Vienna's public transport system has a good reputation – it's extensive, speedy, clean, and pretty cheap, too.
We compared it to costs in other European cities (using the cheapest available tickets in each country) and found some rather surprising results:
Paris, typically thought of as being very expensive, actually offers cheaper single tickets across its public transport network than the Austrian capital.
But the cheapest city for single tickets of the capital cities in the European countries covered by The Local is, perhaps less surprisingly, Madrid.
A single ticket in Spain's capital costs just €1.50, although if you want to travel to the airport, that hikes the cost up to €2, still a fair bit cheaper than any of the other capitals.
A one-way ticket costs €2.15 in Paris and, coming in as third-most expensive is Vienna, where one-way fares across all forms of public transport cost €2.40.
You can see how all the different cities compare across different ticket types in the table below.
In London, it's a slightly trickier comparison as, unlike the other European cities, single-ticket prices vary across the network depending on the type of transport used.
The cheapest underground ticket is €3.23 (£2.80) but you can get a one-way journey on a bus for just €2.02 (£1.75).
What about prices for 24-hour tickets? It's a slightly different story here. Vienna comes out on top as the most affordable city.
A 24-hour pass in Vienna costs just €8, followed by Zurich of €9.77 and Madrid on €10.
And when you look at annual tickets, Vienna's transport system is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of bang for your buck.
Costing €365 for the year, the Austrian capital's annual ticket works out at just €1 a day. And, given the Jahreskarte lets you travel throughout the whole of the city's so-called core zone (districts 1 to 23), it's really good value.
READ ALSO: Is the Vienna €365 ticket still worth it if you only use public transport on weekends?
Vienna is obviously smaller than several of the other, more expensive, cities on the list, Paris, London, Madrid and Berlin, but it's bigger than Copenhagen, yet significantly less expensive to travel around.
Admittedly, airport travel is excluded from Vienna's pass, but when you look at other capitals' annual tickets, several – Paris and London, for example – only include travel within the first one or two zones. Although, of course, both Paris and London are significantly larger than the Austrian capital.
In Paris, for example, if you want an annual card that covers the inner-city – which most people do – the only option is to pay for an all-zones ticket, making it significantly more costly.
And not all capitals even offer an annual ticket as an option. Copenhagen doesn't have an annual pass and, as of 2023, Madrid's annual ticket is only available to companies to buy.
In short: Vienna is a very affordable city to travel around, especially when compared to other major European capitals.
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