Várnagy Zoltán: Urban Transportation - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

In a place with a population of a few thousand it is no great problem to go about one’s business, to get to work or do shopping. One can easily walk to the centre or even to the other end of the village or small town. However, as soon as a town exceeds a certain limit, the demand for some kind of vehicle immediately appears. Many people today have bicycles or cars, but when modern cities were first formed, the only means available for getting from one place to another were the horse, the coach or the cart. Those who could afford to, kept horses and coaches, while others just walked or hired horse-drawn vehicles.

In 1810 there were 116 horse-drawn coaches for hire in the streets of Pest and 100 in Buda. The first decree to regulate their operation was issued by the emperor in 1827. As the poem “Pest” by the Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi bears witness, the cab was an essential part of city life as early as 1845:

And then there’s so much there to hear and see, The heart swells all the time with youthful glee: Young cobblers on a fist-fight always bent,

And cabs as they run down the innocent;

The pickpocket, the fishwife’s angry talk Amuse you as those noisy streets you walk.

The omnibus, a large, horse-drawn vehicle providing transportation inside the city, also appeared (in Paris already in 1662). Its introduction was patterned on stagecoach services connecting one city to another. The efforts to translate the Latin name of the vehicle into Hungarian indirectly illustrate its importance: after several failed experiments the word társaskocsi-a direct translation of the German Gesellschaftswagen, meaning “social coach, communal coach”-came to be accepted.

The first service in Pest commenced in 1832, and the following year saw the appearance of the omnibus in Buda. This new means of transport soon became popular. The first coaches were replaced by larger ones, and more and more new routes were opened to connect various districts of the city with each other and with outlying villages. From 1850, one could travel by omnibus from the inner termini at the railway stations to such places as Megyer, Kőbánya, or Óbuda. The om3