(09 Jun 2023, 6:04 pm)Storx wrote The problem is it's ignoring the white elephant in the room and that's Whitley Bay to Holystone which isn't covered by any other services especially North Whitley Bay who want a route to Newcastle. Also no-one wants to go to Wallsend as there's nothing there, it's basically just the old 42 which failed miserably and is the 342 now (it used to serve Wiltshire Drive).
Wiltshire Drive is the most useless part of the 51 imo. The 6 buses from New York to Blyth is the biggest problem as it's complete overkill and most the time there's barely anyone on especially North of Whitley Bay - it's the same number of buses as the 21 which is one of the busiest corridors around.
If we ever get franchised services, hopefully we might see changes to make them actually more useful because there's no need for more than 4 buses max North of Whitley and even that's questionable.
Another problem in my eyes is that GNE tried to get clever by merging several services into one and basically ballsed it up in the process , it never really revovered, then Covid screwed everything up, but as mentioned a few times, instead of axing, surely adapting would be a better course of action, bus networks should slways be seen as "working progress", not "oh that'll do"