The legacy of Ballarat's tramways

The shape of Ballarat's tram network in 1971

On Sunday 19 September 1971, 50 years ago today, the last ever revenue service on Ballarat's tramways ran from Lydiard Street to Sebastopol. The mayors of Sebastopol and Ballarat ceremoniously piloted it back to the depot, and the transition of Ballarat's public transport network to motor buses was complete, with the tramways entering their preservation era. But the legacy of the tramways echoed through Ballarat for many years after, and can still be heard today. 

Ballarat bus map from 1976 (via SLV)

A map and timetable from 1976, five years after the trams were withdrawn, show the legacy of the tramways on the bus network that replaced them - several new routes have been added, but broadly, where the old trams used to go there is a bus that's replaced them. In fact, even forty years after this in 2016, immediately prior to the government's most recent reforms, you can still see the way the bus network is built on the bones of the old tram routes - particularly looking at Routes 1 and 12, which head up Sturt Street before diverging at Drummond St to head to Wendouree and Sebastopol respectively. Certainly the route numbers didn't change much in that 40-year period. 

Ballarat's bus network in 2016 (via PTV)

A legacy that was still intact in 1976 but was long-gone by 2016 was the quality of the timetables. As I mentioned in one of my first posts, trams generally ran around every 30 minutes till around 11pm, with up to 20-minute frequencies during peaks - though with much poorer service on Sundays. If we look at the 1976 bus timetable, these service levels have largely been retained on the routes that replaced trams. But where there never was a tram, and it's only ever been a bus, the service levels are much poorer - hourly or worse, or even being expressed in terms of return journeys per day. This to some extent mirrors what often happened in Melbourne when trams were replaced with buses - some of these bus routes have much better service levels than comparable routes, even to this day. 

Ballarat bus timetable from 1976 (via SLV)

By contrast, in 2016 when you could still see the bones of the tramways in the bus route structure, the timetables had been scaled back significantly. "Last tram at 11" had been scaled back to "Last bus at 7" - frequencies had been normalised a bit, in the sense of more consistently being 30, 60 or 90 minutes all day rather than "Varied frequencies between 30-80 min" as in 1976, but in broad terms they certainly hadn't improved, and the increased peak frequencies had all but disappeared. The only extra peak services - the only services more frequent than every 30 minutes - were on the Buninyong line, which had two extra services in the peak hour during University terms. 

The exception to this is the Sunday service. In the 1970s trams and their replacement buses generally ran on Sunday afternoons but not Sunday mornings, while new buses generally didn't run on Sundays at all; by 2016 routes generally did have all-day services on Sundays, albeit at low frequencies (something which improved further in 2017). It's worth noting that Sunday services actually got a lot worse than this in the intervening years - when I first started at the University of Ballarat in 2006 there were about 3 or 4 buses out to Buninyong per day, which made catching the train back from Ararat and getting to the Mt Helen Residences on Sunday evenings an impossible task. From memory this improved around 2009ish. 

Incrementally improving buses and increasing density helps justify trams (via CoB)

What of the future of Ballarat's buses and trams? The idea of bringing back the trams is always popular around Ballarat, but it is a hard ask in the short term - the potential ridership is relatively low, as long as Ballarat's population is relatively small and spread out, and as long as the car has such unchallenged mode share. These things can all change over time, though; the "Urban Transit" background paper for the City of Ballarat's Integrated Transport Plan recommends a phased approach whereby bus service levels are incrementally improved along key corridors, urban density is increased on those corridors, the increased population and increased service levels drive increased passenger numbers, which justifies further improvements and further density, in a virtuous cycle that eventually gets us to a point where we can justify investment in trams. Ballarat's population is growing pretty fast; if we make sure it grows in the right way and the right places, this could happen quicker than you might think. 

There's obviously a lot that needs to happen to fix Ballarat's buses, to make them more useful to the people who rely on them and more attractive to those who currently drive, and to kick off that phased approach. But I tell you what - if all we did was run the buses till 11pm like we used to run the trams, that'd be a hell of a start. 

Click here for a post on the PTUA's Connecting Ballarat paper, which talks about the many things with Ballarat's bus network that need fixing. 

Hat tip to PTUA Ballarat Branch member Glenn, who flagged the SLV documents with me a few weeks ago.