Metropolis on rails – How to spend days in Vienna without taking the road and where Belgrade went wrong

How do you know you’re in Vienna, even if you’re wearing a blindfold for three days? No doubt by the mixture of German and Serbian in your ears, but also by the fact that, while moving around the city, you never take the road once – although the roads are wide and there is no shortage of motorization.

Of course, there is also the possibility that, like us, you flew into Vienna – because its airport serves more than 30 million passengers a year – and the plane parked in a remote location, so you had to take a bus to the building. Well, that was our only ride on air-filled tires: on the way back, we got on the plane directly through the jet bridge.

And what did we do around the city? Sitting in a hotel room or holding on tightly to the neighborhood where we were anchored? In short, none of that, not even close. From one end of this modern metropolis to the other, whose medieval European monotony and depression of old styles and social construction are successfully broken up by modern buildings and neighborhoods, we moved to distant districts without any hassle or feeling weighed down by loss of time or nerves – all by subway, train and tram.

Until 15-20 years ago, a place the size of Belgrade, Vienna has now grown significantly and is home to two million people, as it was before the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, when it was the imperial capital. And what made it possible to move around the city efficiently, despite such a sudden demographic boom? The overall spreading of car transport and a car mentality like from an American suburb? No. That might have still been sustainable in the decades when the number of the Viennese stagnated or even declined. The solution was found where there was room for the most people - on the rails.

The classic Belgrade alibi follows: “Vienna has a subway, it’s easy for them (and we are small and poor).” True, but many other cities have subways, and they are still not as smooth as the capital of the Eastern Reich (German: Österreich). First, it should be said that Vienna has five lines, and will get a sixth in the next decade, and then the network should reach 90 kilometers. The Vienna subway carries more than a million passengers on weekdays. Cities of comparable size usually have three subway lines. Why is Vienna so far ahead?



You could say that they were practical and that they thought about how to make the most of what they had (this is called efficiency). They planned the subway, more than half a century ago, in Vienna and Belgrade together, on the same (Bavarian) technological basis. Viennese prof. dipl. ing. dr. techn. Rupert Schickl (1922-1992), who collaborated with the Belgrade subway planners, has a memorial plaque at the Volkstheater underground station. In Vienna, they used an existing tram tunnel for one subway line, and for the other two - the old railway to the Imperial Palace and the viaduct around the central zone, on which they installed an ordinary tram. A tram is a subway train when nothing obstructs its path – that’s what practical people will say, while the curmudgeons will insist that it must have a third rail and a high floor, and that only a “heavy (!) subway is a real subway” (the general public doesn’t even know that behind Belgrade’s laziness and chaos lies such nonsense). Later, in Vienna, they built the underground and the aboveground, station by station. And Belgrade, for example, had two railway lines to the center of Zemun - a tram and a railway - only to tear them both up and then plan to build a third railway line along almost the same route in a deep tunnel, under poured sand and through groundwater and sludge (we have the resources). The only difference is the logical clarity of the concept, a smart approach, which is what is being intensively... talked about today.
Tram and museum card

For a short visit to Imperial Vienna, regardless of how you got there – if you are coming by car, the solution is to park for several days in a public garage on the outskirts – the most cost-effective way is to buy a 72 Stunden Wien public transport card in advance, which is valid for three days from the moment of validation and costs EUR 17.10. A 24-hour ticket costs EUR 8, and a 48-hour ticket costs EUR 14.10. But since Vienna is a multifaceted and permanent capital of culture, you should consider the Vienna City Card (EUR 17 for 24 hours/EUR 25 for 48 hours/EUR 29 for 72 hours/EUR 35 for 7 days), which also provides free transport for a child under 15 or a dog accompanied by an adult, as well as discounts in museums.
Another one of our alibis: “Those people have priorities, not like people here” also falls flat, because the national stadium in Vienna has existed for over 100 years, and the sports hall, slightly smaller than the Belgrade Arena, has been around since 1958 - until then, handball was still played on a football field and basketball on concrete. And no, they weren’t rich at all back then. In terms of the diversity of museums, galleries, music institutions and other archives of civilization, Vienna is on par with the world’s largest metropolises, not cities with two million people. The principle is similar: use what you have, do everything you can and it will come back to you.

It’s not just the subway (U-Bahn) that made it easier for us to get around Vienna. In addition to it, there is also the S-Bahn, a city-suburban railway, like BG:voz, only much more extensive and frequent, with 10 lines and 300,000 passengers a day. And at the airport, the railway is the law, although there are also buses, both to Vienna and to nearby Bratislava. The express City Airport Train (CAT) runs to the Wien Mitte station, practically in the city center, and the Bundesbahn RailJet can take you to the Main Station and further to the most important Austrian towns. There is also a regular suburban S-Bahn that stops at the stations along the way.



With 171 km of tracks, the Vienna tram is one of the largest in the world and, together with the subway, forms the backbone of public transport. The network was reduced after World War II, in the era of automobiles, and is now being extended. The street tram is not fast at all, because it stops at traffic lights, and the stations are much closer together than in Belgrade. It is still very popular. Eight of Vienna’s tram stations, however, are located in “subway-like” tunnels - in the 1960s, two tram sections were moved underground. So, we waited at the underground tram station near the Main Railway Station for tram number 18, which stays underground the longest and therefore most resembles a “real” subway. We couldn’t help but think that such a tunnel from the Sava Bridge to Tasmajdan with 2-3 stations would revive the Belgrade tram and public transport in our city in general. It’s not that nobody has ever suggested it. We’ve had the money for that for a long time, but...

We should add that shortly after World War II, Belgrade removed tram transport from its very center, Terazije and its surroundings, and to this day, on the way to the urban center, people transfer from a means of transport with a larger capacity (trams) to a means of transport with a smaller capacity and higher costs per passenger (buses and trolleys). In Zagreb, it’s the opposite, and in Vienna, you can barely see a city bus in the center. Vienna’s public transport company has only about 500 buses.



Similar to Belgrade, Vienna also recently got its Main Railway Station - it was created by merging two older ones, the South and East Stations - but unlike Belgrade, it did not shut down the remaining frontal stations in the city center (West and Franz Josef) for some petty-bourgeois “unshackling of the city” (the railway created large cities in the first place); on the contrary, it invested in their renovation and development. Vienna’s stations are home to public transport hubs, regional and city ones, as well as urban shopping malls, and two planned Belgrade subway lines will intersect at the closed Main Railway Station Belgrade – “missing” the almost new one in Prokop! - and the largest shopping mall was built near the former railway, but along the Sava River, where boats do not run. And the garage is like in America.

Such urban planning means that in Belgrade, both the train and the subway - when they exist - will be used to a relatively small extent, and that the bus will permanently remain the primary means of transportation (in addition to that, for our advanced car mentality, no matter how much space there is in our heads, there is no more space on the streets). And all of this has its economic price as well, although, they say, it is free.

M. Radonjic

Grad Beč | Međunarodne kancelarije – Beograd

Vienna City Belgrade Office

public transport in Vienna

Vienna subway

Ubahn

Sbahn

Vienna tram

underground tram

expansion of car use

car mentality

Rupert Schickl

Belgrade and Vienna subways