mykrocosm

Caught the train to work today. I’d love to do that on a regular basis, but :

- The ticket was $3.50 each way. A multitrip of 10 for the week costs $23. My car uses around $20 a week in petrol, roughly $15 of that in commuting.
- The trip took 45 minutes, on two trains. By car it’s 16-18 minutes.

Adelaide is such a road-friendly city, the public transport network is fighting an uphill battle. But there are things that I think would make it more attractive :

- Introduce another zone level. That “Zone 2″ for 3km distances or 2 train stations is useless to most able-bodied people. An intermediate level, say for travel within 8 or 10km, priced at about $1.50, would be great. That’d really compete with cars.

- Consider large commercial districts that are not within, but near the city. Believe it or not, there is NO peak hour service between the Outer Harbour (Port Adelaide) and Bowden (one stop from the city), where hundreds, possibly thousands of people are employed. The morning schedule is designed to express every single train right into the City, and anyone wishing to alight at Bowden has to continue to the city and hop on another train to return that one measly stop. In the evening, the reverse applies again, anyone commuting from Bowden to Outer Harbour has to first travel one stop into the city. Ironically, there are plenty of stops at Bowden during off-peak hours, exactly when they are the most useless. It doesn’t affect me personally, but it certainly would if I lived in the North West. What a strange oversight in the transport plan.

- Pass-through services that bypass the city terminal. You wouldn’t need many of these, just one or two a day during peak hours. It’d be great to come from the south and head straight through to the north, and vice versa, without having to transit the city centre every single time.

- Better tickets. The present system revolves around disposable and often unreliable paper tickets, and a massive overhaul would be needed to implement more resilient card-based tickets. This would then pave the way for a much friendlier system with account balances, online payments, and so on. Politically and financially though, this would be one very hot potato.

Hmm… oh, and a brickbat to the grumpy old hag at the Faulty Ticket counter, Adelaide station, who couldn’t be bothered trying to communicate and simply activated my replacement ticket without asking. If I’d already had an active ticket you would have wasted another one of mine. Thanks a lot. Next time let me activate it myself, on the train. Cow.

I’m back! I managed to experience a nice chunk of Sydney, given the little time I had. I did a little Christmas shopping out at Bondi Junction. A strange place in the middle of dull suburbia, nowhere near the beach or the city, nothing there but a whopping great Westfield mall. Back in the city and on my way to the harbourside I got held up outside the Hotel Intercontinential by the Turkish Prime Minister’s motorcade returning from some official function. The next day we managed to pick up some tan on Maroubra beach, before this shark scare sent everyone scampering out of the water. The rest of the time we spent cruising around with the top down in Dan’s Peugeot 307 CC. Damn, that was fun!

Flea and I are off to the eastern states tonight - she to tour the Apple Isle with her family and I to the cosmopolitian delights of Sydney. I’m looking forward to catching up with some old friends there. See you when I get back!