The Sorry State of the 388

Sydney has plenty of worthy candidates for the title of the city’s worst bus route. The 370 is universally loathed, the late L90 (vale) had a variety of colourful nicknames and it wasn’t so long ago the 610 made getting to the Hills nigh impossible. Sydney Uni student magazine Honi Soit even published a list of 5 contenders that was subsequently picked up by the SMH.

Into this colourful company I’d like to make a nomination; the 388.

There’s something about the 388

The 388 runs from Lawson Street in Paddington to Bondi Junction. It is basically an annexed version of the more well known 389. Only a single stop (on Lawson St) isn’t also served by the 389.

The weird thing about it? It only runs once. A day. In one direction.

I literally stumbled across the Lawson Street bus stop a couple of years ago and its existence struck me as so weird I reached out to TfNSW to find out why. The reply was a generic ‘operational reasons’ type response, which also hinted at the possibility of extending the service. This hasn’t happened and I must say I’d forgotten about it until last week, when I was surprised to find the 388 is still running!

Why, Oh Why?

The short answer is, I don’t know. My brief exchange with TfNSW didn’t clear it up so I can only speculate. I guess the starting point is to consider what’s near Lawson St and Vialoux Ave, the only stop that really benefits from the existence of the 388. Well, a bunch of things. Mainly Grammar prep school, White City tennis courts, Weigall Oval and a mixture of medium density public and private housing. I suppose the bus could meet the very specific needs of the users of one of these places. What those might be, I have no idea.

The bus stop in question is within a 500m of walk of both the 389 and New South Head road buses, so it’s not really wanting for access. I’d say it was a weird shopping service to get some belligerent resident to Bondi Junction, but there’s no return bus so that seems unlikely.

My guess would be it came about from some sort of scheduling anomaly, but beyond that, I couldn’t say.

Mapping the 388

Now all that is strange, but not beyond the pale for a transport agency that runs plenty of legacy low frequency routes. What’s stranger still about the 388 is that it’s actually part of a different bus region from the 389 it almost exactly replicates. This basically means that a different organisation operates the 388 from the 389.

The 389 is part of Region 6, Inner West and South operated by Transit Systems, while the 388 is part of Region 9, the Eastern suburbs, operated by State Transit. From a customer standpoint this doesn’t mean much, except for one thing: the 2 routes appear on completely different network maps.

This is exactly the kind of absolute chaos the current wave of network redesigns should be addressing. I spoke about the December 2020 changes to the Northern Beaches region earlier this month and plan on having a deeper look at some of the decisions made in the North West region January 2021 redesign in the near future. Hopefully, a rethink of the Eastern suburbs (and shiny new network map) isn’t too far down the track!

If you’ve ridden, driven or have any additional information about the 388 please get in touch, I need closure!