The Activity Centres Need Good Non-Radial Connections Too.
A framework to find key gaps in activity centre public transport
Last week, The Victorian Government revealed its ultimate height limits for 25 of its “Train and Tram Zone” activity centres. These new controls allow buildings as tall as 20 stories in parts of Brunswick, and buildings up to 12 stories in parts of Brighton, just to provide a couple of examples.
I am among many who enthusiastically welcome these changes. For far too long, Melbourne’s population growth has been managed with a “spread and squeeze” model, where the fringes sprawl ever outwards, and the CBD expands upwards with tall mega-towers. I hope that these activity centres, placed around train stations and tram stops, will be the catalyst for the middle ring suburbs to take their share of the pressure, giving options for young families and downsizers alike to live in these desirable suburbs.
But the activity centre program is not without pushback.
Concerned residents have raised issues such as changing neighbourhood character and overshadowing by apartments. There are worries about overcrowded schools and parks. Yet what I have observed is that the most common reasons for opposition are concerns about finding car parking and being stuck in endless gridlocked traffic.
In this radio debate, YIMBY Melbourne lead organiser Jono O’Brien attempts to alleviate these fears by making the case that many people will not need cars for every trip in the activity centres, as they are located near public transport. Whilst this is true to an extent, proximity to public transport is clearly tied to lower vehicle ownership – it is still difficult for households to reduce car usage with our current public transport network.
A Radial Network
The core reason that reducing car usage is difficult in suburban Melbourne is a long discussed one. Melbourne’s public transport network is, by most measures, very effective at moving people into and out of the CBD. Our rail system is described using the ‘hub and spokes’ analogy, with the CBD as the hub. However, before the covid pandemic, only 16% of Melburnians worked in the CBD – and that doesn’t even consider non-work activities such as shopping and education.
Likely due to their proximity to the rail network and relative proximity to the CBD, suburbs containing activity centres had a higher percentage of CBD commuters, but none of these suburbs were close to a majority. This reveals that whilst radial connections to the CBD are important, they do not fully reflect the diversity of trips made within Melbourne.
As a result, a location can appear well served by public transport when assessed on radial access, while still being poorly connected in other directions.
Therefore, assessing whether an activity centre is well served by public transport requires looking beyond radial access alone. We need a way to evaluate how well these centres are connected in all directions, not just towards the city.
The Four-Pointed Star ✨
To better assess if an activity centre is effectively linked by public transport, and identify significant service gaps, I propose using the conceptual framework of the four-pointed star.
This framework asks whether a location has useful public transport connections in each of the four cardinal directions: North, South, East and West.
The activity centre locations pretty much all have decent radial transportation, towards the city and away in the opposite direction, so in most cases, two of the four directions are already reasonably well served by default. However, apart from a few cases, they lack good tangential connections – that is connections to the other two non-radial directions.
As an example of a centre that plausibly passes the test, I will use Box Hill, perhaps Melbourne’s most successful cluster of suburban density, with a notably low car ownership rate, where 17% of households are car free, in contrast to 7% statewide.
The Belgrave and Lilydale railway lines provide the East and West points of the star, whilst the 903 smart bus arguably fulfils the North and South points (Weekend 30-minute frequencies aside). Box Hill comes really close to fulfilling the four-pointed star, making it one of the few places in middle suburbia where a car free life is possible.
Under the four-pointed star framework, Box Hill illustrates what a well-connected activity centre looks like in practice: it has strong radial links, but also meaningful non-radial connections that allow movement across the suburban network without relying on the CBD as an intermediary.
Taking it to activity centres
The structured approach I will use for the three activity centres I will analyse consists of three steps. First, identify the most important destination in each cardinal direction, then note if there is a route which serves the connection and finally assess the service level of that route. A regular frequency of every 15 minutes or better can be considered frequent.
Kew Junction
Kew Junction is a classic case of an activity centre, where going towards and away from the CBD is relatively easy (albeit in increasingly overcrowded trams), but going in a tangential direction is not.
The 609-bus route, on face value, seems to fill this gap, going to the north and south of Kew to Fairfield and Hawthorn respectively, but unfortunately this route is one of the worst in Melbourne, with only four trips a day going north from Kew – and even more shocking is that southwards towards Hawthorn, there is only a single trip per day. Neither direction has any trips on the weekend.
Another issue with the 609, is that it lacks a bus stop in the heart of the precinct, near the junction. So alongside improving the service to being at least every 15 minutes during the day, I think that realigning the route through the middle of Kew to be something along the lines of this would be extremely helpful, providing access to the heart of the activity centre.
Fixing the 609 with only these relatively minor changes would allow Kew to be considered a well-connected activity centre by the four-pointed star framework and cement it as a desirable location for low car-use households.
Murrumbeena
Applying this method to Murrumbeena brings up an interesting problem, which I am going to call the Chadstone conundrum.
There is no direct northbound connection from Murrumbeena to East Malvern and beyond, meaning that it does not fulfil the four-pointed star framework. And there is on the surface a good reason for this. Chadstone Shopping Centre is such a strong destination that it makes sense that for just about any bus route that can, to go to the shopping centre. If we decided to join the 612 and 627 for instance, filling the gap, it would take away service to Chadstone from passengers on the route, which would be a net negative for some passengers.
In this circumstance, bus network planners must determine whether its worth the potential gains to do such a change, or overlay an additional frequent route on top, leaving existing routes largely unchanged, at a greater price.
I personally lean towards the more difficult and structural reform. In the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, the bus route 703 narrowly dodges Glen Waverley town centre and still is extremely popular; many passengers interchange at Sydnal. However, a case-by-case approach must still be taken, taking into account local travel patterns.
High Street (Thornbury)
For my final and simplest example, let’s take a look at High Street in Thornbury.
This is a case where I believe sufficient routes already exist and all that is lacking is frequency. Bringing both the Mernda Train line and 510 bus to an all-day 10-15 minute frequency would make a world of difference, providing a new level of enhanced mobility to Thornbury. It would turn into an ideal model of an activity centre which provides high quality public transport in all four cardinal directions.
Orbitals are not always the Solution
In this post, I’ve used the term tangential rather than orbital to refer to non-radial connections – and the distinction is deliberate. One of the persistent hang-ups of transport planning in Victoria is an orbital-or-bust mentality, where small, targeted solutions are passed over in favour of big projects premised on forming rings around the suburbs. The SmartBus orbitals, the Suburban Rail Loop and the North-East Link (billed as completing Melbourne’s freeway loop) all to an extent share this logic. Whilst they have their place, the orbital bus routes 901, 902 and 903 illustrate the drawbacks well: they are rarely on time due to the inherent delay risk of long routes, and they have inconsistent demand across their length - sometimes competing with parallel railway lines, sometimes passing through low-demand green wedge areas - in the name of being a complete “orbital solution.”
Not every solution needs to be a fix-all. The four-pointed star framework deliberately resists this temptation: it shrinks our focus and asks only whether each centre has a useful connection in each direction, not whether those connections form a perfect ring around Melbourne.
Going Forward
The examples in this post reveal a common shortcoming in “coverage-based planning” - where a location is considered well-served simply because a single public transport corridor passes through it, without consideration of the other directions of travel. Most of the activity centres can be considered well served by a simple coverage-based approach - indeed the department modelled capacity on transport links when selecting activity centres and that assessment appears to have looked primarily at radial connections to the city.
This is a decent starting point, but it cannot be the end. The government needs to be proactive, reforming bus networks to make these activity centres places where public transport can be used for almost every possible trip. The four-pointed star framework is a tool to quickly assess if an activity centre is close to achieving this, and I invite you – the reader, to apply it to your local activity centre, or a non-activity centre suburban location.
The political reality is that bus reform is abstract and unglamourous. Ministers cannot cut a ribbon on a rerouted 609 (Although I’d love to see them try). Yet the development of these activity centres has created a reason to take a close look at some of these areas. Missing this opportunity would mean locking in a level of car dependence for a generation of new residents who moved in on the promise of great public transport access and risk locking in gridlock, proving fears about the activity centres correct.
Great article! Hope the relevant authorities see this!