• Jhex@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    is public transportation actually good in Australia? as in, you can actually do your daily living with it? (work, school, shopping, etc)?

    • JoshCodes@programming.dev
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      22 minutes ago

      Sydney and Melbourne have pretty good public transport. Unfortunately they’re compensating for everywhere else, which has some truly fucking awful public transport. Looking at Adelaide in particular but I know others are also shit.

    • Contentedness@lemmy.nz
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      21 minutes ago

      I’ve been living in Melbourne for ~10 years and don’t own a car. The public transport and bike infrastructure around where I live is pretty good.

      If I need to move house or something like that there’s a car share service that has vans you can hire by the hour.

      Interestingly the State Government here has made all public transport free for the month of April. They only announced it late last week. LINK.

    • Dubman@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Definitely not in Brisbane. Our public transport feels completely forgotten about. The only form I have access to is a bus and the closest bus stop I would have to walk to is over 2km away. I don’t live in the middle of the city or anything but the area is well established and there is basically no infrastructure to provide basic public transport to people.

      This whole fuel shit show will likely be awful and probably expensive.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      IIRC, Melbourne is one of the very few cities in the world that didn’t demolish its streetcar network in the 1950s, so there’s that.

    • dmtalon@infosec.pub
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      2 hours ago

      Australia is big, but Sydney, when I was there a million years ago had very good public transportation with a single card that got you access to buses, ferries etc…

      • Jhex@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        …good to know!

        I used to be an avid user/defender of public transportation (in Canada). Used it for 15 years (11 of which I actually had a car but did not use for daily commute)

        But then it was ruined… literally a 13 Km commute (less than 10 miles if you are American) would mean 1.5 hours in a bus EACH WAY, vs 45 mins by car (which is still a travesty for such a short commute)

        Now I am lucky to work from home most of the time and commute with an eScooter when the weather allows me to

          • Jhex@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            no, Ottawa area… buses were terrible leading up to the LRT opening and after the LRT opening was a disaster (one that they are still recovering from) the buses became unusable

            • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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              3 hours ago

              Ah, I didn’t use the buses on my visit to Ottawa. We did use the VIA Rail from Montreal and made sure to have a Beavertail before we left your fine city though.