What's the best place for a Eureka Stadium Station?

Eureka Stadium (via Wikipedia)

Eureka Stadium (aka Mars Stadium) in Wendouree has had a lot of upgrades over the last few years, and they've recently started playing AFL matches there. It's great to see this kind of thing happening in Ballarat, but it's clear that in order to run something like an AFL match you need more than just a good oval and a big grandstand - you need a lot of surrounding infrastructure to get all the punters to the ground before the game, and away afterwards.

The second AFL match had much smaller attendance than the first.
Streets up to 1km away from the ground were nonetheless lined with parked cars

It's an absolute nightmare if everyone tries to drive - the roads become clogged and you have to park hundreds of metres away from the ground. So it's really important to allow and encourage people to take public transport to events like this - and if you want people to use PT, you have to make sure it's good. It needs to be fast, convenient, comfortable, and with enough capacity to handle the crowds. It is possible to do this with buses and coaches, but it's undeniable that trains are better on all these counts and would be much more attractive to the average driver. They are, however, a lot more expensive - buses and coaches can run on existing roads, but trains need tracks and stations.

The proposed station site on Creswick Road

The proposal that's been floated by council whenever this topic has arisen, is to build a new station directly across Creswick Road from the stadium, in the reserve adjacent to the Maryborough line. The problem is that there's currently only been one AFL game held at Eureka per year since the upgrades. There may be other non-AFL events that draw decent crowds (given how much was spent upgrading the stadium, you'd certainly hope so) but it would still only be used for big events a few times a year.

It's not worth building a station just for that - if it's going to be a worthwhile investment, the station needs to be used 365 days a year. This means the station needs to be placed where it will work for the stadium just as well as it works for everyday commuters. Council's proposed site would of course allow easy access on game day, but it's very problematic for a general-purpose station for two main reasons - it's on a different branch to Wendouree station, and it's a long way from housing.

If you split the trains between two branches, each only gets half the frequency

"Branching" is a general rule of public transport that Jarrett Walker explains very well. If Wendouree and Eureka stations are on different branches, and you want both to be in regular usage (ie not just for special events) then each will necessarily only have half the frequency of Ballarat station. The only possible ways around this would be for Ballarat trains to keep extending to Wendouree, but to run a shuttle from Ballarat to Eureka; or to have 6-carriage trains that split in half at Ballarat, with one half going to each branch. The former would force passengers to get off one train and onto another at Ballarat, which would be an enormous pain and probably take longer than the train journey itself; the latter is both time-consuming and operationally difficult - it happens for a few long-distance Ararat and Maryborough trains now, but those are only a few times a day. Neither are practical options for short commuter services like this.

If you do have half the trains going to Wendouree and half going to Eureka, both of these stations are half as useful. We don't have to look very far to see the consequences of this - for the first few years after it was built in 2009, Wendouree station only had about half the frequency of Ballarat station. Many trains would simply terminate and originate at Ballarat, with only about half extending to Wendouree. This made Wendouree dramatically less useful to passengers - they only had half as many options for when to leave in the morning, and a coin toss as to whether their evening train would get them back to their car. So many of the people in Ballarat's west simply gave up on using Wendouree, and drove that bit further to Ballarat, further clogging up the roads and carpark. There are one or two exceptions, but nowadays the vast majority of Ballarat-line trains do stop at Wendouree - but if we build a new station on the Maryborough branch, and divert half of Wendouree's trains there, it'll be a return to the bad old days.

There are very few houses within 1km walk of the Creswick Road site

The other reason a station in the proposed location wouldn't be ideal is the small number of houses within walking range. The site is surrounded by industrial precincts, a golf course, a quarry, and of course the Showgrounds/oval itself. The standard planning rule of thumb for how far people will walk to a train station is 1km, and there's only a few pockets of housing within that range.

The pedestrian catchment for this site includes a lot more houses

The better alternative would be to have the station to the south of the ground, roughly where the pedestrian crossing at Lexton Street is. This would still work fine in terms of access to the ground for footy matches - it's only 700m walk to the main entrance on Creswick Road, or 600m approaching from the south, via Greenfield and Henderson Streets. Which is pretty comparable to the distance between Richmond Station and the MCG (~450m to Gate 5, more like 850m to Gate 2). Eminently walkable. It has the obvious advantage of being on the Ararat line in between Ballarat and Wendouree, so it gets the maximum possible frequency with no drawbacks to the other stations. And it would have a much larger catchment of pedestrians who could use it on an everyday basis - not only are there more residential blocks, but some of the closest ones are fairly dense infill developments of two-storey townhouses, which is exactly the kind of development you want near transit hubs. A large section of the Howitt Street shopping precinct is also within walking distance of this site, making it useful for a range of other trips.

New infill townhouses being built on Gregory Street

The counterargument to this location is that it doesn't work as well as a massive park-and-ride - there's slightly less room for parking, and it's not right on an arterial road like the Creswick Road site is. This is arguably true, but to be honest, neither site is really appropriate for a park-and-ride anyway. For one thing, the frequency-splitting problem applies to drivers as much as anyone else; for another, both would clog up the surrounding streets too much. The whole point of park-and-rides is to put them out on the fringe to prevent people from driving into town in the first place. If a park-and-ride is a good idea (and as I'll discuss in a future post, that's a big if) it would need to be at Warrenheip, or somewhere west of Wendouree.

Ballarat is definitely going to need more stations in coming years, as its footprint and population grows. A station we only use a few times a year would be a massive white elephant, but one that we could use every day would be a great investment in turning Ballarat into the city we need it to be.

While we don't have a train station near the ground, what else can be done to improve public transport to matches? Part 2 here