This Is the Slowest Bus in Berlin
At 13.1 kilometres per hour, the 147 bus travels the speed of a brisk jog, or a child's bicycle.
Tuesday, April 14
The 147 bus line, which runs from Ostbahnhof through Wedding to Hauptbahnhof, is officially the slowest operating route in the city. In fact, you could probably run faster.
Of the 155 bus lines operating across the city, 89 became slower [than] the year before.
Across its 11-kilometre route, the bus reaches an average speed of about 13.1 kilometres per hour — about the speed of a brisk jog, or a child's bicycle. Even worse: it's getting slower. According to newly released data, it ran about 0.3 kilometres per hour slower than it did the previous year.
The BVG released the data for 2025 in response to a parliamentary enquiry by the Die Linke politician Kristian Ronneburg. The report showed that of the 155 bus lines operating across the city, 89 became slower, 40 got faster, and 26 maintained the same speed as the year before.
Berlin's fastest buses are usually those marked with an X (for ExpressBusse), and the fastest of those is the airport bus, the X7, which clocks in at an average of 36.9 kilometres per hour. The X7 makes only one stop on its route from U-Bahn Rudow to BER airport, and travels most of the route on the motorway. The slowest express bus was the X83, which manages an average speed of only 17.7 kilometres per hour on its route through southern Berlin.
There was one bus even slower than the 147 — but it doesn't count as the overall slowest, since it runs only seasonally. The 312, also known as the swimming pool bus, takes passengers from Nikolassee S-Bahn station to the Wannsee Strandbad and back. Last year, that bus averaged just 12.8 kilometres per hour.
The BVG serves 6,770 bus stops across Berlin.
