Go North East: Latest News & Discussion

Dan

Site Administrator

18,120

18 May 2018, 5:13 am #94

(17 May 2018, 7:12 pm)Jamie M I do think there has been a few too many changes within the past few months. Fair enough if they're merging routes or whatever finding what works and what doesn't work, but I gather any situation is like this if it involves public as the stakeholder. We're in a huge claim culture right now where people complain about everything and anything, so I can see it may start being a little bit more confusing.

If you run public transport as an Autocratic Dictatorship and blissfully ignored said complaints, you may manage to run services to a sensible time and price -- however, it would no longer be called "Go North East", rather "RyanBus bus" or any other 4th class passenger travel model. Seat or buggy as optional extras on fares and buses anybody?

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The local authorities also have a part to play in regular service changes - that's why Arriva and Stagecoach usually have their service changes at the same time as Go North East.

Service changes in September, each year, are inevitable, due to the fact that Nexus' Miscellaneous Works contracts are only usually offered on a one-year basis. It makes sense to tie a change in schedules together with an existing change made by a local authority, which cannot be avoided.

Since then, there have been other contract revisions:
- October 2017: Durham County Council
- January 2018: Durham County Council
- March 2018: Nexus

The majority of commercial network changes which took place at the same time were relatively minor, excluding the South Tyneside service changes in January, and came at the request of customers or the local authority. Aside from that, any minor timing changes really are to benefit customers in terms of reliability. If there is no PVR impact, any saving made won't be huge, so isn't the company penny-pinching. Traffic volumes and driving habits are constantly evolving in the North East, and it's pointless having a timetable if it's neither realistic nor achievable. Long-term roadworks often have an impact on the reliability of services (Felling Bypass, Killingworth, Norham Road Bridge, to name just a few) where operators have to change their timetables, often adding in additional resource, to provide an achievable timetable which will operate within the traffic commissioner's guidelines of 'on time'.

The re-timings to services being made to Washington's services from this weekend are mainly to allow driver reliefs to move from Concord to The Galleries. The new 10/11 minute frequency on the Connections4 is being introduced to improve reliability - although I agree it's not as easy to understand as a streamlined 10 or 12 minute frequency, it ensures that the same level of service is provided (no PVR reduction) and provides a minute or two here or there which can really help on a tight schedule. This 10/11 minute frequency was introduced to the Saltwell Park services some time ago (service 53 all day, service 54 peak times) and appears to have worked quite well?

The network has remained pretty stable this year compared to previous, in my opinion.