This left me wondering where other travellers stand on the issue. When travelling to a "safe" destination, how do you prefer to get around and what factors determine how you get from the hotel to your place of work?


I have found that public transportation anywhere in Western Europe is fast, efficient, accurate and almost perfectly safe both in terms of the equipment and in terms of petty theft and such. In eastern Europe I would still us the public transportation but with a bit more caution due to the petty-theft issue. I have heard horror stories about taxi drivers in Romania and Bulgaria. Most of the eastern European countries are "good" public transportation countries, i.e. the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia, Slovania, Poland, Latvia and Hungary.

To get better acquainted, why don't you take a look at some of the websites of some of the underground systems in Europe? Try www.bahn.de (Germany), www.eurostar.com (trips between London, Paris and Brussels)and others which can easily be found in Google. Belgium, Netherlands, Italy - they all have excellent web sites.

The other place where I would recommend an excellent public system is in NE Asia, namely Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore in the SE.