Buses on Hoddle Street during peak hour; Melbourne's busiest bus corridor - Melbourne Transport

In this video we take a visit to Hoddle Street; a major north-south arterial road in Melbourne's inner north. Between Victoria Parade and the Eastern Freeway, Hoddle Street is home to Melbourne's busiest bus corridor, served by 13 different bus routes including the high-frequency DART (Doncaster Area Rapid Transit) Smartbus routes. Most routes along Hoddle Street serve buses around the Doncaster/Manningham areas along the Eastern Freeway as this part of Melbourne developed without a railway line.

Here we see a lot of Transdev buses filmed during afternoon peak hour, including Mercedes Benz O405NH's, MAN 12.220's, 15.220's, 16.220's and 16.240's, Scania L94UB's, K230UB's, K280UB's and K310UB's, Volvo B7RLE's and Scania K320UA and K360UA articulated buses, all with various Custom Coaches, Volgren, Designline and Gemilang bodies.

Being filmed in March 2019, this video was filmed several months before Transdev started taking delivery of new Scania K310UB & K320UB buses. A large number of the MAN 12.220's, 14.220's, 15.220's & 16.220's seen in this video have since been withdrawn from service.

Throughout the video you'll see just how crowded these buses can get, some so full that they can't take anymore passengers. I feel the problem could help be alleviated if Transdev had higher capacity buses. Despite operating some of Melbourne's busiest bus routes and having over 540 buses, Transdev only has 6 articulated buses in the fleet, which is a ridiculously low number for such a large bus operator. Meanwhile Torrens Transit in Adelaide with over 700 buses has at least 115 articulated buses with many being used on busy O-Bahn busway services. Even ACTION in Canberra with 456 buses has 44 articulated buses, and Metro Tasmania with 220 buses has 20 articulated buses.

Another problem with the Hoddle Street bus corridor is the lack of effective bus priority. There is a bus lane for citybound traffic but it's only in effect from 6am to 10am on weekdays. There was an attempt to make it a full-time bus lane when Hoddle Street was upgraded last year, but local businesses kicked up a stink "claiming" that they would loose parking and that buses using the lane were empty, even though many buses were heading to the city to begin their afternoon runs where they would then take home crowds of passengers. And people wonder why buses in Melbourne run late...

A new full-time bus lane was installed for outbound traffic fairly recently but it doesn't extend for the entire length of Hoddle Street. In summary Melbourne sucks at allocating priority for road-based public transport, whether it be bus lanes or dedicated tram lines, and tram/bus priority lights at intersections. It's like as though the road network is trying to cater for everyone, and by everyone it means everyone gets stuck in the same traffic with no attempt at prioritizing public transport to provide a quicker alternative to the car. Even smaller cities such as Perth, Auckland and Canberra do a much better job at allocating priority for road-based public transport.

Date: March 2019.

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