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

Crossing the Danube by water bus from Mari JáS2ai tér to Margaret island

1928. These could be hired for 15 pengős for an hour, which was slightly more than half the 26-pengő fare for the use of the city’s small grey taxi cabs.

In 1945, with Budapest’s bridges blown up in the war, the ferry services regained the importance they had had a hundred years earlier. The first of these was a nine- seat barge, which started to sail between Dezső Szilágyi tér and Árpád utca in February 1945. This service was followed by the April opening of another, which, using a small fleet of four boats belonging to DGT’s Óbuda Shipyards, carried some five thousand passengers a day on a route going around the northernmost tip of Margaret Island. When an ice drift in the winter of 1945 swept away the “Manci” pontoon bridge, it was one of the propeller boats, repaired in the meantime, which rescued the 31 people stranded on the bridge. By the end of 1945 nearly two million people had been carried across the river by boats of various sizes. In 1946 the boats were taken over from the smaller firms by the Hungarian-Soviet Shipping Co., and then by its successor the Hungarian Shipping Co. (MAHART). The only company to operate independently was KPM Duna RÉV, founded in 1954.

The first water buses appeared in 1956 on the Danube, and in 1968 all ferries were united as a branch of BKV. The company, founded in 1968, operated the following eight ferry services in the beginning:

1. Megyer-Pünkösd Baths

2. Meder utca-Népsziget (People’s Island)

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