UN 159: The 5 word secret to faster bus reform in Melbourne

Victoria and Western Australia currently have pretty similar state political conditions. For example both have long-term Labor governments on big majorities riding high in opinion polls. And oppositions are demoralised after recent crushing defeats. 

Both Melbourne and Perth have seen high rates of population growth. Transport policy settings also match with both building major road and rail transport projects. And funding for new service, especially buses, is tight in both jurisdictions.  

A lack of new funding doesn't mean there's nothing to do. Things are continually changing. New data comes in each day. Changes to traffic flow or train times may necessitate changes to bus timetables. And a vigilant transport agency should always be looking for low-budget 'greater good' improvements, like what Melbourne's DoT achieved on the Transdev/Kinetic network in September 2021.

Tending a bus network is much like maintaining a garden. Doing nothing means it gets messy and unappealing with weeds taking over and tending towards entropy. How's Melbourne's bus garden going? Is what's being done enough to keep the weeds at bay? Keep reading and find out. 

Comparing bus service changes 

With similar tight budgetary settings, it's fair to compare achievements of Melbourne versus Perth with regards to bus services and reform of them in the last few years. If one city significantly outperforms the other then we'll be able to establish which has the most effective planning and administration.   

Bus service changes in Melbourne are documented on the PTV website here . The material here goes back almost exactly 2 years (August 2021 - July 2023). This neatly coincides with everything done after the Bus Plan came out in June 2021 so is a fair measure of that plan's impact. Also there would have been nothing gained by going back further due to the disruption caused by the pandemic. 

The last two years of bus service changes isn't as well documented on the Transperth website due to their habit of removing older material from their Planned Service Changes section. However the enthusiast-run Bus Australia forum documents these changes well, with threads devoted to pasting and discussing Transperth service changes in 2021, 2022 and 2023 .

How did I count what got done? Not everything is equal. Moving a bus stop due to road changes or a rebuilt station is minor and shouldn't count as a network reform. Neither might a slight change to a timetable to retain coordination with revised train times. However adding or removing trips is more significant. And network changes like route additions, deletions, alterations or major frequency adjustments are most important of all.

An ideal comparison would weight changes based on importance. However this was overkill for the quick comparison I was after. So I simply counted changes equally, regardless of whether it was minor or major. 

Such equal counting wouldn't matter much if both cities have a roughly similar mix of major and minor changes. I've looked through the changes and am satisfied that Perth's bus service change events are of equal if not larger significance than Melbourne's on average.

Thus if Perth has recorded more bus service change events than Melbourne then it has likely also achieved more bus network reform. This is especially if the difference in activity is so high as to remove any remaining doubt.  

My results are graphed below. 

Note: A 'bus service change event' is defined as anything done to a bus route that is regarded as significant enough by the relevant transport agency to be worth telling the public about. Minor examples include relocated stops due to road changes or revising bus times to meet an altered train timetable. Larger examples could involve new, deleted or modified routes in an area. The graph shows the number of routes involved by month.  

As it happens, the difference could hardly be clearer. In the last 2 years Melbourne had just one month (September 2021) where it had service change events affecting at least 30 routes. In contrast Perth exceeded that threshold nine times, with five occurrences just in the last year. 

Two of Perth's nine big months were triggered by new rail lines or stations but seven were not. The latter indicates Perth's ability to keep reviewing and reforming bus networks without infrastructure triggers or even service kilometre funding top-ups. The cumulative graph below shows that Perth's edge over Melbourne has widened, particularly in the last year. 

The evidence shows that, budget limitations notwithstanding, Perth's Public Transport Authority has a 'no improvement is too small' culture. If they think there's a benefit in adding one or two trips here and there, then they will do it, often to multiple routes at a time.

PTA will also redistribute service between routes if they consider a greater good case exists. In other words what Melbourne did in September 2021 (and rarely since) is everyday 'business as usual' practice for them. The August 2021 extract below shows typical examples (click for better view).   

Perth's 'review and improve' recipe includes adding a few trips each time to a high performing direct route like Route 60. They repeat the process until operating hours and frequency qualify it as a 'high frequency service' with a 900-series route number. This is much like Melbourne SmartBuses except that weekends are not an afterthought, with 15 minute maximum waits, even on Sundays. 

The advertisement below promotes the late 2022 launch of the 980, previously the Route 60 mentioned above. This is not a one-off, with the story of Route 915's creation in 2020, also following several prior incremental service upgrades, told here.

A process of 'business as usual' bus network reform and incremental service upgrades has given Perth an expanding frequent network that now has more routes than our SmartBus. The extent of the latter last expanded in 2010 despite Melbourne adding close to a million people since.   

Bus service change events per capita

Perth has less than half the population of Melbourne. Is it reasonable to consider bus service changes per capita? I believe it is, notwithstanding Melbourne's larger train and tram networks. This is because even inner suburbs need buses to weave trains and trams into a grid network more useful for diverse trips that are not just to and from the CBD. Melbourne's outer growth areas are almost all bus only and many established areas have multi-decade backlogs in bus network reform. 

In total I counted 158 service change events for Melbourne and 564 for Perth over the two years. If we convert that to a per capita number (by dividing by 5.1 and 2.1 millions respectively) we get 31 bus service change events per million population for Melbourne and 269 per million for Perth. The difference is stark:

Perth achieved 9 times more bus changes per capita than Melbourne in the past 2 years. 

Rework just for the last year and the disparity widens. Melbourne achieves 9 service change events per million people compared to 161 for Perth. That's an 18:1 difference in Perth's favour.

It's true that Melbourne still did good things with bus services in the last year, with the 2022 state budget helping. And May 2023 was the most active month since September 2021. However the pace of reform has still slowed relative to Perth. What  takes Perth a month requires at least a year for Melbourne to do. 

Melbourne's inability to move quickly on bus network reform (or even modest timetable optimising) is like a golf course groundskeeper who can only tend one square metre of ground per day. They're doing something but it's not enough to stop the weeds encroaching.

Similarly our bus network, the only public transport near most Melburnians, is tending towards entropy. We are accumulating a lot of poor performing routes and are only rarely giving high performing and/or high needs area routes the service they deserve. I discussed what to do about poor performing routes here and identified high needs routes worthy of a service boost here.   

Finding

Ben Carroll as minister and Paul Younis as Secretary are presiding over a Department of Transport and Planning that finds itself unable to implement even modest bus service changes at a reasonable work rate, Bus Plan notwithstanding. 

This is denying millions of Melburnians the public transport service they need and taxpayers value for money from the bus network. A big opportunity exists for DTP to pick up its bus game to a pace that its counterparts elsewhere have shown is attainable, even in a tight budgetary environment.   

The secret

This leaves us with the five word secret that DTP in Melbourne need to know if it wants to speed per capita bus reform to match current Australian best practice. That is in relation to almost everything to do with buses, DTP must: 

Drop everything and copy Perth

Perth has shown that even if it gets no or little funding for extra annual service kilometres, they have the will and capacity to  review usage and service levels, with numerous small additions and deletions along with a progressive expansion of their frequent network. We could do worse than to follow suit, especially to copy their 'no improvement is too small' policy.

Index to other Useful Network items here

Appendix - Melbourne's bus service change events in the last two years

* 26 June 2023: 863 extended, 895 rerouted/simplified
* 28 May 2023: 343, 356, 357, 358, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 564, 569, 577, 578, 579, 580 582 recoordination with trains
* 30 April 2023: 733 & 767 major frequency boosts. Minor route and timetable changes for 200, 305, 309, 907. 
* 12 February 2023: Route 505 extra trips added
* 30 January 2023: 624 minor deviation added to serve school
* 11 Dec 2022: 828, 831, 834, 835, 836, 837, 838, 839, 847, 888, 889 and 899 will now operate from the new bus interchange on the southern side of Berwick Station. Bus Route 846 has minor route changes around new interchange
* 31 October, 2022: 235 & 237 major frequency boost (to every 10 min)
* 23 October, 2022: Tarneit North FlexiRide starts
* 28 August 2022: 897 & 898 routes extended 
* 7 August, 2022: Route 390 frequency boosted
* 3 July 2022: 513, 534, 536 and 951 minor route change near interchange. 514 created to simplify  complex 513.  
* 26 June 2022: 153 & 498 minor route change for new interchange & 182 rerouted for road change. Also 152, 160, 161, 166, 167, 170, 181, 192 minor timetable change for recoordination with trains.
* 24 April 2022: 706, 857, 858 and 902 minor route change for new interchange at Chelsea. 530, 531, 532, 544 minor timetable changes. 528, 529, 533, 537 major frequency and span boosts and route reforms in revised Craigieburn network. 
* 11 April 2022: Route 511 minor route change due to road change.
* 21 February 2022: FlexiRide Rosebud starts, 787 route simplification and new timetable
* 20 February 2022: 781 major extension, 887 major extension and service boost
* 31 January 2022: 626 minor deviation added and timetable change
* 30 January 2022: New route 881, deleted route 673. 683 684, 685 get minor timetable changes for recoordination.
* 12 December 2021: Melton FlexiRide started
* 28 November 2021: New 816, deleted 815, major timetable upgrade 813 in Keysborough mini-review. Timetable upgrade for Route 525.
* 14 November 2021: 788 major timetable upgrade
* 31 October 2021: New 390 route starts
* 4 October 2021: 381 minor timetable change with extra trips. FlexiRides replace Telebus in Lilydale area, Route 672 run constant direct route. 
* 24 September 2021: Night Network reforms 21 regular routes gain improved hours major timetable upgrade and reforms to services on 13 night only routes. 
* 20 September 2021: New 202 route commences, minor timetable change to 546. Timetable reforms to 19 Transdev routes, with 10 major improvements overall, 4 overall losses and minor changes to 5. More here. 
* 19 August 2021: 511 and 525 get minor rerouting to connect to trains at Donnybrook.