During our trip to San Diego this year, we completely relied on local transportation and Google helped us take best decisions to save time & money. If you are planning a visit to San Diego and if it's your first time, this post would very helpful for you. I will try to share all finer details about the transportation, timings, route planning, transits etc. We will also touch one important aspect of commute planning through apps, which can bring a lot of difference the way you commute in a city.
Here are few things which we intend to cover in this post and we will go one by one.
1. How to get free shuttle from Airport to closest MST station.
2. Why to chose one or multi-day MTS pass instead of single route ticket.
3. How to get discounts on app based taxis like Uber or Lyft
4. Why & how to use Google for deciding most optimized route.
5. Hiring car for local commute and it's advantages.
Above photograph shows one of the shuttles which start from Airport and take passengers to parking area, where people can hire a car. Most of them go through MTS station and if you request for the lift, they would drop you there. We jumped into these because of some other reason and there is a story associated, which I would skip for now. These shuttles are available from the parking area which just across the airport. You need to take the foot-over to go to the other side and then look for some of these shuttles.
MTS is best fit for folks who don't want to hire car, because MTS covers different parts of San Diego. And if you get daily or multi-day pass, you save a lot. And the pass you get also covers bus ride. If you have to take 2 rides in a day, cost for your one day pass is covered. And on a average you take 6 rides in a day when you are out for exploration. These 6 are mix of train and bus rides.
At times you may feel that MTS route can take more time so why not book a cab, Decision becomes easy if you are in a group. A group of 3 can also chose to stick with taxies and not buy MTS passes, but it depends if you can crack some discounts for app based taxies. Like we used Lyft and we had $5 discount for first 5 rides. So for 2 of us we had 10 rides and since my friend used my promo code for first ride, we got 3 more. We made good use of these in San Diego and Las Vegas.
And the final tip is to use Google maps when you are planning your commute. Please above screenshot, which speaks a lot. You just have to enter your starting position and the destination. On the basis of this information and current time, it would suggest you the route you should follow, which bus/train to catch and from where? Walking directions, if any. Exact timings of these buses and trains. Most of the times this plan works and success rate was 100% for us. We tried this for at least 10 times in San Diego.
For first timers these are little tricky things to plan and I wish I had came across such tips before I planned my trip to San Diego. If you have been to San Diego and have anything else to suggest, please drop a comment below.
If you liked this post and found it helpful, I would request you to follow these things when traveling -
1. Manage your waste well and don’t litter Use dustbins.
2. Tell us if you went to a place and found it hard to locate a dustbin.
3. Avoid bottle waters in hills. Usually you get clean water in hills and water bottles create lot of mess in our ecosystem.
4. Say big no to plastic and avoid those unhealthy snacks packed in plastic bags. Rather buy fruits.
5. Don't play loud blaring music in forests of jungle camps. You are a guest in that ecosystem and disturbing the locals (humans and animals) is not polite
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