Our transportation decisions determine much more than where roads or bridges or tunnels or rail lines will be built. They determine the connections and barriers that people will encounter in their daily lives, and thus how hard or easy it will be for people to get where they need and want to go.
Elijah Cummings
In the fall of 2023, I sold my car and used the money to move back to my hometown, which is to say the Greater Los Angeles area. The spot I landed in isn’t quite the old neighborhood, but it’s the closest I’ve lived in decades. I love road trips, but I hate driving. The actual operating of a motor vehicle is fun on lonesome roads out in the open desert; it’s trying to anticipate the actions of every other driver, pedestrian, cyclist, et cetera that was going to drive me to drink.
The area where I’ve landed is very walkable, everything necessary feels nearby, there are beautiful destinations and lovely views along the way, the climate is mild, the main drags have good sidewalks and crosswalks and the side streets seem to have few and thoughtful drivers. Walking around my neighborhood feels safe, pleasant, and relatively easy.
Ponta Delgada was very similar. I was able to access all of my errands and plenty of recreation as a pedestrian. The less appealing similarity is that both communities are kind of cut off from everything outside of town. There are public buses but their routes and frequency are less than ideal. Most residents would still consider a car a necessity. The world gets very small very quickly without one.
For my summer in Portugal, the study abroad program took care of us. They chartered vans to take us from the airport to our housing and tour buses for the field trips out of town. I don’t remember now if there were any rideshare apps working on São Miguel. The Uber eats drivers were noticeably on two wheels.
While in the Azores, the only time I needed vehicle transportation that wasn’t part of the program was a trip to and from the airport to accompany my housemate who was going home early. I am disproportionately proud that I was able to give my address clearly enough to take a taxi home from the airport. I had repeated my address to myself countless times in preparation, like a kindergartner hoping for a gold star from teacher. Taking a taxi alone in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, and they put the number after the street name, is kinda scary, but I suppose that’s what gives it a sense of accomplishment.
Normally, there are ferry boats that make it easy to visit other islands in the Azores. In 2022 they were still shut down from the pandemic. The world was open again, but much smaller than it had been in the before times. Ponta Delgada was very accessible, the rest of the Azores not so much, at least not that summer.
Another consequence of timing is that we weren’t allowed to leave Portugal. After two years of borders closing and opening only to close again, the grownups in charge of us were afraid we’d end up on the wrong side of a closed border. I’d made plans to visit a friend in Madrid, normally an easy train ride from Lisbon but had to scrap those, as well as my hopes of visiting friends in Paris.
I toyed with the idea of taking the high speed train from Lisbon to Porto for a weekend, but my initial plan was thwarted by changes in group dynamic and wildfires, then later, when it was more doable, I think the heat had just zapped my energy. I love trains, but there was the rest of the trip to plan, and possibly overnight accommodations to fuss about. It just started to feel like a lot. If I ever stay in Lisbon again, there are so many places I can take a train to, but it’s kinda weird to plan a trip to a place based on how easy it is to take trips away from that place.
I did get myself around Lisbon though. The buses were challenging for a foreigner with limited ability to speak the language. Traveling alone to a Mexican street fair, I had the unfortunate problem of Google Maps freezing. I mean, it could show me where my destination was, it had just lost track of where I was. Being in a completely unfamiliar part of the city looking out the window did very little to help me, as I could only rarely glimpse a street name long enough to orient myself.
This is when I learned that showing my frozen Google Maps screen to little old ladies, who as far as I could tell only spoke Portuguese, while I was speaking English (other than the please and thank you type words that did nothing to convey my situation) really isn’t helpful. Miraculously, I only overshot by one stop and was able to walk to my destination and enjoy the sights and sounds of familiar pageantry for an afternoon. City buses are kinda the same in every city, which would be really nice if I liked city buses more.
Using the same Navigante transit card that I’d tapped for bus fare I was also able to ride the Metro, which I did more often and with better results. My student housing was so close to the Campo Pequeno station that I felt like I might have been able to see it from my tiny balcony, if it hadn’t been underground and all. The Metro required no fluency in Portuguese, nor even literacy. There was a clear M sign at every station entrance, and the lines were distinguished by a color and a symbol. One needed only rudimentary map reading skills to make easy use of the whole system.
Timing may have been relevant to my experience here too. I found the trains were rarely overcrowded in Lisbon. Sometimes, they were standing room only, but it was rare for a car to be uncomfortably full. The world was still kinda half open at this stage in the pandemic, though. Whatever the reasons, I found Lisbon’s Metro to be everything I like to pretend Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is. It was clean, efficient, and user friendly. There were a lot of cool art installments in the stations, too.
My last Metro ride was a late night trip from Campo Pequeno to the station in the Lisbon Airport (transferring from the yellow line to the red line) with all of my luggage. There wasn’t any hour that the Metro, or Lisbon in general, felt unsafe to me as a woman traveling alone. It was bittersweet how completely at home I felt on the Metro by that last train ride out of Lisbon.
My love of the Metro and comfort walking may have had one downside, though. There were so many transit options I never got around to trying. A young friend of mine completely wiped out on a rented electric scooter, so any temptation I might have had to try those vanished quickly. There were lots of dedicated bike lanes, and were I an accomplished cyclist (with access to a bicycle), I suspect that’s a good way to get around town.
I was never in a situation where a tuk tuk or a tram seemed like the most sensible option. Though I had lowkey meant to ride the iconic yellow tram, I just never went out of my way to make it happen. I heard good things about the commuter trains but I never had any organic need of them either. I’m curious about the funiculars but again, I never needed one. There was a neighborhood steep enough I was happy for the public elevator, though.
With its steep hills and metropolitan sprawl I don’t see Lisbon becoming a car-free city in my lifetime, but it’s not completely car dependent either. I took a few Ubers here and there, and was pampered with tour buses for big field trips out of town. Mostly though, I did very well getting around on my own with public transportation and strong legs.
Lisbon has been my favorite public transit system so far. I have long had a love/hate relationship with BART. I love the convenience, but hate the expense and the origins, though the same sort of eminent domain nonsense was used placing freeways in L.A. (and in other cases without nearly so much pretense of greater good). I am hopeful that with the Olympics coming to my hometown in 2028 maybe Los Angeles will finally give up its traffic jam based identity for something a little more pedestrian/passenger friendly.
I am a passenger
Iggy Pop
And I ride, and I ride
I ride through the city’s backsides
I see the stars come out of the sky
The Passenger
Crystal, Clearly 
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