A Funicular Won't Save You, and Neither Will a Bus With Its Own Highway

🇵🇹 Portugal 🇨🇴 Colombia By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Lisbon sells itself to tourists as a city of dinky yellow trams clanking past pastel façades, which is true for about four hundred metres of Alfama and a lie for the other ninety percent of your commute, which will be spent wedged into a bus that smells faintly of bacalhau and regret. Bogotá, meanwhile, built an entire elevated bus empire called TransMilenio that its own residents will tell you, with the flat affect of hostage-negotiation survivors, to avoid between 6 and 8am unless you enjoy having a stranger's armpit as a permanent facial feature.

I have commuted badly in both cities. I have missed both a funicular and an articulated red bus the length of a small aircraft carrier while running in shoes not built for running. Neither country will apologise to you for this. That is, in fact, the whole lesson.

Do's & Don'ts

🇵🇹 Portugal

🇨🇴 Colombia

Portugal: A City That Looks Like a Postcard and Commutes Like a Grudge

Lisbon is built on seven hills, a fact the tourism board treats as romantic and your quadriceps treat as an act of war. The trams — yes, the famous ones, Tram 28 specifically — are so overrun with tourists photographing their own feet that actual commuters have largely abandoned them, leaving locals to the metro, the buses, and a general policy of walking downhill wherever physically possible and uphill only under duress.

The metro is small, four lines, clean enough, and reliably late in the specific Portuguese way where nobody apologises because nobody is surprised. The Navegante card is the backbone of the system — buy one, load it, and never again hand a driver coins like some kind of medieval peasant. Buses run frequently in theory and erratically in practice, particularly after 9pm, when Lisbon's public transport quietly decides the working day is over regardless of what the printed schedule claims.

What nobody tells newcomers is the ferry culture. Commuters heading across the Tagus to Almada or Barreiro take boats to work, which sounds idyllic until you're doing it in October rain with a laptop bag and the boat is somehow both late and full. The Portuguese have a specific talent for infrastructure that is beautiful, historic, and mildly non-functional, and nowhere is that clearer than watching a 19th-century funicular strain under the weight of forty adults who all, correctly, decided walking up Bica was not going to happen today.

Cost is where Portugal wins outright. A monthly Navegante Metropolitano pass covering the whole Lisbon area runs a fraction of what Northern Europeans pay for a fortnight of trains, and even taxis and Ubers are cheap enough that skipping the whole ordeal is a viable weekly indulgence. The trade-off is patience — for delays, for crowding on the yellow line at rush hour, for the fact that "five minutes away" in Lisbon can mean five minutes of level pavement or five minutes of near-vertical cobblestone, and the app will not tell you which.

Colombia: Elevated Buses, Ground-Level Chaos

TransMilenio is, on paper, a genuinely impressive piece of engineering — a bus rapid transit system with its own dedicated lanes slicing through Bogotá traffic, moving over two million passengers a day. In practice, it is a system so overloaded that Bogotanos have developed an entire vocabulary of dread around it. Ask anyone who's lived there and they will tell you, without irony, to structure your entire working life around avoiding rush hour on it. This is not hyperbole. This is operational advice.

The stations themselves are elevated, glass-walled, and during peak hours function less like transit infrastructure and more like a controlled experiment in how many humans can occupy a rectangle before something gives. Doors that are supposed to open on both sides sometimes don't; buses that are supposed to arrive every ninety seconds sometimes arrive in nervous clusters of three, followed by a twelve-minute silence. Petty theft on crowded routes is common enough that locals keep phones in front pockets and bags zipped against their bodies as reflexively as breathing.

And yet — the SITP feeder buses that connect neighbourhoods to the trunk lines are a genuinely underrated piece of urban life, cheap and surprisingly pleasant outside peak hours, and Bogotá's Sunday Ciclovía, which shuts down over a hundred kilometres of major roads to cars and hands them to cyclists, joggers, and dog walkers, is one of the best civic ideas any city on this list has had. It just doesn't help you get to your 9am meeting on a Tuesday.

Altitude adds its own tax: Bogotá sits at 2,640 metres, and newcomers sprinting for a bus will discover their lungs have opinions about that within the first week. Add relentless traffic outside the dedicated lanes and taxis that can take longer than the bus during rush hour, and you have a city where the fastest way to get anywhere is often simply not going anywhere between 6 and 8.

The Verdict

Portugal wins on charm, cost, and the fact that its transport failures are merely inconvenient rather than genuinely gruelling. Missing a tram in Lisbon means a pleasant twenty-minute walk past a viewpoint; missing your TransMilenio window in Bogotá means recalculating your entire day around a system that treats "capacity" as a polite suggestion. Colombia wins on ambition — TransMilenio moves an absurd number of people for the money — but ambition doesn't un-crush your ribcage at 7:45am.

If you want a commute that's merely annoying, take Lisbon. If you want a commute that becomes a genuine personality trait you discuss unprompted at dinner parties, Bogotá will oblige. Neither city, notably, has solved this. Both have simply made peace with it, which is the most honest thing either has to say for itself.

What Nobody Warned You About

Reddit r/lisbon — paraphrased: the 28 tram is a tourist trap now, locals gave up on it years ago and just take the 714 bus or walk

Reddit r/bogota — paraphrased: nobody who actually lives here rides TransMilenio at rush hour by choice, you structure meetings around avoiding it entirely

expat.com Colombia — paraphrased: bought a TuLlave card day one, best decision, cash fares and confusion at the gate will eat your whole morning

Conclusion

Neither of these cities is going to hand you an effortless commute, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. Lisbon will charm you into forgiving its delays because everything is cheap and the view is nice while you wait. Bogotá will not bother charming you — it will simply expect you to adapt, the way everyone else already has, by avoiding the worst of it and treating the rest as a mild, recurring inconvenience. Pack good shoes for Lisbon's hills and a healthy respect for personal space for Bogotá's buses. You'll need both, and no amount of "exotic city living" Instagram captions will get you out of it.