(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.

That picture of the 125 is down to Metroline, there was a shortage of blind sets being produced by Mckenna so they could not get them in time for the extension. The issue is now rectified along with the timetable information. 

I don't see why they have to promote buses changing due to a contract with regards to the 212 and 444. I think you'll find that when the electrics were first introduced in London in 2016, there was a heavy promotion, but why still promote it four years and 300 plus buses later? We did the same thing with Hybrids. They had a special uniform livery until that was done away with a few years back as nearly half of London's double-deck buses are now Hybrid. Everything loses its wow factor after a while. My thing is why try to jazz up something that is never going to be jazzy. A bus is a bus. It doesn't need to be sparkly to attract passengers. It just needs a decent level of promotion, service levels and reliability.

I was sat behind one of the new E400 MMCs that Hownsgill Have and the sign on the back read, as posh as your car and I thought but it's not. 

With the North East, the potential is there to have a bustling network but operators will only work with one another so much, and an officiating body I think could do the network some justice. 

London only gets the money it does because it can be justified in most cases. The Underground is fantastic, the fact it is so frequent makes you want to use it. I can't tell you how many times I've waited over 10 minutes for a Metro in the peaks. I know things are going to improve with the new Metro Trains and timetable but I never use Metro because of how unreliable and infrequent I found it when I first moved...I can't imagine how many other people there are like me.