At time of writing, Melbourne is less than a week away from “The Big Switch”, which will see the new Metro tunnel take on 100% of Sunbury, Cranbourne, Pakenham traffic as those lines move out of the City Loop. Up until now the tunnel has been operating in “Summer Start” mode, with limited off-peak operation.

When the “Summer Start” was announced there was noise from the usual quarters eager to criticise anything their political opponents do, even though trialing a major change to a city’s infrastructure prior to making it a critical link seems a very sensible thing to do. For its part, the Government was happy to be able to boast that the tunnel had opened in 2025, even if the claim of “One Year Early” was only true in a calendar sense.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the actual timetable for post Big Switch services was released and the reaction has definitely been mixed. On the one hand, reaction to the actual service levels through the new tunnel has been fairly positive.

The Sunbury line essentially sees a doubling of frequency. As someone who used to live in Diggers Rest, the removal of 40 minute frequencies at some off-peak times won’t be missed. This makes sense as this line now has a dedicated tunnel rather than sharing one with two other lines. Cranbourne and Pakenham mostly see improved frequencies outside of peak times.

While the Big Switch timetable does improve off-peak frequencies, these improvements aren’t actually enabled by the new tunnel, as the network has a capacity to handle the higher peak frequencies. Low off-peak frequencies are an operational decision likely come down to cost.

Some discussion has centred on whether 10 minute frequencies through the tunnel outside of peak does indeed represent the fabled and promised turn-up-and-go operations. Actual experience over the coming years may bear this out. Regardless, this service level will be the best of any line in Melbourne.

Perhaps the biggest discussions have been around the changes to other parts of Melbourne’s and Victoria’s public transport timelines. Or more specifically the lack of changes. When “The Big Switch” was announced, it was billed by the government as this monumental change impacting “everywhere – including buses, trams, regional and metropolitan trains”.

The actual released timetable changes however shows only minor changes to other lines and other transport modes. Instead there is a teaser that this is “just the first installment” with “more frequent services across the network to come from the middle of the year including on the Werribee, Sandringham, Craigieburn and Upfield lines”.

While perhaps an interesting lesson in expectation management and leading to intrigue about what exactly changed in the three months between the two press releases, the collective disappointment does point to an ongoing weakness in Melbourne’s train network – service frequencies, particularly outside of peak times, are not great.

Over the last twenty years there has been significant investment in public transport infrastructure. From level crossing removals, re-built stations, regional fast rail and now the Metro tunnel. But if we actually want to encourage people to swap their cars more often for public transport, the trips people are taking need to be in a ballpark of competitiveness with cars.

Having public transport links where people want to go is one thing but unless transfers between services are efficient, the utilisation of the network will be primarily for trips that can be made on a single service, least passengers be waiting 20/30/40 minutes between connections.

Since we have spent the big money on these infrastructure improvements, we should spend the comparatively smaller amount to make sure that infrastructure is well utilised.

For these reasons we advocate for a frequency of at least every 15 minutes on all Metropolitan routes and a frequency of at least every 30 minutes on all intercity services throughout normal operating hours. While such changes might not be a flashy as a new Metro tunnel, they will give people significantly more confidence that they can rely on the public transport network for more of their journeys.