Laura Newell: The grim reality of the school run on public transport makes it obvious why WA loves cars

Anyone else feel like we’ve wound the clock back six years with this fuel crisis? Emergencies being declared, waiting on public appearances from the Premier to know what life is going to look like in the coming weeks. I’ve even broken out the COVID cocktail and sourdough recipe books. So when it was announced that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese would address the country last week, I, like everyone else, tuned in. The message I came away with was that I was to take my Easter holidays as if nothing was going on, and “do my bit” and use public transport. Other than that, if I could please just stop filling jerry cans with hundreds of litres of fuel and piling them up behind my hydrangeas, that would be just great. Decisive leadership at its finest, eh? Like many amid these financially crunched times, my family was never going on an Easter holiday. To start with, my husband and I both worked Friday and Monday and, even if we hadn’t, we don’t have the spare cash lying around for a quick trip to Bali, Brisbane, or even Broome or Busselton. Likewise, we own one small jerry can. It gets used to fill the lawnmower. That brings us on to the big one — using public transport. Having grown up in London, I’m all up for using public transport but here in Perth I — like many others — don’t live directly on a train line and so use it rarely. But, being a concerned citizen, of course I want to do my bit, so I did my due diligence on what abandoning my car would actually look like. As mum of a primary school kid, I have to get her to school by 8.30am. By car, that journey takes me 25 minutes in the morning rush. I then do another 35 minutes (traffic depending) to get to the office. That usually has me walking into the office about 9.05am. Transperth’s Journey Planner tells me to do that 35km trip would take me two hours, and involve a walk of just over 2km, the use of four buses and two trains, to put me at my desk at 10am. Bet my boss would love that. Now, we could try to make it a little easier and use my car to get to the train station. That cuts out one bus journey and a bit of the walk. But have you tried getting a park at the station recently? You’re more likely to find a petrol station with diesel. My husband does my trip in reverse in the afternoon, with the school run on his way home. His 6am work start time looks exhausting, with his usual 25-minute car journey direct to work now a 4.40am start to get public transport. That involves a 1km walk, two buses and a train. Oh, and his boss will love losing him an hour earlier to collect the kid. Then, twice a week my daughter attends ballet. That requires a 25-minute trip north from work to fetch her from school, then 25 minutes the other way again to her class. That’s another four buses, two trains and two hours. She also does a tap class — usually a 15-minute drive north of our home after school. That’s the real public transport killer — becoming a 67-minute journey with 1.7km of walking, two buses and a train. Oh, but the good news, it would be free for my daughter and would only cost me and my husband $2.80 per trip if we use a SmartRider with “autoload,” plus $2 for parking. That’s a neat $15.20 a day for my family when we aren’t doing an extra curricular activity. In comparison, the 130km combined my husband and I do in our hybrid cars (which we already pay insurance and road tax for anyway and give us 4.5km litres per 100km), would cost us around $14.21 a day if we took Monday’s lowest Premium 98 price of 242.9 cents per litre. And we wonder why the car is king in WA?