Sweden has a lot of local bus routes and every region (or län) has its own most popular bus route:
- for Stockholm and Örebro län it’s “Ej i trafik” (something like “not participating in public transit service”, “trafik” in Swedish often means both [car] traffic and public transport service);
- for Södermanland it’s “Är ej i trafik” (“Is not in service”);
- in Östergötland it’s “Tyvärr, ej i tjänst” (“Sorry, not in service”).
The joke is that while there are many numbered bus routes (hundreds in Stockholm län), the regulations make bus drivers rest after completing a route so quite often a bus arrives to the end station, unloads all passengers, changes its route number to the one above and goes away; then, obviously, another bus (or the same one after the driver has rested) comes to pick passengers. Since I almost never travel by bus in Germany (we have trams here after all), most of my bus trips happened in Ukraine and Sweden—and those countries differ in approach to drivers indeed.
Another interesting thing is the variety of buses: in Stockholm län you have buses going on trunk lines—quite often those are articulated buses and they’re always painted blue—and ordinary buses (always red); some buses are double-deckers, like on bus route 676 (Stockholm-Norrtälje) and some coaches are double-deckers too (I still fondly remember travelling on top floor of one from Luleå to Sundsvall—no fond memories about Ukrainian bus trips though). And in Norrland they still have skvaders (aka buses with additional cargo departments). Also buses in Stockholm län quite often have USB chargers for every seat and even WiFi—everything for passenger comfort.
It’s quite interesting that some bus routes are operated by two buses: for example, if I want to get from Bromma to Portugal (a place on Adelsö island near Stockholm) I’d take bus 312 which goes to Sjöangen, there I’d step out, get into new bus 312 waiting there while the previous bus goes to the rest. Also it’d travel on a ferry which I also like for some reason.
So there’s something interesting about Swedish buses after all. But railways are still much better (more comfort, higher speeds, less problems from car traffic etc etc) and definitely more awesome (I’ve witnessed rail bus pushing a fallen fir from the tracks less than a week ago—try finding an ordinary bus doing that). But it’s still nice to know that Sweden has good things beside people, trains, food, drinks and nature.
P.S. This seems to have gone a bit further than just describing how popular bus routes differ in various Swedish regions. Hopefully my upcoming NowABitClearerVideo post would go the same way.