Last weekend was the the Labour Day long weekend, with the Moomba festival in central Melbourne, and huge crowds in part thanks to warm weather.
The City of Melbourne said crowd numbers across the event were expected to break records, with up to 1.3 million people in attendance.
But Moomba wasn’t the only event in town last weekend.
Other events in central Melbourne on Saturday 8th March included:
- Billie Eilish at Rod Laver (about 14000 people)
- A-League at AAMI Park (attendance 8206)
- New Order at Sidney Myer Music Bowl (capacity 12000)
- Cruel Sea and others at a concert in the Royal Botanic Gardens
- Any number of smaller concerts and events were on around the CBD, including at The Forum and Crown
On this Saturday, there were no extra public transport services scheduled, aside from five extra trains around 10pm after the A-League match. Those started from Richmond, so were unable to provide any extra relief for other events – despite official claims of “plenty of tram, train and bus options”.
(Just 2 Likes? Why on earth are they posting this info to Twitter and nowhere else? Are they obvious to the exodus?)
The problem of no extra public transport services on a busy Saturday night? Regular evening train timetables are insufficient, with trains only every half hour on most lines (all but three), including the really busy lines like Cranbourne/Pakenham.
It’s an issue of both capacity and waiting time. You want everyone to fit on board, but you also want them not to have to wait 30 minutes for a train home after a big night out. Treat people like that too many times and they’ll stop using your service, and drive instead.
You won’t be surprised to hear that many trains were packed. One concert-goer noted queues just to enter Flinders Street station, and said it was as busy as peak hour.
How busy: Princes Bridge
So how busy was the City on Saturday?
City of Melbourne’s pedestrian counter system provides good data on the number of people passing fixed positions around the CBD.
Looking at the Princes Bridge sensor, which is just south of Flinders Street station on the busier western side of the bridge, we can see that from about 10am, average Saturdays (orange line) are busier than average Thursdays (blue line), and that Saturday 8th March specifically (red line) was far busier still.
Work days being quieter than Saturdays on Princes Bridge isn’t unexpected given the vast majority of workplaces near the station are in the opposite direction to this sensor.
Saturday 8th March had a big spike in the 9-10pm hour, with many Moomba activities finishing at 9pm, and the nightly fireworks ending a few minutes later.
But even after that, with the concerts ending after 10pm, there were more people walking past until midnight than in the busiest hour on an average Thursday or Saturday.
How busy: CBD
If we add up sensor readings from all over the CBD, we can see how busy the rest of central Melbourne was.
Note: this is not measuring the number of people. Not everybody walked past a sensor each hour, and conversely some people would have walked past more than one sensor. We’ll just use this to compare the relative pedestrian traffic at the times shown.
The average Thursday (blue line) has a peak during the morning commute 8-9am, another at lunchtime, and a third in the evening peak 5-6pm.
The average Saturday (orange line) is smoother and less spiky than a Thursday, but busier after 7pm.
On Saturday 8th (red line) the CBD was busier than the average Thursday or Saturday after 1pm, except the Thursday commuter peak.
In fact the commuter peak at Thursday 5-6pm is the busiest single hour in the CBD all week. Let’s focus on that, and compare it to Saturday 8th March.
- Saturday the 8th, 7-8pm was as busy as the Thursday evening peak.
- In the hour of 10-11pm, when many of the concerts were finishing up, it was about 73% as busy as Thursday evening peak.
- Even on the average Saturday, 10-11pm is about 44% of Thursday 5pm-6pm. Obviously quieter than the 8th, but still pretty busy.
How many trains?
So my question is: if Melbourne is increasingly busy on weekends and in the evenings, is public transport provision keeping up?
If the CBD is at its busiest on Thursdays 5-6pm, when quite rightly the train service frequency also peaks with frequent service on most lines, how do Saturday services stack up?
The answer is not very well.
Let’s look at two busy lines: the Craigieburn line to the north, and the longer Cranbourne/Pakenham line to the southeast.
If we treat Thursday 5-6pm as the benchmark in terms of train services per pedestrian movements, here’s how each hour looks on the average Saturday.
Overnight and early morning looks like over-supply, but remember this is only measuring capacity. You need a minimum service frequency to provide a service that anybody can use. I’ve cropped the top of the scale so we can focus on mid-late morning, afternoon and evening.
From 9am for the rest of the average Saturday, train services on these two lines fall below the benchmark, in other words total capacity is low compared to peak hours, relative to the number of people moving in and around the CBD.
Not that everybody’s making a trip that could be on a train – particularly in daytime, many people would be walking around exploring, shopping, and so on.
From 7pm – when you’d expect more people are heading home – the capacity drops even lower.
- Craigieburn drops from 3 trains per hour to 2
- Cranbourne/Pakenham drops from 6 trains per hour to 2
In the 7-8pm hour the capacity relative pedestrian movements, compared to the peak service is just 34% on the Craigieburn line, and 22% on the Cran/Pak line.
It rises slightly as the city quietens down, but is still well below the benchmark in the 11pm-midnight hour.
Lack of weekend service isn’t just a Melbourne CBD problem; it’s also an issue across the rest of the urban area.
This is a very simplistic calculation, and only based on two lines, and pedestrian activity that doesn’t exactly match potential train passengers.
But what it shows it reflects the experience of train passengers last Saturday night. Even after waiting up to 30 minutes for a train home, many people couldn’t get a seat for the ride home.
And more broadly, the fact that travel patterns have changed has been repeatedly flagged – including recently in The Age, with the management of Melbourne Central shopping centre reporting a notable shift to weekend shopping, and “We’re at record number of sales coming out of Melbourne Central.”
Extra services for specific events are really a side issue. Melbourne is busy every weekend. The problem is the suburban rail network’s base level of service – which mostly hasn’t changed in 50 years, particularly on Saturdays – is too low.
More people are travelling on weekends. Why isn’t Melbourne’s public transport service adapting?
Sunday pedestrian counts are a bit different to Saturdays, especially in the evening, and some train services are much reduced in the mornings. I might do a follow-up post on that.
Thankfully there is movement in regional Victoria from next month, with V/Line’s Ballarat line moving to every 40 minutes and PTV noting upgraded regional bus services.
4 replies on “Weekend trains not keeping up”
And then you add planned works, a couple of weeks ago I and my partner courted a train to Southern Cross and was planning to South Yarra to see a play at Chapel off Chapel and to discover no trains for Frankston, Cranbourne, Pakenham and Sandringham, replacement buses are coaches and I am in a wheelchair. Far from happy, why do planned works happen on weekends, they should be at night.
Sydney has 15 minute weekend train frequencies from first to last, and evening trains are well used, despite all these factors going against them:
– 2 person train crews, so services are expensive to operate
– Lack of nightlife and fewer events (often spread out to places like Olympic Park) in the Sydney CBD meaning it’s a far less popular evening destination than the Melbourne CBD
– Predominant morning culture in Sydney, compared to Melbourne which has a predominant evening culture
It’s almost like the two cities should swap train timetables, because Melbourne has the nightlife and needs a frequent service, and Sydney has a frequent service but lacks things happening in the evening.
The only thing aside from public transport which hasn’t changed in over fifty years is Spring Street. Force the Old Boys (all from elite private schools) and for-profit politicians out of parliament and allow new blood to take over for the first time in almost a century (or about the second time since Federation).
The Greens’ biggest blocker is that triangular logo that looks like a green version of the ⚠️ hazard sign e.g. “avoid”. If their name was Labour (with a u) or Progressives or something like that they probably would have been in government by now.
I suppose the simple answer is that extra services cost money. If fare evasion was better policed, there may be money to improve services. Spend some money on fighting fare evasion, fines will roll in, and probably be profitable for the government.
Yarra Trams will praise itself for the Grand Prix service it provided, and it does do a good job at that, although to the disadvantage of regular passengers. There are frequent summer events in St Kilda, and Yarra Trams caters for the event, but not the aftermath, when there are still hundreds of people who need trams It is the same for Pride March and various other events. Yarra Trams, well PTV, the government department, can cater for special events and but not for passenger demand.
I was looking at 1995 tram timetable today for route 72. I had forgotten how bad the Sunday service was, 30 minutes until 1pm on Sundays, and then a 20 minute to around 6pm, then back to 30 minutes. There has been some improvements.