Some great news for bus users in parts of the City of Wyndham with bus improvements coming from this Sunday. All three are associated with long-anticipated road and rail projects being opened for use.
West Tarneit
The new
West Tarneit Station will relieve passenger loading and parking pressure at Tarneit Station, the busiest V/Line station outside Southern Cross. Public transport in the area currently comprises the very popular 182 bus south of the railway (mostly every 40 minutes) and the unreliable Tarneit FlexiRide north of the line.
The new station opens on September 13. As a Geelong line station the basic service is every 20 minutes during the day on every day of the week. Peak frequency is somewhat higher while evening gaps can lengthen to 40-45 minutes. It is Wyndham's first new station since Regional Rail Link commenced in 2015.
Two fixed bus routes will serve the bus interchange at West Tarneit. These include:
* Existing Route 182 between Werribee and Tarneit will operate via the new station. In addition this
very heavily used route will get a major service increase. Off-peak service will increase from every 40 to every 20 minutes with longer operating hours. Peak service will be on average every 15 minutes though there are some longer gaps. Like some other recently upgraded bus routes service finishes around midnight Monday to Saturday and 11pm on Sunday.
Route 180 shares a significant part of Tarneit Rd with Route 180. While coordination is hampered by Werribee trains being every 20 minutes off-peak (unlike other lines like Sandringham which now enjoy a 10 minute frequency), if Werribee trains were upgraded to every 10 minutes then it might be possible for Tarneit Rd to have its first every 10 minute bus corridor with some careful scheduling of the two routes.
* New Route 186 will operate between Tarneit and Tarneit West, giving the area north of the line fixed route coverage for the first time. Its service level is similar to the 182, that is every 15 minutes peak, 20 minutes off-peak seven days a week. It too runs late at night. I expect the 186 to be an instant success with many relieved to have this as a reliable alternative to FlexiRide.
It is also possible that the
Tarneit North FlexiRide will serve the new station though no details yet.
The maps and timetable for 182 and 196 are on the Transport Victoria website. Transport Victoria has also published an item called
Better train and bus services in Melbourne’s west to tell people about West Tarneit Station and the above two bus upgrades.
Transport Victoria has a habit of setting up pages and leaving them as unlinked 'orphans' until too close to an improvement's start date. This, and their incomplete indexing from their main
News page, is why Google is handy to find items that TV has written, published but not yet linked to.
TV also takes a fragmented approach to publishing information, preferring a mode or project rather than area or customer-based presentation. For example, despite commencing on the same day and being in the same general part of Melbourne, other upgrades may be published separately with few references or links between them. In other cases additional material on the same set of network changes may be scattered elsewhere because it is done by a different section of the department. Two examples of this are presented next.
Werribee
The third bus upgrade for the area to start on September 13 will be the Route 194 extension to Werribee.
Similar to Route 140 in Mt Atkinson, the intention was for this route to operate between two stations. However the road network was discontinuous and there was a pressing need to cover an unserved area so a shorter route was introduced in the interim.
Mt Atkinson's temporary version was numbered 140A (and left off
local area maps) while the Harpley Estate temporary version was given the final number (194) and included on the Wyndham local map.
Bus 194 will operate its full Wyndham Vale - Mambourin Harpley Estate - Werribee route from Sunday with this enabled by the Ison Rd overpass which opened on September 4. This will greatly speed travel times with an easy connection to Werribee.
In addition Route 194 getting a large timetable boost. Weekday service will improve to every 20 minutes with 11pm to midnight finishes all night of the week. This is a large improvement for the new estates of Mambourin and Harpley Estate as well as the more established Riverwalk which previously only had the limited service Route 441 available. However, in contrast to the 182 and 186, weekend service will remain at every 40 minutes.
Love the Bus campaignWerribee and Tarneit are in one of two pilot areas for Transport Victoria's new
Love The Bus campaign.
Tackling the low social licence of buses (a finding from market research DTP did for its proposed but aborted
bus network reform) it seeks to personify the bus as something that's changed with better coverage, higher frequency and longer hours. Watch the campaign's video on Facebook
here.
Love The Bus is Melbourne's first bus marketing campaign for a long time. A predecessor was 2018's
Explore Melbourne by Bus (beautiful posters, an interactive map but poorly targeted) under PTV. Then under Metlink there was the
I highly recommend you get on the bus campaign sometimes starring comedian Frank Woodley from 2007. Again that sought to improve buses perception after
large service upgrades that extended service to 9pm and added Sunday service on many routes. There has also been some more targeted route-specific marketing, such as for university shuttles like 401 and 601.
While the video linked above is broad (attracting derision from those whose bus services remain limited) the
main website page for
Love The Bus concentrates on western and northern growth areas that have had substantial bus service upgrades in the last few years. Such targeting is good as it better aligns claims about service levels with reality and customer experience.
Also helpful is the attempt to articulate a service offer with regards to frequency and operating hours. Such an expression is particularly desirable in Melbourne where buses need to overcome a (not always true) perception of poor service levels. Auckland faced similar issues before
successfully reforming its bus network. You can compare service offers between our
Love The Bus and Auckland's Frequent Network here:
It may be that Auckland designed its service offer first and timetabled buses on its reformed network accordingly. Whereas
Love The Bus is more a case of marketers coming later to sell bus services whose underlying service offer varies greatly. For example the 20 minute frequency has no clear time bands and may or may not apply on weekends. In 2021 I said that Victoria's Bus Plan should propose a standard
service hierarchy for bus routes to make clearer Auckland-style service messaging easier.
Then there's maps. DTP/Transport Victoria use them internally but are shyer about using them to publicly explain or sell the network, preferring written descriptions or leaving people to fend for themselves via the journey planner. The
Love the Bus campaign is a welcome break from this reticence, with the production of maps that highlight bus routes that run every 20 minutes or better for 'most of the time'.
The maps are on sub-pages for
North (covering Craigieburn) and
Outer West (basically the City of Wyndham).
In Wyndham's case most of these routes (153, 154, 170, 180 and soon 182 and 186) are every 20 minutes seven days while 190 and (soon) 194 are this frequent on weekdays only. Route 192 between Werribee and Wyndham Vale is also every 20 minutes seven days but was left off the map, possibly as it has 30 min (or more) gaps in the morning peak.
The Outer West map reflects the network from 13 September 2026 while the text reflects the pre 13 September network in its inclusion of the shorter and less frequent Wyndham Vale - Harpley Estate version of the 194 without a link to the abovementioned news item on its extension and frequency upgrade. The text also inconsistently lists the new 451 Thornhill Park route but omits both the 140A in Mt Atkinson and the 405 in Cairnlea despite all three meeting the 20 minute threshold, at least on weekdays.
The north (or basically Craigieburn) map is below. Again there is vague 'most of the day' messaging about the applicability of 20 minute service. This provides consistency with the Wyndham map but at the cost of specific information for Craigieburn that some might find helpful (eg "every 20 minutes for most of the day Monday to Friday"). Also since the V/Line service at Donnybrook is much less frequent than the V/Line service at Tarneit and Wyndham Vale it might have been helpful to note train frequencies on this map since it has no 'safety net' 20 minute maximum waits like Craigieburn and Roxburgh Park stations now have.
Notwithstanding above issues identified, these maps are a great concept. Especially if they are put up at stations and bus interchanges. But some design choices illustrate the continued dominance of single mode 'silo' thinking within DTP/TV. Presumably that's based on a narrow project brief to raise the profile of buses. That is they do not highlight train lines that meet the 20 minute frequency requirement despite these connecting bus routes and offering more distant travel.
Passengers and the fare system treat the public transport network as a whole, so should TV. This single mode pattern of information presentation is something that Transport Victoria need to be coached out of; for a while they even described multimodal local area maps as 'bus maps', which is incorrect.
Where do you find these maps? I won't blame you if you can't find them. Currently they are hosted on an obscure
safety campaign section of the TV website that few would visit. They are currently not linked from the
general maps section nor indexed on the
news page. Hopefully that will change from September 13 (although Craigieburn's is current now).
The only other official map that showed some (not all!) of our more frequent bus routes got dumped when the PTV website transitioned to Transport Victoria. But the SmartBus map continues to be hosted elsewhere, eg
here. While they might be telling us to love the bus, TV has yet to love their maps.
Summary
These bus improvements along with the new West Tarneit station substantially improve public transport in these newer parts of Wyndham. Particularly notable is the 20 minute weekend service on two of the three bus routes discussed, well ahead of the 30 to 40 minute weekend frequencies more widespread in Melbourne. The operating hours also continue the extensions that have made after 9pm bus travel newly possible in many parts of outer Melbourne.
Transport Victoria is making tentative steps towards promoting bus usage in some areas that have recently seen (very welcome) service upgrades. Its use of frequency maps represents progress for an organisation that has historically resisted promoting the more frequent parts of its network, especially through maps. However it needs to develop its mindset further in areas like multimodal network thinking, customer focus and information presentation for its work here to have the effect it should.
See other Timetable Tuesday items here
