Along with the usual traffic hold-ups public holidays add another layer of complexity to the bus user's life. This is because buses run to different timetables and in some cases not at all on those days.
Plans in 2006 to introduce standard rules for what buses ran on public holidays were only partly carried through. Hence there remains confusion as to what buses run on public holidays .
It's so complex that PTV doesn't always have much of an idea themselves or get published information clear and correct.
Arrangements for Good Friday are a bit easier to understand than for some other public holidays.
The general rule is that buses run a Sunday timetable. If a bus route does not run Sundays then it will not run on Good Friday. This rule applies for all but two routes (681 and 682). In these two cases buses run Sundays but not public holidays.
Hence, unlike most other public holidays where other quirks exist, the main reason for buses not running that you think ought to run are because they don't run on Sunday.
The list
Here's a list of all Melbourne's daytime bus routes that didn't run Good Friday. Beside their numbers is listed a reason for them not running.
201 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university shuttle
202 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university shuttle
236 No Sunday service
237 No Sunday service
271 No Sunday service
273 No Sunday service
281 No Sunday service
284 No Sunday service
285 No Sunday service
301 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university shuttle
303 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - peak route
309 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - peak route
318 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - peak route
343 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
350 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university service
389 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
401 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university shuttle
403 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university shuttle
404 No Sunday service
407 No Sunday service
414 No Sunday service
415 No Sunday service
417 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - industrial route
431 No Sunday service
468 No Sunday service
490 No Sunday service
503 No Sunday service
506 No Sunday service
509 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - shopper route
511 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - peak route
512 No Sunday service
526 No Sunday service
531 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
536 No Sunday service
538 No Sunday service
542 No Sunday service (half)
546 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
548 No Sunday service
549 No Sunday service
550 No Sunday service
551 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
558 No Sunday service
559 No Sunday service
601 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university shuttle
609 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
612 No Sunday service
671 No Sunday service
672 No Sunday service
675 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
677 No Sunday service
680 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
681 Runs Sundays but not public holidays
682 Runs Sundays but not public holidays
686 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
687 No Sunday service
689 No Sunday service
694 No Sunday service (duplicates other routes)
696 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - shopper route
697 No Sunday service
699 No Sunday service
705 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - industrial route
706 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - shopper route
740 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - peak route
745 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
757 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
758 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
766 No Sunday service
768 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - university shuttle
772 No Sunday service
773 No Sunday service
774 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
776 No Sunday service
777 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - shopper route
778 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - industrial route
783 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
786 No Sunday service
787 No Sunday service
795 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
800 No Sunday service
802 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
804 No Sunday service
814 No Sunday service
821 No Sunday (or Saturday) service (to be deleted)
823 No Sunday (or Saturday) service
838 No Sunday service
840 No Sunday service
842 No Sunday (or Saturday) service - shopper route
844 No Sunday service
857 No Sunday service
885 No Sunday service
FlexiRide Croydon No Sunday service
FlexiRide Lilydale No Sunday service
FlexiRide Mooroolbark No Sunday service
FlexiRide Rowville No Sunday (or Saturday) service
FlexiRide Rosebud No Sunday (or Saturday) service
FlexiRide Melton Operates but with a Sunday start time
List summary
When you add all this up you get 95 bus routes that don't operate Good Friday. These range all the way from tiny once or twice-daily weekday shopper routes to services along major highways like Princes (800), Nepean (823) and Hume (531).
Reasons for not running and the number of routes can be attributed to the following:
Peak commuter route (5)
Shopper route (5)
University route (8)
Industrial route (3)
Residential area route with Sunday and Saturday service but not PHs 2
Residential area route with no Sunday service 52
Residential area route with no Sunday or Saturday service 20
Out of the 95 there's 21 special routes that you would likely never run Good Friday (or Christmas Day). These are weekday only peak, industrial or university routes. The only public holiday exceptions you might make are for university routes as universities tend not to observe state public holidays.
The remaining 74, highlighted in yellow, are routes that a 7 day roll-out program would consider upgrading to run daily (including all public holidays). This list includes a few duplicative routes like 694 that you would never upgrade and would likely delete. Conversely it includes occasional routes (like 609 in Alphington and 745 on Scoresby Rd) that serve major roads or corridors that should get upgraded to more than the handful of trips currently run.
A resumption of the 2006 MOTC program would likely involve staged roll-outs so the job could be entirely done in about two years (at a similar pace to that done in the 2006 - 2010 period).
However unlike the MOTC program there could be a sharper attention to priority when sequencing, with the highest used or highest needs area routes like 281, 284, 404, 414, 503, 506, 536, 538, 546, 559, 612, 675, 774, 800, 802, 804, 814, 844, 885 etc being upgraded first. 681 and 682 in Rowville are also 'quick wins' since they already run 7 days and just need public holidays added.
Other public holidays
Except for Routes 681 and 682 (which do not run on any public holiday) it is common for bus routes to run a Saturday timetable on public holidays other than Christmas Day and Good Friday. But not always. There remain about 20-odd bus routes that do run Saturdays but do not run on public holidays for which a Saturday timetable would normally apply.
Because standardisation was never complete this is ripe for data and information errors, and do PTV often make them! More in this thread.
Even where bus routes do run a Saturday timetable there are oddities carried over from when shops closed around noon. Despite Saturday afternoon trading being legalised about 35 years ago many bus timetables have yet to get updates that reflect this. Hence service may shut down or reduce in frequency after about 1pm. This carries through to most public holidays. That includes ANZAC Day where buses may run in the morning when many shops are shut but not run in the afternoon when many open.
This pattern is most prevalent in low income taken-for-granted historically safe Labor areas like Campbellfield, Reservoir, Springvale and Dandenong which have received very few bus improvements since John Brumby left office.
More detail on all this here.
The route with more trips when the shops are shut
Route 695F to Fountain Gate is the only bus route in Melbourne that has more service on Good Friday than any other Friday (or for that matter any other weekday).
This is because 695F only runs after 4pm on a regular Friday and doesn't run at all on other weekdays. However it runs morning to night on a Sunday (whose timetable it uses on Good Friday). Fountain Gate is closed on Good Friday. Hence the most Friday trips run on the one day that the shops are closed.
This appears to be because 695F was conceived as a Fountain Gate shopper route with service on late night shopping Fridays and weekends only. Network simplification, if attempted in the area, would likely provide for more uniform 7 day services.
Conclusion
A big deal can be made of bus network reform, with it being the centrepiece of Victoria's Bus Plan launched nearly 2 years ago.
Even though it already had bus planners on staff, the Department of Transport and Planning has established a separate bus reform team, presumably to go bigger and bolder than before. Reform is desirable but success depends on budget funding and community acceptance.
Winning both is hard as recurrent funding is hard to obtain and radical reform proposals can create 'losers' who are typically more vocal than the larger number who might benefit from a change.
This is possibly why, of the three major bus reform programs in the 2006-2010 period (a. minimum service standards, b. SmartBus rollout and c. network reviews) only the first two achieved more than half of what they set out to do.
Network reviews were potentially controversial with the need for consultation drawing out implementation time-lines further. By then the government had run out of money and/or shifted policy focus to fixing (by then) crowded and unreliable trains. Despite most (not all) review recommendations having merit, a far lower proportion of them happened than with the minimum standards or SmartBus.
The lesson from that era is that long reform processes can fall victim to wider political and budgetary circumstances, with initial momentum being lost, not to be recovered for many years. This remains a risk today, with today's challenge being interest rate pressures on borrowings (often major projects conceived when money was cheap).
Mitigating that risk involves keeping reform going, even if small and cheap when finance is tight. This also means tight targeting to maximise benefits and a willingness to compromise or stage work. Seven day service and standardised public holiday patterns on popular routes in high needs areas is one of the most cost-effective and uncontroversial bus network reforms possible. Picking up on the start made in 2006, it would go a long way to creating a more usesful dependable network with wide benefits.
See other Timetable Tuesday items here
3 comments:
At least Melbourne has timetables on its bus and tram stops. In Adelaide these have been removed and you need to look it up from the website. Not everyone has a mobile phone to do this. They could have made it simple like a QR code at each stop that would tell you the next service. In London for example (and probably Aus cites as well) one in seven residents don't have a suitable mobile phone, and probably a higher proportion of bus users. Keep up the timetables on stops Melbourne.
I was looking for your thoughts on Melbourne's "peak-only" bus services, in particular, routes 303 and 318 which run 4 trips each way in weekday peaks only. However, this is the only post I can find that mentions them.
I had reason to catch the 303 bus outbound recently a couple of times recently. On a Tuesday evening the bus was around half full, while on Friday evening there were maybe 10 passengers. The bus pulls into Doncaster P&R, but this stop saw only one or two alight. The busiest stop was the one immediately after the bus turns off the freeway at Middleborough Road, Blackburn North! On the Friday I stayed on until the end, and only one other passenger stayed on beyond Mitcham Road.
On a Friday evening recently, I saw an outbound 318 bus go along Hoddle St with only three or four passengers on board. This was a Friday, admittedly, but even with 3 times the passenger load, it would seem to be a lightly-used service.
This made me wonder whether these routes were retained as token services because the political cost of deleting them altogether was too great. Certainly it seems hard to justify running an express bus from the City to Blackburn North which is within easy reach of (and already well served by) rail feeder buses.
Would love to see a full post on your thoughts on these routes and how they came to be!
Thanks Alan. Yes, a full post would be good but for now I offer the following:
There's way fewer peak special routes than there used to be. Especially in the Doncaster area where some of them got rolled into regular services (some SmartBus) in 2010 with further simplifications in 2014. The 303 was deleted but was eventually reinstated after political pressure. And yes middle-class CBD commuters are more politically vocal and influential than the average invalid pensioner or casual worker in Noble Park who has fruitlessly waited 30+ years for their 800 to get 7 day service.
With its large rail network peak buses have played a relatively small role in Melbourne, especially compared to Adelaide and Brisbane who either have weak rail networks and/or a planning culture that favours duplicative rather than connective networks. Networks that have done best after the pandemic are more connective / better service all day. As opposed to peak heavy networks that are only good for white collar CBD commuters (who can very likely work from home).
Special peak services add complexity and present an opportunity cost, especially if they involve inefficient counterpeak empty bus movements. They also mean the regular network is less frequent than desirable in the peaks. However they may still have a role when there are large passenger numbers wanting to go to the city and rail options are poorly developed.
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