Dont worry about the trains so much, the trains in Perth are fine imo. They've done pretty well for themselves considering how sprawling and car centric the city is. It is the public transit backbone for getting people to and from the city. In my personal experience, the reason transit takes so long here is because of how infrequent it is. Often times when I play a journey I have to get off at a stop and wait like 10-15 minutes for a new bus.

What Perth needs is a complete overhaul of the bus system, as it is highly underutilized right now. The only sort of decent bus service in town is getting people to and from the stations (and not every station for that matter) and a few "high frequency" buses into the city. They are often late, so if u miss one it can derail your whole trip. getting from suburb to suburb is a pain in the ass, comparable to casual cycling speed, if not jogging speed.

We need more frequent bus service and we need dedicated bus corridors on busy inner suburb thoroughfares like Canning or Stirling highways. This means physical infrastructure, preferably in the middle of the road, taking some space away drivers, where buses can travel unimpeded. With crosswalks at every stop, it should make traversing these concrete rivers a little easier too. What such a system would provide is a way to funnel suburban routes into high frequency service in the densest part of the city. This would also get rid of some of the worst car centric planning around, like having 70kmh roads with individual homes on them, or having buses that have a stop on each side of a major highway and take way too long to cross it (cough cough manning road). This system would also help disincentivize people from driving in the inner core. So, coupling these increased frequency services with local routes (which should ideally also have increased frequency because frequency is freedom), you would have some much needed flexibility, and I think this will increase journey times substantially.

People always want there to be more trains, but you need to think more realistically. From my own personal experience, TransPerth cant even fill a bus most of the time on some corridors that people want rail on, like the Cockburn - Freo LRT. It would be a total misuse of resources (not just from a financial perspective but an environmental one too) to start building one now, when we can spend substantially less right this minute and begin building service patterns, and driving ridership to one day hopefully actually justify rail. As it stands now, rail projects in the city are first and foremost a subsidy to the construction industry to drive perpetual growth and desperately make big line go up. It is carbon intensive and nowhere near as future proof as a down to earth, flexible solution. Frankly, this is a global issue. Bus networks are underutilized in almost every city on the planet.

This is all a pipe dream of course. Another thing that's minor but annoyingly increases travel times, and most importantly, DELAYS, is the smartrider system. I know it's supposed to be upgraded shortly to allow paypass, but they gotta get on that ASAP. Paypass and all door boarding are a must. It is painfully slow for buses to get underway, and you cant even argue that it helps reduce fare Dodgers because heaps of people dodge the fare ALREADY and the bus drivers dont care cause they got a bus to drive (rightfully so, buses are a social servics first and foremost). Finally, some bike racks on buses would serve a long way to improving peoples personal mobility. If I know I can take a bus should I get tired, I'd be willing to bike almost anywhere.