Ask anyone stuck on a rammed platform at rush hour and they’ll tell you good public transport is worth its weight in gold. When it works, you barely notice it, but when it doesn’t, it can make or break your day (and your mood).
So, which cities are getting it right? Every year we quiz tens of thousands of people about life where they live, and this time more than 24,000 locals rated their public transport on a scale of one to five, from ‘awful’ to ‘amazing’. Below are the 20 cities where the highest percentage of residents called their buses, trains and trams ‘good’ or ‘amazing’. To keep things truly global, each country gets just one spot on the list, so only its top-scoring city makes the cut.
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The world’s best cities for public transport, according to locals
1. Taipei, Taiwan
🚇 Public transport score: 95 percent
If you have ever squeezed onto a rush hour train, Taipei’s MRT might make you a little jealous. 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 95 percent approval rating from locals, the highest on our list. 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. One EasyCard covers the MRT, buses and YouBike rentals (and your 7-Eleven snacks), and the wider network keeps on growing, with New Taipei’s light rail and Circular Line logging a record 30 million trips last year.
2. Singapore
🚇 Public transport score: 93.5 percent
Singapore’s MRT has long been held up as the gold standard of city transit, and 93.5 percent of locals agree. Its 146 stations handle around 3.5 million rides every day, and roughly 99.4 percent of trains ran on time in 2025, according to the Land Transport Authority. This summer also brought a milestone that was more than 30 years in the making. In July 2026, three new stations at Keppel, Cantonment and Prince Edward Road finally closed the loop on the Circle Line. As acting transport minister Jeffrey Siow joked at the opening, ‘people can stop asking LTA why the Circle Line is not a circle’. Cantonment, which sits beneath the old Tanjong Pagar railway station, is worth a detour for its vaulted ceiling and stained glass alone.
3. Hong Kong
🚇 Public transport score: 92.8 percent
Anyone who has lived in Hong Kong knows the MTR is not so much a metro and more a way of life. In 2025, 99.9 percent of passenger journeys on its heavy rail network were on time, and the system handled almost 2 billion journeys across the year, according to the MTR’s annual results. But the real magic is in the variety. Where else can you step off a high-speed train, hop on a century-old ‘ding ding’ tram and finish with a ride across the harbour on the Star Ferry, all with a single tap of your Octopus card? No wonder 92.8 percent of locals gave it top marks.
4. Edinburgh, UK
🚇 Public transport score: 92.4 percent
Here’s a bit of a plot twist. The UK’s highest-scoring city isn’t London but Edinburgh, which beat the likes of Zurich, Vienna and Seoul with a 92.4 percent approval rating. The Scottish capital’s secret weapon is Lothian Buses, the majority council-owned operator that carried 119 million customer journeys in 2025, while Edinburgh Trams enjoyed a record-breaking year with 12.5 million. The trams had a famously rocky start, but passenger numbers have climbed since the extension to Newhaven through Leith opened in 2023, and you can now tap on with a contactless card and have your fares capped daily or weekly across buses and trams. Not bad for a city of steep hills and cobbles.
5. Seoul, South Korea
🚇 Public transport score: 91.1 percent
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