One thing that we don’t do very well in Victoria is open transport data.

For some reason, there has seldom been a period of time over the past few decades when comprehensive, consistent and up-to-date data has been available for transport in this state. This contrasts with places like the UK, which has a dedicated agency and website for releasing, managing and updating transport data.

However, there are a few exceptions.

In 2017, PTV released a large amount of bus stop usage data for Melbourne and some regional centres. This only covered 2015-16 but is a very interesting dataset.

Unfortunately, because no comparable public data is available in the same format and with the same methodology, this provides us little more than a brief snapshot of what the bus patronage picture looks like at a particular period of time.

In early 2020, I requested patronage data by bus route. The Department of Transport generously also included updated patronage data for individual bus stops for 2018-19.

I have converted the raw data into a mappable format (see below for details) and come up with this interactive map showing daily bus stop patronage across Victoria for 2018-19. However, this didn’t break down patronage statistics into day types like the earlier data (i.e. weekday, Saturday, Sunday, public holiday and school holiday weekday). Nevertheless, it is still very interesting and I have mapped it below.