How to Move Around Baku Without Wasting Time

Baku is easier to move around than most capitals of its size. The part visitors want is small, and the transport that covers the rest is cheap.

The practical answer for most trips is walking in the centre, the metro for distance, and a booked car for the airport.

Walking

The Old City, the boulevard, the main squares and most central hotels sit within an area you can cross on foot in half an hour.

Walking is not the budget option here, it is the fast one. Traffic in the centre is dense, and a car covering ten blocks in the middle of the day is slower than you are.

The surface is good and the boulevard is flat. In summer the heat is the limiting factor, not the distance.

The metro

Two main lines, clean, cheap and quick. It is the right tool for crossing the city rather than for hopping between neighbouring sights.

You need a BakiKart, the city transport card, sold and topped up at stations. There is no cash payment at the gate, so this is the first thing to buy on arrival day.

Trains are frequent. Stations are deep, escalators are long, and lifts are not universal, which matters if you are carrying a case or travelling with a pushchair.

Buses

Buses run on the same card and cover the areas the metro does not. A few older vehicles still take a small cash fare.

For visitors they are most useful for the peninsula and for places just outside the centre. Routes are not intuitive without an app, so check before boarding rather than after.

Ride apps

Apps work here and solve the two problems of street taxis at once: the destination is set in writing, and the price appears before you accept.

This is the default for evenings, for rain, and for anyone who does not share a language with the driver.

Street taxis

Plentiful, cheap and fine, with one rule. Agree the fare before the car moves.

Say the number out loud, or type it into a phone and show it. This is normal here and nobody will find it rude. Skipping it is the most common cause of a bad experience in Baku.

The airport

Heydar Aliyev International Airport is outside the city, and our route data records the drive at around thirty minutes in normal conditions.

There is no metro to the airport. This is the one journey worth booking in advance, in both directions, because it is the trip where luggage, time pressure and unfamiliarity all arrive together.

Out of the city

Nothing outside Baku is served well by public transport for a visitor on a schedule. Gobustan, Absheron, Guba, Gabala and the rest are road trips.

That means either a car with a driver, or a hire car if several days of your trip are outside the capital.

What to do on arrival day

Buy a BakiKart at the first metro station you pass. Download an offline map of the centre. Note the address of your accommodation in local script.

Those three things take fifteen minutes and remove most of the friction from the rest of the trip.

What it costs

A metro ride is a fraction of a manat. A bus is the same order. A short ride-app journey across the centre costs a few manat.

This is a cheap city to move around in. The expensive journeys are the ones outside it, and those are the ones worth planning rather than improvising.

Arranging it

We arrange airport transfers and day trips with drivers. The city itself needs no arrangement at all, which is the nicest thing about it.