City of Ballarat advocating for a review of Ballarat’s Bus Network

The City of Ballarat is continuing to advocate for a review of Ballarat’s urban bus services to help the network better meet the needs of local residents.  

City of Ballarat Mayor, Cr Daniel Moloney said Council was responding to numerous concerns raised with the City of Ballarat about local public transport buses. 

“With petrol prices hitting record highs, using the bus should be a cheap and easy option to get to work, job interviews, university study or medical appointments,” he said.

“But for most Ballarat residents lengthy indirect routes to key Ballarat destinations, slow travel times and lack of frequency of services mean despite its relative low cost, catching a bus is an unviable alternative to using a car.

“Feedback we’ve received from some of our most vulnerable residents, like our seniors and those with limited mobility suggest they won’t use a bus because it takes too long, and they need to use multiple services.” 

Recent community conversations undertaken by the City of Ballarat’s Ageing Well Team provided first-person examples from local residents of a local bus network which is failing.

A 73-year-old Wendouree resident needs to catch three buses from their home to get into the CBD: “The first takes me to the train station, second to Little Bridge St bus interchange and then the third gets me to where I want to go. I can be on the buses for 2 hours each way just to do some shopping and have a coffee which only takes 1 hour! I no longer drive and miss the ease of getting places in a reasonable time. I now spend more time at home on my own as going places takes so long on public transport I think twice before going out”.

The issue of public transport, predominately public buses, featured frequently in the City of Ballarat’s recent surveys and consultation in developing the Youth Strategy: 
•    Crossing from one side of Ballarat by public transport to another has been identified as a challenge, ‘it should not take hours for someone to travel from Sebastopol to Wendouree’ via public bus
•    Public transport needs to be focused on getting people around Ballarat rather than a focus on work or travel to Melbourne.

Cr Moloney said Council had raised the need for a review with the Victorian Government over many years including on multiple occasions in the past two years after Council adopted the Ballarat Integrated Transport Action plan in August 2020.

“We want to work with the Government and the Department of Transport to help make services more responsive to the needs of users and potential users,” he said.

“Our view is with a few important changes to the bus network, things like having more cross-city routes and not every service going to the train station, more people would choose to catch a bus.

“Analysis as part of our Ballarat Integrated Transport Action Plan tells us this could be done with no additional buses or services.

“With bus contracts for regional Victoria including Ballarat having been renewed recently, now is the perfect time to take a look at what’s working, what isn’t and how we can improve it.” 

The City of Ballarat’s Integrated Transport Action Plan identified bus network reform as one of the key transport issues for Ballarat. 

The Plan proposes a series of short-term, low-cost changes which will increase bus patronage and make the current bus network vastly more convenient, using the same number of services and spread of operating hours.

These changes include:
 • Reviewing and streamlining the existing timetable to reduce journey times and make bus trips more competitive with other modes of travel 
• Introducing more direct cross-city bus routes, not always oriented to Ballarat Railway Station, reflecting the need of most Ballarat customers to reach a destination within Ballarat other than the station 
• Staggering service timetables to reduce instances of multiple services arriving at the same destination at once.