(09 Oct 2014, 10:09 pm)Greg in Weardale wrote If a service is frequently regulated then the timetable clearly does not work and extra vehicles must be added to the PVR. Otherwise passengers will continue to be inconvenienced by the advertised service not being provided.

The 1000 run out of Newcastle may be on time on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but on Thursday and Friday, it might be so late that it has to be regulated.
The following week, it may have to be regulated on Monday and Wednesday and be on time for the rest of the week.

How do you prepare for the unexpected without wasting resources - adding to costs and reducing profits (by and large, unnecessarily?)

The timetable for service 56, and other similar services operated by Go North East and other operators, do work most of the time - but it's difficult to design a timetable when passengers adopt a 'turn up and go' attitude due to the nature of the services, meaning passenger numbers fluctuate and aren't consistent from run to run, day by day.

I'm not sure about your experiences in the past, but earlier this year I had the privilege to be shown the work which goes into designing timetables and the factors which have to be considered when doing so... One major factor was that a driver is going to be under more stress to keep to time on a tight schedule, and drivers who are in that mindframe are more cerceptible to be involved in accidents. As you'd imagine, bus operators will have to fork out money to pay for repairs after an accident - and if this cost could potentially be larger than the costs to have buses with increased layover, the companies will have to make a decision on what they feel is the most appropriate. Designing a bus timetable is not as easy as one may initially think - and I think it's even harder for high frequency services!

To reiterate what I said previously: although service changes could take place to increase layover at either end of the route (which in turn would mean that either one or both of the service's two red spares would have to make up part of the PVR), Go North East is currently concentrating on improving the quality of the engineering departments, which in turn should mean that there are fewer vehicles VOR and those vehicles that are VOR are repaired sooner and more efficiently. This in turn benefits customers as their quality of service should remain (more) consistent. If the Fab56 had fewer spare vehicles, or none at all, engineering would be under even more pressure - and this would be a backward step. As I said before, the service is clearly operating to Go-Ahead's very high standards (in terms of having little lost mileage), otherwise service changes would have taken place long before now.