As the summer holidays fade into memory and Australians return to work, many of us are once again taking the daily public transport commute.
Our cities' trains, buses and trams are far from perfect (aside from perhaps Sydney's shiny new Metro extension). Some stops are in need of much better facilities. Industrial action is always a curveball. Weather can cause major delays. And public transport options in many areas are dismal.
But for all these problems, there's one small consolation. At least we're not in the United States.
Public transport in some American cities can be especially dire. It's a transport landscape that's been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first.
"There's the legacy of decades of disinvestment [in public transport]," historian and cartographer Jake Berman tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live.
"And a really unique situation where North America bulldozed its cities to rebuild them around the car. That's not something that happened anywhere else in the world."
What makes a good public transport system?
Berman is the author of The Lost Subways of North America, which maps the old transit networks of 23 cities in the US and Canada.
He says there are four things that make a good public transport system, wherever it may be.
"The transit has to be fast; it has to be frequent; it has to be reliable; and it has to go where you need to go," he says.
According to Berman, the exact mode of public transport doesn't matter, as long as it fulfils these criteria.
"It could be a monorail if you want it to be," he says.
American cities falter in one big way: In many of them, the public transport options simply don't go to all the places people need it to go.
"The public transport networks often have bad coverage … or the city itself is built in such a way that it makes it impossible to serve those places competently with public transport," he says.
For example, Dallas has around the same length of rail as Barcelona. But the big difference is there's not much around many of Dallas' train stations.
Many American cities are defined by low housing density and urban sprawl — making it very hard to service all areas with public transport.
And there's one example that really highlights this.
The traffic nightmare of Los Angeles
There's strong competition for the American city with the worst public transport.
But Los Angeles, famously described by writer Dorothy Parker as "72 suburbs in search of a city", is a prime contender.
The coastal metropolis is perpetually clogged with traffic, with the very idea of catching public transport anathema for many Angelenos.
But it hasn't always been that way.
In the 1920s, Los Angeles had the largest streetcar system in the world, mainly thanks to a privately owned system called Pacific Electric Railway.
Pacific Electric "completely dominated the region for decades", Berman explains, but he adds that the company was more concerned about real estate deals and freight, rather than moving people around.
By the mid-century, Pacific Electric was losing money and asked the City of Los Angeles to take it over. The city turned them down, as the car was seen as the future and the company didn't have the best business record.
"They said, 'No, we don't want this. We are going to build these publicly owned, efficient freeways instead'," Berman says.
And so freeways and accompanying traffic jams soon dominated the City of Angels.
Or as Berman puts it: "Gridlock was a choice that the people of Los Angeles had made."
But over recent decades, there has been a reverse in course, with the Los Angeles Metro Rail building more lines.
But if we look at the numbers, a city like Sydney is doing better.
Sydney Trains has an annual ridership of around 302 million on its 355 kilometres of tracks, compared to Los Angeles Metro Rail having an annual ridership of around 61 million on its 175 km of tracks.
New York, New York
New York City's iconic subway is often a backdrop in movies. The platforms and carriages are subjects of poems and feature in song lyrics. It's the source of great nostalgia, but much greater frustration.
"New Yorkers have a love-hate relationship with the subway," Berman says of his hometown's main public transport system.
New York's first subway line opened in 1904 and went on to become one of the largest metro systems in the world.
"There's no way that New York City can function without it," Berman says.
The subway has excellent coverage, crisscrossing the city, but it's continually plagued by funding problems and a lack of necessary expansion.
"It's more a question of how New York organises its transport bureaucracy than anything else," Berman adds.
"The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York just doesn't have the internal bureaucratic capacity to build subways in bulk anymore."
After years of false starts, New York became the first US city to implement a congestion tax this year. From January 5, cars travelling into Manhattan's business district pay $US9 ($14), with larger vehicles paying more. This will help fund improvements to the subway.
But Berman says there's a long way to go.
"The real white whale of New York City subway expansion is something called the Second Avenue Subway, which has been promised since my grandmother and grandfather were living in New York in the 1930s," he says.
Even so, the New York subway system has a daily ridership of around 3.6 million people (compared to a daily ridership of up to 1 million passengers in Sydney Trains — the busiest system in Australia).
The lost tunnels of America
As American cities fell out of love with public transport, projects were abandoned, with a few surviving until today.
There was a planned LA subway, which was dug in the 1920s and has been abandoned since the 1950s. Cincinnati, in the Midwest, dug half of a subway system but never ran any trains. There are also abandoned tunnels in New York and Boston.
Perhaps the most interesting is Rochester, which Berman calls "the only city [in the US] to open a subway, then close it".
Rochester, about a five-hour drive north of New York City, is the smallest city in America to build a subway system.
Completed in 1927, its fortunes waxed and waned. Rochester "never changed its land use patterns to encourage real estate development around the subway stations", Berman notes.
Ridership dropped severely in the early 1950s and passenger service ceased in 1956. Some parts were used for freight and others were repurposed for highways.
"You can still jump the fence and see the track bed through downtown Rochester," Berman says.
Racism hampering public transport
One reason for America's dire public transport is much more nefarious than a love of shiny cars.
For much of America's history, racial groups have lived, worked and been educated apart, something that was mandated by law for a time.
The 1950s saw the beginnings of desegregation, but Berman says it "was a major factor in the decline of the public transport network", pointing to the racist views of the white majority.
"In Atlanta, the bus network ridership dropped by double digits after desegregation happened, when there were no more signs saying black people had to sit at the back of the bus," he says.
In other places, this manifested as an opposition to new public transport.
Berman describes how Detroit was offered $US600 million ($934 million) which is about $3 billion ($4.6 billion) today, to build a metropolitan subway system, but they couldn't agree on how to fund it.
"Because there was an association in people's minds between having black people come into your lily-white neighbourhood and expanded public transport," he says.
And he says there are remnants of these attitudes today.
"For instance, there's opposition to the expansion of the Los Angeles metro network in neighbourhoods that are very, very white. The classic example is Beverly Hills."
But he says this development is "actually getting done now, as LA is digging a tunnel through Beverly Hills on the way to UCLA [the University of California, Los Angeles] from downtown".
The roadblock to a better system
Despite this messy history and the possibility that the second Trump administration may have some input, Berman is hoping for a public transport renaissance in America.
"We are now in the hangover phase. But when you see something like Los Angeles finally deciding to build out a subway system, or Houston building a tramway network, that's progress," he says.
Berman adds that there's one big roadblock.
"The United States doesn't really have the institutional memory to build public transport at scale, because it hasn't really been done," he says.
"One thing that's necessary is to import expertise, to bring in a bunch of Japanese or French or Spanish [experts] to learn how to do this kind of transport expansion at scale.
"The politics are slowly shifting in the right direction, but it requires putting in the work and the money."
And while this may not seem like much consolation when there's no sign of the number 86 tram and you've been waiting 15 minutes on High Street, it is something.
