The thing I hated most about Sydney remains the same... the traffic and transport is a shithouse nightmare. Even worse than my worst nightmare.
Trains and light rail (trams) are good but buses are shit and driving is equally shit. Took me 20min to drive 2 km this morning. Utter nightmare. The thing I hate about Australia the most (like the US) is that it's so car dependent. It's not sustainable, pollutes the environment, not exactly great for our health and stress levels either, parking is expensive as hell.
Dumbass middle-aged white male car-loving politicians think building more roads, more lanes, more freeways, bridges, tunnels, multi storey carparks will solve the problem... until they run out of space again and then what? Build 10 lane roads, 4 layers of overpasses and 20 level carparks (that cost $100/day to park in)?
Meanwhile trains are efficient, don't jam, are easy to use and get people around easily.
Public transport is so much better in Europe and Asia ( and more affordable too) and people do use it. In the 30 odd years I've been visiting Taipei, Taiwan there are less cars on the road than before (due to the extremely efficient and user friendly metro they built) whereas Sydney seems to have 10x more cars than what I remember during my childhood.
I get the feeling that Sydneysiders (and many ppl around the world) enjoy sitting in traffic because catching public transport is 'below' them and being comfortable (ie not having to walk 5 or 10min to a bus/train stop especially if it's raining) is the most important criteria .... then they complain about the traffic while adding to the problem themselves. It's selfish.
Btw I'm not saying that people should never drive, I'm talking about Mon- Fri commutes... esp. if you're going into the city.
I know that most people don't care about this issue which is rather sad... it's only going to get worse. The bloody developers keep building new apartments but not enough garages and never think about how all these new residents are going to add heaps more traffic to the area and how they're going to get around...
While I really applaud Sydney transport in bringing back trams to the city (best thing they ever did and I wish they'd done it while I was uni as taking buses down George st (again, 20min for 2km) was hell)..they need to do more for the outer suburbs.
And about Geneva- and all those dumb (as always, middle aged white male) politicians who think that building a tunnel under the lake will solve the traffic problems it won't. Take a lesson from Sydney. The Sydney Harbour tunnel did initially ease traffic from the bridge until it too became congested.... building more roads, lanes, tunnels and shit does not solve the problem dumbasses. Getting ppl out of their cars and having less cars on the road does.
And make more bloody park and ride facilities. Switzerland and France do that well. Sydney is shit for that. Ugh.
Rant over.
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