(04 Apr 2020, 10:13 pm)Adtrainsam wrote 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.

I'm not sure if you've just moved here or something but TFL is much better than Nexus (who are absolutely hopeless) and is who your comparing here not GNE or whatever but it's not better for example the following 5 things just as an example which show wrong stuff or is just difficult to find:

1. Find the emergency timetable for the 335, or in fact any timetable or publicity - this is a brand new bus route that's just started and replaced the 42 between Cobalt and North Shields.
2. Find the service update on the bus section of both TFL and Nexus under the bus section for Covid 19 and the emergency timetables only using the Nexus website.
3. Find an integrated ticket for using the W1 to the Metro, then the Metro, then the 21 to Low Fell from Gateshead.
4. Same as above but find the times for each of those using only the Nexus site.
5. Use the 'live' travel map to find the next time of the 142 at Hayes to Heathrow on TFL, then use the 'live' travel map from Whitley Bay for the next 308 to Newcastle.

I'm sorry but Nexus is the problem up here and always have been, they can't do anything right. It's no wonder the Pop card didn't work like anything else they do yet cities like Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham are all able to have systems that work and are mostly larger areas aswell. People blame DB for the metro mess but it's not particularly got any better and it was their choice to refurbish trains that we're finished. Not to mention the Pedestrian Tunnel that was delayed, Haymarket delayed, Central Station delayed, North Shields delayed, station refurbishments cut back big time - look at Howden, the francising system that they blew millions on then just abandoned it, seperate smartzones schemes and the network one which isn't done by them (which should be), project Orphous (or however you spell it) which again blew money and yet again we're looking at expanding the Metro no doubt blowing more money when nothing happens. Absolutely hopeless.

This is in comparison to Leeds, Manchester etc not London which has even bigger problems with the Crossrail fiasco basically going to bust TFL.

Not to mention the fact they can't give any of the bus companies any confidence when every other week they're talking about taking the bus routes over.