More services for western Victoria

This weekend will see upgrades on trains and buses across a lot of western Victoria, so a quick look at what they'll mean. 

Firstly, the Ballarat line will go from hourly to every 40 minutes on weekends - which is great. As discussed in a previous post, this means Ballarat passengers will have the same frequency on weekends as weekdays, but without the supplementary Melton services.

This will mean a very welcome reduction in wait times, so that aspect is great. 

It will also mean some improvement in the overcrowding we currently see between the city and Melton - but it's not yet clear whether this will be enough to solve the problem. Still, a really good step forward. 

Overcrowding on a Ballarat Line train

Ostensibly to line up with this change, Ballarat's weekend buses will be increasing in frequency. Routes 11, 21, and 22, which currently run every 30 minutes on Saturdays, will run every 20 minutes; every other route, which currently runs every 60 minutes on Saturdays, will shift to every 40 minutes. Sunday timetables are all over the shop, and will remain so; some go from 90 to 80, some go from 60 to 40, and a few go from 240 to 200 (ie from four hours between buses to about 3.5).

The choice of which routes get the best timetables is a bit odd, but that's a discussion for another post; the new timetables don't tinker with these settings, just provide a general uplift, so it's not surprising these issues aren't corrected.

It's also worth noting, the Ballarat line has had 40 minute frequencies on weekdays for years, and calls to line up the weekday buses to 20 and 40 minute frequencies have so far been ignored. It's great that they've done the right thing with the weekend timetables, but we now find ourselves in the rare and bizarre situation where the weekend timetables are, on most routes, better than the weekday timetables! 

A Route 30 bus on Sturt Street, Ballarat

The specific timings are worth a closer look, though. As I said, the increases in bus frequency are ostensibly to line up with the increase in train frequency; trains are going from every 60 minutes to every 40 minutes, so the buses should too, in order to provide a good connection between your bus to the station and your train. But the reality is not quite so neat. 

If we want to take Route 21 into the station and then take the train to Melbourne on a Saturday morning, it's actually worked out quite well. The first bus of the day gets into Ballarat Station at 0757, and there's a train leaving at 0804. 7 minutes is a pretty good amount of time to allow for the walk from the bus stop to the platform, and to allow for the bus being a minute or two late, so this is a great connection.

The next train at 0843 connects well with the 0838 bus, and this pattern repeats until mid-afternoon, when there is a 30-minute gap between buses rather than the usual 20 minutes. This throws the whole pattern off, so for example a bus arrives at 1608, four minutes too late for the 1604 train, and every subsequent bus also arrives four minutes late - which means you'd need to take the bus before it, and arrive 16 minutes early.

This is roughly the point where your average person will say "screw this, I'll just drive". 

If we want to arrive on the train and take Route 21 out into the suburbs - whether to go home, or, for example, to visit Sovereign Hill - we find essentially the reverse situation. In the morning, the buses leave 1 minute before the train pulls in, so you've got a 19 minute wait till the next one. But then it flips - the 1441 arrival has a bus at 1450, and this kind of good connection is repeated until the last bus of the day at 2008. 

You get the impression some effort has been put in place to coordinate the timetables to make seamless connections for Ballaratians doing a day trip to Melbourne, heading off in the morning and returning in the evening. 

Why not coordinate all trips - all day in both directions - to make things easier for, say, Melburnians doing a day trip to Ballarat, or Ballaratians heading to Melbourne for an evening event? It's not entirely clear to me. 

The fact that there is an overlap of about 90 minutes in the mid-afternoon when you can get a good connection in both directions suggests to me that it is possible, albeit maybe with costs that need to be passed on in some way. 

Frankly, if it meant losing our last bus of the evening, in exchange for making all the buses line up with the trains, I'd make that tradeoff - at least in the short term. 

It is worth saying - it's not all about connecting to the trains. The vast majority of trips on Ballarat's bus network are not people taking the train, they're people just getting around Ballarat; the increased frequencies will be a fantastic improvement for those people, reducing their waiting times and getting them where they need to go quicker. I don't want to undersell that - particularly since these bus upgrades weren't an election commitment like the train improvements were. But it is frustrating to come so close to best practice, and fall at the last hurdle. 

A VLocity train in the dock platform at Ararat Station

The Ararat Line will also see some new weekend services. Currently, there are three trains per day in each direction, supplemented by three coaches on Saturdays and four on Sundays (which connect with trains at Ballarat). This will increase to five trains per day, plus the coaches - roughly the same as the weekday frequency.

The big difference is a new late-night train from Melbourne, which leaves at 2115 and gets in at 2342. This is a smart move that will allow people from Beaufort and Ararat to go to twilight footy matches and other early-evening events, so I suspect it will prove popular. 

The other extra service gets thrown into the middle of the day, with all the existing trains adjusted, turning what was a reasonably consistent service every 2 or 3 hours into a slightly weird mixture of gaps ranging from just 40 minutes up to 3 hours 40. Still, it should give people more options for when to travel, so it's a positive step.

Again the focus seems to have been people travelling to Melbourne in the morning and back in the evening, not the other direction. A long-term bugbear of mine is that the last train leaving Ararat on weekends is at 1617 (or 1616 on the new timetable). This means, for example, when I visit my Dad in Ararat, I can't hang around for dinner - I have to leave basically in the middle of the afternoon.

This has been an issue since I was a uni student, living in Ballarat during the week and Ararat on weekends, and I'm sure it affects a bunch of other people - whether they're visiting family and friends or just general tourists, who have to cut their day or weekend trip short. 

This would be relatively low-hanging fruit - there should be no issues with track space at that time of the evening - so hopefully an after-dinner train can be added as a future upgrade. 

A VLocity train approaching Ararat, with Mt Langi-Ghiran in the background

There's always more to do, but the train improvements are definitely a big positive. Good on the government for delivering on this commitment. 

The bus timetable changes, while in many ways an unexpected bonus, are at the same time quite frustrating. It cannot be beyond the realms of possibility to get these timetables to line up all day, and there really needs to be some transparency and accountability for why they don't - or we will probably keep seeing these issues.