(03 Sep 2014, 4:21 pm)Dan wrote This is the point I'm getting at though.
From personal experience, services 23/24 very rarely pick up passengers from Stockton Road until after Ryhope. With Go North East almost having the monopoly here, these passengers prefer to use their services opposed to Arriva's. Under 16s prefer to use Go North East buses because they're often turned away on Arriva's buses - I've seen two posts about this on Facebook lately, but unlike me, they didn't argue or complain to the company about it.
This means that Arriva are heavily relying upon the loadings from Sunderland when travelling to Peterlee, and from Peterlee when travelling to Sunderland. At the moment, in my opinion (as someone who gets to see the loadings throughout the day regularly), these loadings aren't fantastic. When services 23/24 leave Tyne & Wear, things change a little, and this accounts for your sightings in Peterlee where buses have had higher loadings.
Arriva cannot expect to bring in new customers with this service as they have no onward connections in Sunderland and very few in Peterlee (unless they're migrating from the X7 as a result of cheaper adult single fares); as such, the only way we can predict how well this service is going to do is by looking at the current loadings out of Sunderland.
It all seems to boil down to this vicious circle that I keep on mentioning, and testing to see if they burn their fingers or they do well... Competition can benefit passengers (if services aren't continuously facing cuts, as on the case on the Tyne Valley), but by and large, it doesn't (and this has recently been discussed elsewhere on the forum). I could understand if this service was being introduced to combat high loadings between the two destinations, but this is not the case...
The new X21 could attract new passengers as the 21 stops places where the X7 doesn't like Darlington, Newton Aycliffe, Sedgefield and Trimdon. Also some people travelling between Station Town and Peterlee will often still use the 21/21A as it runs combined 30 minute frequency while the X7 runs hourly and no Sunday service.
Go North East does have the monopoly in Sunderland as they have services all over Sunderland while Arriva have a limited presence in Sunderland and Go North East has a more frequent service than Arriva between Sunderland and Dalton Park.