Quote: (01-01-2018 08:36 PM)Heart Break Kid Wrote:
How is the public transit in Irkutsk and Siberian cities in general?
Cheap and effective. Download the Yandex app or use Google Maps to plan your journeys. 15 RUB was the fare, I think. The vehicles, especially the trams, can be old so it's a kick to imagine life in the old Soviet days when they were shiny and new.
Irkutsk doesn't have a metro, but Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and Kazan definitely do, can't remember about the other cities offhand. Even if a city doesn't have a metro, there will be plenty of marshrutkas, trolleys, buses, etc.
To get to Baikal you take the suburban electric train and then you can take a train that goes along the shore of Baikal on the tracks that used to be part of the Trans-Siberian Railway before the route was changed around. I'd recommend doing that.