The French Will Judge Your Metro Etiquette. South Africa Will Just Ask If You Have a Car.

🇫🇷 France vs 🇿🇦 South Africa

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Two countries, two entirely different definitions of "getting around." In France, commuting is a system — precise, unionised, occasionally on strike, but a system nonetheless, and God help you if you don't understand the unspoken rules of which way to face on the escalator. In South Africa, commuting is a series of individual negotiations with reality, most of which begin with the question "do you have a car, and if not, why not, and are you insured against your own optimism."

I have lived with both. Paris taught me to read a strike calendar the way sailors read weather. Cape Town taught me that "public transport" is a phrase best deployed with the same caution as "I'll just wing it." Neither city is wrong, exactly. They are simply answering different questions about what a city owes its residents, and what its residents are expected to sort out themselves.

Do's & Don'ts

🇫🇷 France

🇿🇦 South Africa

France: A Cathedral Built on Punctuality and Passive Aggression

The Paris Métro is, structurally, one of the great achievements of urban planning — sixteen lines, a train every two to four minutes, and a level of density that means you are rarely more than a five-minute walk from a station. It is also a finishing school in silent judgement. The French don't need to say anything when you stand on the wrong side of the escalator; the collective sigh of forty commuters does the talking for them. I once held a Métro door open for a woman running for the train and received a look from a nearby Parisian so withering I considered emigrating on the spot.

The RATP network runs like a Swiss watch until it doesn't, and when it doesn't — a strike, a grève, called with the casual regularity of the seasons — the entire city adapts within hours. Vélib' bike stations empty out, electric scooters multiply like rabbits, and everyone simply accepts that this is the cost of a workforce with actual bargaining power. I've come to respect this more than I expected to. There's something bracing about a country where the transport workers can, and will, shut the city down over pension reform, and the rest of the population shrugs and gets on a bike rather than calling it an outrage.

The RER, the regional rail system connecting Paris to its suburbs, is a different animal entirely — dirtier, less reliable, and the site of most tourist horror stories about pickpockets at Châtelet-Les Halles. Locals know to keep bags zipped and front-facing. New arrivals learn this the hard way, usually once. Commute times average around 35 minutes each way for Parisians, which they consider perfectly reasonable and which anyone from a car-dependent country will find suspiciously civilised. The unspoken code of the Métro — no eye contact, no loud conversation, book or phone held at exactly sternum height — takes about a month to absorb and a lifetime to master. Get it right, though, and you disappear into the city like anyone else. Get it wrong, and you'll be identified as a tourist before you've said a word.

South Africa: Where the Car Is Not a Luxury, It's Infrastructure

Here is the thing nobody tells you before you move to Johannesburg or Cape Town: public transport, in the European sense, largely does not exist, and the private sector has filled the gap with a system that is chaotic, occasionally dangerous, and — I will say this once and mean it — often more genuinely useful than its reputation suggests. The minibus taxi industry moves roughly 15 million people a day across the country, more than every other mode combined, and it operates almost entirely outside formal regulation. Routes are learned by word of mouth. Fares are negotiated in hand signals out the window. It works, in the way that a flock of starlings works — no central authority, remarkable collective competence, and the occasional catastrophic collision.

For anyone earning a salary that allows for options, the real commute happens by car, and the real cost of living in Johannesburg is not rent — it's the vehicle, the insurance, the tracking device, and the low hum of vigilance that accompanies every trip after dark. Cape Town is gentler, more walkable in its central bowl, and the MyCiTi bus rapid transit system is a legitimate bright spot — clean, punctual-ish, and safe enough that expats use it without a second thought. The Gautrain, linking Johannesburg, Pretoria, and OR Tambo airport, is the closest South Africa gets to European-style rail, and locals treat it with the reverence usually reserved for minor miracles.

Then there's load-shedding — the rolling power cuts that turn traffic lights into four-way stops and traffic into a Darwinian experiment. South Africans have developed an almost meditative calm about this. Nobody honks. Everyone just... takes turns, more or less, in a display of road courtesy that would astonish anyone who's driven in Naples. It's the strangest thing: a country with genuine, serious commuting hazards has produced some of the most patient drivers I've encountered, purely because losing your temper at an intersection with no traffic lights and no police is how you end up on the news.

The Verdict

France wins on infrastructure, full stop — you cannot out-argue a Métro system that runs every ninety seconds at peak hours. But infrastructure isn't the same as good manners, and Paris will make you feel like a criminal for breathing wrong on public transport. South Africa's system is objectively more precarious, more improvised, and occasionally more expensive than it should be for a country with this population density. And yet there's an honesty to it — nobody pretends the system is perfect, so nobody is shocked when it isn't. If you want to be quietly humiliated by an escalator, move to Paris. If you want to be genuinely tested by logistics, move to Johannesburg. Cape Town, infuriatingly, might be the only city on earth where both approaches sort of work at once.

What Nobody Warned You About

r/expats — "I lived in Paris for three years and still get glared at for standing on the wrong side of the escalator. It never stops. You will never win."

Internations Paris — "The RER during a strike week is not public transport, it's a group therapy session. Bring a book and lower your expectations."

expat.com Cape Town — "Everyone tells you not to use minibus taxis, then everyone who's lived here five years uses them constantly and swears by specific drivers. Ask around before you judge."

Conclusion

What both countries prove, in their own maddening ways, is that a commute is never just a commute — it's a referendum on what a society has decided to organise centrally and what it's decided to leave to chance. France organised everything and then weaponised etiquette as a substitute for warmth. South Africa organised almost nothing and built an entire informal economy on the gaps, one that somehow moves more people than the formal one ever could. Neither is a model I'd hand to a city planner without heavy caveats. But if you've ever stood silently fuming on a delayed Métro platform, or negotiated a taxi fare through a half-open window in Braamfontein, you already know: the system tells you everything about the place, before the place has said a word to you.