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It’s a privilege to live in a city brimming with brilliant galleries, theatres, restaurants and cafes, but the stuff that truly makes a difference to our everyday quality of life is infrastructure like public transport.
Each year, we quiz thousands upon thousands of urbanites about what it’s like to live in their city, including their thoughts on local buses, trams, and trains. Based on rating their local network on a scale of one to five (one being ‘awful’, five being ‘amazing’), our 24,000 respondents have helped us produce a ranking of the 20 best cities in the world for public transport.
The best of the best? That’d be (drum roll, please) Taipei! A whopping 95 percent of locals in the Taiwanese capital would describe the city’s transport network as either ‘good’ or ‘amazing’, landing it in a comfortable first-place position ahead of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Edinburgh.
So, what’s all the fuss about? Well, Taipei’s MRT (that’s the Mass Rapid Transit, or metro) is a breath of fresh air compared to subterranean networks in most other major cities.
‘With spotless stations, neat queuing lines painted on the platforms, and trains that turn up when they say they will, Taipei has earned a near-perfect approval rating from locals,’ writes Time Out contributor Roisin Teeling, ‘It’s no small operation either. The metro carried more than 767 million passengers in 2025, which works out at roughly 2.1 million a day.’
Oh, and the appropriately named EasyCard covers entry onto the MRT, as well as buses and YouBike rentals. Pretty nifty, right?
🚇 Here’s the complete top 20 of the best cities in the world for public transport right now.
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