Interesting points, and I agree with what you've said.

I've seen a demonstration of an app which allows operators to make use of push notifications. It allows users to "opt in" if they wish to receive push notifications for service updates. The user selects each service they would like to receive service updates for, and then every time a controller has a service update to publish regarding a specific service, they would tag the update with each service it is relevant to.

Clearly this is relying on a company's passengers having a smartphone with the app downloaded and I'm not suggesting it will appear in the North East any time soon, but for me, this has to be the way forward!

The only issue I think it could cause is potentially becoming overkill and giving a bit too much visibility, possibly becoming a little bit annoying to users.