As with most European cities, public transportation is a vast system that most people use instead of personal cars. That or they ride bikes and/or walk. As I live around a 20-25 walk from the school, and the nearest bus stop is ten minutes away, I just walk to the college.
I always like to tell people, when describing my walk, that I go up a mountain, down a mountain, through a mountain, and across a river to get to school. While technically all true, there is a bit of an exaggeration as to how steep the climb and descent are. It is a shorter walk than I had while in N.U.in FIE@DBS. The most annoying portion of the walk is in fact crossing the lock bridge get to the newer part of the city. As one of the most famous bridges in Salzburg, you often come across hoards of tourists you must fight your way through.
While I walk to school, I have taken the bus a few times, usually to get to the main train station. As I am not a regular rider, I just buy a ticket at the platform, an hour costs 2 Euro, rather than buying a month pass for over 50 Euro. If you cannot get a ticket beforehand you can always buy one on the bus, but at a more expensive price. The most important thing is that you have a valid ticket, as plain-clothed officers will sometimes board buses to check tickets and anyone without one will have to pay around 100 Euro as a fine (this has already happened to two of the ten students on the trip).
There is also an extensive train system, which I have only used on school excursions or to travel on weekends. Very similar to the bus, you can get a ticket at the station, sometimes pay on the train, depending on the type of train, and if you have no ticket, the possibility of getting a fine.
One of the stereotypes about Austrian and German transportation is that is efficient and always on time. I can say this is basically true except for Sundays. It seems on Sundays, buses just will not show up or have very loose time schedules, something that caused a problem when we tried to get to the train station one morning for a school trip. We ended up waiting for 30 minutes before calling a taxi that then did not have enough room so splitting up to wait for a second. We did make the train, but now we know just to assume to take a taxi or be flexible on times when traveling on a Sunday.
