(03 Sep 2021, 12:41 pm)Andreos1 wrote I've always wondered about older vehicles being allocated to less popular routes.
It's almost like operators are giving up on it and are going through the motions.

What if (and its a big what if)? An operator was able to justify a business case to grow a route and to do so by allocating new vehicles to it.

Unless there a funding mechanism like the old Kickstarter scheme, then due to depreciation, allocating new buses to routes which may just about break even, or run a very small profit will almost certainly mean the route will then run at a substantial loss when the costs of that new bus are factored in to actual routes costings.

It's more sensible to take a midlife bus, smarten it up with WiFi, USB etc and then do a marketing push as by that stage in a vehicles life it should just be the running costs which need paying, making a route more viable.