New bus interchange and services for Ballarat

Construction on the bus interchange (midground) and staff car park (foreground)

Last Friday, PTV announced that as of 19 December, Ballarat buses would start using the new bus interchange at the railway station, and that Ballarat's bus routes would start running a bunch of additional services. So what does this mean for the travelling public? 

The bus interchange has had many years of delays, and the last time I'd been by the station precinct there wasn't any noticeable progress, so I was a bit surprised that it would be opening in mid-December - after all those delays getting started (and apparently doing preparatory works, relocating services, etc) it seems to have sprung up practically overnight. 

When it comes to the services, obviously this isn't the comprehensive network review we've been pushing for. There are minor tweaks to timings throughout the day, generally just a minute or two, but the route structure stays squiggly, the end-to-end journey times stay padded out, and the base frequencies (mostly) don't change. Mostly, extra services are added to the end of the timetable to extend the hours of operation - most of the routes get one or two extra evening services on weekdays and Saturdays, and a few routes get three extra services. 

This is very welcome, because the lack of evening services is one of the key problems that's been holding back patronage. It was very often the case that you could get from the suburbs into central Ballarat for an evening event - dinner, drinks, movie, theatre, etc - but you wouldn't be able to get home at the end. With these new services, most routes' last ride out is just after 8.20pm - so clearly there's still a long way to go, if you want to see a show that finishes after 10pm, but you can at least have a meal and a few postprandial bevs before you have to say goodnight. 

Late night buses are hard to come by in Ballarat (via jayessaitch)

To some extent, it also helps with connections to the evening trains. Previously, many weekday peak or peak-shoulder trains didn't have a bus connection on all routes. Now, on the vast majority of routes, you can get any evening train up to and including the 6.48pm from Southern Cross and have a connection back to your suburb when you arrive in Ballarat - and on many routes you can go as late as the 7.28pm. 

However, it's worth noting that the waiting time between the train and the bus is a very mixed bag, both for these new later services and the existing services between 5-7pm; there will be a bus, so if you're relying on PT you won't be stranded, but waits of 20+ minutes aren't uncommon and in several cases the wait is 40+ minutes. 

Nobody who has a car and could choose to park at the station will take the bus with connections that poor, so if we want to attract rail commuters out of their cars, and take pressure off the station carparks, the specific timings need a lot of improvement. Which should broadly be achievable - most of the post-5pm buses are at fairly random times, not clockface times, so you'd expect juggling them around to improve some of these connections should be possible. 

In addition to the various evening services, Route 24 to Sebastopol has also received a bunch of extra services between 9am and 3pm, lifting it from an hourly to a half-hourly service in that time period. This uplift is great to see, and will mean a dramatically more usable service for the people who rely on it to get around during the day. 

Unfortunately one key issue with this route is unresolved; in the morning peak, buses arrive at the station at 8.17am and 9.17am, meaning that anyone working in central Ballarat and starting at 9am doesn't have a convenient bus available - slotting in an extra bus that arrived at 8.47 should probably have been a high priority, but I'm guessing the extra services are making use of school buses and/or drivers who previously sat idle during the day. This would be low-hanging fruit, whereas the morning peak would be the hardest and most expensive time to add a bus - so perhaps understandable, at least in the short term. 

Similarly, Route 20 to Canadian generally has an hourly frequency but it has a 90-minute hole in the timetable around 3pm, presumably where it was felt the school run was a better use of the resources. The new timetable fixes this hole, adding an extra return trip mid-afternoon which evens up the frequencies. 

Lastly, it's not an extra service, but Route 21 Buninyong's first service of a Saturday morning has been shifted 30 minutes earlier - this appears to be because it allows passengers to connect with the 8.20am train to Melbourne, which wasn't previously possible. 

Unfortunately no extra services have been added to any routes on Sundays, which started out with a substantially worse service than the other days of the week. If we're dividing up a very small amount of funding, I can't say I disagree with prioritising the other six days of the week, but it's emblematic of the larger issue that we shouldn't have to be dividing scraps; our buses should receive enough funding for high-quality services every day. 

All in all, this was a pleasant surprise, and I'm always glad to see any extra service improvements. But none of this changes the need for fundamental reform of Ballarat's bus network, which the government has repeatedly indicated they would do once the interchange was finished - and we need to really hold them to account on this, as we head into an election year.