On roads
Buses, cars, trains and most taxis have an
,
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engine
but some kinds of city transportation don't have an engine.
A lot of transportation that doesn't have an engine uses people or animals to help them move. This is how transportation worked a long time ago, and sometimes now we use this kind of transportation because it’s good for the environment or because it’s an interesting way of showing the history of a city or place.
Bicycle taxis
This bicycle taxi is in Havana in Cuba.
A bicycle taxi in Havana
Bicycle taxis are very popular in different places all over the world, and have lots of different names, for example ‘cycle rickshaws’, ‘velotaxis’ or ‘bikecabs’.
It doesn’t have an engine. It has three
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wheel
and a strong taxi driver!
It isn’t
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expensive
to travel by bicycle taxi. It’s
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cheap
Other places in the world also use bicycle taxis, like Vietnam.
The driver needs to be very strong to carry people and things around the city. They often have a cover over the top to protect people from the sun or from rain.
Horse drawn taxis
This taxi is a traditional kind of transportation in Malta. It doesn’t have an engine either. It has four wheels – and four legs!
A horse drawn taxi in Malta
Today you don’t see many horse drawn taxis, but before we had cars, they were the fastest way to get around a city!
This is how people traveled in the past in a lot of cities.
Sometimes you can also see horse drawn taxis in London.
They can be slow and often don’t travel far, but it’s interesting to understand different ways of traveling around a place.
Skytrains
There’s a lot of
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traffic
in some cities, so traveling on roads can be very
.
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slow
This is a problem, because people want to travel fast.
People in Bangkok in Thailand can travel fast
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above
the road. The city has a special train called a Skytrain. It travels on
.
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track
A lot of people use the Skytrain to travel to work every day as it goes all over the city.
A Skytrain in Bangkok
More than 600,000 people travel on the Skytrains in Bangkok every day. There are 43 stations for people to get on and off the trains.
In Chongqing in China, there are lots of tall
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buildings
There isn’t much
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space
for roads or train tracks, so the city has a very special Skytrain. It can go through an apartment block! The building has 19 floors and the Skytrain station is on floors 6 to 8.
A Skytrain in Chongqing
Underground trains
In a lot of cities, people can travel under the road on
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underground train
The trains go through
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tunnel
Underground train in a tunnel
The floor in Tokyo train stations can turn passengers’ steps into energy for electronic devices, like cell phones.
Some underground stations are very
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deep
One station in Kyiv, Ukraine is 105 meters under the ground! It takes five minutes to travel down to the
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platform
on an
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escalator
Escalator in Kyiv underground station
15% of the air in an underground station is human skin!
It takes a long time to build underground tracks and it’s hard work. But underground trains are very popular for people traveling to work and other places because they’re faster than traveling by car or bus.
