I used to think the Tashkent metro was the whole story.
When I first visited Uzbekistan’s capital in 2019, I was mesmerized by those Soviet-era stations—each one a marble palace underground, complete with chandeliers and mosaics that wouldn’t look out of place in a museum. The metro system, opened in 1977, carries roughly 600,000 passengers daily across three lines spanning about 36 kilometers, give or take. It’s efficient, it’s beautiful, and honestly, it gets most of the attention from tourists and transit nerds alike. But here’s the thing: the metro only tells you where the Soviet planners thought people should go. The real circulatory system of Tashkent—the one that actually moves millions through neighborhoods the metro never reaches—runs on buses and marshrutkas, those cramped minivans that feel like they’re held together by prayer and duct tape.
Anyway, I guess that’s where the story gets messier. The buses are supposed to be the official, regulated option. Tashkent operates around 120 bus routes, managed by the city’s public transport authority, with a fleet that’s been gradually modernizing since about 2018. You’ll see newer Chinese-made buses with air conditioning and digital displays alongside ancient relics from the 1990s that belch black smoke.
How the marshrutka economy actually works in practice—and why nobody can agree on the numbers
Wait—maybe I should back up. Marshrutkas are basically shared minivans, usually holding 12-15 passengers, that run on semi-fixed routes. They’re faster than buses, more flexible than the metro, and they go everywhere. I mean everywhere. The official count says there are something like 400-500 marshrutka routes in Tashkent, but that number feels wrong because new ones appear and disappear based on demand, neighborhoods expanding, or just someone deciding to start a route because they own a van and need money. The whole system operates in this gray zone between formal and informal economy—drivers are usually independent operators or work for small companies, paying daily fees to route associations, and the city government sort of regulates them but also sort of doesn’t.
The pricing tells you everything about the hierarchy. Metro rides cost 1,400 som (about 12 cents USD as of 2024). Buses run you 1,200 som. Marshrutkas? They fluctuate wildly—anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 som depending on distance, time of day, and honestly the driver’s mood.
The physical experience of riding each one reveals something about post-Soviet urban planning that nobody planned
I’ve seen the metro at rush hour, and it’s remarkably civilized—people queue, trains arrive every 5-7 minutes, and there’s this collective Soviet-era muscle memory about how to behave in public space. Buses are more chaotic but still recognizable as public transit. You board through the front, validate your plastic Atto card (the unified payment system introduced around 2020), find a seat if you’re lucky. The bus system got a major overhaul with new routes and schedules, though the execution is, let’s say, uneven. Some routes run reliably every 15 minutes. Others show up when they feel like it.
Marshrutkas operate on completely different physics. The driver is usually yelling destinations out the window, the van leaves when it’s full (not on a schedule), and personal space becomes a philosophical concept rather than a physical reality. I once counted 19 people in a marshrutka designed for 13, and nobody seemed particularly bothered. Turns out this is just how you move through a city of 2.5 million (or maybe 3 million—the population estimates vary) when the official transit network wasn’t designed for where people actually live now.
Why the Tashkent model might actually be more resilient than critics want to admit
Here’s what gets me: Western transit consultants love to talk about formalizing the marshrutka system, integrating it into the official network, eliminating the inefficiencies. And sure, there’s definately room for improvement—better safety standards, emissions controls, labor protections for drivers. But the marshrutka network responds to actual demand in real time. A new apartment complex goes up in Chilonzor district? Within weeks, there’s a marshrutka route serving it. The metro takes years to plan a new line. The formal bus system needs committees and budget approvals. The marshrutkas just… adapt.
The Tashkent government has been trying to thread this needle since about 2017, gradually introducing more regulated bus routes to replace marshrutkas on major corridors while letting the minivans continue serving the gaps. By 2023, they’d banned marshrutkas from the city center entirely, pushing them to outlying districts. Some routes got converted to official bus lines with employed drivers instead of independent operators. It’s a slow transformation, and honestly, it’s messy and contradictory and nobody’s quite sure where it’s headed.
I guess what I’m saying is that Tashkent’s transit system is really three overlapping systems that don’t quite talk to each other but somehow manage to move millions of people every day. The metro is the showpiece, the buses are the official face of modernization, and the marshrutkas are the actual connective tissue that makes the city work. You can’t understand one without the others, and you definately can’t fix one without breaking something in the other two.
