Mysterious skeletons have been popping up around bus stops across Melbourne’s Western Suburbs. Some of these poor skeletons are victims of ‘ghost buses’, where the PTV app will tell you that a bus has come and gone, but you haven’t seen it! In other cases, buses come only every 40 mins or 1 hour on weekdays and often not at all on weekends or in the evening. So residents of the West can often feel like they’re going to die waiting for the bus! The skeletons are a HalloweeNEED BETTER BUSES initiative of the Better Buses for the West campaign, a community campaign calling for a transformation of the broken buses in Melbourne’s west. The campaign is asking all parties to commit to transformational bus network reform ahead of the November state election. We want to see the long, winding routes that take a spooky 4 x longer than a car trip, transformed into a grid of fast, frequent buses coming every 10 minutes and getting you where you need to go without it being a near-death experience. Residents across the west have been joining in the trickery, by adding their wait times to posters with little gold stars, and adding pictures to their social media, tagging @dying4thebus. 

Melbourne’s West contains some of the country’s fastest growing LGAs, but most of the west is a public transport black hole. While the population continues to grow, the infrastructure is not keeping up, and that is leaving people in some very scary situations indeed. To see the skeletons head to @dying4thebus on instagram.