Transport in Australia is Fucking Bullshit
I live and work in Australia’s second largest city. I appear to have drawn the short straw with regards to a work-related functionary which means a couple of evenings of crepes and canapes at the nation’s capital, Canberra. All well and good so in an idle moment I begin discussing travel plans with the secretary. Ideally I’d like to make a Friday evening getaway so as not to spend a single minute longer than necessary on planet bureaucrat. This is, you may be unsurprised to learn, completely impossible.
It’s an hour’s flight or so. The joint is just over the border, geographically spitting distance in Australia. Melbourne being the car-loving mecca that it is, eschews the commonly held international view that it’s a good idea to connect your airport with your CBD with anything like, say, a rail line. Not when you can build huge carparks and charge people literally hundreds of dollars for parking their cars there – why build a rail line? You might have to cut down a tree or demolish an outdoor dunny, besides it’s hard work in the sun!
I digress… Can I get that late Friday flight back to Melbourne? Surely a crazy notion for returning businessmen and the like? Nope, pretty much all the flights stop at around 6pm. Hell, joints like Qantas wont even fly direct and will po-faced suggest a flight via Sydney. They’re taking the mick… so, how about some other method of transport like say the train?
The good news about the train is that it leaves from the city, meaning a scurry from work to the station is imminently suitable. The bad news, and honestly I’m still not sure I actually believe this, is that there really isn’t some form of viable direct train from Melbourne – you know, that close-by second largest city in Australia I mentioned – to Canberra. There are various sort of hilarious interchange services involving no small amount of bus travel from places with names like Cootamundra. These take about eight hours, involve changes and all that sort of jazz, and ultimately cost substantially more than just jumping on a goddamn Tiger flight from Melbourne to Canberra.
I’m not really familiar with Australia’s rail network however as I was born and raised in Darwin, I recall for a great many years the big issue was the recommissioning of a rail line from Darwin to Adelaide. A colossal rail line of 3000km with not a lot in between but red country and all for the purpose of hooking up a town with a hundred thousand people, give or take. Yet apparently that was worth doing and it exists today. Yet some sort of direct goddamn rail link from Melbourne to Canberra, the CAPITAL CITY and the CULTURAL CAPITAL of the goddamn country is not on the cards. Awesome.
There looks like there might be actual viable overnight journeys purely by coach. These, unlikely the trains, run proper overnight services and go door-to-door between the cities. This also costs more than it costs to fly, but it’s reasonable and ultimately since the only current alternative I have is to pay for a hotel night and then catch the first flight (which isn’t particular early) which then delivers me to Melbourne airport which isn’t actually in Melbourne or on a goddamn train line, meaning by the time I get to the city, then get onto a train to where I want to be it will be late Saturday afternoon.
That’s where we’re at. It’s not possible for me to be at a dinner function in Canberra on Friday night and be at home in an outter suburb of Melbourne on Saturday AM.
That my friends is a fucking joke only I’m definitely not laughing.
