Why I Love Berlin - Part 1

The past few days have had their toll on me. Gastroenteritis paid our home a visit just as hubby’s two week break ended. Our laundry loads doubled and we lived off of electrolyte solutions and crackers as the kids and I quarantined ourselves from the outside world and waited for our guest to leave.

Today, with the smell of fresh laundry and orange-poppyseed cake wafting through our home and the satisfaction that there were no remaining traces of the stomach bug having visited us, I took the kids to Tiergarten for an afternoon stroll. (Tiergarten is to Berlin what Central Park is to New York City.) It was our first time outside for half a week and the kids were thrilled. So was I.

I mentioned earlier that my love of Berlin warranted a blog post of its own. I was wrong.

There is so much that I adore that a single blog post would be misrepresentative. Funnily enough, however, I can categorise most of what I love about Berlin in one word: choice. This post is centered on the choices I had today, literally, just outside my doorstep – public transport.

Berlin has an intricately dense web of buses, streetcars, U-Bahn lines (subways) and S-Bahn lines (light rail). I can get almost anywhere in the city within an hour, the few exceptions being the most desolate and obscure corners of Berlin that I would visit once a year, if at all. Just outside my doorstep, I have the choice between an U-Bahn line and two bus lines (four if you count the overnight routes). Within a two-minute walk from my doorstep I have an additional U-Bahn line and four more bus lines at my disposal. Within a fifteen-minute walk from my doorstep I have access to yet another subway line, at least five more bus lines, three S-Bahn lines and a number of Regional Express lines which take me outside of the city for a tiny surcharge.

Many people are hesitant to depend on public transport for their daily commute. I can confidently say, from six years experience, that the BVG (Berliner Verkehrs-AG, responsible for buses, streetcars, and the U-Bahn) and DB (Deutsche Bahn, responsible for the S-Bahn) are extremely reliable. An advantage to having two different companies running the different methods of transport is that the city rarely has a complete shutdown. When busses, streetcars and the U-Bahn ceased to operate due to striking workers last spring, the S-Bahn, run by DB, continued to operate and even increased their service to pick up the slack.

I have no need for a car. The opportunity cost is much too high to justify my owning one. Between the monthly car loan payment, gas, and insurance, my wallet would be around 550 EUR lighter every month – more than FIVE TIMES what hubby and I spend monthly on public transportation.

As odd as it may sound, I find travelling in the city with my kids on public transport easier than in the car. I never have to struggle getting impatient kids/babies buckled in or repeatedly fold and unfold my stroller. Hubby and I can freely interact with our children without having to concentrate on the traffic. Our oldest son is completely infatuated with anything train-like, so rides on the U-Bahn, S-Bahn, and streetcar are always a welcome novelty to him.

I have said it before and I will say it again – if you live in this city, own a car, and use said car daily, you are either lazy or crazy, or both. Berlin is a city in which you can live car-free. Sadly, I cannot say the same about the city of Mississauga, where I grew up.