Prague Public Transportation
In my previous post, I told you about Prague’s Metro trains, and buying tickets for Prague’s public transportation system. In this post, I will talk about Prague’s trams. And I will also mention taxis in Prague, and how to best make use of them.
Let’s begin by explaining the taxi situation in Prague. With the metro, trams and buses, you may never need to take a taxi in Prague. However, if you do, the best way to get one is to go into a hotel or restaurant (or museum) and ask them to call one for you. If you grab a taxi on the street, it is most likely going to be what we in New York call a gypsy taxi – one that is not licensed but is posing as a taxi. Those gypsies are likely to take a roundabout route to get you to your destination, and grossly overcharge you.
How can you tell if a Prague taxi is legit or not? If they are, they will have the name of the taxi company, its phone number and license number stenciled on or immediately behind the passenger door. The gypsy taxis may look like a legit taxi, but they will have no information on their doors.
Even if you go to a hotel, you should ask them to call you a taxi, rather than using the ones out in front. At the Hilton Old Town where we stayed, there were “taxis” parked in front all the time; however, we found out the hard way that these are basically limousines that have contracted rates with the hotel for their service, rates that are significantly higher than the legit taxis charge.
To give you an idea of what I am talking about, our trip from the airport to Hilton Old Town took about 30 minutes, and cost us, with tip, around $40. We took one of those hotel limos one day to go from our hotel to Malostranska Namesti, about a 15 minute ride including traffic – if he had not taken every possible wrong turn, the trip wouldn’t even have taken 10 minutes. With tip, we paid him $25. After that, we said: “no more gypsy taxis for us!”
So let’s move on and talk about the trams. As simple and reliable as it is, the Prague Metro leaves lots of holes, parts of the city that it doesn’t really cover. For example, there are no Metro stops close to the popular Charles Bridge. That’s where Prague’s tram system, which is much more elaborate, comes in handy. Now, I can’t begin to give you a full appraisal of the tram system. While we made great use of the trams, in our 10 days in Prague we only rode 4 of the 22 trams lines. What I will do is tell you about the routes we took and how they helped us get where we wanted to get to. And I should tell you to keep in mind that all the tram stops show up on Google Maps, so you can easily plan your public travel around Prague ahead of time (which is what I do).
On our first full day in Prague, we wanted to visit the Prague Castle. There are guided tours you can take to the Castle that will pick you up at your hotel and take you to the major buildings in the Castle, but we decided that it would be better for us to do it on our own. Around the corner from us, at Namesti Republiky (Republic Square) was a stop for Tram 5.
This took us in 3 stops to Malostranska, a transportation hub in Lesser Town where many trams (and the Metro underground) crisscross.
At Malostranska we crossed the street and transferred to Tram 22, which 3 stops later dropped us off just a few short blocks uphill from the Castle. That was important because the Castle is on top of a very steep hill. If we wanted to, we could’ve hiked up the hill from Malostranska. But we wanted to save our legs for walking around the Castle complex which is extensive (and completely covered in leg and back-numbing cobblestones).
There were several other times that we traveled to the west side of Prague’s Vltava River, to Lesser Town and environs, and each time, the tram came in handy. For example, from Malostranska, we took tram 12 one day to Malostranske Namesti, a square with the incredible Baroque St. Nicholas Church.
St. Nicholas Church
There are also tons of great shops and cafes near there (and some museums as well), and the western entrance to the Charles Bridge is a few short blocks away.
The Western Entrance to the Charles Bridge
Later in the week we wanted to see Czech artist Alphonse Mucha‘s monumental series of paintings called the Slav Epic, which are on display at a branch of the National Gallery, the Veletrzni Palac. I discovered that Tram 24 from our stop, Namesti Republiky, went there, and stopped right on the corner near the Gallery, and so we were able to get there in just about 15 minutes!
After visiting the Mucha exhibition, we wanted to head back to the area near St. Nicholas Church, to have lunch at a wine bar called Vinograf. I was thinking that we would have to ride tram 24 back to Namesti Republiky, then hop on the 5 and take that to Malostranska, and switch to the 12 there. But a little exploration of the Veletrzni Palac tram stop revealed that tram 12 stopped there! So we hopped on the 12 (feeling by now that we were solid tram-riding veterans) and rode it straight through Malostranska to Malostranske Namesti, got off, and walked a few short blocks to Vinograf (and by the way, if you like wine, you won’t want to miss that one).
Vinograf Wine Bar
So there are just a couple of examples of how easy, convenient and useful the Prague trams can be in getting around town, going from one attraction to another. Next time we visit Prague, perhaps we will travel a little further afield, and need to use the buses. Whether we do or not, we know we can rely on the metro and trams to get us to most of the places we will want to see. And if we need to use the taxi, we know what the deal is, so we can do that, too!
One last note: if you found some of the places that I mentioned in this post to be of interest, do not worry that I have said all I am going to say about them. As I begin writing about each individual day we spent in Prague (which will be very soon), I will go into greater detail about Vinograf and the Charles Bridge and lots of other amazing things we saw and did in Prague! Stay tuned!
The post Prague Public Transportation, Part Two: Trams and Taxis appeared first on The Dairy Free Traveler.