Wednesday 25 January, 2012 

In the most comprehensive survey ever done about V/Line more than 11,000 people across regional Victoria have given their reasons for using public transport.

Minister for Public Transport Terry Mulder said passengers were surveyed about their reasons for travel to help V/Line and the government with future transport planning.

"We already knew the busiest times of travel for V/Line are generally during the morning and afternoon peak periods for work," he said.

"However we wanted to know more about what the other reasons were for people to use public transport. Some of the results were surprising and certainly not consistent across the state.'

Based on the survey results, during 2010-11 Bendigo line customers travelling to Melbourne are predominately made-up of:

• People travelling for work with 1.02 million trips, or 40% of all reasons for travel with V/Line;
• After work education in Melbourne is the second most common reason for people to travel to Melbourne on the train with 600,019 trips (24%);
• Personal business and leisure activities was the third most popular reason with 10% (249,956 trips);

V/Line Chief Executive Officer Rob Barnett said planning for where future patronage growth was likely to occur would become critical in the future.

"No two parts of the state are the same and people are travelling for different reasons. What was interesting was the number of Melburnians using V/Line to travel for high quality cultural events and attractions in regional Victoria.

"This is an untapped market we are going to target to help lift regional tourism and country Victoria."

In other results the survey revealed: Visting friends and family is the biggest reason Melburnians use V/Line to travel to Bendigo (36% or 116,738 trips) followed by:

• Work with a surprising 27% or 87,879 trips made by Melburnians to other towns and Bendigo;
• And personal business constituted 8% of all reasons for travel with 19,212 trips.

Towns and cities with regional university campuses all benefited from strong travel from Melburnians for study with 13% of all trips made to Bendigo for education reasons (with 41,200 trips).