You’d think you’d be able to make that trip in an hour? or better of walking?

To get to a 9am lecture. The electronic board would say a bus would be arriving at 8.20am. The ‘phantom’ bus would never turn up then 2 buses would turn up at 8.40am once behind the other and I’d be 20 mins late for lectures. due to 40min commute in peak hour.

I’d have to either walk/cycle (30 degree heat in summer is not fun – sweaty man) or catch a bus at 7.50am. It never ceased to amaze how often the electronic timetable board – realtime – what a joke – was constantly wrong.

Ahh, the joys of public transport..

These screens are something like a car accident, you don’t really want to look at it but you can’t help yourself.

Sydney on the other hand…
A while ago my daughter was in Sydney, staying in Marrickville and attending Macquarie. The trip planner always suggested routes through Strathfield, even though it is quicker via the city. We stopped using it.

Thankfully, the wait is never too long, unless some drama has affected the line – like a car accident in front of the tram, or power lines down. Also thankfully, I live close enough to the city that if pressed, I could walk home!

David Irving, I live at Maslin Beach and my sister lives at Port Noarlunga, we stared at 3 different timetables for about 20 minutes and still couldn’t work out what bus she was meant to be catching and where, we were trying to be more enviro-savvy, but I ended up just driving her. My mum lives up the road, and she uses the fact that she is a whiz at interpreting the bus timetables as evidence that she’s still got all her marbles….I’m dubious.

Anyhow, the next time, having consulted with my mum, ‘the public transport oracle’, my sister managed to catch the bus on time…the price = $4.50. The journey was within the zone, which if you lived in the inner city would be a lot cheaper than $4.50, but in an example of how fringe-dwellers get screwed, yet again, you have to buy the highest price ticket, no matter how short the trip is if you live in zone 3…at least that was what the bus driver said. It seems really unfair. Likewise, last summer a two hour ticket rarely got me home, [so I had to buy two tickets to make one trip!], because of the speed of the trains on the buckled tracks. In fact last february, using mass transit, I got from Richmond, Melbourne to Tullamarine airport and on to Adelaide city, faster than I could get from Adelaide city to home, which, for our interstate friends, is about a 40 minute drive.

oh sorry this is turning into a real whinge from me, but what bothers me most is when I first moved here, I didn’t even have a drivers license and I looked at the public transport situation before buying and thought it was pretty good [and simple!!!], and it has been in steady decline ever since, despite the fact that the area just south of me is experiencing strong population growth. The govt has committed to extending and electrifying the rail, which will hopefully make the service more reliable.

It is easy to imagine how Mussolini was popular. Or Kennett for that matter.

(*) In-joke – “cartographic licence” is the judgement exercised by the cartographer on what to leave in, what to omit, and how to portray it so that the end result resembles the territory sufficiently well to be useful.

I don’t know what you Adelaide people are complaining about, I find this map a model of clarity! http://www.adelaidemetro.com.au//routes/pdfs/cbdmap_0909.pdf