Timetable Tuesday #71: 130 streets in 130 minutes - welcome to the indirect 787 bus

The Mornington Peninsula has the least public transport service per resident of any metropolitan or near metropolitan location. Network coverage misses tens of thousands of people. And the few routes that exist rarely meet minimum service standards of one bus per hour seven days per week. 

Those routes that are there are prone to trying to do many things at once, none of them well. The prime example of this is Route 787. Running from Safety Beach to Sorrento, it’s close to being Melbourne’s longest distance bus route. And it runs through more streets and turns more corners than any other service. An end-to-end trip on a Saturday takes 134 minutes, just four minutes less than the noon train to Benalla. 

Route 787 operates in the marginal government seat of Nepean, held by Chris Brayne MP. As can be seen from the map below it goes on so many streets that two pages are needed to display it.

  

The area map below shows it in relation to other routes. The main one of these is the 788. This is the main highway routes with 787 being the parallel back-street route, sometimes weaving back to the bay to serve the main shopping centres. Connections to Route 788 are available at some of these points.

  

How understandable is Route 787? Its word description (in one direction only) requires 765 words, the length of a short essay. Judging it as an essay, putting this description into an online readability checker says it needs 29 years of formal education to understand. That's because its route description on the PTV website is a long sentence and these tend to be less readable. 

Patronage

Route 787 has very low patronage when measured on a bus operating hour basis. On weekdays it gets six passengers per bus service hour with this dropping to four on Saturdays. Part of the reason for this is the route’s slow speed due to its indirect route. This could partly be attributed to poor route design. However the area's street design, which limits permeability and the ability to operate direct bus routes much take some of the blame.  Some areas overlap with Route 788, which due to its more direct route and more frequent service (relatively speaking) would attract some passengers.

Timetable

Route 787 started as a quasi-community service without a route number. For a while it was simply called ‘The Bus’. Later it became part of the PTV system and got a route number.

Weekday and Saturday timetables are different. On weekdays it runs as three shorter routes. On Saturday it's a single long route, operating via no less than 130 streets. You can see this below. Intervals between buses are anywhere between under an hour and over five hours. 

You can see historic 787 timetables on Krustylink.

   

Conclusion

What would you do with the 787? I gave some ideas here. The local council has been advocating for better buses but there's been no public support from the local MP and nothing from the state government yet. It would seem to me that a split would be sensible to simplify the route. Say the western half (west from Rosebud) continuing to Frankston via a doubled frequency combined corridor with the 788 and the eastern half comprising one or two local feeders route. Any improvement would almost certainly need more buses. Anyway please leave your comments below. 

An index to all Timetable Tuesday items is here.

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