Cityrail is heavily unionised, to the extent that it's not that rare of an occurrence that you will see staff standing at the ticket machines when you go to buy

Cityrail is heavily unionised, to the extent that it's not that rare of an occurrence that you will see staff standing at the ticket machines when you go to buy a ticket to stop you from doing so ( this seems to be their alternative to striking ). This is in response to wage and staff concerns mostly, and I believe that the fares for the train services at least in Sydney are mandated to be fixed at a certain level unless they pass some kind of bureaucratic process. So, the union won't let the budget slide in the direction of infrastructure spending rather than wages and staff spending, simultaneously the fare fixing keeps the pool of money for the system fairly static. Thus, infrastructure projects in public transport are glacial / non existent depending on your point of view, for about the past fifteen years I have been hearing about a line being added between Epping and Parramatta that is still yet to be completed, I'm not sure it's even been started. The fact that the public transport is so bad results in people that really need to keep a tight schedule attempting to minimise their reliance on said system, they'll get a car or move some place very close to their place of work (thus perhaps contributing to the ridiculous rents and real estate prices in Sydney). The less people use it, the less people complain about it, the less reason the tragically inefficient system has to actually improve, and frankly it would probably take the threat of armed invasion to get them to pull their shit together at any rate.