(04 Apr 2020, 2:49 pm)Big O wrote With all due respect what you're saying in regards to London bus use is garbage. Bus use in the North East is falling. Bus use in London has declined recently but there is a surge in Overground use which is also subcontracted from Tfl. The London Overground now runs a frequent orbital service around London, replacing many routes in the process. It has alleviated pressure on the bus network and many routes have been altered to match the new demand. The customers have not gone away, they use a different mode of Tfl travel.

Would you like to elaborate on how the routes are disorganised?

We have an IBUS system which is very easy to understand, the Tfl website contains live updates on each route and stops along the way too. If you don't know what stop the bus is stopping at, then it's your fault. There are so many quick and easy methods to prevent this. When I talk about branding I'm talking about more than Stickers on the bus, its the brand of Tfl I'm talking about...Also not good to comment on what you don't know. Branding is being worked on by an external agency and from what I've seen it's simple and informative. The previous branding on some of the routes was horrible I won't argue that.

There isn't a take it or leave it policy, not sure how you picked that one up along the A1..8000 plus buses and 63-night routes isn't "take it or leave it". The reason you don't see and 38A and 38C in London is because it's confusing and the reason you don't have a 1 to Whitley Bay and a 1 to Cobalt that operate on the same stretch of road is that, again its confusing and a bit ridiculous. My wife was confused when we first moved up here and so was I and I come from a background on the buses...Whether you want to believe it or not, the network up here is not the best and won't be until things are addressed properly and not using the various smokescreen methods.

You can’t say that travel up here is bad. The north east is a hell of a lot better in integrated transport, in that I mean Tyne and Wear, than other parts of the UK (except London). I think we can all agree that bus usage is declining across the UK. 

London is very different to the north east as they have less car ownership than up here. The customers here have “gone away” to cars and not any other transport. Go North East or Stagecoach aren’t TfL. If they’ve lost customers, they don’t get any revenue. TfL will still get the money from Tube, DLR, Overground etc. 

Although the buses might be integrated in terms of fares, Nexus have done a similar thing with the Pop Card and other schemes, but haven’t taken off as Oyster did. The bus stops are looked after by Nexus with updated timetables and info. There’s a nexus journey planner, all very similar to London.

In terms of being disorganised, read this blogpost https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2019/...place.html 
This is just one of many examples, with misleading bus stop information or routes that aren’t being advertised and left for the public to figure out where buses go. Roger French, a highly respected person in the bus industry, also shows how TfL have forgotten about their buses.  https://busandtrainuser.com/2019/05/29/c...bus-route/ There are countless examples similar to these. While you might think passengers should figure out where a bus goes, you’re not going to attract customers or get any money if you don’t advertise your bus service. Whether it’s branding,  press launching a bus route or making people aware about it, people aren’t going to use it if they don’t know about it.

TfL are heavily subsidised, and when brand new electric buses entered on their 212 and 444 routes, there wasn’t any promotion, they just slipped quietly (literally) into service, whereas companies such as Transdev and Go North East spent a lot of time advertising their new 1 buses and X lines buses respectively. 

London buses are run so differently to the rest of the UK, there is no way that there is going to anything similar in the North East without large subsidies. London doesn’t really promote the bus network and it doesn’t matter to TfL because they get subsidies and they can rely on revenue from other modes of Transport. The rest of the UK bus companies have to persuade customers to get on board and if the costs of running the service is rising, they will have to reduce the service or increase the prices. Why? Because everything is about money and we don’t get the money that London does.