<p>Will I need a car? How’s public transportation in Columbus? If I go to OSU this coming fall, I likely won’t have a car until around spring 2009.</p>
<p>None of the 6000 freshmen are allowed to have a car. They do fine.</p>
<p>Public transportation is decent in Columbus (better than some, not as good as others), but it consists only of busses. No subways, elevated trains or even free roaming taxis (if you want a cab you either need to head to a hotel lobby to hail one, or call for a pick up). </p>
<p>The Columbus busses (COTA) pretty much go everywhere in the city (including the airport) and OSU students can ride any COTA bus for free with the student ID (they pay a fee for this which is included on their statements). </p>
<p>The bus system can be a bit difficult to decypher, but that's true of any city mass transit system. Once you catch on to it things are pretty predictable.
Overall, COTA seems to be pretty safe and covers most of the city. My son has been all over Columbus on COTA without any real problem. </p>
<p>OSU has their own bus system (called CABS) for travel within the campus and that is also free to students.</p>
<p>If you live in the dorms you wouldn't want a car anyway because they would make you park it so far away, you would need to ride the busses to get to your car. It would be faster to walk or bike to where you wanted to go or just ride a bus to where you were heading in the first place.</p>
<p>As others have noted, Columbus' public transportation fall somewhere in the middle. Most of what you'll want to go to lies along the High Street corridor (Short North, Victorian Village, Downtown, German Village), so buses are not a bad option.</p>
<p>I did notice, my last couple of years in Columbus, that it did get somewhat easier to hail a cab in the Short North area, German Village and campus though it's still nowhere near a New York or Chicago type of cab culture.</p>