(30 Oct 2022, 11:40 am)toward6931 wrote yeah, i agree with this, i think Manchester is just too big if your not constantly putting new vehicles in service,
i suppose for example if say London had 75 EVs either long term leased or purchased out right one year cascading some of the older hybrids they have which i think is 2010-2013 registered examples to Manchester,
and then the year after Manchester had 75 new vehicles again either purchased outright or on a long term lease you could renew they fleet abit more. although lets not forget they have received new electric vehicles every year for the last 3 years so its not like they haven't had anything
Don't believe Manchester has had any electrics, their last batch looking at bustimes, caveats and all that was 2020. In England there has been very little.
I'm not even sure 150 vehicles is enough, it would help Manchester but it won't help everywhere else. Stagecoach was on a massive spending spree in 2007 - 2012 or so and it's all coming for renewal now. If they don't spend big then they'll be playing catch up.
Usually what Stagecoach is buy new buses for the North East, Manchester and other profitable divisions before they're life expired then send them off to the least profitable divisions to do a couple years before they're withdrawn.
However since they haven't done this some of the divisions ie. Stagecoach East Midlands - https://bustimes.org/operators/stagecoac...n/vehicles are with an ancient fleet. You can see it happening with ours, Manchesters and Cambridge's / Oxford's older Deckers (including the OU10xxx batch) but it's just stopped so now they're stuck with expired Decker's. Investing to displace the 08 Decker's next year won't help much as it's just sending them more expired Decker's they needed to be sent in 2020 really.
It's a bit of a mess and what happened at First.