Melbourne's (and Sydney's) public transport hell

I've got a headache... Can this be over please... Whose bright idea was it to move into a place 10sqm smaller than our previous apartment? Oh yeah... Us. That's because we don't want to and can't get a second car and there isn't much availability next to a train station in a nice suburb and near the freeway... If 3br apartments actually existed (yeah OK they do but are extremely rare and are usually penthouses and too expensive) we would have gotten one... But alas I will never get used to the Australian lifestyle of living in a suburb with nothing except houses and spending your whole life driving or commuting long hours on public transport... I can't see how driving everywhere polluting the environment and screwing up your back is good for anyone...

PTV how I hate thee... I'm going from Flinders St to Footscray on the train now.. A total of 3 stops. It's leaving from platform 9. But the next one will leave from platform 5. It could also leave from platform 6 or 10. WHAT THE HELL MELBOURNE? In every other metro on earth the same suburban line stops on the same fucking platforms. But in Melbourne that means if you are in the city going to the same place every time you still need to look at the timetable every single time every single day because the ADHD train line designers can't decide where to stop.  In Melbourne they can't decide what bloody platform to go to nor which direction the line should run. I'm still convinced the PTV people and town planners here are blind and drunk monkeys. After always being late to my appointments as PTV has fucked me around so many times with their network disruptions I gave myself extra time and I've now arrived at my destination 30mins early. I can't get my ti...

One thing that pains me about living in small cities is that you can't get anything done... there aren't enough service providers and prices are high as there is no competition.. In Geneva I would've had to go to Bern to do many things, in Lyon I had to go to Paris like a billion times to do certain things (and pay like 3x price for our translations as there just aren't many translators in Lyon/no competition) and now in Melbourne.. a city that is hardly small with over 4 million people.. but compared to Sydney feels like a small place. In Sydney we have multiple CBDs where you can get everything done as you could in the actual CBD. In Melbourne there is only ONE CBD.. and even then... Let me give you an example.. In Sydney if you want to go to the ATO you can go to either CBD (Martin Place), Chatswood (north), Parramatta (west), Rockdale (south) or Penrith (outer west). In Melbourne there are NO offices in the CBD (wtf?), the closest is Docklands which is next to ...

2 hours to travel 23km.. can you please just kill me now as I cannot handle Melbourne's shithouse transport. For those smartarses suggesting I should just get a car.. we can't get a second car as we'd have nowhere to park it!)

Could there be anything more painful in Melbourne than the worst designed most user unfriendly public transport ever? It assumes everyone has lived here 10 years and knows all the lines and stops (and directions!) off by heart! Telling me only the last stop does not help me.... List ALL the stops like Sydney does ffs! And there isn't a single network map at this station omfg. This poor lost old Chinese woman without a phone just asked me for help and Im useless. And they dare raise the prices.... Grrrrr The only place where it works is the CBD. It's frequent and free there. But the map still doesn't make sense.

So I got to test Uber in Melbourne today thanks to trains on a certain line not running and me not knowing it in time and realising I would be very late for an appointment that would have been a complete nightmare to reschedule considering how long I waited for this one... I seriously don't know what I'd do without Uber.. It's saved me in Geneva (mainly to get me to the airport at the crack of dawn, or when I'm carrying too much stuff, since Geneva's transport is largely problem-free and excellent), Lyon (many times), Paris, Sydney and now Melbourne. I don't use it often but it's saved me many times in many cases... notably in Lyon where strangely and annoyingly every single time I had a very important meeting/appointment the public transport would fail on me.. 3 important events - there'd be a strike, or it wouldn't be running to schedule, or late or just no explanation of everything... Heck, if I could afford to use it every day I would......