Improving Melbourne’s bus routes

Completed the final project for my Masters degree in GIS at RMIT University last year, investigating whether we would get better public transport outcomes if we reconfigured our bus routes into a network of sparser but more direct and frequent services in an intersecting grid.

Diagram of proposed new bus routes for Melbourne

Found that if we moved from this (showing current bus routes for the weekday interpeak period):

Map of existing Melbourne bus routes

to this:

Map of proposed new bus routes for Melbourne

we would get this:

Map of travel time savings for Melbourne local government areas

By reallocating existing bus resources in this way, we could achieve reductions in travel times in all parts of Melbourne, with the largest improvements in the outer suburbs. Sounds fair to me.

Data credits: public transport data from Public Transport Victoria under CC BY 4.0;  local government area boundaries from State Government of Victoria under CC BY 4.0

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