One City Commutes Uphill On A Tram From 1901. The Other Commutes Nowhere, Slowly, By Car.

🇵🇹 Portugal 🇧🇪 Belgium By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Lisbon and Brussels are both capitals of countries that punch well above their size in cultural self-regard, and both have built commuting cultures that are, in their own ways, a genuine source of local suffering wrapped in enough charm or infrastructure history that nobody's quite willing to call it a crisis. One runs its commute on hills and nerve. The other runs its commute on some of the worst traffic congestion in Western Europe, dressed up as a simple inconvenience everyone's agreed not to make a fuss about.

I have stood, sweating, on the famous yellow Tram 28 while it groaned up a hill it was never really designed for at modern passenger loads. I have also sat, motionless, on Brussels's ring road for long enough to finish an audiobook. Both experiences taught me something about the country I was in. Neither taught me patience, exactly, but both taught me resignation, which is close enough.

Do's & Don'ts: Portugal

Do's & Don'ts: Belgium

Portugal: Charm As Infrastructure, Hills As Fate

Lisbon's commute is, before anything else, a negotiation with geography. The city is built across seven hills with the kind of enthusiasm urban planners today would never permit, and the transit system that evolved to serve it — century-old trams, funiculars, outdoor elevators, and a metro network that INE's own commuting data shows carries a meaningful but still partial share of daily trips — reads as charming right up until you're doing it twice a day in August heat with groceries.

The famous Tram 28 is the clearest example of a transit line that has quietly transformed from "commuter infrastructure" into "tourist attraction that also, incidentally, still needs to get locals to work," and the tension between those two functions defines rush hour in a way few other cities experience so visibly. Carris, the operator, runs the line on genuinely historic rolling stock, which means charm, character, and a capacity ceiling that was never designed for both souvenir-hunting tourists and actual commuters sharing the same six square metres of standing room.

What I came to appreciate, slowly, was that Lisbon's commuting culture has made a kind of peace with its own limitations that feels distinctly Portuguese. Nobody's demanding the trams be replaced with something faster and less charming. The elevators and funiculars are treated with genuine civic pride rather than embarrassment at their quaintness. There's an unhurried fatalism to the whole system — it will get you there, eventually, uphill, slowly, and you are expected to have made peace with that fact before you arrived, the same way you'd make peace with the heat or the cobblestones underfoot.

Belgium: Excellent Trains, Catastrophic Roads, A Nation That Complains About Both As A Hobby

Belgium's commuting story splits cleanly in two, and the split itself is the real story. The intercity rail network, run by SNCB, is genuinely one of the better systems in Western Europe for connecting Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Liège — dense, reasonably frequent, and taken seriously enough by STATBEL's own mobility-survey data to show rail capturing a healthy share of longer commutes. If your commute is point-to-point between major cities, Belgium quietly does this rather well.

The road network, particularly anything touching the Brussels ring road, is a different story entirely, and it's the story Belgians themselves tell with the most relish. Brussels regularly ranks among the most congested cities in Europe by hours lost to traffic, and STATBEL's commuting figures on car-dependent trips into the capital bear out just how much daily life still runs on a road system that cannot support the volume asked of it. What struck me as a newcomer wasn't the traffic itself — plenty of cities have bad traffic — but the specific Belgian relationship to complaining about it, which has evolved into something close to a national pastime, performed with dry, deadpan resignation rather than genuine outrage.

Cycling has grown as the rational workaround, particularly in Ghent and parts of Brussels, and STIB-MIVB's own network investments have leaned into this, but Belgian weather does cycling commuters no favours whatsoever, and "genuinely excellent wet-weather gear" moves from optional accessory to basic survival equipment within your first grey, horizontal-rain October. The linguistic layer adds its own texture too — transit signage and announcements shift between French and Dutch depending on region, which catches plenty of newcomers off guard on their first cross-regional trip.

The Verdict

Portugal's commute is slow because the city itself refuses to be anything other than what it's always been — hilly, historic, charming, and mildly impractical as a result. Belgium's commute is slow because the infrastructure simply hasn't kept pace with how many people need to move through a small, densely populated country every single day, and everyone's agreed the correct response is dry humour rather than outrage. If you want a commute that feels like part of the city's identity, Lisbon wins outright. If you want a commute that actually, reliably gets you between cities on time, Belgium's trains deserve real credit, provided your trip doesn't require touching a Brussels ring road at 8am. I'll take Lisbon's trams. At least when they're late, the view is doing something for me.

What Nobody Warned You About

Reddit r/lisbon — "Moved here thinking the 28 was just for tourists. It is my actual commute. I have made peace with being photographed every single morning."

Internations Lisbon — "Nobody told me 'ten minutes away' in Lisbon means ten minutes if you're a mountain goat. Add the hill tax to every estimate."

Reddit r/belgium — "My coworker's 20km drive takes longer than my 80km train ride. We have agreed never to discuss it directly, only to sigh about it."

Conclusion

Neither city is going to fix its commute anytime soon, and neither, deep down, particularly wants to. Lisbon's slowness is tangled up with its identity in a way locals seem genuinely unwilling to trade for efficiency. Brussels's slowness is tangled up with a national sense of humour that has made ring-road suffering into shared cultural material, recited over beers with the same affection as a football result. Arrive expecting either commute to be fixed by your own impatience, and you'll just be the newest person complaining into a void that has heard it all before, in two languages, for decades.