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In my home city of Tampere, we have one of the cheapest tickets in Finland for a city of its size. Additionally city's population density is so low, that when we joined the EU, it was classified as a "village of ~200.000 people" by EU standards. Additionally our central street that most bus lines use is a historic street made of stone pavement, which causes excessive vibration on the bus structures over time requiring additional maintenance and making buses that operate on gaseous fuel impossible as valves cannot handle vibration for long. That kind of population spread coupled with unique problem of pavement on the central street makes public transit a significant challenge, so being one of the cheapest in terms of ticket prices in the country has been one of the point of pride to the folks doing the planning in the organisation. I listened to a couple of lectures on the topic in my old university some years ago.

To my understanding, the public company that handles the public transit lines is profitable and highly competitive with private bus companies. Latest city budget proposal for 2019 reports that it was profitable to the tune of 3,6 million Euro on the revenue of slightly under 28 million revenue in the latest numbers they have which is for year 2017. Revenue includes 2,1 million "support and assistance from the region".

Here's the document I took the numbers from:
https://www.tampere.fi/tiedost...

Page 115 has the numbers First column is the final numbers for 2017, to which plans for 2018-2022 are contrasted. You can find what individual lines mean by running the document through google translate.

I'd like to pitch in on this one. I live in Finland, city of Tamepere. we have ~200k living in the city. This is the site of our public transportation: http://aikataulut.tampere.fi/?lang=en (fully functional english version, we have a lot of exchange students and foreign workers due to being an industrial town). There is also a mobile version of the site and most stops have a printed upcode barcode that you can scan with your phone into an app to help with seeing timetables on the fly.

Full site has the following:
1. Per bus line and per stop timetable (which tends to be accurate within ~2 minutes).
2. Journey planner, where you simply input your start point and end point and set your desired departure or arrival time, and software will provide you with several routes that fit your criteria. You can also set details, like to ignore certain bus lines when doing route calculation or how much margin of error you want to switching lanes.
3. Traffic monitor of GPS-fitted busses (actually most if not all busses have trackers, but it seems only a few are enabled to broadcast to public at any given time).

Public transit itself here is excellent. The only times I ever need to use a car is when I leave the city or am in a big hurry. This in spite of the city being so big that it was classified as a "village" by early EU rules due to having extremely low population density, often considered a bane of public transportation. Night traffic also exists, timed with shift changes in bigger working places (for example shift changes for central hospitals or major factories).

Every bus has been equipped with GPS for a while now. Bus essentially has a notification board inside set to be visible from everywhere in the bus that displays the next stop's name and projected time of arrival as well as current time. Busses are modern Volvo and Scania models, fully air conditioned and equipped with heaters so they're comfortable through hot summers and cold winters. There are many other little allowances for comfort of people, like NFC tickets (you just wave your card through a NFC reader and it shows you the balance on the ticket in front of the driver where you enter, while people exiting the bus do so through middle and rear doors).

Pricing is reasonable by local standard: you can enter any bus for an hour after purchasing the ticket which costs 2.50EUR. By using preloaded tickets, you shave almost a euro off the price. You can also get a monthly card for something around 50EUR, and there are significant discounts for students children and elderly. They also have "workplace" tickets specially tailored for workplaces to buy for their workers.

We have bus lanes throughout city centre, which means that you will avoid most of the congestion especially during rush hour by taking a bus.

In general, if you want to make it work, it can be made to work and work well to the point where even a low density 200k city can have public transit good enough to allow to not even have a car if you don't want to own one. It's one of the major infrastructural advantages here, of you move with your spouse, one car for the family is more then enough, and a single person can go without a car alltogether in many cases. There have actually been calculations done that it's cheaper for an average single student/worker to have a bus card and grab a (very expensive high quality service legally mandated local monopoly) taxi for those few times that bus tables do not suit him/her.

Yep. I was astounded by the $6.45 in Sweden. Here in Finland (right next to it) I'd say that a typical rate would be around 1-2 euros an hour (the only price I could find on the net was 1,70e/h, about $2/h).

However, it would seem that the type of net cafes differ from country to country. Here in Finland I don't know really of any place where the "main thing" is getting a net connection (excluding a small net-oriented library in the center of Helsinki, where access is free). However, some cafes have Internet terminals (or even WiFi) which can often be used for free while you're in the cafe. I've heard a proverb once that in Finland the coffee costs money but the Internet is free, while everywhere else the 'Net costs but the coffee is free.

Anybody else have similar experiences?

There seems to be a Linux port underway too.

I've seen two slightly different solutions here in Finland.

The first one is in Tampere and it is built into an old articulated city bus. The front part has the computers and the rear section contains the classroom. It has a homepage which contains an English summary and pictures (click "kuvia"). Connectivity for this bus is handled by WLAN at ten fixed stops or by GSM datalinks anywhere else.

The second bus was built at the Lappeenranta University of Technology. It is based on an old library bus. The page is only available in Finnish, but if you click on the picture with the text "varustelu", you should be able to make out most of the technical specifications. Connectivity is handled by WLAN to a base station Linux computer that has a combo NIC, an ISDN adapter and a modem. The solution allows connections nearly anywhere without having to run cables to the bus.

In Tampere Finland we have a IT-bus project going. It's called Netti-Nysse. It's primary target is to help people of all ages to learn and use of computers and internet. "...to lower the threshold to information society and show that there is nothing to be scared of." There are summary in english. If you want to see pictures then click the link labeled "KUVIA". It's not the only project of a kind in Finland but it's definetely largest. Some other projects are also trying some smaller kind of vehicles to improve the services of people living in areas which don't have all the services of society. In "LINKIT" you find links to other projects in Finland and outside. Unfortunatelly other projects have pages only in finnish.

Tampere has converted an old bus into a mobile internet classroom. The bus is equipped with 10 IBM NetVista X40 computers and the back of the bus serves as a classroom and has a data projector. Internet connection can be made with WLAN (there are 10 WLAN equipped "bus stations") or with cellular phones if outside WLAN coverage. There is some info available in English. From these pics you can check the bus layout.

Tampere has converted an old bus into a mobile internet classroom. The bus is equipped with 10 IBM NetVista X40 computers and the back of the bus serves as a classroom and has a data projector. Internet connection can be made with WLAN (there are 10 WLAN equipped "bus stations") or with cellular phones if outside WLAN coverage. There is some info available in English. From these pics you can check the bus layout.

Tampere has converted an old bus into a mobile internet classroom. The bus is equipped with 10 IBM NetVista X40 computers and the back of the bus serves as a classroom and has a data projector. Internet connection can be made with WLAN (there are 10 WLAN equipped "bus stations") or with cellular phones if outside WLAN coverage. There is some info available in English. From these pics you can check the bus layout.

click here for troll pix!