Public transport is free in Brussels and there is a bus there called “not the 48” which takes you to a mystery location.
None of this is true—the claim originates from a Twitter joke. Public transport is not free in Brussels and the bus pictured goes to a stop called Mystère.
A tweet with over 11,000 retweets claims that “not only is public transport free in Brussels, but they even have a bus called "Not The 48" which takes you to a mystery location if you're feeling a bit down or you just don't have anything to do that day”.
The tweet shows a picture of a bus that says it is going to “Mystère” and has the number 48 on it with a red line through it. The tweet has also been shared almost 3,000 times on Facebook.
However, this isn’t true. The person who tweeted it has acknowledged that it was a joke, having also made a similar joke in 2019.
‘Mystère/Mysterie’ is a stop on the route of the 48 bus in Brussels and can also be reached by bus number 54. The stop appears to be named after a nearby street called Rue du Mystère.
According to Twitter users, the line through the number 48 on the bus’s front indicates that it’s not going to the end of its route, which for that bus would normally be Decroly or Anneessens.
Also, public transport is not free in Brussels, except on its annual ‘Car Free Sunday’.
Although the tweet was meant as a joke, it has been assumed to be true by many Twitter users and some on other social networks. We also have fact checked other satirical claims that have been taken seriously on social media previously.
Image courtesy of Steven Lek
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as satire because the post isn’t true and started off as a joke.
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