(03 Sep 2014, 4:11 pm)Jimmi For an express service you can but the 23/24 do carry more than the people than just the loads leaving Park Lane.
By any chance was 1301 late because its flaming awful, the revving just before it left Park Lane sounded terrible, I feel sorry for anyone who had to endure that on the 23 today, they are bad enough on the 64 so I'd hate to have that on a hard route like the 23.
This is the point I'm getting at though.
From personal experience, services 23/24 very rarely pick up passengers from Stockton Road until after Ryhope. With Go North East almost having the monopoly here, these passengers prefer to use their services opposed to Arriva's. Under 16s prefer to use Go North East buses because they're often turned away on Arriva's buses - I've seen two posts about this on Facebook lately, but unlike me, they didn't argue or complain to the company about it.
This means that Arriva are heavily relying upon the loadings from Sunderland when travelling to Peterlee, and from Peterlee when travelling to Sunderland. At the moment, in my opinion (as someone who gets to see the loadings throughout the day regularly), these loadings aren't fantastic. When services 23/24 leave Tyne & Wear, things change a little, and this accounts for your sightings in Peterlee where buses have had higher loadings.
Arriva cannot expect to bring in new customers with this service as they have no onward connections in Sunderland and very few in Peterlee (unless they're migrating from the X7 as a result of cheaper
adult single fares); as such, the only way we can predict how well this service is going to do is by looking at the current loadings out of Sunderland.
It all seems to boil down to this vicious circle that I keep on mentioning, and testing to see if they burn their fingers or they do well... Competition can benefit passengers (if services aren't continuously facing cuts, as on the case on the Tyne Valley), but by and large, it doesn't (and this has recently been discussed elsewhere on the forum). I could understand if this service was being introduced to combat high loadings between the two destinations, but this is not the case...
