Guest post: This week's Adelaide bus changes

I've written about Adelaide twice. Firstly in 2020 about their aborted radical bus network reforms and then in 2021 when I compared public transport services across the larger Australian capitals (including Adelaide). 

They've since had a change of government, with the Liberals losing to Labor. Most political attention has been devoted to reversing privatisation but there have been some bus changes starting this week.  

To take us through them I am pleased to welcome Tom (@AussieWirraway on Twitter) who has provided this guest post.  

Introduction

This is a featurette covering themes in Adelaide bus planning, and changes that while minor, are worth writing about as we take stock on the motivation for bus reform of an overly complex network. This week saw some notable changes and service improvements to Adelaide Metro’s bus network. 

For the first time since about 2017, bus service hours will increase. Since the failed Network Reform of June 2020, Adelaide’s bus network has remained unchanged, but these improvements are not all sunshine and rainbows. 

The South Australian Public Transport Authority (SAPTA) is reverting to an old model of service improvements, that ignore their own context, and especially in the case of the 206/208 have been implemented in ways that leave a lot to be desired. This post will (try to) briefly cover these service improvements – the good and the bad.

Frequency upgrades

The best reform to come out of these services changes is route 206 to Lightsview becoming a “Go-Zone” bus, which dictates service levels of every 10 minutes in the peak, every 15 minutes at other weekday times from 7 am to 6:30 pm, and every 30 minutes all other times to last service and on weekends. 

The 206 is an existing bus that was previously peak only, running every 15-20 minutes to the city between 7 and 9:30 am, and outbound between 3 and 5:30 pm. That’s a very good improvement! For context Lightsview is an infill suburb in middle Adelaide and was home to 6,090 people on census night, it has one of the highest suburban densities in Adelaide. (click image below for a clearer view)

However, this Go-Zone provides limited new coverage over an existing one, adding just 9 stops to the existing Galway Avenue Go-Zone as shown on the above map (That’s not even to mention the fact that 3 of these stops are already served by the 202/203 go-zone on Hampstead Road!). 

The 208 remains unchanged despite the 206 improvements making it increasingly redundant. The 208 is a bus that provides a link through the middle Northeastern suburbs from the City to Paradise Interchange, it’s a good route, with strong anchors at either end, but outside its go-zone has relatively poor operating hours. 

On weekends, for example, the last bus leaves Paradise Interchange for the city at 5:42, with all trips until midnight being 208N (N for terminating in Northgate). This remains unchanged in the timetable; indeed, the entire 208 timetable remains unchanged every day of the week, except that 208B (B for terminating in Broadview) trips have become full 206 trips. This means that on weekdays between the city and Regency Road where these services split has an uneven frequency, as a bus running every 15 minutes meshes with one running every 30 minutes.

Take this sample for buses running from the city in the 10 am hour, if you live south of Regency Road, these are not easy to remember clockface frequencies. On weekday nights this does mean frequencies are double what they are now, and Galway Avenue, Walkerville Terrace and Melbourne Street now all have buses every 15 minutes until 11:30 pm, a very high level of service and rare in Adelaide.

Weekends are even weirder, with the 206 running every 30 minutes and the 208 running every hour, 30-minute waits for buses will still be common, and instead of meshing buses on Galway Avenue better, SAPTA has instead decided to have buses run more evenly to Stop 26, Folland Ave, Northgate.

So don’t get me wrong, these service improvements are more than welcome and should have been done years ago, but watching in real time such a mistake being made is bizarre. There were other options here, including buses that used the O-Bahn to Klemzig Interchange like the existing Lightsview bus, the 528, or combining the new frequent 206 with the tail end of the 208 to Paradise Interchange and deleting other parts of the 208 no longer needed. 

This is poor route reform, but planners likely know this. Implementing a Go-Zone to Lightsview was a half-hearted commitment of the Government at the 2022 election, and I wasn’t even aware of it till told recently. It’s unknown when the decision was made to pursue this change, as SAPTA had zero public window for public consultation, it appeared in the June state budget and has now been implemented in slightly over a month. 

That’s a good timeline and speaks well of SAPTA’s ability to implement new timetables, and operators' ability to schedule drivers and buses to fill changes. Torrens Transit, who will operate the new 206, has struggled for drivers since 2021, which has led to new less intensive peak timetables in many parts of Adelaide. This is hopefully a sign that the 2019 timetable can once again be implemented in full.

Northern suburbs, new route

Casually announced on the Adelaide Metro website a few weeks ago was a brand-new bus route, the evenly numbered 450 to serve a new growth area in Adelaide’s north. Riverlea Park is currently not a particularly large community, the local council estimates a population of around 800 people, but by 2041 should be 11,000. It also benefits the current 2,000 residents in the small town of Virginia, who for the first time will have a regular connection to the Adelaide Metro network, which is decades overdue.

The 450 is presented as the main route to this development, and will likely become a frequent one in future, running essentially express along vacant farmland to Elizabeth railway station and city centre. At the same time, the presence of the 450 has caused the existing 4 times daily route 900 (which was basically the 402 and 450 combined as one bus via Virginia) to be deleted and reformed into the new 402, a 6-trip daily, peak route from Riverlea to Salisbury railway station. It’s not a traditional express route and takes longer than the 450 but offers an express train connection on the Gawler line.

The 450 has the bones of a good route and is ultimately sensible, but its hours of operation could be significantly improved. Inbound to Elizabeth it runs hourly from 6:20 am until 2:49 pm. Outbound from Elizabeth it’s the same, hourly from 10:15 am until 7:15 pm. Residents coming back from the city in the evening certainly won’t want to miss the 6:38 pm Gawler Central train, as it’s the last one that makes a bus connection. I also haven’t mentioned that both the 402 and 450 are weekday-only routes, which while understandable for the 402, is very disappointing for the 450. 

These hours of operation are not fantastic and are indicative of the very limited funding currently available. Given that many of the PM trips terminate in Riverlea Park without forming inbound services, buses will head out of service to the depot or a form a different route elsewhere. Edinburgh North depot, where the buses are stabled, is a 5-minute drive from Elizabeth station! 

Running these completely unavoidable trips in service back to Elizabeth station rather than deadheading can add no more than 15 minutes to a driver’s roster, but it’s not here. There was no governmental budgetary announcement for either the 450 or 402, and no consultation from Adelaide Metro, which perhaps indicates that these services are funded by the developer of Riverlea as part of its services obligation, and that from the axed 900.

Overall, the 450 is a solid bus route and one that will be very useful for the residents of Riverlea to reach the city and local Elizabeth shopping and government services. As the area gains more residents more funding is likely to become available to increase the hours of operation and the frequency of the route, while the 402 remaining a peak-only route largely makes sense, but the trip does need to be faster.

Splitting a corridor, less frequent buses

In the definitely questionable “did this really need to change?” territory is the splitting of the 230 and 232 frequent go-zone corridors. The 230 and 232 currently have a go-zone standard route from stop 31 Torrens Road to the city, providing wide, frequent coverage to many residents in the northwest outside the reach of the Outer Harbor line, and providing one of three frequent corridors to the Arndale shopping centre. 

These changes, as shown below, have split this route much earlier than it does today, at stop 10 Torrens Road. This is so the corridor can serve Days and Harrison Road, as they previously did before the South Road upgrade.

This change sees the 232 significantly increase its runtime (several minutes) due to a substantial deviation it now must complete. One which mainly parallels the Gawler train line, which also offers a much faster trip into the city, it also fails to interchange with that rail line providing no new stops for passengers wanting to make a transfer. The 230 and 232 will see no other changes to their frequency both running every 15-20 minutes in peak, 30 off peak and hourly in the evenings and weekends. 

This is a very hard change to justify which increases the travel time for passengers, significantly impacts clockface frequency for many more residents than it benefits, and overall seems like a downgrade on the existing network. There are also some weird oddities in the peak timetables for this bus, but for the sake of brevity, I won’t mention them here.

The consultation for this change occurred in November 2022, so the lead time on this one is approximately 8 months, however, no outcome from the consultation was ever publicly released. At the time of the consultation, I publicly advocated for people to write submissions against the change, but Adelaide Metro has adopted it along with this other suite of reforms. However, this one isn’t too complex, but is a shame for such a marginal benefit saving so few minutes of walking for a few hundred residents.

Conclusion

This set of bus changes is entirely unrelated to one another, occurs essentially in completely different contract areas and had no right to all be implemented on the same day in late July, but it can't be denied it's convenient for me. 

Overall, this is a mixed bag of changes, especially given that what is good here, could have been unashamedly better if more attention was paid to network reform. All the changes apart from those to the 230 and 232 are worthwhile, but I hope you'll agree it could have gone further. 

This was a lot of words to talk about what's essentially three changes to buses in Adelaide. The long and short of it is that it does demonstrate the fact that SAPTA can do reform quickly, and the public consultation isn't necessarily seen as something that “must” be done before implementing a change seen as “without downside,” demonstrated both with the 450 and 206 changes. 

A lack of consultation has seen the downfall of previous plans, the 2020 new network proposal is a case in point here, but equally, I don't have a real problem with announcing these changes a few weeks out from their implementation. 

I'm glad to see some changes happening, and if kept in motion I'll be interested to see what might come up next, namely the timetable revision for the Gawler rail line should be due sometime before the end of the year, which offers a strong opportunity to reform many parts of the northern bus network. 

But with the government focused on bringing the train and tram networks back into public ownership, it remains to be seen if this is a priority or not.

Follow Tom on Twitter 
Tom is also involved in advocacy group People for Public Transport

Opinions expressed above are Tom's alone and the above is presented as supplied. Thanks to Tom for this contribution.