(31 Aug 2024, 7:07 am)Dan wrote Thanks for pointing out what has changed. What an absolute dogs dinner the Q3 timetable has become!

There is a nice, straightforward headway on evenings Sunday to Friday, but Saturdays are completely different with an abysmal headway which no customer is going to be able to remember nor understand.

I am a firm believer that headways on an evening should be kept as close as possible all week long, as bus users on an evening tend to be fairly regular customers who remember that their buses are due at x minutes past each hour.

I appreciate demand levels are higher on a Saturday evening (which is probably why there is a different timetable on Saturday evenings - I dare say GNE are running that commercially unlike the rest of the week), and the number of pedestrians as well as congestion in Newcastle City Centre is far worse, but there is no excuse for not working with Nexus to create a clockface headway which works best for both parties on secured and commercial journeys, which is kept the same all week long.

Blindly following real time information data to create a timetable is not acting in the interests of customers.

Even the Sunday-Friday timetable is odd. From 7pm, you've got the following gaps between buses from St Peters Basin: 25min, 35min, 60min, then 30min for the rest of the evening. I've no idea how they've ended up with a random gap of an hour around 8pm.

I've also noticed that on Sundays, the short Q3 from St Peters Basin only runs as far as Pilgrim Street (19.52, 20.52, 21.52, 22.52) and start at Market Street East. Monday-Friday, the 19.10 runs to Haymarket, then the 21.52 and 22.52 only as far as Pilgrim Street and starts Market Street East. On a Saturday, all the shorts run to/from Haymarket, except for the 23.22, which ends at Pilgrim Street?!

The customer may as well be stood spinning the wheel of fortune, predicting where their bus departs from this time.

Saturday is completely bonkers, and you're right, no customer is going to remember that. What's more likely to happen, is they'll go out for a bus that they've just missed, get pissed off by it, and end up using another form of transport. Then the bus loses out again, thanks to bad management.

Is this the product of having commercial meetings on VOR deckers? Service design that is nothing short than crackpot! I don't know who they're developing this timetable for, but it's as sure not the customer.