One feature of Melbourne's notoriously complicated bus network is that there are routes where different trips go via different streets and even sometimes to different destinations.
Some routes might have extensions on certain nights only (eg to cater for late night shopping) while other trips only operate on those nights. There may be connections to a weekly market bus. Or they might only operate on some public holidays and not others (normally because universities have odd holiday rules).
Whenever there is a variation worth drawing to passengers attention the usual thing is to add a footnote to the timetable.
This can show up both at stop timetables and online.
Some footnotes can be confusing, hilarious or wrong. And PTV can be inconsistent with some deviations getting footnotes while almost identical ones on another route do not.
Trains are different again with PTV presented timetables lacking them for different peak stopping patterns, though they appeared on large station specific timetables.
Here's a tour of some of the notable footnoted bus timetables across Melbourne. It's a Twitter thread I started but you don't need to be a Twitter user to view.
https://twitter.com/MelbOnTransit/status/1639350171854340096
You will see differences in how similar variations on different routes are treated; consistency of presentation is not PTV's strong suit. But I wouldn't blame them too much - DPT through PTV is trying to explain a network that is so unmanageably complex that errors and inconsistencies are inevitable despite best endeavours.
Thus if you want good information on buses there's only so much you can do until the network is vastly simplified. This is a task that is well stated in Victoria's Bus Plan. However it should be emphasised that much, such as removing reduced summer timetables, non-standard public holiday arrangements and perhaps some quieter deviations, are low cost and can be done without wholesale route reforms.
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