People over on Reddit and Twitter keep asking about how many articulated buses there are in Melbourne, so now you’ve made me write about blog post them. The short answer – there are 40 of them used on PTV route services.
By operator
Ventura has the most of articulated buses in Melbourne, with 25 in their fleet – some used on school runs in the outer eastern and south-eastern suburbs.
And others out of Frankston on routes along the Mornington Peninsula.
CDC Melbourne has six articulated buses scattered across their depots, mostly for school and charter work, along with one for the route 601 Monash University shuttle.
Sunbury Bus Service has three articulated buses – two for route service, the other for charter work.
Kinetic also has six articulated buses used on routes from Doncaster to the Melbourne CBD – two older buses in the silver ‘SmartBus’ livery.
And four newer ones in PTV livery.
And a ring in
SkyBus Melbourne was once a big operator of articulated buses on the Southern Cross Station – Melbourne Airport run.
But since the 2015 introduction of double deck buses, they’ve been bumped down to other services or moved interstate.
Footnote: articulated buses interstate
Sydney is a big user of articulated buses, despite their network working alongside a busy rail system.
Canberra is another big bus city, so ACTION has a number of articulated buses.
Adelaide runs both standard and articulated buses along their oddball O-Bahn Busway.
And Brisbane City Council is a massive bus operator competing against the Queensland Government owned Queensland Rail, deploying articulated buses to their network of parallel busways.
Footnote: double deck buses in Melbourne
Articulated buses aren’t the only oddball vehicles on Melbourne’s bus routes – there is also an even smaller handful of double deck buses.
Sources
The ‘Australian Bus Fleet Lists’ website lists the details of virtually every bus and coach operating on Australia’s roads – here are the gory details for the buses I’ve listed above:
You can find the articulated on those pages by searching for the ‘AB’ (Articulated bus with standard seating) seating code.
The only city and eastern suburban Sydney articulated buses I noticed last week were used on 333 to Bondi Beach, and they are showing their age badly.
Articulated buses used to be common on the ‘Metrobus’ services:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrobus_(Sydney)
Based on this a few years ago Sydney switched to buying double deck buses rather than articulated ones:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-13/nsw-budget-includes-tweed-hospital-bus-boost-and-roads-planning/8612746
More recent changes have seen the creation of the B-Line service to the Northern Beaches with double deck buses:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-Line_(Sydney)
And reworking the eastern suburb routes following the opening of the light rail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBD_and_South_East_Light_Rail
Fun fact, route 670 was running articulated buses even 30 years ago. IIRC they were originally painted in The Met green and yellow but eventually ended up in Invicta’s beige and vanished into thin air roughly when the “LoRider” buses started appearing.
They would have been the Volvo B10ML buses with Fuji bodies imported from Japan after the Tsukaba Expo in 1984.
https://www.busaustralia.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=41&page=1