peter berrett wrote:
>
> Yyuri wrote
>
> > To a point. Lets say 50 people on a bus (roughly). Lets say a 20 car
> > Overland as you suggest carries 1000 people (roughly 50 per carriage). Thus
> > to run another train you would need to attract 1000 people off other modes.
> > Even a seeding service with 5 cars would need to attract 250 people with
> > more to stay viable. Hence to compare the frequencies of service, I would
> > GUESS there would be around 20 buses a day to Adelaide (accurate answers
> > welcomed) This means that on average, there could potentially be a bus
> > leaving almost every hour.
I'm not sure of the number of buses going to Adelaide either, but I'm sure that 20 buses
a day does not equal one bus an hour. It probably means 10 buses leaving at the same
time, twice a day; or at best 7 buses leaving at the same time three times a day. I
remember a bus trip I took from Melbourne to Sydney some years ago (the train was booked
out), and distinctly remember a refreshment stop at Albury, we arrived and there was
one bus there also stopped for refreshments. Within 10 minutes I counted 13 buses - all
going to Sydney. Those 13 buses did not represent a 2 hourly frequency of buses, but the
equivalent of probably one 10 ten carriage train travelling on the Hume rather than rail
tracks. Food for thought .
If a train attracts 250 passengers somehow to run
> > 1 extra train whose service frequency is now 12 hours, the buses frequency
> > now goes down to 24/15 or 1 hr 20 minutes on average. Convenience is still
> > weighted in favour of the bus service. Plus even if you attracted more
> > people, the train service frequency wouldn't improve unless you then decided