High-speed trains are fun! My significant other and I typically use them to get to our vacation destination. Once we're there, we use rapid transit to get around, e.g., bus and metro. This article is about some oddities we've experienced, being tourists on rapid transit.

We just left our trusty ICE, TGV, or Eurostar and want to get to our accommodation. There always are these three questions:

1. How to get a ticket?
2. What bus/metro line do we need to get there?
3. Where does that bus/metro depart?

Tickets

Let's start with the ticket: In Ljubljana, for example, you buy individual tickets in a specific mobile app. But you need to choose how many zones your ticket should be valid in. As in, you only want to get around the city centre? Here's a cheaper ticket.
You want to go further? That'll be a bit more expensive.
Fine idea, but where the fuck does one zone end and the next start? There is a map...somewhere, but where? Definitely not where you purchase the ticket. Karlsruhe calls "zones" "Waben" (honeycomb in English). Even though we've been living in Karlsruhe for almost four years, we still have no idea where a Wabe begins and where it ends. In Verona and Florence, you don't have zones but urban and suburban tickets. Same problem there: What ticket should you buy?

Often you purchase these as paper tickets on the platform. Then they're valid some 90 minutes or so after stamping them on the vehicle. Imagine how surprised we were when we bought four tickets on the platform in Verona and they came out already stamped. As we're only two people, we wasted 3€ on the extra two.

In Verona you can also buy tickets in the app but you have to scan a QR code on the bus to activate it. That QR code is only next to the driver so everyone needs to cram through the first door. In Paris you instead charge a plastic card with some 10 trips and use those at the gates to the metro. In Århus you add bank details to the local app and pay for each trip in the vehicle. Other times you charge your card with money and pay for each trip, like in London. Oh, London's Oystercard. It's a nice idea but so non-transparent. We never knew how expensive each trip would be. Adjacent trips would be cheaper than two non-adjacent trips and we sometimes got reimbursed after the trip ended. We left London with some 15£ left on our cards.
Lastly, there are the day tickets and 72h tickets, like in Rome or Göteborg. That's so convenient; you just don't have to worry about your ticket. Especially the Deutschland-Ticket is amazing! Pay 63€ a month and board any non-high-speed public transit everywhere in Germany. Definitely the best thing we got out of national politics in at least a decade.
Göteborg receives a special mention because of the inclusion of ferries. You don't need a special ticket to get on those boats and visit the many islands surrounding Göteborg. So amazing!

Lines on Maps

We got our ticket, what bus/metro line should we take? By far the best way of doing it is the London tubes way: Simple names, whose recognizability reach far beyond the outskirts of London: The Piccadilly and Jubilee lines could hardly be more memorable.
On the other end of the spectrum lies Karlsruhe. There is the bus 30 and 70 and 52 so you think all two-digit lines are buses. But no, the 11 is a metro, as is the S32. Oh and if you thought the 2 and S2 are the same you thought wrong! Of course they go in wildly different directions.
How do you figure out what line to take? Of course, there's a local app and always Google Maps. Karlsruhe's app is awful, always has been, always will be. It keeps forgetting your connection, recommends Yorkstraße in Munich rather than the one in Karlsruhe, then obviously fails to find a connection and crashes.
But there's worse, like Verona: At least Verona' app spits out connections with line numbers that do exist. But there always are two buses with the same number, one in each direction along the line. So which one should you take? You need to look at the final stop. As in London: Piccadilly line towards Cockfosters or Heathrow Airport? Often there are more than two buses with the same line number. They stop sooner or later along the line. But in Verona none of the buses arriving show the final stop that the app provides. It never worked out over our entire stay there. We always had to guess and use a compass to figure out if we're on the right platform.
What could be worse than Verona in that aspect? Rome! In Rome sometimes the same bus, going in the same direction, arrives on the other side of the road. Sometimes it just turns around behind the platform. So confusing!

Platforms

Okay, you know what line in what direction to take. Where does it depart? Sometimes there are platform numbers or letters. For example, in Helsingborg there are letters. We stood in a huge hall with numerous platforms, A, B, and so on. We needed platform O and were in a hurry. Guess what, platform O isn't in the hall all the other platforms are in; it's outside. There, of course, was no map to tell us and we had to ask helpful commuters.
Karlsruhe, again, isn't any better here. The stop Europaplatz has six platforms, two of them underground; four more topside. We needed to take a metro from platform 2 but didn't already know of the underground platforms. Too bad the platforms don't have any labels and there are no maps anywhere except for the operator's website. Fun times.
In Bologna we had some troubles with platforms while waiting for our high-speed train, also. Bologna has two platforms named 4: 4 and 4 (Ovest): One for high-speed trains and one for regional trains. I guess you're supposed to just know that and not realize it the moment your train departs...

Oh, and you're lucky if you even have platform labels in your app of choice. Google Maps is terrible at that and almost never shows them, for example.

Closing

Closing this article, I have to add that I love rapid and high-speed transit! It is so amazing to not have to worry about a car and where to park it. And, oh my, I hate how cars suffocate cities. Often there are cars and parking lots everywhere. As a pedestrian, as a human, you have to jump around to not get run over.
I mean, we at least don't have the hellscape that is American city design. But so many European cities are still way too car-centric. I'm a human, let me breath! All the oddities we've encountered are easily forgotten once you know your way around them. Rapid transit, bikes, walking and maybe the occasional shared car for transporting large things get the job done in a city.