TT 230: Maximum waits for Australian trams compared

Yesterday Daniel Bowen cited statistics that showed that Australia's busiest tram lines were no longer in Melbourne. Indeed three of the top four top performers were new systems in Sydney and the Gold Coast. See Daniel's item for some possible reasons for this. As a follow-up I went through timetables for all routes. For a tram (or any high-capacity street transport) you should be able to turn up at any reasonable time (that I will define as 6am to midnight 7 days) and expect a service to arrive within a short time without checking a timetable. Everyone's threshold for that will vary with factors like the length of the trip, willingness to walk or the availability of alternatives being important. But a good starting point is to check maximum waits for each route such as annotated below. Most notable is that Melbourne does not do frequency well with 30 minute maximum gaps typical, even on its busiest tram routes. Whereas, just like is done for their trains, Sydney has a maximum wait of…