Today we want to focus on another factor of our current poll concerning City Architecture: Infrastructure. Infrastructure is everything that sustains our quality of life including at least (public) transportation, built environment, water supply, waste management, building and development constraints. All these points form infrastructure but public transportation is a point that concerns every one of us.

And this time I want to share some personal infrastructure experiences that I have had.

Here are a good and a bad example of infrastructures in the light of public transportation.

When I was on an around-the-world trip in 2004, I had a four-day-stop in Los Angeles. Before, I was in New Zealand for two weeks and was visiting the islands by car. So, I was tired of driving and after arriving in Los Angeles, I thought public transportation was a good choice for being mobile only for four days.
It was a good start in Los Angeles, there was a pick-up-service from the airport to get to the hotel. My hotel was located in Hermosa Beach from where it was easy to visit the surroundings within walking distance. The day after I decided to visit the famous Universal Studios, Hollywood Boulevard, Beverly Hills and so on. At that point I had to choose L.A.’s public transportation. If I only knew back then how bad a choice that was. So I planned the way to Universal City. First, I had to take three different busses from different companies (that means, every time I changed the bus, I had to buy a new ticket) to get to a metro. It took several stops riding the metro before I reached my destination. In the end it took me more than four hours to get to Universal City which is only about 30 miles away from where I lived.
I have never experienced such a bad public transportation system as the one in Los Angeles. It was so bad, that there was no other choice as to rent a car. But this can not be a proper solution during this time where we have so much environmental discussion.

After this trip, I was happy to get back to Berlin, a good example of public transportation. Every single place in Berlin is connected to a centralized public transportation system which means that you can use any means of public transportation from nearly every spot in the inner city quite easily. There is no competition in the public transportation so you don’t have to buy several tickets if you switch between busses and metro. The layout of the whole system is well planned and you can get from one end of the city to the other in less than one hour which is around 30 miles as well. During the day you will find it quite easy to get to wherever you want to go within the city. Even at night there is a well planned bus service which substitutes for the metros and subways. Over the weekend there is an extended service of the metro and subway at night which makes it even easier for all the tourists visiting Berlin.

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