I can totally relate to this! I noticed this exact same phenomenon when I visited Seattle from Bangalore, India. Even today whenever I have to visit a new place I make sure to get the general direction right and then just ask people.

I wouldn't put it down to bad city planning though. From my limited experience of visiting Seattle (about 3 weeks) I sensed that it's got more to do with people don't want to be bothered and left alone. Where as in India if I ask one person for direction I get at least half a dozen people telling me how to get there, which bus to take and what not!

Well I had the exact opposite experience. I am from France and I made a two month internship in Bangalore. If there is one thing we agree with my collegues who went there is that it was awful to find your way. Even cabs/auto-rickshaws have great difficulties to bring from a point A to a point B if you do not know yourself the exact path. The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city. The indications in the street were hard to find and see. I suppose it might be because of what we are used to from where where we are from.

> Even cabs/auto-rickshaws have great difficulties to bring from a point A to a point B if you do not know yourself the exact path.

Cabs and auto-rickshaws in Bangalore are notorious for swindling huge sums of money by pretending that they know nothing about the city where in reality they know every nook and corner. They do this so that they can take you all over the place and on top of that bill you exorbitant amounts. And if you are a westerner then just don't go anywhere near them unless you know the exact route to take!

>The public transportation was really bad and covered only certain parts of the city.

This is definitely not the case as the public transport cover just about every part of the city, even where autos hesitate to take. It's just that you need at least a month to figure out the routes, buses, transits etc., which gives the perception of non-existent public transport. I lived in Bangalore for 7 years before I started using public transport and despite being a local, Kannada being my mother tongue, it took me about a month to get it right.

From my personal limited experience of visiting various metros in India I'm fairly confident that Bangalore has the largest public bus transportation in India.

>The indications in the street were hard to find and see.

That's probably because there aren't any :). There are very few on arterial roads but even they aren't reliable as the one-way traffic rules change very so often!

That is actually true. Not every cab driver knows in minute detail every place in the city, or might know them by different names. All I said was that if someone gives you verbal directions to someplace it's easy to get there because the city structure is simple.

I'm not sure I'd put this down to "horrible city structures".

Frequency of public transport is typically proportional to the population density. People are more likely to want to know the time of the next bus/train/tram when the cost of missing it is a 20 minute wait.

Managing population density is definitely part of city planning and I'd suggest limiting it has a more beneficial impact on quality of life than more frequenct public transport.

I live in one of the most denstly populated areas on earth and for me at least, the benefit of having a train interval of < 2 minutes does not offset the downside of having no space. E.g.:

- Peak train density >6 people per sq meter (1.8 sq ft per person)

- Peak urban density ~130,000 people per sq km (333,000 per sq mile)

That's quite a generalization you're making. Most of Montreal is served by 10 minut buses - that is, most time between two buses is 10 minutes. And there are buses 24/7 on big streets. And there's the metro. And there's the train if you want to go on either shore.

I never spoke about the transit system in Canada. I am Calgary at the moment, and even though there is definite room for improvement, it's fairly reasonable. (avg bus time here is >20min though)

Lahore has four levels of transit system available. There is a cross-city Metro bus system (which has a dedicated overhead road for itself so effectively a train). There are big buses which run long routes. There are shorter vans which run shorter routes. There are 'route'-rickshaws which even run even shorter routes. And if you are rich, there is a fifth option of getting a taxi-rickshaw at 10x price.

All this makes the system extremely robust (if bus is late you can eg. take a two van combo), and because all 4 systems compete with each other the transit system is time efficient and cheap.

Lahore is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, almost five times denser than Calgary.

I don't know if you'll ever see this, but... what is the price for one of the taxi-rickshaws? I'm really curious about costs around the world.

1 USD ~ 100 PKR. Minimum wage is 10k PKR and typical college educated people earn 20k on their first job.

So minimum bus/van/route-rickshaw fare is 15 PKR. Might have gone up to 20 PKR since I was home. Max goes up to about 50-60 PKR. (you pay for how far you want to go).

taxi-rickshaws can cost anywhere from 30 PRK (1 km) to 600 PKR cross city (20-30). Depends on from where to where you are going, time of the day, and your ability to haggle.

Wow, I honestly would have never thought that cities would have better (easier to navigate) layouts in countries like Pakistan. I am very interested in learning some details on what exactly you mean by this. :)

So I was specifically talking about moving from place to place without the need for maps. I am only comparing with Calgary and the greater Toronto area (not Toronto city). I am sure other cities in NA are different.

One reason is that Lahore is divided into gated housing authorities (which is bad for a lot of other reasons) but to get to your destination you just need directions to the the gated community. One inside, everything is neatly divided into grid structured blocks and numbered streets which are easy to navigate.

Calgary's streets have names not numbers. (Erin Grove, SE) tells me almost nothing about where the street is located. Even if I were a native I would need a map for unfamiliar streets.

Also, because people in Lahore are generally poor (most people don't have cars) and not very literate, the city grows in a way that they can navigate. Nothing to be proud of, but that is probably the reason I would say Lahore is 'better' designed.