TT #167: Frankston's loopy 774 bus with the 127 minute gap

 

Frankston is the land of loop bus routes. There's at least six, depending on how you count them. And none of those have been substantially reformed for decades. Frankston's local MP is Paul Edbrooke MP. Today we'll look at the 774, Frankston's shortest but most productive loop bus route. 

The 774 map from the PTV website is below. It tells you what streets the buses goes down but not in the order that they travel. And that's important for a unidirectional route like the 774. Old-format PTV maps, which were manually drawn and human checked, had direction arrows but no such luxury carried through to PTV's new style of maps. 

PTV local network maps are however still manually mapped. These do have arrows. You can see from the one below that the 774 is a short roughly clockwise route starting and finishing at Frankston Station via Frankston South. Very little of it is unique as almost all of it is overlapped by the 772 which serves less built up areas to the south. Closer in to Frankston, on inbound trips there are overlaps with the 782, 783 and bidirectional portions of the 775 and 776. 

While the network map above shows the direction of the 774 loop it does not show the Nepean Hwy variations in central Frankston on certain midday trips. These need to be understood in conjunction with the timetable. 

Timetable and service levels

Route 774's complete timetable are below (click for clearer view) or can be found on the PTV website here. The first thing to note is that they are split even though the bus goes the full loop. Thus for trips north to Frankston you may need to first go south and then refer to the second timetable to find your trip and arrival time. This is a consequence of both complex route design (loop routes should be avoided where possible) and poor arrangement of data by PTV (including ordering that require timetables to be read in opposite sequence to presented to understand the artificial break at Frankston High School). 

Like other bus routes in Frankston South, Route 774 missed out on the minimum service standards introduced from 2006. Thus it is Monday to Friday daytime only. There is no evening, weekend or public holiday service. Most of 774's passengers do have a partial alternative in the 772 which operates Saturdays and most public holidays but not Sundays. 

Route 774 has a very late start for an outer suburban bus. The first bus arrives Frankston at 7:36am. Allowing some transfer time this means that the earliest one can arrive in the CBD with a train connection is not much before 9am. After that there is an over 2 hour (127 minute) wait until the next bus arrival at 9:43. Oddly it's only 30 minutes until the next bus after that. After that frequency settles down to about hourly until the last departure. This is at 7:17pm from Frankston. The latest one can leave the CBD by train to get this trip is about 6pm. Hence the 774's operating span isn't long enough to be a reliable CBD feeder, though as noted before its catchment has other routes like 772 nearby. 

What about the Nepean Hwy deviation mentioned earlier? The timetable has footnotes for three trips around midday - 2pm. These trips miss one stop near Davey St in favour of two stops to the west, including at Nepean Hwy. Presumably these are more convenient for Frankston CBD shoppers. 

Patronage

You wouldn't think that that a route with such limited service would be successful. However the 774 is the most productive bus route in Frankston when measured on a boardings per hour basis. At a high 37 boardings per hour on weekdays also narrowly misses the top 40 bus route list discussed here. Some of its usage is dependent on Frankston High School that the route serves. But by no means all of it. On non-school days the 774 attracts a still above average 30 passenger boardings per service hour. 

History

Basically nothing. The big story is stagnation for 50 years if not more for bus routes serving Frankston South. Maps going back to 1971 are here if you want to confirm how little routes have changed. 

Conclusion

Bus routes in Frankston South enjoy above average patronage productivity on a boardings per hour basis. However as noted here the points where patronage productivity is highest and where patronage is highest are different. 

If you want to unlock all the benefits of public transport you need to maximise patronage. This means adding service until after productivity has peaked but while it is still high. 

With limited operating hours and gaps of up to 2 hours between buses with a complex network there is clearly great scope and need for bus reform in the Frankston area, notably Karingal, Frankston East and Frankston South. A large part of the latter must include reforms to routes like the 772, 773 and 774 to provide simpler and bidirectional routes with less overlap. 

See other Timetable Tuesday items here