While 660 new bus services have been introduced across Melbourne’s Western suburbs to support the recent boost of V-Line train services, The Sustainable Cities collective is calling for clarification of how these extra services will be allocated.
The collective says this information is critical in determining the popularity of those services and their potential impacts on residents.
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Reliability, speed and frequency are essential for making public transport easy and attractive to use. While having bus services align with train schedules is a step in the right direction for creating a better bus network, the collective says unreliable, circuitous and infrequent services have undermined buses from becoming an attractive choice for residents in the past.
They suggest that success will be achieved by running them in a grid-like network with frequent and reliable services.
“Western suburbs residents can’t afford further delay on enjoying the ease of accessing school, work, shops or essential services with reliable and efficient bus services,” Sustainable Cities spokesperson Caleb Li says.
“It is now time for the government to demonstrate its commitment on reforming its broken bus network and delivering better bus services as addressed in the Victoria Bus Plan.
“Running bus services that cannot address residents’ needs is simply a waste of public resources. Apart from adding more bus services, what the government should do is to uphold transparency on the distribution of those new services and run them in a way that meets residents’ needs.”
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