I like to point to Eynesbury as a pretty good example of what's wrong with our lack of transport planning.
Most people don't know where Eynesbury is. It's basically a country town about 15 minutes south of Melton, in the never never lands between Melton and Werribee. Although it's not a particularly bustling place at the moment, there is so much construction happening there, and it's such a nice area. But there's NO public transport at all. Your only option in or out of the city without a car is to catch a taxi 20 minutes each way up to Melton station, then a VLine into the city. Probably a $70 commute every day into the CBD. There's also not much there yet. There's no supermarket either, so unless you fancy carting your groceries back in a taxi, you NEED a car.
Although the area between Melton and around Wyndham Vale is quite barren at the moment, assuming it's a waste of money to get some decent public transport happening is a stupid way of thinking. You could begin construction on a train line, or at the very least, acquire the land now while it's just sparsely populated farmland right now, ready for when our sprawl consumes it all. But instead what will probably happen is that nobody's going to do that because there's not many people there right now, and in a few decades when it's all the new deer park/st Albans, they'll put a bus in. The bus will be used by a.ehopping 10 people a day, because everybody's already been forced into owning a car
I wish we'd stop doing this. The extent of our "urban planning" is basically just "does the construction of this new estate interfere with any highways or freeways? No. Approved.". I mean half of these new estates in the middle of nowhere don't even have proper connections to arterial roads