I built this side project to graph bus congestion in Sydney. Each line on the graph (a Marey chart) represents a bus completing its route (percentage) over time.
The busses were constantly late (sometimes waiting an hour for a bus from Darlinghurst to the eastern suburbs on the weekends)
Unbelievable noisy. Walking through the CBD on a workday morning was deafening. Engines with no acoustic dampening at all.
Reckless drivers. Gave up trying to ride a bike. Just too dangerous and aggressive bus and car drivers :(
I definitely don't find myself complaining about them as I much as did 10 years ago. Back then, one of my local bus stops in Newtown had "what is the point of this?" written in marker over the timetable, and everyone who saw it smiled in agreement.
However, this could be explained by today's GPS tracking data, rather than improvements in reliability. When you open your transit app, you want to know when the next bus is, so you can find an alternative if the wait is too long. When it tells you the next one is in 3 minutes (which is an accurate estimate because of the GPS), you don't actually care if that bus is running 18 minutes later than originally scheduled.
For the bus I use for my commute, I don't leave either the house or the office until I see its GPS tracker pass certain points of the route. I've never had to wait for more than 3 minutes at a bus stop doing that. On occasions where there is no GPS feed, I treat that bus as "theoretical", and don't risk going out to try to catch it at its scheduled time, unless I'm desperate. But every time I did risk it, it ended up arriving right on schedule.
So I'd say the experience of catching buses has profoundly improved, but not necessarily because the reliability has improved.
And 10 years ago, we didn't have Opal readers, which are great, since together with having digital driving licenses on our phones, it has allowed many of us to completely forgo carrying a wallet.
Bus drivers are still as reckless and grumpy as they used to be though.
Yep definitely better! The 370 isn't anywhere as bad as it was for example. I don't think you'll wait for more than 30 mins unless you're deep in suburbia.
> The buses were constantly late
Yep still happens, though the frequency is quite high so it's not too frustrating
> Unbelievable noisy. Walking through the CBD on a workday morning was deafening.
Yep still very loud on the hills, though electric buses are being rolled out. George St is now pedestrianised with the tram so it's less noisy.
> Gave up trying to ride a bike. Just too dangerous and aggressive bus and car drivers :(
Cycling infrastructure is getting a lot better! BikeEast (https://www.bikeast.org.au/) do a lot of advocacy in the eastern suburbs. Clover Moore has done amazing things for the CBD.
