Buses in Ottawa

After having taken the bus a good half dozen times, I'm clearly a veteran.

It's very different from the way it works in the UK. Here, your ticket covers your whole journey - if you need to get off one bus and onto another, you can ask for a transfer, which you can then show to the driver on the second bus. You'll also see that buses on some routes have a rack at the front, so you can put your bike on it while you ride the bus - that's a nice piece of joined up thinking.

Slightly less impressively, you can buy passes that are valid for a month. Not like in the UK - these are valid for a calendar month, so if you want to buy one on, say, the 26th of the month, you should probably have planned a little better. I assume that it'd be charged pro-rata, but I'm not sure I'd like to ask. It seems that the surliness of public transport employees is international.

Finally - it's exact change only, please. I don't know if they don't have access to the change box, or just don't like it, but if you've not got the right money, I shouldn't expect any change. That's proved slightly frustrating, but I've planned ahead where I can.

You can buy bus tickets in advance - it's a booklet of tickets, really, and you need to stamp them when you get on the bus to validate them. This is where I get a little confused - I think most buses need you to validate two tickets, but some (express services) need three, and others (rural routes) four. I assume there's some way of working out what's what, but I've yet to figure it out.

So I think in October, I'll be using a bus pass; it will pay for itself in a couple of weeks, and it'll mean I no longer need to worry if I've got $3.25 in change hanging round.