You might recall I had put in a request to Vicroads to resolve a 13 year old problem with a local bus zone.
The bus zone hours hadn’t been updated since last decade. In 2006 the operating hours of bus route 701 were extended so it runs until after 9pm in the evening, and Sunday service was introduced for the first time.
Vicroads replied and said they had passed the query to PTV.
Then PTV replied and said they had passed the query to City of Glen Eira.
I was waiting for the inevitable next step: for Glen Eira to refer it to Vicroads. But no!
Sometime in the past couple of weeks, they’ve fixed it. Behold, the new signage.
And yet, this raises some concerns.
Someone actually bothered to look up the timetable. The last bus of the night is scheduled for 10:03pm on weeknights, heading to Bentleigh. So they made the bus zone end at 10:15pm.
But they messed up. Bus services actually start just before 6am. The first service of the day is scheduled at 5:59am on weekdays, heading to Oakleigh.
And their research missed that this stop is regularly used for train replacement buses during planned works. When those run, the last service is at about 1am on weeknights, and there are all night services on weekends.
This last occurred in July.
Why not just make the bus zones 24/7? A few hundred metres south, I found this brand new bus zone for recently added bus route 627, a route with similar operating hours, which is 24/7. And this stop isn’t used for train replacement buses.
24/7 bus zones, particularly where people are unlikely to park anyway:
- help remove ambiguity for motorists
- make the signs more readable
- are future-proofed against future bus timetable changes
- cope with train replacements and other circumstances that might see buses needing to stop there at unexpected times.
And why separate AM and PM? I think this just makes the signs harder to scan/read.
In fact, on one of the revised signs, the new Bus Zone hours format is inconsistent with the existing adjacent stopping rules. Ingenious!
Have you looked at the bus zones in your neighbourhood? What do they say? Do they actually cover the bus operating hours?
Do local motorists observe the bus stops? Some bus stops are unsigned, meaning 24/7 parking restrictions apply.
Given these bus zones as now signed don’t actually cover bus operating hours – not even the regular route – I’ll try and send feedback to the City of Glen Eira and see what they do next. (Tried this morning – their web site spat out an error.)
It’s a little depressing that collectively, three authorities had to play Pass The Parcel with this, and when it’s finally got done, it’s been messed up.
If they can’t get the little things right, what hope is there for the big stuff?
3 replies on “The circle is broken. But…”
I don’t know about the bus zones at Oakleigh – have to check, but the one there that most amuses me is the “2 minute dropoff” parking spots on the south side of the station. Motorists seem to think “I might be longer than 2 minutes, better not park there” when waiting for someone from the train, so often they’ll park in the “no standing” patch back alongt he kerb behind a completely empty “2 minute” parking space. Monash council’s parking enforcement seems conspicuous by its absence
There are still some State Route signs on the sides of suburban highways, that I’ve seen here in the south-east, where the route number was phased out and replaced with an A, B or C route number over a decade ago. I recently contacted VicRoads about one of them, and they’ve passed it on to the City of Casey Council.
It really makes you wonder how these kinds of mistakes have been around for so long, yet nobody has noticed them.
Quite what the aversion to the 24hr clock is in this country… unambiguous, spacesaving, less clutter. 0600-2215. Easy