TASHKENT BUS HUB
International coaches from Tashkent’s bus terminal reach Almaty, Bishkek and every Uzbek regional capital; above the street grid runs the first metro ever built in Central Asia — 50 stations on 70.4 km — now in its fastest expansion since the 1980s.
Tashkent’s main bus terminal (Toshkent avtovokzal, by the Olmazor metro end of the Chilonzor line) dispatches the regional mesh: daily coaches to Almaty and Bishkek, frequent services to Samarkand, Bukhara and the Fergana Valley cities, and marshrutka ranks that fill in everything the timetable misses. Cross-border services to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are the working-class counterpart of the air corridor — priced for the family-visit traffic that dominates arrivals statistics. Intercity fares remain low by design: the state keeps road transport affordable as a social policy, and private carriers fill frequency gaps.
The Tashkent Metro opened in 1977 — the first in Central Asia — and carried 286.8 million passengers in 2025 across four lines and 50 stations. The Circle Line, the first major expansion in decades, opened in stages from 2020 and gained two more stations in March 2025; 14 new trainsets arrive in 2026. The approved trajectory doubles the system to 103 km and 79 stations by 2030 with 1.5–3-minute headways and 1.8 million daily capacity. The flagship project is the 21-km, nine-station line to New Tashkent — its $110 million first phase (8 km, three stations, Turkish-built) is due before the end of 2026. Payment is fully digital via the ATTO platform: 1,700 UZS by card or app, 3,000 by QR ticket.
THE TIO READ
Every Central Asian capital is building transit, but Tashkent is the only one building a metro toward a city that does not yet exist. The New Tashkent line is a statement of confidence in the $50 billion satellite city. For the traveller, the practical note: the metro is cheap, monumental (Kosmonavtlar and Alisher Navoiy are museums with trains), and photography has been legal since 2018.
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