If you've noticed that the price of living in Australia has crept up over the past couple of years, you're not alone. Everything — from groceries, to petrol, to property and public transport — has skyrocketed, which has been especially hard on Aussies doing it tough.
And while many of us have been able to pocket savings while working from home that would otherwise have gone toward public transport, others haven't been as lucky during the pandemic.
In a thread on Reddit titled "Let's talk about public transport," Aussie user u/No-Succotash4378 raged about some of these issues, including the cost and efficiency of trains, buses, ferries, and trams in Australia.
Aussies were quick to agree in the comments, while sharing their own observations about the disastrous state of public transport in Australia. Here are some of the best responses.
1. "I never had the luxury of WFH, and commuting throughout these past few months has been pretty annoying. The fact that they keep increasing the Opal fare, yet not providing reliable or consistent services, sucks. I have friends who come to work an hour late whenever there is industrial action because there are no bus services until 7:30 a.m. It's also the worst feeling when you are trying to get home after a 9.5-hour shift, only to find that you have to wait 28 minutes for your connecting train on a platform that reeks of piss."
"Not to go off on a tangent, but they wonder why the CBD is dying when they make it so annoying and expensive to commute in and get around. The trams have constant signal issues, they're expensive, and reduced services means it's faster to walk. It should be free in the CBD like in Melbourne, or alternatively, bring back the 555 bus."
—u/pichuru
2. "I remember when they introduced Opal, they had that free trips after using it eight times to compensate for unlimited travel that weekly tickets offered. So while Opals were still a little more expensive than weeklies, it did at least allow for free transport on Fridays and weekends if you used public transport regularly. Then after a few years, they got rid of the free trips after eight usages because some people were presumably abusing the system."
"They had the gall to market the change as 'fairer fares for everyone.' How was it fairer for the majority of people who were doing the right thing to now have to pay for something that was only free as compensation for a system that was more expensive than the previous one?"
3. "This was always the plan. I chanced upon someone working on rolling out the system in the very early days, and she told me it would happen after phasing out regular tickets. The initial low prices when compared to paper tickets were just to get everyone on board with the system."
—u/papwned
4. "I've noticed that buses have been outright cancelled for no apparent reason more often than they used to lately, on top of everything else."
5. "I saw an ad in Wynyard station yesterday encouraging us to walk to work to 'transport yourself.' Because, you know, we're all in walking distance to our places of work. Sounded a lot like, 'Go fuck yourself.'"
—u/Owlmystery
6. "Step 1: Create massive sprawling suburbs up to 50 kilometres away from the CBD where anyone can actually afford to live. Step 2: Raise prices of public transport (which takes 1.5 hours each way) and make sure services are unreliable. Step 3: Whinge and complain that your city is dying when people prefer to work from home in convenience."
—u/dragonphlegm
7. "When Andrew Constance was transport minister he blocked me on Twitter because I would send him a screenshot of the TripView app every time my train was late. I live in the Blue Mountains but work in the Inner West, so this was a near daily occurrence."
8. "They slashed so many buses from the city to the east; it is bloody terrible. It's now quicker to train to Bondi and get a bus home than to get the light rail."
—u/brittleirony
9. "They raise Opal fares yet can't pay their workers more. Where is the money going?"
10. "The Liberal Party philosophy is 'small government,' i.e., the government should take a back seat and allow private enterprise and the 'free market' to keep things like public services running. Hence the NSW Liberals' privatisation of electricity, roads, public transport, etc. and the Federal privatisation of Telstra, immigration; even ADF bases are guarded by Chubb, not by soldiers. Then you wonder why public services in NSW and federally are a shit-fight. The simple answer: We chose a government who regard public services as a burden, so they run them down to cause the public to say, 'These services suck,' and support the privatisation agenda, which inevitably gets raised."
—u/Red-Engineer
11. "They keep cutting bus routes in the east to try and force people to catch the light rail (which takes way longer). I’ve seen a lot of elderly folk who have been catching the same buses for years standing around being very confused because their route has changed or been cancelled."
12. And lastly: "A public service like public transport should never be run as a profit-making business. That's not what it is there for. That being said, the weekend timetable has returned to being just that, a weekend timetable. However, don't blame the unions for industrial action. They gave the government over nine months notice of when and what type of action would be held if they didn't come to the party. The NSW government then chose not to negotiate and subsequently wait until the last moment to notify the general public, most likely as a bargaining tactic. Source: Mate of mine works for Sydney Trains and is part of the union, so, you know, grain of salt and all that."
—u/SorysRgee
Some Reddit submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
What are your thoughts on public transport in Australia? Have you been affected by rising costs or the poorly run transport timetabling? Or perhaps you're someone who is employed in the industry and has a better insight than the general public?
Let us know in the comments!