V/Line's COVID recovery

V/Line VLocity trains at Southern Cross Station

V/Line's 2024-25 annual report has recently been tabled, so I wanted to take a look at their passenger numbers, how they're faring in the post-COVID world, and the long-term context of passenger growth. 

V/Line train patronage from 2004-05 to 2024-25

Firstly, overall V/Line rail passenger numbers have reached a new high of 25 million in 2024-25. In 2023-24 they just beat their own pre-COVID record from 2018-19, and this year has shown that growth is continuing.

This stands in pretty stark contrast to Metro trains and trams, which - at least last year - were still well below their pre-COVID numbers. Metropolitan buses have recovered better in percentage terms; eyeballing the graph in Daniel's post it looks like they're almost back to pre-COVID levels. In any case, V/Line has clearly exceeded all of them. 

Patronage of individual lines, 2004-05 to 2024-25

Breaking down the passenger numbers by line suggests why that is the case. The Geelong, Ballarat and Seymour lines are well and truly past their pre-COVID levels now, and have been for several years. 

The Bendigo line's growth has been a lot slower, but it did finally beat its pre-COVID record this year. 

The Gippsland line hasn't fared so well lately. Its best years were actually 2011-12 and 2014-15, in which it reached 2.04 million passengers, but by 2018-19 that was down to 1.81 million. This year's result was 1.80 million, so nearly back to 2018-19 but still quite a bit less than 2014-15. 

Perhaps more significantly, it's lost its position as the fourth-busiest line - a title it's held since the Regional Fast Rail upgrades put it ahead of Seymour in 2007-08. Seymour just nosed ahead last year, and extended its lead this year, reaching 2.00 million passengers. 

What's happening here? The main factor is that the Geelong, Ballarat and Seymour lines all serve growth suburbs on Melbourne's fringe, as well as their more traditional regional towns and cities. The Bendigo and Gippsland lines don't, at least not any more - and you can actually see the drop in the Bendigo line numbers when Diggers Rest and Sunbury were brought onto the electric suburban network in November 2012, a drop it still hasn't recovered from. 

That said, the Gippsland line has seen years of significant improvement works - and the rail replacement buses that entails - so that disruption is also probably part of the story. The good news is, that work is done now, and train frequencies have been upgraded to every 40 minutes throughout the day - which makes it extremely useful for travelling within the La Trobe Valley, as well as for trips to Melbourne - so hopefully we should see an uptick in passengers next year. 

Growth-area line patronage, with pre-COVID trend lines

The Geelong, Ballarat and Seymour lines have all recovered, in the sense that they're carrying more passengers than they were in 2018-19. But before COVID hit, they were experiencing significant (and quite consistent) year-on-year growth (or at least Geelong and Ballarat were). Have they caught up to where they "should" be - where they'd have been if COVID never happened? 

As the graph shows, the Seymour line has beaten its pre-COVID trend line - it just barely eclipsed it last year, and kept rising this year. Although the pre-COVID trendline was pretty flat, so this primarily reflects the fact that its suburban-fringe growth spurt happened later than the other lines. 

The Ballarat line hasn't quite caught up yet, although it's very close. I fully expect it to beat the trendline next year. 

The Geelong line, by contrast, is still a long way off - although to be fair, its pre-COVID growth rate was so immense that it set a very high bar. In the three years before COVID it was adding an average of ~1.03 million passengers each year; in the two years since COVID it's added 2.07 and 1.18 million. 

The battle we're seeing here is between fundamentally changed commuter patterns, and the rising tide of population growth. We're past COVID travel restrictions, but Work From Home is now a permanent fixture, and at least some percentage of the population is commuting less - whether working completely from home or in a hybrid arrangement, a few days a week. But it's a smaller slice of a larger pie - Melbourne's fringe suburbs and Victoria's regional cities are both growing, and constantly bringing new commuters to the station - even if only three days a week. 

Commuters in the dawn light at Ballarat Station

It's also interesting to look beyond COVID at the longer term. The passenger growth in the last twenty years has really been astounding. 

In 2004-05, just before the Regional Fast Rail improvements took effect, 6.35 million people travelled on V/Line trains. Last year, the Ballarat line alone carried 6.80 million. Network-wide numbers have quadrupled in that time. 

V/Line's immense passenger growth over the last two decades should be seen as a great success story, and an example of what can happen when you invest in public transport. In fact, it's such a success that many of these services are seeing severe and consistent overcrowding. More investment is clearly needed - but it's equally clear that it will be rewarded.