Getting Around Aix by Bus

 It’s been a while since I mentioned the bus system in Aix and I’ve been meaning to scope out the best routes to the most important places.  Like to Carrefour.

The Aix en Bus website is very good and I hope the bus system itself lives up to it.  The regular fare is 1.20€ plus 0.10€ de support (does that mean tax?) so 1.30€.  There doesn’t seem to be a discount for kids.  A round trip or 2-ticket fare is 2.30€ + 0.10€ and you can buy 10 tickets for 9€ + 0.10€.  You can buy them on the bus.

We get a bus pass from Road Scholar so we shouldn’t have to worry about it.  Camila and the boys should just pay by the trip since we’ll walk to most places within the city center.  There is a 7-day pass for 55€ but I’m not sure what regions it covers since a 30 day pass only costs 28€.

The AixenBus website has plans of all the routes and a tool, as in Google Maps, that you can use to plan your tailor-made itinerary (Votre itinéraire sur mesure), for instance, the route to Carrefour.  But I think it is easier to use Google Maps, except that now Google Maps is showing me the current departure time for Pittsburgh, although the results show the current time in Aix.  It’s also not as easy to see the previous stops of the bus route in Google Maps, as I swear it was before.  Hopefully everything will straighten out once we are there.  In any case, it looks like the #05 bus is the one to take from the Niollon stop on Rue de la République, getting off at C. Cial des Milles, taking 33 minutes.  Coming back though, we’d have to walk from La Rotonde back to the hotel since #05 takes a slightly different route in the other direction.

#05 bus route from Aparthotel Adagio to Carrefour 

Rick Steves doesn’t mention the local bus system because he assumes everything worth seeing in 3 days is within the historic center and you can walk to it or, if not, you can take a taxi.  He does mention that the longer distance buses to towns like Marseille, Arles and Avignon are faster than the trains.  I’ll study those and post my findings later.