(07 May 2024, 2:59 pm)Rob44 wrote For every positive there's a negative and vice versa. On you trip to Ouston the bus bringing you into town could be made late from the 7 21'2 in a row trying to get around st mary's place and into eldon square. You could get mugged by the beggers and there dogs in Haymarket bus station on your walk to Eldon Square. The bus to ouston could be late due to all the arrive 308's around St marys place waiting to get into the haymarket. OR you could get a bus from yours to Regent centre and metro to Gateshead and aviod Gossy high street or head the other way out of haymarket, pint in junction then nip on train to gateshead. I'm sure delays on north bound GNE buses most tof the time now is from LEAVING gateshead and getting to wherever they are going in Newcastle so chance are ( you would hope) that you bus to ouston from gateshead would be more reliable.
This ofcourse would free up more buses/drivers so cancelations would be fewer too?
As for the second last paragraph i'd be happy with a bus to the nearest station then jumping onto metro or bus. Thats what i do when I stay at the penthouse or when i stay next to kibby now anyway
No Regent Centre link for me because of where I live, the state of the Arriva buses, that's the last place I'd like to be standing for 40 minutes while two buses are cancelled. 5 minutes is too long at the Regent Centre and that's something that needs sorting out asap regardless to anything tbh.
If there was bloody reasonable train service to Chester Le Street in the future I'd do Train -> Train -> Bus and travel backwards, if there was a decent service it would only be roughly 40 minutes or so with perfect connections. Obviously not an option as the train is 1 TP2H now.
(07 May 2024, 3:19 pm)markydh wrote The capacity just isn’t there to add local train stations on the East Coast Mainline. At best you might find somewhere for the hourly transpennine service to stop without causing too much of a time penalty, but that’s only hourly and no one would say that was acceptable as a ‘hub’ and besides, until the Leamside line is reopened (which would be a decade away even if it got approval), there are no alternatives for rerouting freight trains. So there will always be a need for buses to run through to Newcastle and I really don’t get the obsession on this forum for making a form of public transport even less attractive for the very people we need to encourage, car drivers. Too many enthusiasts think with their enthusiast head on and forget that Joe Public values ease of use over being forced to change modes for the benefit of nobody but the operators. Make it needlessly complicated and they just won’t bother at all, which is one reason why Go North East’s hub and spoke model has been such an unmitigated disaster.
The thing is though car users don't want to use buses full stop as they're seen as peasant travel. Trains are a total different kettle of fish as they're a much better standard and will beat the bus every time pretty much. Bus to bus hubs never work as it doesn't make sense at all hence GNE network's doesn't work.
Not to mention you can do local Park and Ride for someone to drive to, park up and get the train to Newcastle in 10 minutes, it's better than sitting on the 25 or 28 for 40 minutes going around the world.
There's already plans for a Metro line down that track, it's 4 track from CLS to Newcastle give or take so capacity wise some improvements shouldn't be too much of an issue, it's South of CLS where the problems start.