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

says, “Capacity: 14 passengers seated, 17 standing”. Now that naive sign reflects the wishful thinking of the times before anybody could imagine what big city traffic looked like. 17 passengers standing, insists this relic of a sign, when the number of passengers, with the bus full, is around sixty. And when it is really crowded, there might be as many as ninety or a hundred aboard, including, admittedly, those sitting. It is at such times that the grumbler grumbles “this is a nightmare."

In 1937 the first diesel bus appeared on the streets of Budapest. The number of buses owned by BSZKRT in that year was 187, and by 1943 there were 323. The shortage of raw materials was so severe in the war that buses ran out of tyres and were fitted with iron wheels. Thus equipped they were used as rail-buses. A mere 27 buses could be restarted in 1945, and the pre-war number was not to be reached before 1949. At the same time the number of bus routes was much higher-44 in 1949, as opposed to 14 in 1943. The above- mentioned Budapest Bus Transport Co. had operated routes reaching places outside the capital until 1942, in which year they ran 87 buses and 13 trailers. Until 1948 the Budapest Suburban Railway Company (BHÉV) and, until the beginning of the war, some smaller private companies also operated bus routes.

With the formation of Greater Budapest, when several settlements in the capital’s vicinity were annexed to it on 1 January, 1950, the importance of bus traffic increased. The demand for public transport services in the newly joined districts was mainly satisfied by buses, apart from the suburban railways. Capital City Bus Works, which was formed in 1949 when BSZKRT was broken up, had a network of routes totalling 249 kilometres in length in that year, and 439 kilometres in 1955, while the number of routes rose from 44 to 67, and that of buses from 397 to 668 over the same period. Bus traffic continued to grow steadily in the following years. In 1967, the year prior to the foundation of BKV, the capital’s 1265 buses carried as many as 500 million people on its 92 routes, whose total length was 560 kilometres.

Due to increasing private motor car traffic, buses can

32