(07 May 2024, 6:39 pm)Storx wrote Yeah of course, wasn't suggesting it next week. There's plans to reopen the Bensham Curve though which will make it pretty much 3/4 track from Birtley to Newcastle. Of course it all needs funding but arguably if you want to improve public transport and actually get cars off the road, money like this needs to be spent including sorting out Newcastle Central.

Regardless to what anyone thinks, buses isn't the answer as they're too slow, use the same roads as cars and are unpleasant compared to a private car. Even if it was every 5 minutes outside someones front door most people wouldn't touch it with a barge pole and that's before even going into networking, ticketing and everything else wrong with them.

Obviously it's not in governments interests in the UK, so public transport will never improve outside of London. They'll just keep wasting it on pointless sticking plaster schemes and I'll eat a hat if the Metro ever gets beyond Washington, if it even manages to get there.

I know it's in the long term plans to have a CLS -> Birtley -> Teams -> Metro Centre -> Newcastle service, how the last bit works who only knows tbh.

But the point is none of that is going to happen in the next decade. In the meantime you need to encourage as many people as possible to use the public transport system that currently exists in terms of infrastructure. That is basically buses right now. And that is why curtailing services at Gatehead is a no go.