Hi,

Almost forgot to mention the chaos I encountered this morning!
I live on the Gold Coast, in Queensland, Australia.
I went to my regular train station (Varsity Lakes train station) this morning on the way to go to school, and I noticed that there were a lot of people waiting outside at the entrance to the station. On arrival one of the people from my school said that all trains were cancelled for at least the next hour! Madness, at peak hour! Luckily I got my mum to drive me to school (I am old enough to get a driver's license and should have drove there myself), but for some other people, they had to wait for an hour and arrive at school late.

Later that day I checked the news online, that it was a powerline fault at Roma Street Station, one of the major stations in Brisbane, the capital of Queensland. Chaos reigned today from 4:30am from what I heard, but nothing could match peak hour with everyone just left with few options but to take buses or taxis or drive by car. Of course that meant lots of traffic.

The public transport system is quite underdone in Australia if you compare to other countries such as China, France, Japan and US, and Queensland isn't exactly the best in the country either. So today's event to me showed how much we need upgrades to public transport here, a subway would be nice (though that won't happen), and improvements are still a few years away.

Also btw, here is an image of Varsity Lakes Station: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/691/varsitylakesstationopenh.jpg/

See what you guys think,
Jonius7

Oh wow, things sounds pretty bad in Canada too. In Quebec though? I wonder how it is in Toronto. Surely could be a bit better.
On my trip to Melbourne I discovered how good trams were. It's a subway without the underground tunnels needing to be excavated and can service many places. And it works!
Brisbane had trams but they removed them like years and years ago.
In some cases we may have gone backwards in public transport.

Well, I live in the same town as DJ, so yeah. But when it works, well it works pretty well.

we have buses here, though they stop operating after 2 PM

I wonder how that works. How about peak hour at 5-6PM?
@Art_of_camelot how about trains in your city?

Also some Gold Coast Bus drivers get attacked. Crime rates on the Gold Coast went up significantly last year.

Hm, public transport seems decent around here (just looked, apparently there's three bus lines a block away from my house 0.o).  Tho I guess this is a densely-populated area

Apparently I could go and stalk leafy after about an hour and a half en route...not that I would or anything..
<.<

I live in the suburbs. I run when it's practical (if it's only a few miles and I'm not carrying anything) and otherwise my parents drive me.

We also have school buses, but that's not really public transportation

I remember when we lived in South Korea, I was 5 hours late for elementary school, because the bus schedules got fked up...
I got spanked

Quote from: DJ_O on February 29, 2012, 03:42:00 pm

Also talk about transport fail: Due to financial issues, they are cutting in service rather than increasing prices again now here and now I can't even go to hockey games with Juju anymore except on Sundays. X.x

Prices here have gone up 50% or so in the last few years.

Ouch that sucks.

Over here the price increase was mostly in the '90s, where bus went from $2.00 to 2.75 in like 4 years, even on weekends. After many complaints and the fact bus here was most expensive than most cities, they froze prices until about 4 years later when gas prices started to skyrocket. They almost went bankrupt so they were forced to start increasing prices again and again and it eventually peaked at $3.60 (although during weekends it was $2.20 for me and $1.10 for people under 24). Eventually things got better and they decided to reduce prices to $3 and $2 to attract more customers, then froze regular prices (although the monthly pass still increases a bit). However since last year gas prices started to skyrocket again and instead of increasing prices, they decided to remove most of the the extra services they had added last Summer to cut on costs. I personally would rather pay an extra $0.25 per ride and have services at night, though.