Thread by @MelbOnTransit

Good viewing if you think that your city is too spread out/ small/ suburbanised/ car-centric to ever have good transit. Bigger cities can learn too! Parts of the 'Perth model' of @Transperth PT planning are alluded to but need elaboration. Thread follows. #wapol #transperth

https://twitter.com/RM_Transit/status/1520389465889456128

Before we talk about the goodies you need to know the things that made its achievements even more remarkable. Perth started its network rebuild from a very low base. Due to (i) its car-centric urban form and (ii) the existing very limited PT network.

Perth was tiny pre-1960s. The vast bulk of its suburbia was built post-car with sprawling suburbs & loopy streets. Walkable areas were knocked down for wider roads & parking. It's only a short distance from the CBD to autopia without many Syd/Melb/Adl style inner suburbs.

Far more than other Aust cities the CBD was strictly for business. Everything closed at 5pm. Shopping and entertainment had suburbanised or (at best) out of sight over the railway in (feared) Northbridge. No one lived inner city & with no supermarkets you couldn't anyway.

Then there's the PT network. At its low point 40 years ago there were just two diesel suburban lines remote from the growth suburbs. Stations were spartan & had seen better days. Trains ran every 20 min off-peak dropping to much worse (30-40 min?) weekends. Usage ~8m pax /yr.

PT for the majority meant buses. These ran from dead-end suburban termini into the CBD. Commuters changed from local to freeway express services at dark shed-like bus stations, sometimes away from shops. Timetables were at irregular and low frequencies, especially outside peak.

In the early '90s just one bus route in the whole Perth metropolitan area ran better than every 20 min weekday interpeak. On Sundays the best bus route ran every 40 min. Most though only had 4 to 8 trips with multi-hour gaps.

There were many route numbers & variations. Often a combined route ran on weekends replacing several weekday routes. And cross-suburban travel often meant going to the CBD and out again. So the Perth network was only useful for M-F CBD commuting and even that wasn't great.

The Perth PT revival started with the re-opening of the closed Fremantle line in 1983. Then electrification and the new Joondalup line a decade later. Auckland got Perth's cast-off trains to start its own rail revival. All that's well known.

Less well known was that electrification came with higher frequency. Off-peak trains were boosted to run every 15 min daytime. Fremantle trains ran to Midland while Armadale trains ran to Joondalup forming a simple X network. Timed so you could connect at Perth to go on any line.

There was also interest in boosting weekend train frequency. Early on Sunday services ran every 15 min on the Joondalup & Fremantle lines with the others every 30 min. However it was later incrementally upgraded to every 15 min on all lines (with minor exceptions).

Maybe 15 min rail frequencies aren't still what big city people would call 'turn up and go'. But for Perth's network it was a big deal. And its 7-day network-wide 15 min service equalled Sydney and beat Adelaide, Brisbane and even most Melbourne lines.

Perth lacks the night life of a Melbourne or even Adelaide. And its 30 minute evening train frequencies aren't much to write home about. But even there it's progressed with the 15 min service being extended later and later, especially on the Joondalup-Mandurah line.

In Melbourne the trading hours are wider than the span of its frequent public transport. Perth, with its culture of shorter trading hours & incrementally boosting PT service, is the opposite. Now it has 15 min Sunday am train frequency earlier than anywhere outside Sydney.

The Joondalup line's integrated train/bus interchanges are well known. Buses are a short escalator ride above train platforms. Joondalup's opening coincided with a redesign of the bus network so they fed trains rather than paralleled them on the freeway.

With wide station spacing in freeway medians (not ideal from an urban planning perspective) such an integrated bus network was necessary for the trains to have reasonable catchment. The first gen bus network paralleled the train serving residential streets between stations.

Frequencies weren't that good with 30-60 min interpeak gaps common. They were better in the peak with 20 min maximum waits, even on minor routes. Again it doesn't seem much but beats many local routes in Melbourne. Also service was typically 7 days with wider hours.

By the mid '90s Perth had reformed buses feeding its Joondalup line but not anywhere else. The old problems of complex networks, lack of inter-suburban routes and little service on weekends remained. Much reform was still needed - similar to where Melbourne is in 2022.

In WA the Liberals are less strongly pro-rail than Labor. But there was still a feeling they should do something in PT. That something was bus reform. The Court govt proposed a 'System 21' network of frequent direct buses including an orbital circle route running every 15 min.

The 'Circle route' (initially 98/99) commenced service in stages with the first starting in the late '90s. Its timetable harmonised with and fed trains, also running every 15 minutes. Feeding major universities and shopping centres, it proved very popular.

(Melbourne introduced a similar concept on not one but three orbital routes about a decade later. However due to disjointed planning leading to incompatible train and bus frequencies it was never able to get the connections harmonised, especially on weekends.)

(Meanwhile Brisbane and Adelaide had no frequent orbital routes comparable to Perth. Hence their networks remain extremely radial with widespread 30 min train frequencies meaning inferior connections).

Getting back to Perth bus reform also included local routes. Little things like two buses on a common corridor leaving within a few minutes of one another were attended to. Frequencies became clockface. Even hourly Sunday frequencies were a godsend compared to what ran before.

Weekend-only routes were replaced with simpler services that ran 7-days. More suburbs got after 7pm Sunday service (previously everything shut down then). Routes with dead-end termini got extended to the nearest station, shopping centre or interchange.

The faster and more frequent trains allowed a new network philosophy. Buses would feed rather than parallel trains. Suburbs within about 10km of the CBD kept their CBD buses. However those beyond got circumferential bus feeders connecting to trains.

The disadvantage was that some people lost their one seat ride into town. However there were plenty of advantages. Taking buses out of the CBD and off radial freeways meant they could be run in local suburbs instead. Frequencies could be doubled at little cost, cutting waiting.

Reduced waiting meant easier connections to trains and other buses, permitting a cross-suburban grid-like network useful for more trips. No longer was Perth's public transport purely about getting commuters to a distant CBD with only limited relevance to many.

The biggest reform came when the north-south Mandurah line started. The southern suburbs bus network was reformed massively. There are now many frequent east-west routes. Some areas that had Sunday buses every 2 hours or worse in the '90s how get a 15 or 30 minute service.

WA @Transperth planners also revisited Joondalup line buses. Initially most were in a narrow area, only rarely going east of Wanneroo Rd. However reform saw more east-west routes running towards low-income Mirrabooka, providing a web network similar to that in the south.

Despite Perth's rail expansion there remain many inner and middle suburbs away from rail. They still needed frequent radial buses. Existing service was often with multiple complex overlapping routes. Weekend and night service often fell off badly.

The 'System 21' ideas were picked up to become the 900-series of premium routes. Multiple routes were simplified into one route number. Frequencies are high with maximum waits of 10 min weekdays and 15 minutes weekends. They are what Melbourne's SmartBuses should be but aren't.

Frequent 900-series routes are a teal line on Transperth network maps as displayed at many railway stations. While WA Labor (like its Victorian counterparts) is currently more infrastructure than service focused, planners are still able to squeeze resources to add more.

Perth's next frequent bus will be the 940 along Great Eastern Hwy. It will commence when airport trains and its complementary bus network starts (very soon!) mysaytransport.wa.gov.au/have-your-say-…

The evolution of Perth's frequent bus network is different to Melbourne, where we stopped adding SmartBus routes in 2010, despite growing nearly a million people since. I discussed how they do it here: melbourneontransit.blogspot.com/2020/07/timeta…

To summarise, Perth is notable not just for its rail revival. Its multimodal network view, passenger info and bus planning are as remarkable. They haven't fixed all their issues (many poor bus frequencies remain) but there's still a lot they can teach us.

Much of Perth's lessons come from how as well as what. For decades WA's PTA/Transperth has been good at not doing stupid things that just waste everyone's time and money. You can't overestimate the extent that transit organisations can lose focus by getting sidetracked on trivia.

The most obvious is branding. Transperth has had its unified network brand since 1986 with (I think) only one major logo change in the 2000s. In the same time Melbourne had maybe a dozen brands for various bits of the network. We squandered millions with no passenger benefit.

Ticketing. Whether it's scratch, Metcard or myki, Melbourne has had three generations of drama-filled ticket systems. All had significant delays and over-runs. Perth's system is simpler but rarely made the headlines.

Franchising arrangements. A 1980s contract dispute put bus reform back years. Rail franchising took up many peoples time with the first model collapsing in the early 2000s. We obsessed over contracting while neglecting the basics of infrastructure and good service.

In the last decade we've improved in that we've had relatively stable branding, franchise and ticketing arrangements. That has allowed clear air for some beneficial stuff, eg infrastructure. But service remains underdone with great potential to use what we have better. #springst