contumacious (adj). exhibiting contempt for authority; obstinate stubbornly disobedient

I am supremely exhausted from my long day of uni- but I’m gonna have a long-winded whinge about the state of NSW’s public transport system because of its impacts it has had on my life.

Being a good citizen of the 21st century, I try to be a green as possible to reduce my carbon footprint- so I take public transport (even though it is out of necessity).  To get to uni, I take a bus from home to the closest station, then a train to Central, then a bus to UNSW.  Even though it takes a tedious 1 and a half hours, I have managed these two weeks.However, today- today I have become fed up with the system.

To Westbus Bus Company: FUCK. Get your act together.
You’re supposed to run on the timetable you publish on your website for a reason- your job as a bus company is to get PAYING customers to their destination on time.  Your punctuality is, if I may pretentiously say, is probably one of your worse qualities.  I have been a customer for 18 years and have tolerated the many times where the bus is late, or even worse, when it doesn’t even come at all, and instead, the next bus has to pick up the customers who have waited for more than 30 minutes.  This would imply that your timetable (that is published on your website) is misleading.
Although I am aware that daily traffic conditions would affect the punctuality of your bus service, it shouldn’t affect it so greatly to the extent where customers have to wait an extra 20 minutes to get onto a bus. It becomes a particular problem during peak hour, when everyone has a job/school to attend to.
That extra 20 minutes converts to either being late for school (which results in lunch time detentions) or being late for the train thus being late for work (resulting in a warning from the employer, being sacked, as the worse case scenario esp in the current economic crisis when time IS money).
As a university undergraduate student myself, I aim to attend all of my classes.  Because the 8:05 service was late by 20 minutes, I missed out on almost half an hour of my French lecture. Now, I’ll have to go waste even more of my time on reading up on what I missed out. Thanks a lot Westbus Bus Company (sarcasm)

To CityRail: GET MORE TRAIN SERVICES DURING PEAK HOUR.
Although most of your services are punctual, I wish they were more frequent. In order to get to uni by 10, the latest train I can catch would be the 8:34 City South line service.  Because I missed that service by 10 minutes (because my bus was late), I had to wait an additional 20 minutes before the next service came along.  I know for a fact (as conveyed to me by my fellow uni peers), that public transport in other First World countries, such as the north European nations, have services running every 3 minutes, making it much easier to get around (not to mention the reduced-density per ride).  More services would mean the distribution of customers among the train services, thus meaning PAYING peak hour customers wouldn’t have to remain standing for the whole hour of their trip.  This becomes more of a problem especially during summer. The heat that Australian succumb to during summer should be a consideration when developing timetables.  The current train service is highly inadequate in summer heat as customers have to ‘squash’ their way onto their train- increasing claustrophobic levels.  Many people have ‘Vent[ed] Your Spleen’ in the MX regarding the unacceptable conditions on CityRail trains.
We now live in an age where there is an adequate standard of living- including means of transport.  And although resources/funding may not be available from government as of yet, there is time (esp now prior to the release of the budget) to put pressure of the government to increase spending on the decapitated public transport that is ours.

To Sydney Buses (namely the driver who was running the UNSWExpress today at around 10 past 10): when you see a flock of students waiting to get onto the bus, just god-damn open the door. It really makes no difference if they get on then and there than it is 5 metres down the road. Seriously, loosen up.

Disclaimer: This rant of mine is probably gonna be the only one I make about public transport, because regardless of how shit it is, I still need a economically and environmentally sustainable way of getting to uni and back home.

That’s about it for today.
I have my day off uni tomorrow-finally a day to catch up on stuff!