Yesterday I took advantage of the extra train services for the Royal Show. It was about 2 so I could be talking about the first peak services but I'm pretty sure they ran extra Whitfords and Cockburn shuttles every 15 min and lengthened the existing services on those lines to 6 cars, as well as obviously add the Showground shuttles. While I wasn't going to the Royal Show, I was going to go Cockburn Central but the Clarkson train came first so I took a trip to Joondalup instead. It was a 6 car set 4 min after another train so as expected there weren't many on it, but it was still had modified middle cars with seats along the sides like at the end to maximize standing room.
While regular services are pretty frequent, I did appreciate the shorter waiting times. The frequency was at a TUAG (turn-up-and-go) level, which means I didn't need to use a timetable, turned up there and took the next train. This sort of frequency is important for creating good public transport that is a fair match to zero-waiting time for cars, and for supporting large cities in which people can still move about as they please.
While Perth has more or less nailed it when it comes to trains, most of our bus network has a long way to go, especially on weekends. Trains have the same frequency on weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays and have roughly the same amount of passengers per train, so why do buses get lower frequencies on Saturdays and even less on Sundays. The recent bus reviews upgraded Sunday services to Saturday levels, but why not weekdays if the trains have showed that people will use the services. Actually, given that buses have a lower capacity than trains you'd expect more of them, but the same is enough.
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