(10 Oct 2024, 4:55 pm)deanmachine wrote Looks like the whole prospect of taking the buses under public control is just making things worse up here. The silence from local government is deafening at the minute as our services continue to suffer. I'm sure there's going to be photo opportunities when the occasional electric bus shows up though, but not when these leaking streetlites are most of our reality.

Hopefully a case of worse before it gets better.  Whichever way you look at it there's no evidence deregulation improved anything - unless you're a shareholder of one of the PLCs creaming off public money to increase profits while forever threatnening or actually slashing services, links, frequencies and turning out increasingly knackered old cast offs.  Whether you look at the network, the fleet profile or integration it is all infinitely worse under private control than pre 86.  Whether franchising will go far enough to fix that though is another matter.