Trains and Trams

Melbourne has excellent public transit. I am guessing this asset had a big say in pushing the city to the top of the ranking for most livable places in the world (#1 in 2011). It certainly made me think of how New York must have been 100 years ago. Easy to navigate, but with trams… Besides trams, Melbourne’s public transit includes city trains. My ex best friends. I used to take the train every day when we moved here and I worked close to CBD (downtown). Being able to walk to the train station and the frequent trains suited my needs. But soon I started to count lots of cancelled trains at rush hour. I sat on a train hit by lightning, which was then stuck for hours between stations. A while later I rode a faulty train, which produced sparks that lit the dried grass underneath the train. We waited for the firefighters to put that fire off, then for the "authorized personnel" to help us jump off the train, and finally for the buses that had to replace the immobile trains on that line. Three hours later I got home and wondered whether I should drive instead... Trams zigzag in and around CBD, which puzzles me a bit, not so much because they are slow and passé, but because I can't understand why with all the trams (and buses), trains also run in a redundant loop around the CBD. It takes each train 20 min to finish this loop and then go radially towards the destination outside the city. It's dizzying and painful and if you don't like this carousel movement, any other alternative takes twice the time. Anyway, I took the train in the beginning. The alternative was to drive on the left side of the road, so what right-side-driver wouldn’t have liked to commute by train instead? Last year, when I started to work in the North-Eastern suburbs, I realized that I had to change three trains each way, go into the city, through the loop, and out of the city again. This was infuriating, but because the train network was built to bring workers into the city (I guess), my commute doubled in time. I admitted defeat, gave up the "green mom" award and started to drive. Melbourne, we need to do something about your transit system soon if you want to keep that #1 spot! To change this boring subject (but I had to tell you about it!), I pasted a picture with a tree from the rainforest of Mossman Gorge (Queensland).