New Ballarat bus timetables

A bus heading down Sturt Street

With very substantial changes to the timetables on the Ballarat rail line introduced at the end of January, the Department of Transport has revamped the timetables for the Ballarat bus network, and launched them last weekend. Let's take a look at what this means. 

The Ballarat line used to have hourly trains during the day, and roughly half-hourly (but random) trains during the peaks; local Ballarat buses would run to either an hourly or half-hourly frequency depending on the route, so it was relatively easy to harmonise the bus times with the train times. With the new train timetables shifting to a 20 minute peak/40 minute off-peak service, this harmony with the 30/60 minute buses has been broken. Despite being warned for years that this would happen, the government has not funded any increase to the frequencies of the buses to match that of the trains, so they all still run at the same 30- or 60-minute frequencies they did before. All the Department could really do was fiddle with the timings of the existing buses rather than align the timetables properly. 

It looks like all the routes have at least had a tweak, though with frequencies that don't harmonise this seems to have been a mixed bag. A change to better align with one train almost by definition throws out the alignment with the next, so there's winners and losers and it all kind of ends up being much of a muchness if you're trying to catch a train - probably worse than it was last year, pre-train increase, but not much different to how it was last month. 

Routes 21 & 22 both serve Mt Helen half-hourly on weekdays

But the other big destination served by the buses is the Mount Helen precinct, home to both the University and the Tech Park. It's no coincidence that this part of town gets two routes instead of one, nor that those two routes are among the best-patronised in the city - lots of staff and students heading to these locations take the bus. So making sure the timetable works for this group of people is quite important - at least as important as aligning with the trains. So let's take a closer look at Route 21, the direct route to this precinct. 

Outbound, it's still fine. Buses arrive at the University at clockface times throughout the day - 17 and 47 minutes past every hour. This means if you have a class that starts at 10:30, you can take the bus that arrives at 10:17, and have a bit of time to walk across campus to the lecture theatre; or if you're starting work at 9am, you can catch the bus that arrives at 8:47 and do the same. All good. And of course, destinations in the Tech Park are served a few minutes either side of this so they're fine too. 

But inbound, not so much. Buses are scheduled to leave the Uni at exactly 3pm, exactly 3:30pm, and so on. If your class finishes right on 3:30, you'll have a mad dash to the bus stop to catch it in time, or else you'll be waiting half an hour for your bus. This is extremely inconvenient for those who rely on the buses - and for those who could potentially drive, enough to force them to do so. And if you work at the Uni and you knock off at 5pm, there's an extra special middle finger in the timetable for you, because that one leaves a minute earlier than the clockface - it leaves at 4:59. 

Any timetable is always a tradeoff between competing goals, so what do the people who live along Route 21 get for this? Inbound in the morning peak, people catching the morning trains gain or lose a couple of minutes, depending on which one they're catching. During the middle of the day, the cycle repeats every two hours, and in that time, it connects substantially better with one train, marginally better with another, and substantially worse with the third. Counterpeak? Much the same. 

A bus at Ballarat Station

The post 6pm buses lose the clockface timings (as was previously the case) and by shuffling these around a bit they've made the last outbound bus leave Ballarat Station at 8:04pm, instead of 7:38pm like it used to. 

"Hmm," I thought, as I was perusing the timetables while researching this post, "maybe that will mean it allows you to catch a later train home from Melbourne? That would admittedly be a big win!" 

But no. If you catch the 6:19pm train home from Southern Cross, you can still get a bus home - though you'll now have a 31 minute wait for it, instead of a 5 minute wait like you used to. But if you catch the next train, the 6:48pm, there's still no bus to get you home at the end. The train gets in at 8:11, seven minutes after the last bus. 

On the one hand I don't want to be too harsh on the timetablers - with frequencies that inherently, mathematically, do not harmonise, trying to get them to harmonise was something of a fool's errand. There was never any real chance of them producing a magical timetable that would really mesh well with the trains - the best they could've hoped for is a very marginal net improvement. 

But as it's turned out, they don't seem to have made any real net improvement for train passengers, and have actively made things worse for a lot of people who use these buses to get to work and study every day. They should know by now that you can't just focus on the trains and ignore everything else - you need to take these sorts of local factors into account when you redo a timetable. Given that they did basically the same thing with the Regional Rail Link timetable change in 2015, and this was literally the thing that led me to create the Ballarat Branch of the PTUA the next year, it's frustrating to say the least. 

The old Route 10 bus whose timetable was ruined by the 2015 RRL update

As I've argued before, the Ballarat bus network needs an increase in frequencies as soon as can be practically implemented - a more comprehensive review (ie changing the route paths) would take longer, but an increase in frequencies could happen very quickly. At a bare minimum, upgrading the half-hourly routes to 20 minutes and the hourly routes to 40 minutes would allow them to align with the trains, and would make it much more likely that people travelling from other locations would have a short wait till their next bus - even without explicit coordination. 

But in the meantime, it's clear that this timetable rejig was a net loss for passengers, and it should be changed back to what it was last month while a more permanent solution is devised. The buses may have been quite empty for the last twelve months, but with more and more people returning to in-person work and study in the coming weeks, they will need the buses they rely on once again.