A different Timetable Tuesday where we venture outside Melbourne to other capitals. And I'm going to ask you to do the work of picking which routes to look at yourself. Still it's an interesting exercise to compare the different emphases in services that different cities have.
A few I've spotted include high 7-day off-peak train frequencies in Sydney and Perth with lower frequencies in Adelaide and Brisbane. On local bus routes Perth has relatively high peak frequencies (every 20 min) but sometimes low (60 min) off-peak frequencies. Brisbane has a sharp BUZ/local route distinction with a small number of premium bus routes running very frequently but a very large number of local routes having the worst of all cities (eg Melbourne-style peak frequencies, Perth-style off-peak frequencies and short operating hours). Sydney meanwhile has more 10 minute frequency routes than anywhere else, although they still tend to be in the more affluent areas.
There are also differences in numbering. Most larger cities use three digit numbering with Adelaide (especially) having a lot of letters. Premium more frequent routes have 900-series numbers in Perth and sometimes also in Melbourne.
If you spot more notable differences please mention them in the comments below.
See all Timetable Tuesday items here
3 comments:
Adelaide has low train frequencies on most lines but higher frequency bus corridors
Maybe look at the decline of suburb-city routes in Southern Perth (114,160,158), brought on by the Mandurah line as well as the prevalence of strictly feeder routes (503-5, 523, 537), all of which have no real destinations. Would love to see your thoughts
Tom - definitely a lot of loose ends in the south. The first I thought of was southern Leeming . This has very poor service (although likely also unfavourable demographics if its housing is anything to go by) and routes like 515 lacks a proper southern terminus (should at least go to Cockburn Central). I'd be inclined to swap 515 and 516 in the Leeming area so that 515 is 7 days through the heard of Leeming while 516 is the less direct route for coverage.
The routes you mention do have local destinations (eg shopping) and stations. A big problem in Perth is land use planning with only some stations having shops or major destinations. And some like Cockburn Central have the shops too far from the station. Then you can combine lots of trip types on the one route rather than them almost entirely being rail feeders (which is also an issue for many routes feeding the Joondalup line). If you had that then you could have more 15-30 min off-peak routes rather than a lot being only every 60 min off-peak (but 20 min peak) which is inefficient.
Having said that I don't mind it that middle and outer suburbs don't necessarily have their own route to the CBD if a bus+train combination is faster and it frees up buses to provide a grid like network. That means that although there's few trips you can get to on the one bus there's a lot you can get to with just one change. As opposed to the old network (like Brisbane's and Adelaide's today) where you can only go to the CBD and if you wanted to go anywhere else you had a long detour in then out.
So I quite like the overall approach to Perth's planning though some of the specifics don't seem to cater for cases where you can keep the grid concept but still serve more places without overlap/duplication. For instance lots of routes from the east terminate at Bull Creek Station, which is nothing. At least one should be extended to Garden City, replacing the 500. It's not the most direct but the 500 is a short route and people would appreciate the direct service to Garden City. In a similar vein I'd be looking at whether the 915 could be extended east to the Armadale line via (say) the 507 alignment to link more places to Garden City. These are the two I'd look at first but joining the 503-505 to routes to the east could be helpful. Especially if it makes some trips (eg to popular destinations like Curtin Uni) possible with only one change instead of two. On the other hand you get more complicated L-shaped routes rather than roughly linear routes so you get the horrid complications that the old Transperth network had.
The Cockburn area network has problems in that you've got routes like 114, 115 and 512 with dead end termini. There should be some way of through-routing them for more useful termini.
As for 523, there might be a possibility of linking it with a route going west of Cockburn Central Station. But the longer the route and more train stations it goes to the harder it is to optimise connections at all. Especially at night when frequencies are low. Another possibility from the map could be to join 515 to 523 via Jandakot Rd. That would give both routes stronger termini.
537 has a weak southern terminus but unless the area develops extending to Kwinana might not be well used. But there may be scope to merge it with (say) 526 (although I haven't checked for compatible frequencies). That would at least provide a direct bus to Cockburn Central.
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