About

It all started when…

My wife and I went to Munich. We wanted to go from our hotel to Marienplatz, a central square in the middle of the city. I looked up directions on Google Maps, and got simple (enough) directions: Walk 6 mins, take Tram 18 or 19 for 5 stops, transfer to S-Bahn route 4, 6, 7, or 8, ride for two stops and we’ll be there in 15 mins. Nice and easy, right?

When we went to buy our tickets, the kiosk was… confusing. Thankfully there was a little British flag that changed the menus to English, but there were multiple sets of menus for buying the same ticket. What ticket should we buy? Single ticket, round trip, stripe ticket, group ticket? All of these tickets got us to Marienplatz, but the machine did not tell us the difference between them. When we finally decided on single ticket, we were asked if we wanted to validate the ticket. I don’t know, do we?

We hopped on the Tram and it only took one stop for me to realize I got the wrong ticket. I think. Everyone else who got on, punched their ticket in a validator box. Our ticket didn’t look like theirs. When it came time to transfer, I didn’t know what I needed to do to transfer onto the S-Bahn. Luckily, no fare inspectors gave us any trouble.

Research Time

When we got back to the hotel, I searched for answers to all the questions I now had about Munich public transportation. What was a stripe ticket? What do I need to do to transfer? How do I navigate that multi menu ticketing kiosk? What is the punch box? It took me four different websites and one YouTube video to get all the information I needed. Four different websites? Really? Surely there was one website that had all this information with nice photos and descriptions of the little nuances of public transit. There wasn’t.

So I decided to make one.