(05 May 2024, 5:01 am)DeltaMan wrote I think that's a very good point about depots. I think it will be very interesting to see how they could make franchising work for rural areas in the North East. 

The only one I can think of north of Ashington is Borders Buses in Berwick, and there work is mainly cross border, and you'd assume out of scope of the Mayor. 

No doubt there will be yards owned by the council that could be used as outstations. Transport for Cornwall use council land to park buses overnight. But buses need fuel and heavy maintenance, so it needs to be thought out.

Yeah totally agreed, only other one I can think of is the Travelsure yard at Belford, but unsure what state that will be in since it's currently abandoned. To be fair even some of the more urban areas could be problematic. Like picking somewhere like North Tyneside, if they had a small tranch of routes, who is realistically going to be bidding for them other than the likes of GCT. There's no independents in the area who can pick up numerous routes and GNE / Arriva / Stagecoach are all out of it as they won't have a depot to run the work from unless they kept one of their depots outside the tendering. Doing that though will then mess up the big tenders instead though.

East Durham being another one with similar problems, if GNE don't have Deptford and Arriva don't have Belmont then who realistically is going to be bidding for that?

I hope they actually think about this stuff rather than going in like a bull in a china shop which wouldn't surprise me up here.