About six hours ago I arrived in Denmark after going via Hong Kong and Helsinki. Needless to say I am a little frazzled but nothing insurmountable.
Anyway, the missus came to meet me at the airport and instead of taking a car or taxi we hopped on the metro. The metro is a driverless train system that has trains arriving at each station about once every four or five minutes in each direction. It was also fairly cheap and the system was integrated into the public transport ticketing system.
Now I should probably add that I have always had a fascination with trains and related subject matter. I even loved playing with Lego train sets or watching trains go by when we went to a particular restaurant in Clayton in Victoria.
Back in Australia, the NSW government planned a metro system under Nathan Rees until he got rolled. Sure, the planned corridor for the line may have seemed a bit strange (at least in my opinion) but I still think the concept is one that should be explored properly. We need to beat congested services with higher frequencies and set a reasonable cost to get people out of their cars.
The other big thing here is that people ride bikes and they seem to have right of way. At train stations you can see bikes lined up in their hundreds which shows just how popular they are as a mode of transport.
At any rate, Australia needs to get up to speed with this sort of infrastructure and technology. Simply building a complex transport network and shoving buses and trains in it doesn’t make it sufficient by any standard.
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