Moscow Public Transport for Visitors: Metro, Troika and Getting Around

Moscow's transport network is fast, cheap and genuinely pleasant to use — the metro alone carries around 6.5 million people a day through stations that double as museums. For a visitor the whole system comes down to one decision made on arrival: get a Troika card. Everything else follows from that.

Start with the Troika card

Troika is Moscow's reloadable transport card, and it covers the metro, buses, trams, trolleybuses and the Moscow Central Circle. You buy it at any metro ticket office or vending machine for a 150-rouble deposit, of which 50 roubles comes back when you return the card.

The saving is immediate: a single metro ride costs about 38 roubles on Troika against roughly 55 for a paper ticket, and the "Wallet" balance option brings it a little lower still. Fares are adjusted periodically, so treat these as the shape of the pricing rather than a quote — the current tariff is posted at every ticket office.

The metro

Fifteen lines, more than 250 stations, trains every 90 seconds to five minutes, running from 05:30 to 01:00. Signage is bilingual and announcements are in Russian and English on most lines.

Komsomolskaya and Mayakovskaya are the stations people photograph, and they are worth a deliberate detour rather than a glimpse in transit. Rush hours run roughly 07:00-10:00 and 16:00-19:00; outside them the metro is quick and uncrowded.

Buses, trams and trolleybuses

Above ground the same Troika card works, and the ninety-minute transfer fare makes short hops cheap. Trams are the slow pleasure of the system — the routes along the Boulevard Ring and through Chistye Prudy show you a city the metro tunnels underneath.

Moscow Central Circle and the monorail

The MCC is a surface rail ring integrated with the metro: same card, free transfers within ninety minutes, and windows. It is the easiest way to see the city's newer districts without a tour. The monorail is a short novelty line near VDNKh — pleasant if you are already there, not a destination in itself.

Getting to and from the airports

All three airports are connected by Aeroexpress rail to their respective terminals in the centre, and by regular bus routes that cost less and take longer. Aeroexpress fares vary by ticket type and time of booking, so check the current price on the operator's own site rather than relying on a figure in any guide.

After midnight

The metro closes around 01:00. Night bus routes run along the main radial avenues and through the Garden Ring, and Troika works on them exactly as it does by day. If your route is not covered, a taxi from an app is the practical fallback.

Practical notes

Keep the card topped up before you set out — queues at ticket machines are worst exactly when you are late. Download an offline metro map; mobile signal in the deep tunnels is inconsistent. And allow more time than the map suggests for interchanges at the big hubs, where a transfer can involve several hundred metres of corridor.