My Bus Goes There

While there are a lot of cars on the streets, this is by far a walking and public transport town. Owning a car here is not cheap. Aside from your insurance, there’s also your yearly MOT which is basically a safety inspection that you have to have done. There’s also a road tax. And there are toll roads. Then there’s parking which is not all that easy to find and like all cities, very expensive too. There are parking attendants walking up and down the major streets all day, every day. There’s not really such thing as a back alley so it seems that parking at home for most people involves finding a spot on the street (passes required) or for those with front gardens, converting them into driveways appears to be popular.

There aren’t trains here in Edinburgh other than those that go in and out of town so the bus is the way to go. There’s more than one official bus company and therefore so many different routes to take you everywhere. Right around the corner from home is our most regular stop. The 1 takes you in the direction of Princes and George streets so I take it to work and we take it if we’re going to the train station. The 35 goes to the Old Town, stopping right in front of Brandon’s work, and then eventually on to the airport. A five minute walk up nearby Easter Road gets you to London Road where about a dozen buses stop and in general, if you miss the ideal one you’re looking for you can usually catch another one that will drop you close by.

The usual fare is 1.30 Pounds for any single journey. There’s no such thing as a transfer which we’ve found very frustrating. But you can buy a day pass for 3.20 Pounds and that gives you unlimited travel all day until midnight. Finding exact change for the bus is not something either of us likes and we have tried out the use of both books of single tickets as well as monthly passes. The passes are only worth it if you’re using the bus twice a day, five days a week so we don’t do that every month.

The really great thing is that where we live, we are within walking distance to just about everything we need. There have been numerous times where we just walk instead of even taking the bus. Brandon often walks home from work and I walk to and from band practice every week rather than try to coordinate schedules and count out change.

There are definitely pluses and minuses to this walking and public transport culture. We’ve both lost a bunch of weight which is good but walking home after a long day spent on your feet can sometimes be more than you can take. We do both miss having a car. It would be so great to hop in and get out of town and grocery shopping would be so much easier. But I wouldn’t be surprised that wherever we end up back in Canada we’ll be looking for neighbourhoods that offer some of the things we’re used to right now.