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Diane Griffiths is done waiting.

The 76-year-old pensioner has lived in Willmot, an outer suburb near Mount Druitt in western Sydney, for more than half a century. In that time, she says, she has watched services in the area stagnate and decline.

She remembers when a bus service once ran along Willmot’s main road, Discovery Avenue. Locals say it was removed years ago after teenagers threw rocks at passing buses and shattered their windows. The bus stop on the street was never reinstated.

Today, residents must walk further to reach a bus network that residents and experts say is unreliable, infrequent, slow and undignified. At a stop a suburb over, Griffiths waits for the bus on a milk crate. Others perch on shopping trolleys or plastic chairs.

“A lot of elderly people don’t want to come out of their houses because they don’t want to go by public transport. It’s too hard,” Griffiths says.

Willmot is one of the most disadvantaged areas in Australia, but its experience of lack of public services is not unique. From Melbourne’s sprawling western expanse to Brisbane’s northern fringes, low-density areas with limited or nonexistent public transport such as Willmot are what researchers call “public transport deserts”.

In these swathes of suburbia, the long distances between jobs, services and homes can only be feasibly bridged by driving a car. As petrol prices skyrocket due to the war in the Middle East, residents are now caught between poor public transport and the rising cost of keeping a car on the road. Here political leaders’ calls for Australians to leave their cars at home to stave off fuel shortages ring hollow.

“It’s pushing people to tipping point,” says Delander Hayes, a Dharug woman and the program coordinator of Jesuit Social Services, which operates in Willmot. “If they’re on Centrelink they only have $20 or $30 to spare each week, that’s now all going to fuel.”

In the past two weeks the small service provider has received 18 requests for fuel assistance – more than it would typically expect over an entire year.

For Eddie Bognet, a social worker supporting a household of four in a nearby suburb, the pressure is constant, and rising.

A few years ago one of his family’s cars was broken into and set on fire while parked on the street outside his home. It was uninsured at the time. His remaining seven-seater now doubles as the family car and a youth group bus.

“Things are hard right now,” he says. “It’s a balancing act of trying to get through the week.”

Belinda Oppy is feeling the pinch too. She lives in public housing in a neighbouring suburb with her four children and relies on government support payments. As petrol prices rise, she says she is spending more time at home.

“The kids are missing out on having a relationship with their family – it’s too expensive to visit them often,” Oppy says.

Before Oppy’s family had access to a car, her 15-year-old daughter secured a spot at a selective high school in another area. It was a huge opportunity, but the convoluted and long commute on the bus network meant she would often arrive to school late.

“She’s a bright kid, but it wasn’t worth the stress, I had to pull her out,” she says. Oppy moved her daughter back to the local public school. Her grades have since dropped.

“[In his national address] the prime minister is telling us to leave the car at home and take public transport to work if possible, but the idea that people can just hop on a bus instead is just totally unrealistic,” University of Sydney’s Dr Kurt Iverson says.

According to a report led by Iverson and co-authored by community groups and University of Sydney urban geography staff and students, released November, up to one-quarter of the seven bus services in Mount Druitt’s outer suburbs, including Willmot, did not arrive on time in 2024. They were also at least five times more likely to be cancelled than the Sydney average, the study found.

A Transport for NSW spokesperson did not dispute the findings of the report, but said average bus cancellation rates in the wider region are better than average.

When the buses do show up, the journey can be time-consuming. Marsden Park, a major employment hub, is a 15-minute drive from Willmot. By bus, it takes at least one-and-a-half hours and patrons have to change buses once or twice.

“Lack of infrastructure is deeply correlated with disadvantage,” says Steve Pederson, the community development lead of The Hive, a non-profit that works in Mount Druitt’s outer suburbs.

Local folklore holds that when Willmot was built, the government removed its fertile topsoil and took it elsewhere. “I don’t know if it’s true, but to me it represents how the community thinks of themselves,” Pederson says. “This idea that things get taken away.”

Professor Jago Dodson, an urban policy researcher at RMIT University, has spent decades studying how Australian suburbs are more vulnerable to fuel shocks and interest rate rises compared with wealthier inner-city areas that have better access to public transport.

From the 1950s, sprawling low-density suburbs have been built on the assumption that households would own cars and that public transport was unnecessary, he says.

“It’s really too late to do much in the short term, because we’ve spent 70 years planning in the other direction,” Dodson says. “The hole has been dug.”

“If we’re interested in equity and justice in our cities, then we need to be providing people, no matter where they live, with a good quality level of public transport access that allows them to get jobs, services and education that are available to people in inner-city areas,” he says.

It’s an inequality that Hayes feels first-hand. In the 1980s the government relocated her family from crowded public housing in Redfern – now a well-serviced inner-city suburb – to Willmot, where there is a high proportion of Aboriginal residents.

“It’s manoeuvring people that are inconvenient or that are disadvantaged out to places that can’t be seen or cared about,” Hayes says.

“[Indigenous] Closing the Gap measurables are getting wider and wider and public transport is a compounding factor. How do you access education, employment and health without a viable way of getting there?”

A Transport for New South Wales spokesperson said the government is “committed” to providing the “best possible” public transport system.

They said the government is “actively engaging” with Mount Druitt community representatives and is “considering feedback” to “build on ideas for better public transport connections”.

As billions of dollars pour into new metros, motorways, buses and an international airport elsewhere in western Sydney, Griffiths remains waiting on Discovery Avenue.

“I don’t think the government cares about us,” she says. “I don’t think it’s ever going to change.”