Melbourne's Public Transport system

I read in the Herald Sun today that Melbourne's Metropolitan Transport Forum has a AU$5billion fix to the city's transport system. FINALLY. I'm a Melbourne resident and I don't have a car, so I generally catch public transport - hey, it's better than driving. However, the problem is that Melbourne's public transport SUCKS. There's no other way of describing it. Trams aren't that bad, they're frequent, BUT they generally only service the zone one areas (which are the closer in suburbs), and only service a few zone 2 areas (outer suburbs), which is what I am, and for those areas they take FOREVER to get where you want to go. It's faster to go by train, HOWEVER, Connex can't exactly be trusted. Trains every 20 minutes, that don't go to all suburbs - that is, if your train comes, and on time (neither of which are exactly common). Melbourne may not be a huge city, but c'mon, if the government wants us to ditch the cars, be more environmentally friendly and get public transport, they should at least make public transport appealing and easy to use, not services that are either late, overcrowded (often both) or cancelled.

What the Metropolitan Transport Forum wants is trains every 10 minutes, and to more of Melbourne's suburbs. This is a pretty decent idea, considering, as I said, not all Melbourne suburbs are lucky enough to have a rail station, and this includes inner city suburbs such as Fitztroy, and some outer suburbs such as Caroline Springs and Mernda.

However, that's just the Metropolitan side of things. Originally, I'm a country girl and up until last year, when I moved to Melbourne to go to University, I had to put up with V/Line, which was worse. Trains every hour, and they're constantly late. I see no problem with having, on the shorter services (such as Ballarat, Geelong, etc) to have trains every half hour, or at least having more services at times when there's going to be more commuters (football games, Royal Melbourne Show, Grand Final Parade). My mum once dropped my brother off at our local station to go to the Grand Final Parade a few weeks back, only to find he had to get a coach into Melbourne from our local station, as the train he was supposed to get was already full. My mum was about to drive off to see the train approaching. On a day with the AFL Grand Final Parade and the Royal Melbourne Show ON THE SAME DAY, this train, which stopped all stations on our line, only had two carraiges.

THIS, my dear readers, is bullshit. Absolute bullshit. As I said, if we are expected to use public transport, to be more environmentally friendly, please make it user friendly.