New accessible bus stops along Main Road

VicTrack recently installed a bunch of new bus shelters along the Main Rd/Geelong Rd corridor in Ballarat, which I think deserve a bit of attention. New shelters and surrounding works have been installed at Callow Street, Elsworth Street, Kinnersley Avenue, Milverton Lane, Glenvale Road, Shire Avenue, Gear Avenue, Elizabeth Street, Barkly Street, and the Midland Highway. All of these were existing stops along the route, but some were just poles in the grass, some had shelters but no paths leading to them, and so on. All needed an upgrade.

Locations of the stops

VicTrack are the government's manager of rail land and infrastructure, and this corridor is miles away from a railway line, so why are they the ones building them? Well, it's funded as part of the Road and Rail Minor Works Program, which also included increased carparks at Wendouree station, so I guess it just made sense to package them together.

Anyway - compared with most bus stops, they're pretty good kit. They all have solar panels on their roofs to power a light within the shelter, so they're a bit more inviting if you're waiting for a bus at night.

The shelters have a little solar panel which powers a light

Where there's a footpath available, they have a short path linking the concrete pad to the footpath, so there's continuity for those walking up - and particularly for those in wheelchairs or mobility scooters, for whom a break in the path would be especially onerous.

The Shire Avenue stop now has a connection to the shared use path

Where there's a significant change of elevation between the path and the bus stop (which is pretty common along Main Road) they've installed some quite serious ramps. This is obviously very important for wheelchair users, but it's extremely handy for everyone - some of the embankments were so steep, and prone to slippage, that they used to be a challenge even for the ambulant.

The stops at Glenvale Rd and Moss Ave have quite substantial ramps

They aren't perfect, of course - the basic size and shape of the shelter itself is the same as the previous model, and they don't provide a ton of protection when it's windy. Some would argue that they're oriented the wrong way - with the exception of the Callow Street stop, they all have the open side facing the road, whereas some say they should face the north/east (because prevailing weather most commonly comes from the south/west), with the clear panels still allowing people to see when the bus is approaching. And of course, even where the bus stops themselves are great, sometimes the surrounding infrastructure isn't there to support it - the Kinnersley Avenue stop has a nice concrete pad, but no footpath leading up to it. Which is obviously a long-standing issue that doesn't directly relate to this project.

Still - all-in-all, this is very high-quality bus infrastructure, which isn't something you see every day.

Proposed "Designated Areas of Convenience Living" in the Ballarat Strategy

These bus stops fall along one of the City of Ballarat's "Designated Areas of Convenience Living" corridors, identified in their 2015 Ballarat Strategy - basically, places within 200m of high-quality public transport. The idea is that public transport along these corridors will get a lot better, the housing will increase in density, and the people who live in these corridors will own fewer cars, walk and cycle more, and use public transport more. (Partly for this reason, it's also the corridor of one of the SmartBus routes proposed in Connecting Ballarat). There are a lot of things that need to go right for this vision to be realised, and the biggest of them is unquestionably the quality of the public transport service itself - it needs to be fast, direct, frequent and for a long span of hours, if it's really going to compete with the car.

But stuff like this matters too. Not only is it massively important that the network is accessible for wheelchair users and others who have difficulty walking - decent infrastructure like this is important if we want those who could drive to consider the bus a serious option. The journey to, and the wait at, the bus stop should be as frictionless as possible if we want to encourage people to use them - the last thing we want is for potential passengers to be turned off by the need to slop through the mud, or stand in the driving rain waiting for the bus to arrive.

When these were installed, the only coverage it got in the local media was negative, because the contractors left shrapnel all over the roads. By contrast, the story of the new carparks at Wendouree Station - the other main bit of this funding package - has been followed by local media for months. But the government really deserves a lot of praise for funding these improvements - it's not hugely expensive or glamorous, but it is hugely important. Let's hope whoever wins in November can roll this out to more stops around Ballarat, to fill out the key corridors and remove one more barrier to getting more people on the buses.