There were bears in Brasov. Honest-to-god, rip-you-limb-from-limb wild bears roaming the more mountainous streets at night.

They spent their time going through the garbage that the Romanian locals dared dispose of, batting it about with their massive hairy paws, eating the good bits and gently mauling the rest. These were bears that very occasionally attacked tourists, regularly freaked out dogs and mostly just annoyed the locals who knew when to stay indoors. Yes, in this small Romanian city - in the actual region of Transylvania - there were wild bears. And there were buses. Reliable buses.

I've recently returned from 11 weeks overseas, roaming around the eastern and central parts of Europe. I visited places that were warzones less than 20 years ago, areas forcefully held under communist rule less than 25 years ago and cities where the tourist guide specifically warned of "roaming packs of wild dogs" and recommended that you "carry some good throwing rocks in your pocket".

Somehow all of these places had better public transport than Sydney.

This thought came to me this morning as I stood in the pouring rain, waiting half an hour in peak hour for a bus that simply never came. As I trudged for another half an hour to my office I realised that even as I was travelling between Mostar (in southern Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Dubrovnik (coastal Croatia) there were cheap, convenient and reliable transport options available. These are countries which spent large parts of the early 1990s at war with each other, their tanks destroying bridges and their roads being torn up by mortar attacks. Despite this, in under 20 years they have cooperated and developed such an excellent transport system that a fairly loopy 23-year-old Australian could get from place to place on time.

In Sarajevo, a city synonymous with destruction and suffering the buildings still show the marks left by snipers, but the tram system works like a dream. In Budapest I waited less than three minutes to get an underground train to the city's Museum of Terror. This is a building that the communist party (and before them the Nazi party) used for unspeakable acts. Yet all the while their metro quietly and efficiently delivered people where they needed to go in the city.

How is it this hard for an effective public transport system to be established in Sydney? One that functions regularly and on time, one that services all parts of the city and connects them in a straightforward manner? Where I live, in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, we are relatively well-serviced in all forms of public transport yet I still walk or get taxis most places as I simply don't trust buses to arrive on time. Attempting to catch a bus to work the other morning was an effort to avoid the rain - more fool me. My colleague who lives in the Northern Beaches pays close to $20 a day in petrol and parking simply because getting to work any other way just isn't a viable option. Buses to the city from her area are overcrowded, don't have bus lanes and take just as long as cars to get to the CBD. In the west it's far worse, with expensive toll roads seemingly the only option for the thousands of commuters.

Yes Sydney is a very spread-out city but so is London and it has a pretty amazing system that services even the more far-flung suburbs. London locals may whinge about the tube "running late" but to them that just means there isn't a service every four minutes. Coming from Sydney I marvelled at the efficiency, ease and speed of the London Underground - and even more so at the bus system which coped amazingly well on the days when tube workers were striking.

This same London bus system ensured that on all major routes a bus arrived at least every 10 minutes, sometimes just five minutes apart in peak hour. New South Wales government officials may argue that the demand isn't there for that many buses in Sydney, but my guess is that if buses were a reliable form of transport people would start using them more.

So to Kristina Keneally, Barry O'Farrell or whoever ends up running this state next year I beg you to please give us more trains and buses. Or at the very least arrange for some bears to roam the streets so we have something to watch while we stand at stations and bus shelters and wait.

Lucy Carter presents the news on JJJ.