Here’s a thing I threw together in an attempt to visualise what’s wrong with the timetable for the Lilydale line. A measure in common use is the time between services. The metric is easy to grasp. Trains are 30 minutes apart in the middle of the day, and it’s horrible. The metric doesn’t paint the whole picture. Some services move faster than others, and time lost is time lost whether you’re standing on a platform or stopping all stations except East Richmond.
So here it is – The Time to Hoddle Grid Delta:
…and its close cousin, the Time from Hoddle Grid Delta:
Basically, it shows much worse your trip will be from the best service, for a given time of day. This takes possible platform changes into account. It also accounts for the city loop direction, and it will be based on the first “Hoddle Grid” station, being either Parliament or Flinders St. I felt this was a good measure, because you can compare other lines fairly by using the first station in the Grid.
The baseline (0:00) is based on the fastest train of the day. In the morning, this is the service that leaves Lilydale at 6:47AM and arrives at Parliament 49 minutes later.
I’ve chosen Croydon weekday timetable as the basis for the above chart because all trains stop there, and it’s somewhat in the middle between Ringwood and Lilydale. The exact timing will differ slightly for other stations.
The Y-Axis shows how much longer it takes to get to the Hoddle Grid if you arrived on the platform at any given minute of the day. Lower is better.
You can see the that it sucks the most to arrive on the Croydon platform at 11:49AM. If this happens, you are 77 minutes away from the Hoddle Grid, which is 39 minutes worse than if you’d arrived at 8:43AM.
During peak times, you can randomly land on a platform without reading the timetable, and you know that your overall trip time will only vary by about 10 minutes. In the middle of the day or after 8PM, it’s a total crapshoot. It could be 10 minutes worse than the express. It could be 41.
The next logical step would be to compare this to a line that we perceive to have better service.
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