Melbourne bus route patronage data for 2008 – 2019

Download and view the data here.

The latest installment of my ongoing publication of transport data for Victoria is two more years of usage data for all bus routes in Melbourne for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 financial years.

Transdev bus #8295 running route 901 towards Melbourne Airport, Ringwood

The Department of Transport obliged with my request quickly and no FOI was needed, so thanks to them for the speedy response time.

Note that I have updated my existing spreadsheet from a previous post, complete with notes from Peter Parker, so that you can get a full view of all bus route patronage from 2008 to 2019.

Enjoy!

8 Comments

Join the discussion and tell us your opinion.

The Poo Manreply
28 February, 2020 at 1:39 pm

Cheers for the data mate.
I have 1 question though, how would one go about finding the number of boarding’s per bus service hour?
If you can’t answer yourself then maybe send this question over to Peter.

Gerryreply
28 February, 2020 at 1:42 pm

Thank you for the data mate.
I have one question though, how would one find the number of boardings per bus operating hour?
If you can’t answer, maybe send this to Peter or something.

Philipreply
29 February, 2020 at 9:38 am
– In reply to: Gerry

No worries! The quickest way to do this would be to use the PTV GTFS dataset. This includes all routes, timetables, etc. which you could use to calculate service hours fairly easily for each route.

There are a few small issues though, because many routes have diversions, single trips, etc. So for these routes, e.g. the 624, the route may be totally different even though it might technically have the same route number.

You can access it through here, but it does require some coding knowledge (R is the best): https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/ptv-timetable-and-geographic-information-2015-gtfs

Gerryreply
29 February, 2020 at 11:27 am
– In reply to: Philip

Thanks for that man.
I’m sorry for spamming the replies, they didn’t look like they were going through.

Ha Anhreply
9 March, 2021 at 5:08 pm

Hi Philip,

Do you have any advice on a credible source reporting annual VKT and PKT by metropolitan contracted bus operators? Thanks in advance.

Philipreply
12 March, 2021 at 3:55 pm
– In reply to: Ha Anh

Hi Ha Anh, I’m not aware of any out there unfortunately. Although if you are familiar with Python or R scripts, it would be relatively easy to join the spatial GTFS data by extracting route lengths (https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/ptv-timetable-and-geographic-information-2015-gtfs) with patronage data to come up with patronage per service kilometres. I might give it a go at some point and post here on here 🙂

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