There's no train station, driving doesn't scale up due to the number of people wanting to go there and the buses, including Route 800, can have 2 hour gaps or not run at all.
Welcome to weekend travel at Chadstone shopping centre.
While shoppers can avoid it those who work there aren't so lucky. Key issues include a lack of bus priority, the design that adds kinks to through routes and, entirely within the responsibility for the state government to address, the very low service levels.
This is particularly the case on weekends when Chadstone is at its busiest. No individual bus route has less than 30 minute maximum waits, not even the premium service SmartBuses. Typical waits on local routes are 40 to 60 minutes. That balloons out to 120 minutes or no service at all for routes that serve taken for granted 'safe' Labor seats like Mulgrave and Dandenong. The video shown below was taken on Saturday 25 November 2023 between about 3 and 5:30pm, ie a popular time for people to be at Chadstone.
More information about the Route 800 campaign for 7 day service can be found on the #Fix800Bus Facebook page.
2 comments:
The 742 is one of those buses which you'd think would be great, serving a bunch of shopping centres and train stations, and even a tram, but it isn't. It's just a typical suburban bus with mediocre service levels, despite all of the major locations it serves.
It isn't any better at the Eastland end either, even after extending the bus around the block to Ringwood station and occasionally through-routing with the 670/679. In fact, to me the 742 is at its weakest on the Saturday timetable as the last bus finishes around twenty minutes earlier than any other day. It is however more legible than the weekday timetable, with services being roughly every 40 minutes rather than seemingly at random. Sundays are a flat 60 minutes which is completely unusable (still better than the 800 though!), but that isn't even the worst of it: the last bus from Ringwood on weeknights is a whopping 71 minutes after the second last. Probably the most annoying thing about the 742 though is weekday afternoon peak services and lack thereof. Buses also stop short at Oakleigh, Glen Waverley or Heatherdale, skipping both Chadstone and Eastland and leaving waits of 30/40/60 minutes. Yes, hourly at 6PM on a weekday.
Melbourne has a great number of cross city bus lines, all those SmartBus lines should make getting around easy. But like the trains & trams, the service frequency sucks, and are erratic with long gaps and poor connectivity.
This city always seems to think that having the infrastructure is enough, then treats service frequency as an afterthought.
SmartBus routes should be the backbone connecting the metro stations with turn up an go 10min intervals, otherwise people won’t use them, like myself who can’t be arsed waiting 30min til the next one and ends up driving - even when I really don’t want to.
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