Or lambast them for taking four years and spending thousands to reach a reasonably foreseeable position, thus denying the community an improved service that could have started two years ago?
If you, like the premier who commissioned the Silver review, want a sharp cost-effective state government focused on delivering good services then the answer must be both.
Especially when it is demonstrated that labyrinthine internal processes slow the rate of needed bus service reform to just one-ninth per capita of current Australian best practice.
Keep reading for the fascinating fable of how a fortuitously funded fad fostered a fools errand that flummoxed functionaries before finding a fair finish.
Evolution of Greensborough (and Melbourne) bus reform
Momentum for reform builds
My 2019 item Buses for people not paddocks around Greensborough identified many complex and infrequent bus routes in Melbourne's outer north east. Compared to other areas the north-east had a lot of poorly used or overlapping bus routes with significant scope for reform.
In 2020 the Victorian Transport Action Group produced Networking The North - an agenda for bus reform in Melbourne's northern suburbs. There was significant local government interest in the potential for bus reform to improve services.
Victoria's Bus Plan came out in 2021. While short on specifics bus network reform was stated as a major priority. There was to be a Bus Reform Implementation Plan and presumably local network reviews.
Greensborough FlexiRide wins funding
The 2022 Victorian state budget's Service Delivery paper included the line: "network changes to deliver Flexiride services in Greensborough and St Helena". My warning at the time was:
Greensborough and St Helena have some poorly used local routes so attention in this area is welcome. However the proposed FlexiRide needs to be done in conjunction with regular route reform if it is not to be horrendously inefficient.
However the then minister and MPs were more upbeat about FlexiRide as per this release.
I looked at Greensborough buses in more detail in July 2022 (two months after the May budget). I presented a network planning framework, checked patronage productivity by route and listed some network reform possibilities. I also firmed my position on FlexiRide, saying it was an expensive last resort, to be done only after other options had been exhausted. My words below:
The Department of Transport is slowly getting better. It is now less likely to introduce a FlexiRide bus without reforms to fixed routes than it did when Rowville's started. It still has a way to go in that frequent and local buses should be reviewed and reformed first. A flexible route (with its high cost per passenger) should only be introduced after other options are proved unsuitable. That is if you want to maximise benefit per dollar spent (which should be an important DoT and public policy aim).
For the Department though it was still FlexiRide first as per the budget funding. And the state election was just months away so it was important for the government to display evidence of activity. So DoT set up a FlexiRide Greensborough website and started public consultation on 27 September 2022. This included market research (which would have been outsourced to consultants, costing $$$).
Bus reviews announced
Slightly preceding the Greensborough FlexiRide consultation was the announcement of major bus network reviews for Melbourne's north, north-east and Mildura on 14 September 2022. It drew on the Bus Plan, with expectations raised of a higher frequency and better connected bus network. There was significant expenditure on public consultation, presumably with the hope that this would gauge and even manufacture consent for wider spaced but more frequent, direct (and hopefully more productive) bus routes.
At this time DoT/DTP were playing leap-frog with Infrastructure Victoria, which was also working on bus reform (with $250k spent on modelling alone). Except for some IV silliness over disintegrated bus fares (which their latest work creditably de-emphasises), their bus reform agendas are mostly consistent. It's just that IV is bolder, more specific, does more media but is less listened to by government. Whereas DoT is meeker, vaguer, only does reactive media from anonymous spokespeople but is more likely to be heeded by government. Although it is still a sort of 'B-team' relative to the more glamorous 'A-team' comprising the delivery agencies for favoured major infrastructure projects.
FlexiRide competes for attention
About the only new and flashy thing DoT had was FlexiRide. Arguably a lazy way out, it was faster than fixed routes to implement as it bypassed (rather than improved) the current constipated processes for making timetables, entering data and sticking up bus stop poles. FlexiRide was also consistent with the 'Mobility As A Service' dogma then titillating the transport-technocrat class. Wiser minds (including some in the department) knew all along that MAAS was just techbros making apps to extract fare revenue without running a single service.
Still all momentum was with the FlexiRide fiends, with Tarneit's starting in October 2022. Unable to meet a growth area's demand, it maxed out within two months, forcing long walks, long waits and missed connections. And, whereas a maxed out regular bus route demonstrates that many are finding it useful, with the solution being to add more trips, this wasn't the case with FlexiRide, which maxed out at a low productivity (and thus high cost per passenger). Thus, even as the Department was collating survey responses from Greensborough, the emerging evidence from Tarneit was of FlexiRide being a meretricious money-sapping miscarriage.
Bus reform stalls
Pre-election hubris gave way to a post-election slump as the state's public finances took a turn for the worse due to rising interest payments and infrastructure build cost blowouts. The 2022 result returned the Labor government with more seats despite sharp primary vote falls in diverse working class areas, often with poor bus services.
Then DTP Secretary Paul Younis was unable to win funding for Bus Plan service reform in either the post-election 2023 or 2024 state budgets. That effectively stalled the Bus Reform Implementation Plan and promised bus reviews, with the Secretary using unsound counting methods to claim high activity on bus reform to PAEC.
Evidence drives FlexiRide rethink
There was still money earmarked for Greensborough FlexiRide (from the 2022 budget) but in that time FlexiRide's standing had declined from diamond to dud. The less bus planning expertise someone had the more likely they were to recommend FlexiRide. For a time the (then) minister's office was heeding advice from the wrong people, with this increasingly obvious in Tarneit and Melton (which also now had a FlexiRide).
The weight of evidence (rightly) shifted the agenda from expanding FlexiRide to replacing it with new or upgraded fixed routes. DTP succeeded in winning GAIC funding for growth area bus upgrades, including the replacement of Tarneit North FlexiRide with more reliable and higher capacity fixed routes.
Today's 'official line' now approximates my July 2022 quote above. Though it's more fairly a reversion than a conversion. Experienced parts of the Department knew that FlexiRide like services were doomed to fail years if not decades earlier; passing fads in techbro-captured consultancies or ministerial offices cannot over-ride efficient geometry. It's just that for a while the government stopped listening to parts of the department with the most expertise, with the backgrounds of the then Secretary and his deputy secretaries not helping,
Bus reform back, but a bridge too far?
If FlexiRide was one pole of the coverage-capacity continuum, what about the other? The most recent official vision for buses appeared in Plan for Victoria, released in February 2025. It proposed a bus coverage standard of 800 metres which for a hypothetical grid network means routes 1600 metres apart.
The opposite extreme to FlexiRide, this concept is nearly as fanciful. As warned last month, such a sparse network will fail politically, could sabotage future attempts at bus network reform and may even kill the minister's political career (as infamously happened in South Australia in 2020).
A blanket application of the 800 metre rule without mitigations, such as retaining coverage-style fixed routes in catchments that need them, would represent overshoot in the opposite direction to FlexiRide. But it risks giving the same results, ie much time spent but little gained (unless you are a market research consultant).
Thinking big but moving slowly?
To summarise, there's been a lot of messing around with bus reform policy, including wasted effort on what doesn't work or is too extreme to fly politically. Fixed route reform, as alluded to (without detail) in the Bus Plan got overtaken by the FlexiRide fad. Value for money took a back seat with the least productive approach to carrying passengers having the highest chance of getting funding.
The penny on that has not only dropped but also apparently now disappeared. The (highly productive) 800 bus upgrade was almost alone in getting budget funding in 2024. Greensborough luckily had its bus upgrade budgeted in 2022 so survived.
Its main penalty was the years of service foregone while, having established that FlexiRide was a lemon, DTP was working out how else to spend the money. How long was this delay? From the May 2022 budget to late 2025 implementation is 3.5 years or 42 months. That becomes 4 to 4.5 years if you include the department's pre-budget Business Case work. Level crossing removals including major capital works and station rebuilds have been done in much less time. As have other bus upgrades, including the Route 800 boost, which was up and running only 7 months after being budgeted.
What will be upgraded?
The March 2025 media release says that we'll get improvements on Routes 513, 514 and 517. The first two will get better weekend service while the 517 will get better weekday service from late 2025. Better coordination with trains is also proposed.
What is likely to change from the clues given above?
Routes 513 and 514 each operate only every 80 minutes on weekends, putting them below minimum service standards on their unique portions (east of Rosanna). A 'quick and dirty' upgrade would get them up to the 60 minutes minimum service standard, enabling a combined 30 minute weekend frequency on the overlap. While an improvement over the current 40 minutes combined, it does not mesh well with trains (typically every 20 or 40 minutes on weekend days).
A dearer option would get them up to every 40 minutes each, similar to the weekday service. This would provide for a good (by Melbourne standards) 20 minute weekend frequency on Bell St, a major road. Harmonisation with trains would also be possible, though, because so many train lines are crossed and these operate at either 20 or 40 minutes on weekend days, exact connections can't be guaranteed.
Both Route 513/514 options have legibility and cost-effectiveness implications that, as discussed later, cannot be resolved without network reform.
Route 517 is one of many routes in the Epping - Reservoir - Greensborough area that operate about every 24 minutes on weekdays, thus failing to evenly connect with trains every 20 minutes. This route is slated for a weekday upgrade, in which case an improvement from every 25 to 20 minutes would seem sensible. That upgrade would add Route 517 to the weekday 'Useful Network' with a clockface timetable that meshes evenly with trains. There will also be longer operating hours.
Timetables will improve but are any route changes planned? The media release says this:
Feedback through consultation on the proposed FlexRide Greensborough identified a strong community preference instead for improving existing fixed route services in and around Greensborough, St Helena and Eltham North.
That seems to rule out route changes. Anticipating the introduction of FlexiRide, the consultation didn't test various network reform ideas for fixed routes. But it did ask about the usage of existing routes 343, 381, 385, 518, 580, 901 or 902. 517 was the most common response.
Opportunity costs
Upgrading timetables without reforming routes is safer politically but means that less overall benefit is possible for a given budget.
This is particularly in areas like Greensborough/Eltham/Hurstbridge where many routes either:
(a) inefficiently overlap one another and/or
(b) have low patronage productivity.
The latter is due to a tendency to layer new routes over unchanged older routes without fixing problems like large coverage gaps (eg Bolton St), weak termini (517 & 518), complex unidirectional loops (again 517 & 518), poor directness (eg 582) or timetables that don't harmonise with trains (eg 580).
Examples of routes that got layered on the existing network without significant reform in the last 15 years include the 343 and the 901 and 902 SmartBuses. These have 15 to 20 minute weekday frequencies so are relatively service intensive. The 381 and 385 are also relatively new and have low productivity.
Not reforming routes like these can mean that network issues can remain unfixed for decades. At least some of them could have been resolved by now if consultation and planning had been appropriately directed rather than relying on a doomed FlexiRide to fix everything. And, given the choice of the north and north-east for the first Bus Plan reviews, substantial planning work should already have been done.
It would thus might be a good idea to consider the 513, 514 and 517 timetable upgrades as just a Stage One, with route reforms to follow to efficiently reap even bigger benefits. I discussed how Perth approaches this here.
Network reform possibilities
Eight possibilities for network reform were discussed here. Some have significant interactions between routes. That is if you change one route then others might need reform to avoid coverage gaps or duplication.
Simpler options might involve splitting Route 517 at Greensborough so that the portion to Northland operates every 20 minutes but portions north of Greensborough are every 40 minutes with coordination with every second train. That may also permit simpler two-way operation such that streets don't necessarily lose buses even if frequency is reduced. If a single seat ride to Northland is still required it may be possible to have a through-routing arrangement where an arriving route consistently forms a departing 517.
Bell Street deserves the sort of legibility that can only come from reverting to a consolidated route such as operated before half the Route 513 trips became 514. The rationale for that was due to branching in the quieter eastern part of the route. However routing all trips to Greensborough and having other routes for Eltham (noting significant overlaps) may enable this without recreating the confusion of the old 513.
Thought also needs to be given to the distribution of service when considering reform. Areas like Thomastown, Lalor and Greensborough have better demographics for all week frequent service than the likes of St Helena, Diamond Creek or Hurstbridge. It should also be noted that the 517 isn't the only route in the area with unharmonised timetables; the 566 and 580 stand out due to that and their convoluted routes that need reform.
Conclusions
The government has been wise to dump Greensborough's FlexiRide given its failure elsewhere.
Channelling the resources earmarked for it into frequency upgrades on regular routes next month is also welcome.
However the years of time and effort that it has wasted to reach this point must be remembered as a salutary lesson for the future. All because a bad concept was embraced and then stuck to for too long.
Also, if the government wants to maximise community benefit of its investment in Greensborough area buses it must commence route reform to affordably fix the area's large number of duplicative poorly used routes, weak termini, indirect service and coverage gaps where there should be service but isn't.
See other Timetable Tuesday items here
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