(23 Jan 2024, 10:24 pm)James101 wrote Crikey, this repaint has shown the worst habits of this forum.
A bus that needed a repaint regardless has had so in an on-brand and cost effective manor. In doing so, a core route with a legacy of branding has been returned to the status-quo as per the past almost 40 years.
Yes, Go North East has suffered an almighty fall from grace by its own actions, but this specific thing really seems like a job well done.
Arriva has a schizophrenic corporate identity with multiple brands in tatters, often wrongly defended as ‘defunct’ by those who haven’t grasped that word’s meaning. Stagecoach at their best has a new livery which is washed out and anonymous within weeks and at their worst operate MANviros in Hartlepool and elsewhere which appear to have been dragged out from a field.
Innovation in the bus industry is near enough dead, bar perhaps electric propulsion heavily subsidised. By the end of the decade most metropolitan areas will have franchising systems well under way and we’ll miss these hayclon days of creativity, though at least we might have a better service to console us.
The repaint isn't in the recent "roadstripe" style so I'm struggling to see how it is on-brand. In terms of being cost effective, given someone will have been paid to design it then it is quite literally not as cost effective as simply painting it into the 2019 livery - for 99.9% of users they simply could not care less about it being branded.
In terms of your Arriva and Stagecoach points, does every critical discussion surrounding GNE turn into whataboutery?
On your last point, can a rehash of an old livery really be termed "innovation"? Looking to the continent across the cities where I've used buses there is no route branding, simply an easy to understand system with frequent services and good value fares. To me, innovation in the bus industry would be to deliver services which the general public see as reliable and useful, or to deliver better integration between different modes of public transport.
During the peak of MG-era GNE branding, a few folk on here (rightly) questioned the approach of the company. Other people on here told them they were wrong, and pointed to stats from years ago that suggested branding had a positive impact on passenger numbers. Ultimately the world has changed and so new approaches are needed to grow public transport usage, we can't just carry on repeating old ideas when they quite clearly do not work anymore.