There's never been overall public transport planning in Melbourne. What we have is largely the result of accidents of history. It's what you had in 1937, plus 63 years of inertia. And bus services are worse. The system is riddled with anomalies.
Services disappear in the evenings and at weekends.
And moving across the suburbs, as opposed to in and out of the city, is almost impossible. But there is a solution. Travellers often don't even need timetables because the services are so frequent. Ours was run by groups that spent all their time sabotaging each other, and were very effective. Theirs was run by people who fought back against the car, instead of succumbing to it.