(17 Aug 2021, 12:03 am)streetdeckfan wrote I think the issue is less about having direct services everywhere but having services at all. There are housing estates popping up all over the place no bus services at all nearby, same with out of town retail parks.
It's not even new estates that are the problem, my mother's house was built in the 70s and it's still a mile walk to get the bus to Durham or Bishop. There's a reason pretty much every house in the estate has at least 2 cars!
Now, granted GNE have been doing a fairly decent job recently at serving retail parks, and I think the extension of the 21 to Brandon along with also serving Arnison Centre is a fantastic idea. Same with sending the 10N (or whatever letter it is, seriously give it a different bloody number!) to Tyne View Retail Park, and the X21 to Tindale
Not wanting to go too off topic but the whole planning nature of estates in the UK since the 1970s has been car centric and still is. Developers gobble up rafts of old fields that have never had a service so people buying there naturally use their car - when the bus operators finally come in they find low usage is a problem (well obviously!)
but Andreos is right, operators still think in black and white and it's a grey world. Making buses fit for the future would be to respond to changing customer demographics and journeys and to an extent they are with some of the leisure services as opposed to cut cut cut
But then this group can sometimes think black and white too and live out on the hope the world hasn't changed, it has and it's never going back to normal - the commute is all but dead - we can pretend it's coming back but it's not - not in it's old volumes