(22 Sep 2022, 9:50 pm)Jimmi wrote Historically the trains and reliability haven't been the greatest and many people still think Pacers are trundling on lines across the North of England.
Off peak, Northern has two near direct trains an hour between York and Leeds (plus two taking a longer route via Harrogate) and the off peak single fare at least is just £3 (even on the Harrogate services).
CityZap's main form of marketing was using how bad the train services in the area are by targeting "fed-up commuters" and other rail passengers, just looking around on Google and a lot of the marketing is geared towards making out the trains to be overcrowded and more expensive, they use seemingly the largest price of a day return ticket to drive the argument that they're expensive and using ZAP saves money and the recent strikes has seen them post on their socials suggesting to use them instead even when it's just been CrossCountry striking only losing one service an hour. On the short lived Leeds to Manchester CITYZAP they tried getting that market by occasionally offering Rail users to try the service including a week of allowing season ticket holders to use it in 2017. Hornby has made multiple comments about the Northern services to/from Harrogate as well and proceeds to big up the 36 as being the best thing since sliced bread.
So there is, always thought it was only 1 train per hour.
Let's be honest though people aren't stupid and can see through all that. All a massive failure of deregulation as there's absolutely no argument for the bus service existing at all for any reason at all really.
It's not as if buses can shout from the rooftops about their reliability with all the cancellations they have which I believe Transdev were seriously impacted by aswell down there.