The Hope Street Bus
We got a shiny new bus stop this morning.
It’s a nice, colourful Metlink panel with lots of useful information and the proud logo of the Hope Street Bus Service across the top. It replaced an old stop that looked like this:
The HSBS is an oddity of Melbourne’s public transport system. The buses run, as you might imagine, along Hope Street, from just west of Melville Road in West Brunswick to Sydney Road in Brunswick, a distance of perhaps just over two kilometres. I stand to be corrected, but I’m betting that this is the shortest of all MetLink services. This tiny route is apparently all that sustains the HSBS as an autonomous transport operator.
Hope Street is narrow – if a car is parked on each side of the street there is only one lane left for traffic, which makes driving along it a constant game of chicken. It’s remarkable, then, to report that the driver of the Hope Street bus, who spends all day every day staring down four-wheel drivers asserting their God-given right to priority in all traffic situations, is unfailingly cheery and considerate. A gentleman of Italian heritage who wears a peaked cap and could be anywhere between 55 and 85, he greets most of his few passengers by name. He waves with unfailing genuineness each of the dozen-or-so times that he passes Angelo, the Italian pensioner across the street from me who spends all day leaning on his front gate (unless it’s raining, in which case he retreats to the verandah). The spiffy new bus stop is actually redundant for regular users - the driver is quite happy to stop anywhere that he is flagged down, and passengers can nominate their disembarkation point down to the nearest metre. The regulars get dropped in front of their respective houses without even having to ask.
Most of these regulars are elderly Italian women going up to Sydney Road to do their weekly shopping. If you think this doesn’t sound like much of a demographic to support an entire bus company, you’re right. Typically, the bus carries a handful of passengers. At most, the bus would be three-quarters full, but that probably only happens twice a day.
This city, like lots of cities, lacks “concentric” public transport routes across suburbs to complement the more abundant “radial” routes in and out of the CBD, and the HSBS is one such concentric route. It’s too short, though, to be very helpful in linking together those radial “spokes”. It crosses three radial routes - the 55 tram up Melville Road, the Upfield rail service and the Sydney Road tram. But those three routes are convergent anyway. The 55 tram crosses the Upfield line at Royal Park, so if you live in West Brunswick and you want to catch the Upfield train it’s quicker to hop on the tram. The Sydney Road tram almost crosses the 55 route at the Royal Parade roundabout. So the Hope Street bus doesn’t really offer a shortcut to anywhere except its own destination - Sydney Road - which would otherwise require a tram into Royal Park and a train back out again, or a tram to the roundabout and another tram back out again, both of which would be a pain. There’s not much in the way of destinations on the Western end of the route (my place notwithstanding), so it’s unlikely that residents on the Sydney Road end of the route use the service very often.
Also, there’s another bus service along Victoria Street, which is the next parallel street to the south of Hope Street. The Victoria Street bus, which is run by a larger company with multiple routes, runs from Moonee Ponds through to Westgarth, crossing maybe a dozen radial routes and opening up much more of the northern and western suburbs to public transport users. Unlike the Hope Street service, it seems to run to a well-publicised timetable.
So the continued existence of the Hope Street bus is a bit of a mystery. There’s no way that it can be self-supporting on the passenger numbers that it gets, so it must be subsidized by somebody. There might be a state government subsidy of some sort. I would think that if Moreland Council were paying for it, their branding would be all over it, and that’s not the case. I suspect that St John’s Catholic Church on Melville Road might be involved somehow - their parishioners certainly make up a fair portion of the service’s clientele. Whatever the case, the new bus stops seem to indicate that the route is not going away just yet, which pleases me. It might be tough to justify in terms of transport needs, but the bus serves as a de facto meeting place and community centre. Having an old bloke in a hat wave to you as you step out of your gate in the morning might seem like a small thing, but in a very subtle and non-intrusive way it links you with your surroundings, faintly blurring the sharp edges of suburban isolation. It might not be the most cost-efficient or environmentally-friendly source of social cohesion, but it seems to work, and for that reason I’ll be glad to see it hang around, regardless of who’s paying for it.
2 Comments
- via collins replied:
lovely piece, dan absolutely lovely.
good to read you again, it’s been a long while. i write as an ex-customer on the albion st bus line, but my kids had friends on hope st, and i used to enjoy ruminating on which route was more dangerous. albion st offers the mirage of a few open areas where drivers respond usually by speeding up accordingly. hope st always seemed a little more confined in space, and because of that, drivers seemed tenser, more tightly wired.
brian eno said in his diary-thingummy book a few years back that buses were the new village green. people were forced by circumstance to engage one another, and so tiny step by tiny step, a community develops. buses force it, trams and trains don’t at all. we had a range of drivers on albion st, and they had a range of moods as well. but i really came to enjoy the “hello, how are you?s” with a range of people in my neighbourhood.
small things as you say, but satisfying in the soul.
September 8th, 2006 at 2:38 pm. Permalink.
- Helen replied:
Yes you are a hell of a writer.
The Yarraville buses are exactly the same! Why don’t they buy some medium size buses? the size they tend to use for disabled school outings? That’s what they used to have in Taipei - smaller and more often. (and less black diesel spewing out, and fit better in narrow streets like Hope st, or Anderson st in Yarraville.)
when my daughter was little we used to take this bus every day. The italian bus driver would always greet her with “Hello young lady!” and would let us off at our street corner rather than a designated stop.
September 28th, 2006 at 3:47 pm. Permalink.