As one can expect, the main transport in Venice is on the water. After all, there are no roads, just water channels 🙂
In Venice you can choose between taxis and water buses. Of course, you can get on a gondola, but I think using gondolas as your main type of transport is pretty expensive. They charged €80 for around 40 minutes of sailing. At least, those where the prices in March 2018.
Travel cards
Since we were there for just few days, we decided to get travel cards. For €40 per person you can get a travel card for 3 days for all water buses. My personal opinion is that you don’t need taxi if you get travel card. Water buses reach almost every corner of Venice so you will be ok with them. Just don’t get scared 🙂
Bus stations are actually floating platforms with roofs.
Before getting onto the station, you need to validate your ticket or travel card. We never got checked by anyone, but I guess there are people which job is to make sure there are no “free journeys” on the routes so take care and validate your tickets.
Don’t get scared and hold on!
While you are on the platform, waiting for the “bus” to come and you see it approaching, everything is suddenly looking good. After all, you have waited for a while. Every time the boats (buses) stop, the hit the platforms very hard. This is part of the stopping procedure, but also very dangerous if you are on the edge of the platform. There is a loud sound, and the whole platform moves. If you are travelling with kids, I’d suggest you stay on the waiting benches until the boat is at full stop.
There is a dedicated person on the boat who is in charge of tying up the boat to the platform. Then he “opens the door”, which is just a metal handrail, and passengers are allowed to leave. There are such handrails on both sides of the boat, so don’t worry, there isn’t a “wrong side” to be on.
One important advice. On both sides the captain’s cabin, outside, there are mirrors. Do not stand in front of the mirrors as you are blocking captain’s sight and you may get an angry voice shouting at you if you do so.
Every boat (bus) has a very large cabin where people can get in after they got on the boat. Maybe it was just me, because in March Venice was quite cold, but I didn’t really see many people to close the doors of the cabin. Maybe they are used to the weather or maybe they just don’t care…
On another side, for a first time in a very long time I saw many people giving up their seats to older passengers.
Parcel delivery
If you wander how do your parcels get delivered to Venice, here is a clue 🙂
Ambulance
Ambulances in Venice are not hard to spot either. We haven’t seen them actually “running” across the channels, but here is how they look like.
