As a lesbian, I carry my keys on a carabiner in my right pocket. That way I can look cool and theoretically defend myself quickly (my rape whistle is on my keys, duh). In this same vein of thought, I don’t like to carry my MetroCard in my wallet because I don’t want to pull it out every time I get on the subway. Because thieves are clamoring for my wallet. So I generally carry it in my jacket or my back pocket.

The problem with this is that my keys poked a little hole in my MetroCard and eventually it stopped working. I found this out right after I had loaded $50 on it, and my train was rapidly approaching the station. The unhelpful little guy in the box tried it a few times and then shoved some paperwork in my hands with my still unusable card, so I had missed my train AND had to buy a new one. Nu uh, city government, you ain’t getting away with this!

So I just filled out the paperwork with my address the approximate amount on the card and why it wasn’t working. Also it’s free to send it!

I had almost completely forgotten about it and dismissed it as just more paperwork lost in the NYC municipal shuffle, but I checked my mail today and viola! A brand new card with 45 bucks on it!

Lib Tietjen lives in and knows everything about Brooklyn.

In the beginning, I told myself that it was financially irresponsible not to dodge the fare. It was just too easy. Berlin’s public transport system, a citywide labyrinth of trains, trams, buses and subways, is a thing of beautiful simplicity and structuring: A single ticket is valid for all modes, the network covers almost every conceivable destination, and the service is, of course, überpünktlich (very punctual). It is also barrierless, and spot checks by inspectors are relatively rare. As justification, I used the fact that I had, somewhat rashly, packed up a life of relative luxury in income-disparate South East Asia and landed in Berlin’s thoroughly competitive (read: desperate) job market with only a year’s teaching experience, little in the way of German and even less in the way of money. After mistakenly buying around four tickets too many on my first day, I vowed to make a better fist of getting around my new home city on the cheap. Several days later, having dutifully been stumping up the €6 each morning for a Tageskarte (day pass) and, having never even seen an inspector, let alone been checked, I took my first step into petty criminal territory: neglecting to validate my ticket.

At first, traveling illegally is electrifying; even the dullest journeys become thrilling, suspenseful, dangerous. My silliest boyhood spy fantasies come to life as I furtively glance up and down the train, scanning the myriad faces for any sign of an undercover agent (inspectors are usually plainclothes, adding texture to the fabric of my fantasy). The fact that I am doing my sneaking in the former Stasi stronghold of East Berlin only heightens my indulgence. After being told by a fellow broke hostelmate that BVG, Berlin’s transport authority, often uses retirees as inspectors, reportedly because they arouse so little suspicion, I spend a week irrationally frightened by the movements of Berlin’s aged population (whose numbers are plentiful). Following an incident where I become increasingly convinced that an elderly man, complete with backpack, which obviously is to carry and conceal his fining apparatus, is staring me down, waiting for me attempt to flee, only to find that in reality I am just partially obscuring his view of a map, I realize that I am probably taking it a bit too far. But I do not stop.

Eventually any remaining shred of excitement is stripped away, leaving behind only fear and paranoia. Large parts of my daily travel (and adrenaline) are now spent in a state of hypervigilance; other freeloaders tell me that I am exceptionally lucky not to have been caught yet. Despite this, I continue, beginning to reason that if/when I am caught, the €40 fine will pale in comparison to the savings I have already made. I am vaguely aware (but deliberately ignoring) that this kind of reasoning sounds a lot like that used by a gambling addict. And I have become addicted: to the thrill, then the feeling of defiance, and finally (and perhaps most importantly) the substantial savings it delivers to my back pocket. For traveling without a ticket is that perverse addictive habit that it actually pays to keep doing—the drug that keeps on giving. More and more, however, I feel like a thief; revelations that locals also engage in the practice do little to quell my unease. I begin to wonder: what else would I do if I knew that I could get away with it?

In expensive cities like Tokyo, London and New York, where you are more likely to really need the extra cash, there are no such opportunities for tests of moral fiber. A friend, whom in the privacy of my head I embarrassingly sneer at, says that she pays because her father’s friend is the CEO of a public transit system back home, and that to dodge the fare would seem like some kind of personal betrayal. Hooded in my arrogance of thinking that I am really taking part in a noble act of “defying the system”, of “wealth redistribution”, this immediately strikes me as absurd, as if a personal connection with public transport profits in general is enough to obey the concept in another hemisphere. Despite this, her reasoning, where actions play out as representations of personal connections to ideas, sounds dangerously like basic ethical reasoning, and only deepens my guilt. Still, my dwindling funds remain wedded to thoughts of cramped hostel beds, cheap but delicious beer, and JFK’s favorite jelly donuts.

Inevitably, it happens, and as my brain juggles guilt, fear and relief my body acts on its own, ambling down the carriage in a way I hope looks nonchalant. Thankfully, this is the Ring-bahn, the wondrous circular frame around which Berlin’s effortless transport system is based, meaning regular stops and fullish compartments. I calculate that the unlikely-looking inspector—skinheaded, wearing a stained silver tracksuit, looking more like evader than enforcer—only has time to check the first two sections of the carriage, and risk sitting down, mostly to mask my now uncontrollable hand-shaking. I carefully sit half-cocked, angled towards the nearest door, and look up. Across from me are two women, professional, one of whom meets my eyes and smirks, not unkindly. She knows what is up. Briefly I sense a fellow comrade, for the appearances of Berliners are nothing if not deceptive, but that feeling is dashed as her purse clasps part and a ticket emerges. I try to meet her gaze again but her eyes are past me now and I wonder: Is she willing him to catch me, or for me to be granted clemency?

Later that afternoon, having earlier made the stop, looking a little like a human version of the Spaghetti Monster as I simultaneously leapt out the carriage doors, fumbled for my ticket, lunged for the validation machine and dove back into the carriage, all while attempting to avoid suspicion, I take the U-bahn into town, to vote early at my embassy. Filling out my papers, knowing that postal votes are counted well after the result is usually determined, but still believing in the importance of my small action, I am struck by the hypocrisy of my actions. Feeling ashamed, rather than buoyed by notions of civic duty fulfilled, I descend underground ticketless and head back to the hostel, to search for invisible jobs.

Soon after, en route to an apartment viewing, my girlfriend stoops down suddenly at the tram stop, resurfacing with a white square of well-trampled cardboard. Frowning, she examines her find, and as her eyebrows rise back towards and then above their natural position, so do our fortunes. In her hand is a monthly pass, still valid for three more weeks. Suddenly the chilly November morning is a lot less harsh, and happy as I am, the thought of our crucial piece of luck is tempered by the misfortune it signifies for someone else. For the first time in weeks I step onto public transport guilt-free, towards what an evening phone call will make our home for the winter.

The next few days, I see a little more of the city, feeling a little like a corporate-sponsored VIP being given a free tour by a faceless benefactor. Evidently even in less desperate times my capacity for self-delusion is undiminished. But mostly I experience relief, as weeks of pent-up sighs wash over me and feelings of comfort fill up hollow pockets left behind by anxiety and guilt. It feels good to be legit, and yet I also feel a little squarer, less like a “real Berliner”, less in keeping with the city’s unspoken acceptance, even gentle encouragement of rule-breaking as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I realize that part of the underlying logic of my actions was rooted in the absurd idea that in stealing from the city I had quickly come to love, I could somehow avail myself of its often-intimidating edginess that both allures and terrifies expats in equal measure. Somehow it had never crossed my mind that attempting to authenticate coolness via petty theft is precisely the kind of mindset that would prevent it from ever being attained.

Unfortunately, my wallet continues to fail to carry out its intended money-carrying function, but not for long. Soon after the ticket find, I am offered a job, albeit only part-time. Knowing that even when our godsent ticket of salvation runs out I will be able to afford a replacement (not that I will always utilize this ability, wanting again on occasion to “thrill myself”), I feel ashamed of how I have felt since. In a weak moment of hubris, I think back on my “brief dalliance with near-poverty” and immediately feel sick, as if those words should ever be so glibly and self-servingly combined in phrase. Shaking myself out of my conceit, I think of how fortunate I am if the last month of pasta-based gastronomy and skipping on train fares in a foreign country is as close as I get to doing it tough. In a city full of visible reminders of what it really means to struggle for food and warmth, this should have been far more obvious.

Following my narrow escape from my first inspector interaction, I begin to run into them much more often, fortunately always when in possession of a ticket. After five months, and hundreds of euros worth of free trips, I am still yet to pay for my crimes. However, that all changes on a brief trip to Prague, where, after entering the underground and finding that the ticket machine only accepts small change, we venture further into the station in search of somewhere to change my freshly acquired krona into smaller denominations. After inadvertently wandering into the ‘fare zone’, we are met by two somber-looking inspectors, and, despite being at least 500m away from an actual train and (for a change) possessing pure intentions of honest travel, we are each forced to pay an on-the-spot fine of the equivalent of 35 euros. We then see no further inspectors for the rest of our four-day trip. Is this what Karma feels like?

See also: Reviews of public transportation

Ryan Eyers is a writer from New Zealand living in Berlin. You can check out more of his work at ryaneyers.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter at @ryan_eyers. Photo: metro centric

In Kansas City, unlike larger metropolitan areas such as New York, using public transportation is a definite class marker. Taking the bus here usually means you don’t have money to own a car, and as someone who could afford a car, I had never made the decision to board a bus.

I did, however, make the decision to speed across US-36 through central Missouri en route to Illinois, which attracted the attention of one very angry police officer who promptly pulled me over and rightly ticketed me. I cannot recall all the infractions individually, but I can say that what would have been a single speeding citation was compounded threefold by it having occurred—apparently—in a marked construction zone.

As I stood at the bar in an Illinois bowling alley with my older brother later that night, I asked him not to tell our mother about this new price on my head. (By the way, mom, sorry you had to find out this way.) I finished my glass of that night’s special—some cheap domestic beer—and with that watery swill still wetting my mouth, I realized I couldn’t afford my new debt to the state of Missouri.

When I got back to Kansas City a few days later, I immediately started brainstorming ideas on how to scrounge up money to pay for my traffic tickets. I came up with a few wishful solutions, hopeful that my dilemma could be solved simply and easily. The first thing that came to mind was selling blood plasma. I’d made good money over the previous summer selling my plasma so I could afford bar tabs and some groceries while squatting on a friend’s couch. The likelihood that I could donate nearly $400 worth of plasma in less than 30 days seemed slim and the thought of actually doing so seemed down right unseemly if not exhausting.

But I had to come to terms with what I knew would have to be done—I just couldn’t get over the poetry of it: In order to pay my traffic tickets on time, I would have to sell my car. If the officer realized that by fining me for driving poorly would actually lead me to relinquish the very instrument of my poor driving, then I’m sure he would have felt he’d done a good job that day.

Defeated, I posted an ad online and sold the car within a couple weeks to a nice young man who’d effortlessly talked me down on the price. I’d have $100 leftover after paying the fines, most of which would be changed to singles and quarters and fed into the fare boxes that are inside every metro bus I’d be riding for now on. Without wanting to, I went from driver to rider, pilot to passenger, a reckless headlong animal with a gas foot heavier than a brain’s worth of reasoning skills to a tamed and neutered kid internally struggling with how to afford all these panhandlers at my bus stop.

I was used to driving my car alone, so I wore headphones to maintain a similar sense of detachment. But I’d underestimated how inquisitive bus riders could be.

What are you listening to? Does this bus stop at the Plaza? Crazy weather, huh? Are we going north?

I eventually began leaving my ear buds at home and gave myself fully over to the experience of becoming a straphanger.

I began seeing other ramifications of taking public transportation. I was actually leaving my apartment earlier because of the departure times. When I had a car, I justified leaving 20 minutes before my 9 a.m. class, hurrying through the streets and eyeing every red light as if it were some heartless, traffic-congesting devil. Behind the wheel, I believed that my trip was more important than anyone else’s and that I was naturally a more skillful driver than anyone else on the road. Everyone had to get out of my way. I’d gas my car through the dying moments of a yellow light, leaving all the other drivers behind only to see them reappear in the lanes next to me at the next traffic light. I see this person now from my bus seat, anxiously rapping his fingers on the steering wheel and craning his neck low to maintain a perfect view of the red eye. He is idling his car forward a few inches. He is preempting the dissolve from red to green. The routine is the same at every light. I do not miss this.

Another thing I don’t miss is parking. At $115 per semester for a day permit, parking on campus is both time consuming and expensive. A night permit is another $98. That cost alone covers a semester’s worth of bus fare. Considering the additional costs of gas, maintenance and insurance, I was—in the financial calculations of a broke student—saving a fantastic sum of money.

I read somewhere that no one knows his city like the transit rider does. The driver sees only other cars, but the transit rider sees faces and hears voices of the people in his own city, and they make up the ever-changing landscape in which the rider lives and determines his daily experience. It didn’t take long for me to begin understanding that.

Sometimes there’ll be a comical scene on board like the 40-something man that all but sung his uncompromising love for a bottle of chocolate milk, or the tiny, adorable old woman who expressed at least 15 different ways to describe cold weather. Or there’s the man I sat next to after buying a 12-pack of beer, who, with such a selfless enthusiasm, told me I was surely going to have a good night, like I’d just won the lottery and deserved it.

Some scenes make you feel less at ease, as if you glimpsed something very personal for a second: The disjointed, half-formed but in some very hard-to-describe way poetic ramblings of a very ill man breaking out of himself at the expense of an innocent, lone woman to whom he asked if she killed his baby. And once I glimpsed the eyes of the still, disconnected stare of the inebriate who had moments earlier planted face into the bus’s deck with the unflinching grace of a falling two-by-four.

But some days, the scenes you encounter appear more profound. There was the afternoon I watched a young black man give his front-of-the-bus seat to an old white man in a motorized wheelchair. The young man took a seat directly behind the older man, and had to swat the dangling Confederate flag that hung from the back of the man’s wheelchair whenever the bus experienced a turbulent bump.

There was the unassuming man, anxiously giddy like a child with a secret, who revealed an ability to tell you the day of the week for any date you threw at him. The riders tested him, checking his answers against the calendars in our phones, and he nailed every one. I was born on a Tuesday. Then there’s the one-handed man in my neighborhood who always has his disadvantaged arm wrapped around an old, dirty broom. He’s always the happiest man on the bus and I feel uplifted when I see him.

When I am on the bus, I am not in control—I’ve learned to accept and enjoy this. The idea of owning an automobile when I have even an underappreciated transit system available to me now seems crazy. Ditching my car was hard at first, but I eventually understood that I was making tradeoffs. I could leave whenever I wanted when I was in my car, but I had to find parking (and sometimes pay for it). On a bus, I never have to circle a parking lot three times before finding a space, though I do have to walk a little bit more. Instead of remembering to fill up and pay for a tank of gas, I have to remember to buy a pass. I’m not inconvenienced more while riding the bus—just in different ways.

I’m not suggesting everyone sell their Buick for a bus pass, or that buses are a far superior way of traveling. But once upon a time, I had to sell my car to pay off some traffic tickets and ended up having to rely on Kansas City’s public transportation system to get around. I learned to live with less, not just put up with it. I learned the idea of buying-out what bothers me is not a sound pursuit, and that if I continued to think so then I’d ultimately be bothered by everything. Most importantly though, I learned to stop looking only at the car ahead of me, and look at the people around me.

Bradley Trevor Hoffman is a student and freelance writer living in Kansas City with his girlfriend and their dog, Etta James. Follow him on Twitter, @BradleyTHoffman.

It’s time to check in.

Most of my social plans were scrapped this weekend due to the partially-functionally public transportation in the city, but I did end up spending $27.93 on work gloves and cleaning supplies to help clean the park I live next to, and $48.47 at the grocery store. On Sunday afternoon, with much of the subway system back into action, a good number of my friends and I met up at one of our apartments. I brought a bottle of Prosecco ($16.32). Total weekend spending: $92.72

And how were your weekends?

Sydney Monorail: ★
Cost: $5AUD

I was in Sydney on business recently, which is just the most amazing and douchiest sentence I’ve ever written. But I was, and on my first night I had plans to get drinks with the friend of a friend. I left the event venue (where they held boxing at the Olympics! God, I love the Olympics) a responsible amount of early, with Google Maps’ assurance that all I needed to do was take the monorail one stop. I was willing to pay the unreasonable price of $5 for this because it was worth that much to me not to be lost in a foreign country at night. Come to think of it, that’s probably the business model for all overpriced transit aimed mainly at tourists.

But even though the stop was ostensibly mere yards from me, I could not find it. And the five Australians I asked didn’t know where it was either. Here’s a tip, Sydney Monorail: If your intended passengers can’t find you, you’re doing something wrong. I took a cab to the bar.

The next day, my new friend helped me uncover the Monorail’s hiding place, and we took it downtown from the harbor. I guess I have to give it one star for actually getting me to where I was going , but it’s slow and expensive and dumb and it only has seven stops and I hate it. It’s better to walk everywhere, give yourself a mild case of tendonitis and soak up the beauty.

Washington, D.C. Metro: ★★★
Cost: $1.70-$5.75

My time with the Metro was merely a brief fling, our interactions superficial enough that I can look back on it as a pleasant, if not particularly profound experience. The stations themselves were the cleanest I’ve seen, the cars are roomy and it seems to run pretty regularly.

Deductions come for having tickets that you have to scan both to enter and leave the station, which is annoying, and for the doors, which shut with a frightening velocity that could definitely cost someone an arm or a leg. And who puts carpet on a subway? You know someone’s just going to vomit on it.

Berlin S-Bahn: ★★★★
Cost: €2.30-€3

Four stars for danger! The price is a little steep (especially for visiting Americans and their weak, weak dollars), but there are no turnstiles or ticket-takers on the S-Bahn—only the honor system, which can result in significant savings if you are bold and not honorable. The fine is pretty steep if you get caught, or so I have heard, because I never saw anyone checking tickets the whole time I was there.

Also, I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but I find trains very … calming? Meditative? Especially if you’ve got some foliage, or countryside, or some shit out the window. Anyway, I had a super-zen moment on the S-Bahn coming back to the city from Olympic Stadium when I may have achieved total, if fleeting, serenity. So, that doesn’t hurt.

New York City Subway: ★★
Cost: $2.25

I had higher hopes for the subway. The all-too-frequent delays and inexplicable service stoppages on the weekends are one thing, but one can only wait 45 minutes for a train at 2 a.m. and hear the distant rumblings of salvation only to be disappointed by a garbage train so many times before one begins to feel a little broken. I’m fairly certain I spent more money on late night taxis the few months I lived in New York than I have in five years in Chicago, because after a few garbage trains, it seems like the options are either to fork out for a cab, or spend the night sleeping underground with the rats.

I really like the express lines, though.

Paris Métro: ★★★★★
Cost: € 1.70

Le Métro, le roi. It would be easy to conflate my fondness for the Métro with my fondness for its city. Just thinking of it brings back memories of analyzing the hierarchical social structure of groups of young French hoodlums who sat one car down, or the homeless man with a tuft of toadstool-shaped hair who was always, without fail, asleep on a bench at the Champs-Elysées Clemenceau stop. We called him “Ole Mushroom Head,” because we were unkind.

Of course, there were also loud accordion players and couples grabbing ass entwined around the standing metal poles, which you could chalk up to a certain Parisian charm if you were only in town for a quick visit, but after a month or so, it begins to grate. And Châtelet, the world’s largest subway station, is an absolute nightmare for anyone with even the slightest touch of claustrophobia.

But when it comes to accessibility and reliability, I have never known its equal. If you are a drunk tourist lost in the city late at night, all you need to do is point your stumbling feet in any direction and walk for 10 minutes, and I guarantee you will find a Métro station. I don’t know of any other city where you can say that.

Chicago El: ★★★
Cost: $2.25

The romance is gone between the El and me. In the five years that I’ve been taking it, I’ve seen it at its worst: broken down, smoking, covered in urine. I place my trust in it daily, and while it usually comes through, every now and then it leaves me abandoned on an outside platform in the winter without so much as an apology. It’s my constant companion, but sometimes, the closeness is suffocating. Especially during rush hour.

But it does its best, you know? It’s slow, but it’s steady. It’s got a good view at sunset, and no shortage of entertaining weirdos that ride it. And at the end of the night, it’s still the one taking me home.

Julie Beck rides the blue line.

Photos: Albert OG, Mulad, Marcin Wichary, Bindonlane, LWY, John Picken