Building Melbourne's Useful Network Part 74: Transport services for the night time economy

What are two of the more menial parts of meals out with friends, such as common at this time of year? Splitting the bill at premises that don't is one. Another is the transport home, or, more precisely, the waits after you go your separate ways.  

Unless it's a meeting of transport buffs, where the ingenuity of one's journey plan home can be unembarrassingly discussed, most people at social events like dinners out 'go with the flow'. That is they leave when others in their group do. After the initial wait, there will almost certainly be another before a change; in a big city few people can have a single line from their origin to their destination. 

Those who keep the night time economy going, that is the army of students and migrants dispensing the drinks, knocking up the nosh or guarding the gates have even less choice of finish time.  They are casually and often insecurely employed. Their pay may just cover the three big expenses of rent, food and transport and only then with substantial economies such as crowding a Docklands flat, not owning a car or an hour's wait for a night train instead of a taxi. 

Although they cohabit the same city, their job conditions compared to train drivers, whose union can veto whether they drive the same bit of track several times a day, or departmental bureaucrats, with their unending varieties of leave available, couldn't be more different. 

The person who said that being poor was expensive wasn’t joking. Life’s even dearer for the working poor, with a lack of transport service at the time they need to travel contributing hugely. I discussed how to counter that by providing a job-ready network here.

Today’s focus though is on the source of many of these jobs, the night time economy.

If we want to revive it to be even better than it was pre-COVID, we’re going to have to do something about public transport.  Both workers and visitors need improvements for the night economy to reach its full potential.

A wait for a connection is no less objectionable at night than it is during the day. In fact it can be more objectionable due to winter cold and perceived safety issues. For some reason Melbourne, much more than other big cities, deigns it acceptable to double or triple its length than during the day. 

If the night wait affects a lot of discretionary travel (which it would) then people would simply not travel and stay home. Or they might drive, which causes accidents, congestion and doesn’t help those, including casual workers, who don't.

Key issues I’ll discuss include Melbourne having the developed world’s least frequent evening trains, the tendency for our buses to shut down after 9pm and the four hour gaps that many suburbs have on weekend evenings before Night Network buses commence. Today I'll concentrate on the 7pm - midnight time slot (after midnight service deserves a separate post).  

Developed world’s longest waits between evening trains?

The sort of city that Melbourne likes to compare itself in world liveability rankings (like Montreal and Vancouver) get Saturday evening trains every 5 to 10 minutes. That’s about four times our service. 

Sydney, anti-fun lock-out laws notwithstanding, has since 2017, run trains every 15 minutes until midnight, or twice as good as us. 

Click below for more comparisons. 

Except for one line Melbourne runs its Saturday evening trains half-hourly from about 7pm. That's no better than smaller cities with less night life like Brisbane or Perth. 

Even US cities like LA and Atlanta, not exactly known for their public transport, run higher Saturday evening train frequencies than us, with 20 minute services in force.

To sum up, Melbourne's suburban rail network is large by world standards but is highly radial and  has about the least frequent evening service of any similar city in the developed world. Some welcome relief is coming in January 2021's train timetable. But even these upgrades will miss our busiest lines and half hour evening waits will remain more common than not.  

Mind the cliff

Something else distinctive about our train timetables is the extent to which service falls off a cliff in the early evening. Service can go from frequent to sparse within half an hour. The case study below shows frequency dropping by two-thirds, from every 10 to every 30 minutes around 7pm Saturdays on our busiest line.

Weeknight timetables have gentler cliffs on some lines. The abovementioned Dandenong line is a stand-out for good service on weeknights with trains every 10 minutes until quite late. However other busy lines like Sunbury/Watergardens, Craigieburn and Mernda have severe cliffs, dropping to the standard half-hourly service before dark (at this time of year) seven nights per week. More on weeknight train services here. 

Because most trains and buses have bedtimes more associated with nine year old children, the bottom right map shows the portion of the network still operating every 20 minutes or better around 10pm. Unlike during the day, when trains, trams and some buses run every 20 minutes, in the evening only the trams do. With one exception trains are half-hourly. Woe betide anyone who needs to make a connection as the same good connections between the two modes recur only hourly.

(links to more maps like this, including for other nights of the week, can be found here)

The ‘missing middle’

 I’ve mainly discussed trains. This is because trains often drop down to every 30 minutes while it’s only on Sundays that trams do. The table below shows a snapshot of the network by day of the week.

It also shows the limitations of the Night Network introduced in 2016. This boosted after midnight service on weekends. However it did not address the low mid-evening frequencies at times that night time economy workers might be starting. This shortfall makes the service significantly less useful, even for workplaces near a station (click for readability).  

 

It's important to stress how few extra trips are needed to fill the gaps, particularly for trains. 

Going from a 30 to 20 minute frequency requires just one extra service per hour each way.  Shifting the 20 to 30  minute cliff from after 7pm to after 10pm needs just two or three extra return trips per day per line. Multiply by the number of lines and you can boost the whole network with 400 to 500 extra weekly trips - all off-peak with existing trains. 

To put things into perspective this is only about 50% higher than January's upgrade which will add 280 trips per week and much less than other cities such as Sydney have implemented in recent years.  

Areas excluded

Thought the 9pm COVID curfew was tough? Many suburbs have a similar curfew operating every night due to limited bus services. This was captured in the table above under ‘local buses’. The biggest concentrations of people effectively locked out of the night time economy unless they drive are mapped below (click for clarity).

These areas are likely to include suburbs with large casual and/or night time economy workforces, especially in ethnically diverse areas west, north and south-east of Melbourne. 

Summary - key issues and opportunities

Low frequency network wide: Melbourne mostly runs evening trains only every 30 min. That’s worse than any comparable city in the world.  Sydney runs twice as many trains with widespread 15 min evening service. 30 minute frequencies are also widespread on other key routes including trams (Sunday evenings) and SmartBuses (all nights plus weekend daytime on most routes). Low frequencies make good connections a stroke of good luck and often makes waiting longer than travel time. 

The early evening cliff: Past 7 or 8pm  train frequency drops from every 10 – 20 min to every 30 minutes, largely due to cuts made in 1978 when Melbourne was half its current size.  Severe on weekends where some lines have just 1/3 the number of trains running at 8pm as at 6pm. Weeknights are a little better but the cliff still encourages those going out to tea to finish before 8 or 9pm and affects the ability of public transport to work for those with mid-evening starts or finishes (including a lot of retail for the latter). Lessening that cliff by adding one extra service per hour per direction on each line across the network would be a cheap fix. 

No connectivity with trams: Trains and SmartBuses every 30 min cannot connect evenly with trams typically every 20 min. That means long waits at stations and unreliable journey times. A 20 minute minimum 7 day 6am - midnight frequency for trains, trams and key bus routes would make the network vastly better connected, even without special coordination efforts. 

Most buses cease service shortly after 9pm, even on Friday and Saturday nights. Night Network buses don’t kick in until after 1am, meaning there’s long mid-evening gaps without service. Even the premium service SmartBus shuts down at 9pm Sunday, denying key corridors like Springvale Rd and residential areas like Doncaster service after then. Significant scope exists to run better evening bus operating hours (such as is more widespread in Sydney, Adelaide and Perth) starting to upgrades to (say) 20 or 30 high priority routes with established high patronage and favourable catchment demographics. As is a recurring theme, this can be done by working the existing fleet harder. 

Conclusion

The night time economy needs frequent public transport to reach its full potential. It cannot thrive if its customers have to cut short their evenings and employers can’t get staff due to transport issues.

Melbourne thinks of itself as a grown up city. Yet it can  never be until trains and buses have grown-up bedtimes. Their timetables should be upgraded so they are job and fun ready. 

Currently common half-hour frequencies should first be boosted to every 20 minutes network-wide, with further increases to 10 minutes on busier lines.  First priority should be the neglected 7 - 10pm slot (7 days) with the next round boosting the 10pm - midnight window. Unlike the very expensive to run Night Network trains introduced in 2016, this can be done without extra station staffing. 

People should be able to accept a job without having to think twice about how they are going to efficiently get there and back. They can’t yet do that, even for CBD and inner suburban jobs. It's not for a lack of public transport infrastructure, it's just that it's too lightly used, including at times people need to travel. 

The good news is we can have more useful evening services in little more than the time it takes to recruit sufficient drivers. And the costs are relatively low as we already have the train, tram and bus fleet that just needs to be worked harder. 

PS: An index to all Useful Networks is here.