Category Archives: Transport

You’ll be relieved to know that this is my fifth and final post in the series on transport.

What word to we use to describe the process of getting from once place to another? Journey? Travel? Tour? Trip? We have several words in English that we use to talk about getting from A to B, but they’re all used slightly differently. Understandably this can be confusing for learners, so I’ll try to clear things up a bit here.

Trip is probably the easiest. If you started at A and arrived at B, you’ve completed a trip, whether it took you five minutes or five weeks. We can even use trip to talk about the whole experience of going from A to B, spending time at B, and coming back to A again.

Devonport is only a short ferry trip away from central Auckland.
I’m just going to make a trip to the supermarket. Is there anything you need?
A round trip costs £15. (“Round trip” means from A to B and back to A.)
Last month I went on a business trip to Hong Kong.
Have a good trip.

Journey is similar to trip, but we tend to use it for longer experiences. Unlike trip, we only use journey to describe the process of getting to the destination, not what happens when we get there.

The journey from Timișoara to Baia Mare took almost seven hours.
I saw my cousin on my return journey from Scotland.
If you exit the Underground at one station and enter at a different station, you will be charged for two separate journeys.
Have a safe journey.

Travel can be either a verb (“I travelled by car”) or an uncountable noun (“bus travel”). The following sentences are all correct:

I don’t like travelling by boat because I often get sick.
Train travel in France is expensive.
Motorists are urged to avoid all unnecessary travel.
If you travel after nine o’clock, you usually get a cheaper fare.

Because travel is uncountable, you can’t say “a travel”. A lot of people get this wrong. The following sentences are all incorrect:

*I hope you have a good travel.
*The kids were exhausted after a long travel.
*I’ve done three travels to Germany so far this year.

Tour is a little different. A tour is usually something you do for pleasure, and you’ll normally have a guide, someone who shows you around. In a tour, you usually (but not always) finish up where you started.

Last year we went on a ten-day tour of Australia.
If you go to Boston, I’d certainly recommend the Duck Boat tours.
Tours of the museum are every hour, on the hour, from 10am to 4pm.

Sports teams sometimes go on tours where they play several matches, usually in the same country. Note that tour can also be a verb:

The British and Irish Lions recently toured New Zealand.

A cruise is a holiday spent on a ship, where you visit several places along the way. A voyage is a journey to a very distant place, often on a ship but sometimes on a spaceship. If you’ve ever been on a voyage, please leave a comment!

For shorter trips, we sometimes talk about an excursion or an outing.

My mother doesn’t like being in the nursing home, but she enjoys the weekly excursions.
My eldest son is going on a school outing to the Natural History Museum tomorrow.

An expedition is fairly serious business. You go on an expedition if you’re exploring an area, perhaps for scientific purposes, or if you’re at war.

Several of our common “travel verbs” can also be used as nouns in place of words like “trip” or “journey”. Usually the noun and verb are the same, but for the verb “to fly”, the noun is flight.

It’s a short drive from Jack’s house.
Jakarta to Bali is a 90-minute flight.
I went on a long bike ride yesterday, so I’m quite sore now.
Amelia goes for a two-mile run every morning before breakfast.
We like to go for a brisk walk after our Sunday dinner.
The train ride through the Carpathian Mountains is beautiful.

How do you drive (or ride) this thing?

Finally, a receptionist at a Romanian hotel once asked me, *”How was your road?” In some languages you say the equivalent of this, but in English we don’t. A road is strictly the thing that cars and trucks travel on. We say “How was your journey?” or “How was your trip?” We might also ask “How was your flight?” if we know that the person travelled by plane.

In this fourth part of the series, I’m going to talk about something that everybody here in Romania, and I mean everybody, gets wrong. So many people say sentences like these:

*Last week I went in Budapest.
*We’re going in Crete for our summer holiday.
*I have to go in Italy once a month for work.
*I went at work at 7:30.
*The kids go at school on the bus.

All of the sentences above are wrong (when you see an *asterisk, that means something isn’t right). We often talk about being in a place (in Romania, in Timișoara) or at a place (at work, at school, at the market), but when never talk about going in or at a place. With the verb to go, you must use the preposition to:

Last week I went to Budapest.
We’re going to Crete for our summer holiday.
I have to go to Italy once a month for work.
I went to work at 7:30.
The kids go to school on the bus.

There are some exceptions to this rule (of course). The biggest and most common exception is the word home. We don’t *go to home, we just go home. No to. There are a few other places that don’t take to, which the delightful Ronnie talks about in this video.

To go in means to physically walk inside something, like a shop or a room:

This antiques shop looks interesting. Shall we go in?
The cat went in the kitchen, hopped on the table, and knocked over the vase.

Here is an easy question for you, assuming you’ve read the other posts in this series. Which of these sentences is correct?

A. Maria went to Paris with train.
B. Maria went in Paris with train.
C. Maria went to Paris by train.
D. Maria went in Paris by train.

I hope you chose the correct answer and none of the BAD ones.

The same also applies with the verb to come. We come to things:

Is she coming to the party?
My parents came to Romania for the first time in June.
Sandra looked terrible yesterday so I doubt she’ll be coming to work today.

Of course, we don’t use to with home, so you just come home, as in this terribly catchy song from 1996, Football’s Coming Home.

To come in means to enter a room or building. “Come in” is a nice and polite way to ask someone to enter your house or room:

It’s lovely to see you. Come in!

This was going to be the final part, but I haven’t quite finished yet! (Here’s the fifth and final part.) If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment.

Welcome to the third part of this series about transport. I really should have mentioned the word catch by now. When you successfully get on a train, bus, plane or any form of public transport before it leaves, you catch it. Remember that the verb to catch has an irregular past tense:

I caught the early bus to work this morning because I had an eight o’clock meeting.

He usually catches the 5:45 train to Peterborough.

Instead of catch, you can use get or take if you like:

Ben got the bus to Birmingham but Tracy took the train.

When we want to say that we successfully got on the bus, train or plane in time, we sometimes use make:

We only just made the flight. (This means that we were nearly too late to get on the plane. Another two minutes and it would have taken off without us.)

What happens if you don’t catch, get, take or make the train? That’s right, you miss it:

I’ll have to go now, otherwise I’ll miss the train.

We missed the last bus and had to take a taxi.

Sometimes you have to take more than one bus or train. When you get off one bus or train and get on another one, you change.

I had to change at Leicester and was stuck at the station for two hours.

To get to the centre of London from Heathrow, you need to change from the District to the Piccadilly Line at Hammersmith. (Here you’re travelling by underground.)

Eventually you arrive at your destination. You can also say that you reach your destination, or that you get there. You can use these verbs for any form of transport, public or private.

I arrived in Baia Mare at 10:45 pm.

We got to London at about ten and had a fantastic day there.

It was already dark when we reached Rotorua and we struggled to find a motel room.

That’s all for Part 3. For the next part of this series, click here.

OK, so you didn’t take the tram, or the underground, or the bus, or a taxi (also known as a cab). You didn’t cycle, you didn’t drive, you didn’t hop on a horse, and no, you didn’t fly in your Learjet either. You just went on foot. A lot of English learners use the expression “to go on foot” or “to come on foot”, meaning “to walk”, and they’re all totally 100% correct. However, most native English speakers don’t say this. We just use the verb to walk.

Vicky: How do you get to school?
Vincent: I walk.

Lucy: How did you get here?
Leo: I just walked. It’s a lovely day for it.

On foot has a slightly strange feel to me, as if you’re travelling through a dense, dark forest, and want to emphasise that you’re walking. If you really want to use on foot, however, I won’t stop you! Just make sure that you say on foot and not *on feet (yes, I know, English is completely illogical) and you never say *to walk on foot, which incorrectly combines the expression on foot with the verb to walk.

Right, now we’ve got that out of the way. But what if you want to say how you’re travelling right now? Do you say that you’re on the bus or in the bus? On a taxi or in a taxi? Deciding whether to use on or in confuses a lot of people, so but it’s actually pretty simple. For cars and taxis, you use in, and for everything else, you use on. The only exception to this rule might be a small boat such as a canoe, kayak or rowing boat – because you have to physically get into these types of boats, you’ll probably want to use in.

Some examples:

I’m on the train. We’re just about to go through a tunnel.

I’m on the bus now. There’s a lot of traffic tonight, so I’ll probably be a bit late.

I’m in Dave’s car. It was absolutely tipping it down so it was great that he picked me up.

I was having this discussion in a taxi heading downtown.

Another question you might be asking is whether you should use a or the. “On a train” or “on the train”? “In a car” or “in the car”? You can use either, but mostly you’ll want to use the, because you’ll be talking about a particular car (your dad’s blue Peugeot, say) or a particular train (the 7:40 train to York, for instance). The same is true for buses and planes. Taxis are a bit of an exception: you can call a taxi at any time and you never know what car you’ll get, so I would usually say that I was in a taxi.

I’ll finish Part 2 of this series by talking about entering and exiting various forms of transport, except we don’t use the words enter and exit. So what do we say? For entering we say “get on” or “get in”, and for exiting we say “get off” or “get out of”. These are all phrasal verbs, and the rules for them are easy. If we can be on it, we get on it and get off it. If we can be in it, we get in it and get out of it.

Some examples:

Get in the car!

I got off the train and walked to my friend’s house.

We got on the plane at nine but we didn’t take off until after ten.

We paid the driver and got out of the taxi.

There are also a few other words for entering and exiting that you might come across. A common one of these is the verb to board, meaning to get onto a boat, plane, train or bus:

Ryanair Flight 209 to Timișoara is now boarding at Gate 32.

We boarded a Greyhound at Pittsburgh. (Greyhound is a company that runs inter-city buses all over America.)

A slightly more fancy pair of verbs that you might hear occasionally are to embark, meaning to enter a ship or aeroplane, and to disembark, meaning to exit.

All passengers must disembark from the rear doors.

There are two more verbs you might see or hear from time to time. One of these is to alight, a relatively unusual verb which means to exit almost any sort of vehicle including a bike or a horse. The other is to dismount, which also means to get off, but can only really be used for bikes and horses.

If you don’t want to dismount just yet, here’s Part 3.

We often need to go from one place to another, even if we don’t particularly want to. If you live in a city as I do, you’ll have several options for getting around. Here in Timișoara I can walk, run (!), ride a bike, or take a bus, tram, or taxi. If I want to go a bit further, I can take a car, a train or even a plane. If you live in a large city you might have an underground system (also known as a subway or a metro), and when I lived in New Zealand I took a ferry (a kind of boat) to work each morning. Perhaps you even have a private helicopter.

So how do we talk about all these options? Well, what we never do is use the word with. If you’re the sort of person who says *”I go with train” or *”we went with car”, you need to make an emergency stop! Using with when talking about transport is wrong in English. Instead, you can use the word by:

John: How did you get here?
Jane: I went by bike.

Wayne: What’s the best way to get to Sibiu?
Wendy: It’s probably best to go by train.

Note that when we use by here, we don’t say the. We say “by train” (for example), not *”by the train”.

Another very common way to talk about transport is to use the verb to take:

It’s too far to walk. I think we should take a taxi.

We took the bus to the station, then we took the eight o’clock train.

You can take the cross-town bus if it’s raining or it’s cold.

A third way to talk about transport is to use verbs like to walk, to run, to ride, to cycle, to drive or to fly. Remember that the past tense forms of to run, to ride, to drive and to fly are all irregular.

Richard: How did you get to the concert?
Rose: I drove, but I had to park my car a long way from the stadium. I walked the rest of the way.

Dave: What’s the cheapest way to travel to Timișoara?
Diana: It’s cheapest if you fly. Last month I flew with Ryanair and it only cost me £60 return.

Barbara: How do you get to work in the morning?
Barry: Normally I cycle to work, but if it’s wet I drive.

Note that if you’re talking about a bike, you can use to cycle, to ride or even (informally) to bike. For a motorcycle, you normally use the verb to ride.

Not all methods of transport have a verb associated with them. You can’t say that you *taxied or *trammed or *trained.

That’s all for Part 1 of my series on transport. Please never, ever say “I went with train” again! Click here for Part 2.