Hi crazycanuck. I work for the Main Roads Department in Qld and we hire quite a few urban planners in our planning sections. We have hired many of them as part time students and they have had great on-the-job learning opportunities there, progressing on to graduate positions when they finish their studies.

The down side of working in transport (and cycleway networks are a part of their brief in our joint) is that it is only a narrow sector of urban planning, and probably not our most mainstream career path (it's engineer world) so it can be a little bit limiting if your desire is to progress far and fast as a "townplanner" in the traditional council sense.

Anyways, you might like to check out WA's Main Roads Dept and see if they have anything going for a planning student?

Good luck with the studies...