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Andrew Feinberg
White House Correspondent
Welcome to the bus with the highest stress level in Europe: number 91 from Marseille St-Charles railway station to the city’s airport. It is supposed to run every 10 minutes until well into the evening, at least according to the tourist office. But I have waited 40 minutes for this mid-evening departure, along with dozens of other people who are equally presseé.
The passengers who fondly believed they would be stepping off the airport bus beside the terminal by now are at least 30 minutes adrift.
Forget “every 10 minutes” – as the writer Charles Nicholl once wrote of trains in Colombia: “There are no timetables, only rumours.”
We are the lucky ones, because at least we have found the bus. To deter as many passengers as possible, the transport planners of Marseille make finding the airport bus departure point almost impossible.
Travellers arriving on the city’s excellent underground railway are lured into a false sense of optimism. All the way up the Métro escalators at St-Charles station, time-pressed travellers are cheerfully advised that they are heading towards the navette (shuttle) for the airport.
As soon as you reach ground level in the vast terminus, though, all indications that there might conceivably be buses from the centre of the biggest French city outside Paris to the main airport for the region vanish.
In early evening, the railway station is devoid of helpful people to ask. After pacing back and forth I found a sign to the Gare Routière (bus station). Perhaps that might be the departure point for the elusive conveyance?
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And there it was. Or rather, there it wasn’t. But the bewildered huddle of people and piles of baggage provided some kind of hope: were an airport shuttle ever to show up, it would probably be here.
I tracked down the correct stop a minute or two after 8pm. The first bus would be at 8.20pm. So much for every 10 minutes.
A gigantic double-decker from the airport turned up. The driver offloaded her passengers. When the last had disembarked, we fondly assumed we would now be allowed on board what was surely to become the promised 8.20pm departure.
Instead, she promptly drove away, empty, into the gathering gloom. The illuminated sign flickered over to 8.40pm.
The pleasant young man who sold me the bus ticket shrugged when I went to ask why the bus had vanished. “Sorry, we don’t have any information,” he said. “But I can refund your ticket and you can get a taxi instead?”
The folk at Marseille tourist office predict a taxi could cost €100 (10 times the price of a bus ticket) and even more on Sundays. They might be wide of the mark again, but who knows in which direction? So I politely declined and returned to the expanding scrum.
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Finally, after a gap of at least 40 minutes, a single-decker appeared. With no queuing system in place, the most desperate travellers simply elbowed their way to the front. A dozen people were left behind, wondering whether the “next bus in 20 minutes” display might, like the last one, suddenly change its mind.
Once we were finally underway, a poorly parked car delayed us leaving the bus station. A broken-down FlixBus at the airport entrance cost us another 10 minutes.
The bus-to-terminal sprint is not one that any traveller wants to make. Thanks to a well-resourced security checkpoint that I cleared in seconds, I made my flight – and, at the far end, touched down at surely the worst-connected major British airport: Bristol.
The Ryanair flight to Bristol (catchily from MRS to BRS in airline-speak) pulled up at the gate exactly on time: 12.20am. It turns out that this moment is about as inconvenient as it is possible to be for anyone depending on public transport.
Even if you were to sprint from plane to passport control and get through in seconds, you would still be scuppered. The airport bus for central Bristol leaves at 12.20am, and the departure to south Bristol and Bath is at 12.25am.
With the next services at least an hour away, many people try for a taxi, for which there is an on-site office. The queue stretched out of the door. Customers were warned of 20-minute waits.
Thank goodness for Uber, which could supply a driver for us (by now I had teamed up with Stan and Tom) in 11 minutes. Just as well it wasn’t any quicker: to reach the pick-up point involved skirting around a building site and walking the length of a car park.
Can you nominate any substantial airport in the UK or France with worse public transport?
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