Today I realized that I did not know half about the Luxembourgish transport system. As I went to the airport early enough for students to be on their way to school, I encountered tens of bus lines that I had never seen before. It seemed like the regular city and cross-country busses are only about half of the entire bus traffic that traverses Luxembourg each day. The busses seemed to dance around each other on the streets taking on board or dropping off children, merging with traffic, and driving towards their final destination.

Children were taken from their homes to sometimes school far away as Luxembourg only slowly starts to require that students should preferably go to a high school closest to their hometown. Some students have a regular 45-minute if not even longer commute to school each morning and each afternoon. On top of that comes time spent in traffic jam in rush hour.

I can count myself lucky that I don’t belong to the 100,000 commuters from Belgium, France, and Germany who flock to the city each day. I have never had a commute longer than 15 minutes by bike in my entire life to school, university or work. Exception to the rule: two months during an internship. I appreciate this luxury very much because I do not want to be stuck in traffic twice a day if I can avoid it. Furthermore, I do not have to depend on bus or train schedules, but can decide almost instantly whether I would like to leave now, in five minutes or at another time instead of fretting about the last bus I need to catch, waiting in the cold for a delayed train or being squashed between strangers.

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